Ada pointed towards the keys and said, ‘There, look. We’ll be able to let them out later, when it’s safe.’
She went along to the landing, leaned over the banister rail, and listened. It sounded as if Jaws and the other men were in the kitchen. She heard bottles clinking together, so they must be helping themselves to Herbert Russell’s Jail Ale, and toasting each other. A kitchen chair scraped on the floor, and she heard Phil laughing. She shivered when she thought how close she had come to being raped by every one of them.
Martin was standing close behind her. ‘I don’t think they’ll bother us, even if they hear us.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right.’
Ada crept down the staircase and crossed the hallway, and Martin followed her. She opened the front door and peered outside. The full moon was illuminating the courtyard, with its headless cherub and the two granite barns behind, as brightly as a film set. The night was achingly cold, and she could see stars winking over the leafless trees, the same stars she consulted when she made astrological predictions. Rigel, and Aldebaran, and Sirius the brightest of all.
She tried to step through the door, but her legs simply wouldn’t work. Her brain refused to make them move, or even to recognise that she had legs at all.
‘Are you all right?’ Martin asked her quietly.
‘No! I’m stuck!’
‘What do you mean, stuck?’
‘I’ve lost all feeling in my legs! That Jaws fellow told me about this. He said that he tried to leave the house at least three times when the moon was full, but he couldn’t. I can’t, neither. It’s so strange. It’s almost like my legs have been amputated.’
‘How about that incantation you were talking about?’
‘I’m going to try it. I don’t know if it’ll work, because it’s Irish, and this is England, but it’s worth a try.’
She reached up under her sweater and fumbled through her necklaces and pendants until she felt the circular bronze talisman embossed with the face of Arianrhod, the Druid goddess not only of beauty but of reincarnation. She wanted to be reborn. She desperately needed her life back, the way it had been before she was chanted.
She pressed the talisman tightly between finger and thumb, closed her eyes and recited the words that Alice Kyteler had written.
‘Glaoim ar na taibhsí gach doras a oscailt – I call on the ghosts of every door to open. Iarraim ar bhiotáille na hoíche mé a scaoileadh soar – I ask the spirits of the night to release me. In ainm Danu, lig dom siúl faoi shaoirse ar fud an domhain arís. In the name of Danu, let me walk freely in the world again.’
She waited. At last, from the direction of St Mary’s church, she heard the harsh, abrasive call of a nightjar, like a football rattle. She took that as a signal that the incantation may have worked, and she tried again to take a step forward. Nothing happened. Her legs still refused to move.
She turned around to Martin and he was looking at her so sympathetically that her eyes brimmed with tears.
‘It’s no good. I’ve been trapped here for ever.’ Her throat constricted as she pointed to the courtyard outside and said, ‘That’s my whole life out there. That’s my cottage and my family and my friends and my future. They’ve all been taken away from me, and for why, and for what?’
‘Don’t give up hope, Ada. There must be some way that we can get out of here. Rob and his wife, Vicky – they’re both convinced that their little son, Timmy, is still trapped in this house somewhere, aren’t they, and they’re trying everything they can think of to find him. Well – they called you in, didn’t they? And didn’t they say something about a wizard?’
‘Yes. Francis Coade his name is. He’s brilliant. If anybody can find out how to set us free, he can. I haven’t seen any sign of Timmy, though, have you?’
They heard raucous laughter from the kitchen, and one of the men shouting out, ‘Here’s to the next full moon!’ followed by more laughter and beer bottles being clanked together.
Martin said, ‘Timmy? No. I’ve not seen him. Vicky was sure that she’d heard him, faintly, but who knows? In this old house, it could have been anything. It could have been the draught blowing down one of the chimneys. Or an owl, outside.’
Ada quietly closed the front door, and for a moment she pressed her head against it, in despair.
‘Why don’t we go into the library?’ Martin suggested. ‘We can stay there until the moon goes down.’
Ada nodded, and followed him into the library. She sat down in the red leather armchair by the empty fireplace, while Martin stood by the window. They couldn’t see the moon from in here, but they could see the shadows lengthening, and the garden gradually filling up with darkness, like an inkwell.
After a while, Martin said, ‘Being trapped like this, Ada, it’s certainly made me look at things from a very different point of view.’
‘Such as?’
‘Life, for a start. There’s every possibility that you and I are never going to grow any older, and that we’re never going to die, so what’s the point of it?’
‘I don’t know. We can always go on hoping that one day we’re going to be free.’
‘I suppose so. But you’ve heard those men talking. None of them seem to have any hope left at all. That bloody priest, what’s his name, Thomas. He’s
