'You're saying you think Moira needs someone with her?'
The Duchess shrugged her elegant shoulders. 'Someone looking out for her, maybe. When Donald told me there was a man at the gate asking after Moira, I wondered if perhaps…'
Then she gave him the kind of smile that was like a consolatory pat on the arm. 'I don't really feel you're the one, Mr Macbeth.'
Sometimes, when he interviewed would-be film-directors, there was one nice, bright-eyed kid he could tell was never going to make it. And trying to let the kid down easy he'd always start out, 'I don't really feel…'
'Look, Duchess…' Macbeth felt like he was about to cry. This was absurd. He started to tell her about the night at the Earl's Castle, about Moira singing 'The Comb Song', and how it ended.
'Yes,' the Duchess said impatiently, 'I know about that.'
'So am I right in thinking Moira caused all that, the deer heads and stuff to come crashing down?'
The Duchess looked cross. 'The question is… pouff! Irrelevant! How can anyone ever really say, I did this, I caused this to happen? Perhaps you are a factor in its happening, perhaps not. I'll tell you something, Mr Macbeth… nobody who's merely human can ever be entirely sure of the ability to make anything happen. Say, if you're a great healer, sometimes it works… you're lucky, or you're so good and saintly that you get helped a lot. And sometimes it doesn't work at all. I once knew a woman called Jean Wendle… but that's another story…'
She lay back on the chaise and half-closed her eyes, looking at the wall behind him. 'Or, let us say, if you're a bad or a vengeful person, and you want to hurt somebody, you want to curse them… in the movies, it goes… zap, like one of those, what d'you call them… ray guns, lasers.'
He heard a small noise behind him, turned in time to see a plate, one of a row of five with pictures on them, sliding very slowly from the wall.
The plate fell to the floor and smashed. Macbeth nearly passed out.
From a long way away, he heard the Duchess saying, 'Doing damage, harming people is much easier but that's unpredictable too. Sometimes people dabble and create a big black cloud…' Throwing up her arms theatrically,'… and they can't control where it goes.'
Numbly, Macbeth bent to pick up the pieces of the plate. Maybe he'd dislodged it with the back of his head. The ones still on the wall had pictures of Balmoral Castle, where the Queen spent time, and Glamis Castle, Blair Atholl Castle and the Queen Mother's Castle of Mey.
He held two pieces of the broken plate together and saw, in one of those shattering, timeless moments, that they made up a rough watercolour sketch of the familiar Victorian Gothic facade of the Earl's place.
'Accidents happen,' the Duchess said. 'Leave it on the floor.'
Macbeth's fingers were trembling as he laid the pieces down. He needed a cigarette more urgently than at any time since he quit smoking six years ago.
'I never liked that one anyway,' the Duchess said.
Doubtless psyching out that Macbeth could use more hot tea, and fast, she filled up his cup and added two sugars.
He drank it all. She was offering him an easy way out. She was saying, what just happened – the plate – also, the skulls on the wall… this is kids' stuff… this is chickenshit compared to what a person could be letting himself in for if he pursues Moira Cairns.
Mungo Macbeth, maker of mini-series for the masses, thought maybe this was how King Arthur laid it on the line for any mad-assed knight of the Round Table figuring to go after the Holy Grail.
He'd often wondered about those less ambitious knights who listened to the horror stories and thought, Well, fuck this, what do 1 need with a Holy Grail? Maybe I should just stick around and lay me some more damsels, do a little Sunday jousting. How could those knights go on living with themselves, having passed up on the chance of the One Big Thing?
He said, 'Earlier, you said… about when a guy gets to wondering how much his life has really been worth and if there isn't more stuff in Heaven and Earth than he's reading about in the New York Times…'
The silent girl who'd brought the tea came back and took away the tray.
After she'd gone, he said, 'Duchess, why? I only met your daughter once, never even… Why? Can you tell me?'
Instead, the Duchess told him the story of a man who fell in love with the Queen of the Fairies and all the shit that put him into. Macbeth said he knew the songs. Tarn Lin, Thomas The Rymer, all that stuff? But that wasn't the same thing, surely, Moira Cairns was a human being.
'That's quite true,' the Duchess said gravely. 'But remember this. Wherever she goes, that young woman… she's bound to be touched with madness. Now, who is the white man?'
'White man?'
'I thought perhaps you might be his emissary… White-skinned man? I don't think I mean race. Just a man exuding a whiteness?'
'Somebody I know?'
'You don't?'
'I don't know what you mean.'
'I believe you don't. All right. Never mind.'
Macbeth asked, 'Do you know where Moira is?'
'Oh… the little Jewish person, Kaufmann, tells me she's in the North of England.'
'Bastard wouldn't tell me.'
'You he doesn't trust. Strange, that – I find you quite transparent.'
'Thanks.'
'There was a man called… Matt?'
'Jesus, you intuited that?'
The Duchess sighed in exasperation. 'She told me.'
'Right,' Macbeth said, relieved. 'Matt, uh…'
'Castle. She thinks he was her mentor. I rather suspect she was his.'
'Right,' Macbeth said uncertainly.
'He's dead. She'll have gone to try and lay his spirit to rest.'
Macbeth squirmed a little. Was this precisely what was meant by things you couldn't find in the New York Times? Was this what Mom meant about uncovering his roots? He thought not.
The Duchess smiled kindly. 'You can leave now, if you wish, Mr Macbeth. I'll have Donald see you to the gate.'
'No, wait…' Two trains of thought were about to crash, buckling his usual A to B mental tracks. 'This, uh, white person…'
'A thin man with white hair and a very white complexion.'
The Castle. The bones. White-faced man with a cut eye.
'Shit, I don't believe this… you got that outa my head. You pulled it clean outa my head.'
'Mr Macbeth, calm down. Two or three weeks ago, a man of this description came to consult me. As people do… occasionally. He didn't get in. Donald is my first line of defence, the dogs are the second, and Donald told me the dogs disliked this man quite intensely. On sight. Now… dogs can't invariably be trusted, they may react badly to – oh – psychic disturbance in a person, or mental instability. But when a man arrives in an expensive car and seems very confident and the dogs hate him on sight…'
Stanhope, Macbeth thought. Stansgate?
'And when Donald conveyed my message that I was unwell, he was apparently quite annoyed. He sent a message back that he had information about my daughter which he thought I would wish to know. I suggested Donald should let the dogs have him.'
'What happened?'
'He left.'
Stanley? Stanmore? 'Duchess, you think this guy meant her harm?'
'Two people arrive within a short period to talk to me about my daughter. One the dogs dislike. How did the dogs take to you, Mr Macbeth?'
'I wasn't invited to play rubber-bone, but I seem to be intact.'
The Duchess nodded, 'I don't know how you found me – no, don't explain, it's not important. I didn't mention
