“Where?” I demanded.
“About,” she said, locking eyes with me, just daring me to stare her down.
The truth hit me like a slap in the face.
“Your dream!” I said. “It was her! In your dream you saw her standing over you in the caravan, didn’t you?”
It made perfect sense. If Fenella really
“It was like no dream I’ve ever had before,” Porcelain said. “Oh, but God … I wish I’d never had it!”
“What do you mean?”
“It didn’t seem like a dream. I’d fallen asleep on Fenella’s bed—didn’t even bother taking off my clothes. It must have been a noise that roused me—somewhere close—inside the caravan.”
“You dreamed you’d fallen asleep?”
Porcelain nodded. “That was what was so horrible about it. I didn’t move a muscle. Just kept taking deep quiet breaths, as if I was asleep, which I was, of course. Oh, damn! It’s so hard to explain.”
“Go on,” I said. “I know what you mean. You were in my bed, dreaming you were in Fenella’s bed.”
She gave me a look of gratitude. “There wasn’t a sound. I listened for a long time, until I thought they were gone, and then I opened my eyes—no more than a sliver, and …”
“And?”
“There was a face! A big face—right there—just inches away! Almost touching mine!”
“Good lord!”
“So close I couldn’t really focus,” Porcelain went on. “I managed to make a little moan, as if I was dreaming— let my mouth fall open a bit …”
I have to admit I was filled with admiration. I hoped that, even in a dream, I should have the presence of mind to do the same thing myself.
“The lamp was burning low,” she went on. “It shone through the hair. I could only see the hair.”
“Which was red,” I said.
“Which was red. Long and curly. Wild, it was. And then I opened my eyes—”
“Yes, yes! Go on!”
“And it should have been your face I was looking at, shouldn’t it? But it wasn’t! It was that face of the man with the red hair. That’s why I flew at you and nearly choked you to death!”
“Hold on!” I said. “The
“He was beastly … all covered with soot. He looked like someone who slept in a haystack.”
I shook my head. In a weird way it made sense, I suppose, that in a dream, Porcelain should transform Mrs. Bull, whom she had perhaps glimpsed in the Gully, into a redheaded wild man. Daffy had not long before been reading a book by Professor Jung, and had announced to us suddenly that dreams were symbols that lurked in the subconscious mind.
Ordinarily, I should have written off the contents of a dream as rubbish, but my recent life seemed so flooded with inexplicable instances to the contrary.
In the first place, there had been Fenella’s vision—in her crystal ball—of Harriet wanting me to help her come home from the cold, and even though Fenella had claimed that Feely and Daffy put her up to it, the whole thing had left me shaken; wondering, in fact, if her confession was not itself a lie.
Then, too, there had been Brookie’s tale about the restless Gray Lady of Buckshaw. I still hadn’t decided if he’d been having me on about the so-called legend, but there’d been simply no time to look into it on my own.
I must admit, though, that these nibblings of the supernatural at the base of my brain were more than a little unnerving.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Oh, I don’t know, everything’s so confusing. Part of me didn’t trust you enough. And I knew that you no more trusted me.”
“I wasn’t sure about your clothes,” I told her. “I wondered why you had to wash them in the river.”
“Yes, you put that in your notebook, didn’t you? You thought I might have been soaked with Fenella’s blood.”
“Well, I …”
“Come on, Flavia, admit it. You thought I’d bashed in Fenella’s skull … to … to … inherit the caravan, or something.”
“Well, it was a possibility,” I said with a grin, hoping it would be infectious.
“The fact of the matter is,” she said, giving her hair a toss, then winding and unwinding a long strand of it round a forefinger, “that women away from home sometimes feel the urge to rinse out a few things.”
“Oh,” I said.
“If you’d taken the trouble to ask me, I’d have told you.”
