Black Feathers

7

The knocking is soft, almost surreptitious. Heather Maurice glances at her husband, a flash of worry passing over her face before he stands to open the front door.

“Mr Keeper,” says Fulton, frowning. “I’m afraid you’ve missed Megan. She’s out berry-picking with Sally Balston and the Frewin boy.”

“I know,” says Mr Keeper. “That’s why I’m here.”

Heather dries her hands on her apron and comes to her husband’s side.

“What is it?” she asks. “What’s the matter?”

Mr Keeper glances over his shoulder. Already, a couple of neighbours have taken an interest in his presence. He gestures towards the table and whispers:

“It might be better if we talk on the warm side of the door.”

The Maurices stand back and let Mr Keeper pass. He sits at their table and loads his pipe. Fulton Maurice, usually placid, fidgets. Heather places her hand on his sizable forearm. Mr Keeper doesn’t seem to notice. He lights up, takes a deep breath and clouds the kitchen with smoke in a single exhalation.

“There’s something I couldn’t tell you with Megan listening. Something that would make all this much harder for her.”

Heather’s brow creases and she squeezes her husband’s arm. Fulton Maurice places his massive hand over hers, engulfing it. Mr Keeper leans towards them, his face solemn but kind.

“It’s nothing bad, you understand. But it is so very important and you must swear to me that you will never mention it to her – whether she walks the Black Feathered Path or not.” He searches their eyes. “Can you do this?”

Fulton Maurice nods but Heather is thin-lipped. When she speaks her voice is unsteady.

“You’re asking a great deal of us already, Mr Keeper. And a lot more of our Megan. She’s our only child and still just a girl. I’m not sure any of this is right for her. Or for us.”

Mr Keeper’s face becomes grave. Fulton Maurice shifts in his chair and looks away.

“This isn’t simply about you,” says Mr Keeper. “It isn’t even about Megan. It concerns all of us. It concerns the land. And Megan is not so young as you wish to think. She is, even now, becoming a young woman and I can tell you, with the Earth Amu as my witness, that without Megan our future will be uncertain at best. The Crowman wants her – he’s made that plain enough – and now it’s up to her to decide what’s right.” Mr Keeper takes a pull on his pipe and looks out through the wind-eye beside the front door, staring far beyond the cottages on the other side of the track. When he looks back, as though returning from some terrible distance, neither of the Maurices can hold his gaze. “I can’t make Megan’s choice for her and I wouldn’t want to, but can I at least rely on your silence? You must believe me when I say that much rests on your answer.”

Heather sighs and leans against Fulton’s shoulder.

“We’re her parents,” she says. “We can’t help but be afraid for her.”

Mr Keeper nods.

“I know.”

Heather turns to her husband. Their eyes meet and, in time, Fulton Maurice speaks.

“We need to trust in the way of things, Heather. Strikes me none of this is an accident.” He looks at Mr Keeper. “You have my word I’ll say nothing to Megan.”

Heather sits straight again.

“And you have mine.”

“I thank you both.” Mr Keeper put a hand inside his boiler suit. “There’s something you need to see.” He draws out a large, flat leather pouch which he lays on the table. Its ruby-dark surface has been polished smooth by years of handling and its edges are beginning to fray and crumble. With fingers roughened and wrinkled by constant foraging, Mr Keeper gently flips the pouch open. Inside is a pocket. He reaches for it and hesitates. Instead, he taps out his pipe and refills it.

“I need to tell you a story first.”

“There was one Keeper who lived in the time when the Crowman walked this land. Just one. He remains the only person to ever meet the Crowman face to face – to be touched by his wings – and survive. The encounter almost killed him, left him crippled and blind. But the reward was great. The Crowman gave him new eyes with which he could see deep into the Weave. It was the gift of prophecy and it made him the first in our line. The Rag Man was his name.

“Now, every Keeper can see a little way into the Weave but the Rag Man saw everything. He saw us. And I think he saw Megan.

“In all the generations since the Black Dawn, there has never been a female Keeper. The Crowman has shown himself to one boy after another and their task remains unchanged. To tell the story. To keep it alive by journeying through the Weave and setting down the tale. This process keeps us all in touch with the Crowman. It keeps him alive inside us and that, in turn, keeps the land alive. But every Keeper so far has been fallible, even I. The risk always remains that one of us will journey in error and return with the story only half told. The farther away in time we travel from the days of the Crowman, the more likely that is to happen. Already, it may be that the story is not correct in all its facets. Already we may be forgetting the Crowman’s true nature and how he links us to the Earth.

“But the Rag Man, he saw a girl in the Weave, generations in his future, when the Black Dawn was only a distant memory. The first and only female Keeper. He saw, too, that this girl would be the last Keeper. Either she would journey and rediscover the tale in its entirety, thereby keeping us united with the land for all time, or she would journey and fail. The story of the Crowman would be lost and our connection to the Earth severed as it was before the Black Dawn. Only this time, if that bond is cut, it will be final. Within a generation or two, all of us will be done for. The Earth Amu will die and the light from Father Sky will be snuffed out. For our lives and the life of the world are as one. We share the same destiny.”

Mr Keeper pauses to reload and relight his pipe. Heather and Fulton Maurice sit, silent and still. Keeper slips his finger inside the pocket of the leather pouch and slides out a piece of paper. It is yellowed and its edges are nibbled and torn with wear. A pattern of thin, perfectly parallel blue lines covers its surface and between these, in a style too twisted to be readable, is a mass of spiky scrawl, apparently written in great haste.

Megan’s parents lean forwards and frown over the handwriting.

“I know,” says Mr Keeper. “Impossible to decipher without several years of study under your belt.” He grins. “Which, fortunately, I have. This, as far as we know, is the Rag Man’s only surviving inscription. There may be others but they have never been found. These lines are a prophecy, somewhat fevered, but nonetheless a vision of the future – the one we now occupy, if my instincts are correct.”

He places the page in front of him on the kitchen table and is silent for a few moments before beginning to speak:

be watchful for an innocent

guided by a black feather

chosen in the shadow of trees

in a time of harvest

in an era of plenty

fair of face and hair

yet her name is black

this is the keeper of keepers

in whose journey the land may live or die

the boy cannot exist without the girl

without the teller, there can be no tale

Heather Maurice claps her hands with relief.

“Well that settles it, Mr Keeper. It can’t be our Megan. Her name isn’t Black!” She looks to her husband for support but his face is vacant. Mr Keeper shrugs with a resigned smile. “Fulton,” she says. “Make Mr Keeper understand. It’s all been a mistake.”

“I think Mr Keeper may be right.”

“How can he be right? She’s not named Black.”

Fulton sighs, his enormous frame shrinking.

“Maurice is a very old name. It doesn’t mean anything now, but a long time ago it meant dark-skinned or black. I’m sorry, Heather. When I heard those words, my skin turned to gooseflesh. I don’t know if Megan has the strength to–”

Mr Keeper holds up a hand.

“Please. I know it’s distressing.” He slips the ancient sheet of jagged script back into its pocket and closes the pouch, before returning it to his boiler suit. “There’s nothing can be done right now. These are only words – from a time none of us can remember. They could be wrong. They may not even have come from the hand of the Rag Man.” He leans towards the Maurices. “None of this is set. Not yet. But I couldn’t let the matter go any further without telling you everything.” He pushes his chair back from the table and stands, suddenly cheerful. “Let us wait and see what Megan decides. Let us see what rises inside her. One thing, at least, is clear, though – the Rag Man was very specific. She must be a girl. Still a child. If Megan is the one, her walking of the path must be swift – not years, as was my initiation, but months. I pray she decides soon.”

October 2005

Sophie cleared the paper plates and discarded party hats, the leavings of cake and fruit jelly from the waterproof tablecloth; all the colours seeming dull in the cloud-choked October light. The kitchen was silent now, vacuous and forlorn in the wake of ten small children and their mothers. Streamers hung, pinned to the beams and thrown over the lights in the ceiling, some vague current of air animating them, giving rise to papery whispers.

A blue candle in the shape of the number 5 lay extinguished and partially burned in the centre of the table. Sophie lifted it, turned it in her hands for long moments before wrapping it in a paper bag. She took it to the bureau in the living room and unlocked the hinged writing panel with a key from a small vase on the mantelpiece. She placed the candle beside its four predecessors and a collection of other tiny relics – a lock of his hair, cut the very night he was born; several silky crow feathers; an infantile drawing of a ragged bird, in black crayon; the rattle Louis had made for him; his first pair of woollen booties. There were other mementos – lucky pennies and corks saved from champagne bottles and cards of congratulation – all relating to Gordon.

There was no glow of nostalgia around these artefacts, merely a dark aura. Sophie ached, not with loss, but for something none of the family had had in the five years since Gordon was born: light hearts. They’d birthed him into an afflicted world. It was almost as if Gordon had brought its troubles with him: the changes in the climate and increased solar activity, the creeping totalitarianism of government, the epidemics and poverty, the undercurrent of fear. This was the joyless era Gordon would live through – if he survived. If any of them did.

In one of the bureau’s hidden compartments was a growing collection of letters, sketches and poetry. The penmanship and craft of strangers. Sometimes they arrived in the post. Sometimes they were delivered by hand, or left anonymously on the mat outside the front door. Louis once had a tiny wooden carving of a scarecrow, about the size of a chess pawn, pressed into his hand by a crazed-looking vagrant outside Waterloo Station in London. On one of her shopping trips to Bristol with Amelia Porter when Gordon was two years old, a woman in the street had started screaming and pointing at Gordon’s pushchair.

“He’s coming, you stupid bitch. Open your eyes. Black Jack’s coming to damn us all.”

The woman had dropped her own shopping in the road and run towards them, eyes suddenly wild, hair flying, only to be tackled at the last possible moment by an elderly ex-serviceman who’d witnessed the whole incident.

Everything about that day had been wrong – even before the lunatic woman made her lunge for Gordon. It was the first time Sophie had really noticed how tainted everything looked, the first time she’d admitted to herself that her family was living through dark times. Shop fronts were boarded up even in the most prosperous parts of the city, the graffiti covering them not merely profane but hallucinatory and prophetic. Each time she opened the bureau, memories from that day resurfaced, especially the defacing of derelict buildings and chipboarded windows: scrawled murals of bloody combat overseen by a screaming black angel and the strange poetry that accompanied the images. All of this so similar to the tokens which now filled the writing bureau’s secret compartment.

Police had been everywhere but none had come to help them. Instead, they loitered in groups on street corners or in alleys, looking more like gang members than protectors of the public. Among these menacing coteries, she had glimpsed for the first time figures in long grey coats and broad-brimmed hats – now the Ward were everywhere. Bristol had smelled faintly of excrement that morning, the occasional waft making Sophie and Amelia wrinkle their noses. A few days later, following record rainfall in the South West, the sewers had backed up and Bristol suffered an outbreak of typhoid.

Sophie touched the compartment in the bureau, almost needing to check that the collection of strange gifts was real. But of course it was. She knew what she would see if she opened that cleverly crafted recess in the wood – what she and Louis privately referred to as the Crowman’s coffer. Years of stored-up evidence that there was something different about her pale, sensitive little boy. Something strange. Something foreshadowed. Sophie drew her fingertips away, squeezing back tears of apprehension and fear. She folded the writing bureau’s panel shut, locked it and replaced the key in its vase. Turning back towards the hallway, she screamed, her hands flying to her mouth.

Gordon stood there, still wearing his party clothes – blue shorts, and brown leather shoes now scuffed and muddy, a white shirt and small tie under a sleeveless green pullover. He held his hands out to her. In them he offered up the slack body of a jackdaw, its head lolling, its eyes glazed, its feathers dappled with tiny rubies of blood – Gordon’s or the bird’s, she couldn’t tell.

“They’re all dead, Mum.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t me. I found them.”

Sophie’s hands came away from her mouth.

“Take it outside, Gordon,” she whispered.

Her boy turned away from her and she followed him into the hallway.

“Louis?” She shouted up the stairs. “Louis, come down. Quickly.”

By the time they reached the back terrace, Louis had caught up and the three of them stared at the bodies of four other jackdaws, neatly arranged on the grey flagstones.

Gordon’s face was ashen with guilt.

“I didn’t do it. They were just here.”

Louis reached out a gentle hand, intending to bestow comfort on Gordon’s back, when they heard the door in the garden wall creak. The hand never made contact. A figure slipped out of their property and pushed the old door closed behind it. All they glimpsed were the drabs of a hunter or poacher, probably a man.

“Jesus Christ, who’s that?” He took a couple of steps into the garden. “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing? This is private property!” There was no response. “Right, f*ck this.” He turned and ran into the house. Gordon and Sophie heard his footsteps pounding up the stairs and running down again moments later. He ran past them with his shotgun, heading for the end of the garden. “Stay right there,” he shouted back.

Ten minutes later, he returned.

“Did you see anyone?” asked Sophie.

Louis shook his head.

“Whoever it was is long gone. I couldn’t even see which way he went.”

He knelt down in front of Gordon.

“I don’t want you coming out in the garden for a while, OK?”

“Why, Dad?”

“It’s just for a while.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“I know you didn’t. I just want you to be safe.”

Gordon began to cry.

“None of that. Come on, let’s get rid of these birds.”

Louis stood, broke his shotgun and placed it on the garden table. As he bent to retrieve the jackdaws, Sophie said:

“Should we call the police?”

“What can they do? Anyway, I don’t want the police up here. They’re more like government spies than peace officers. Let’s not…” Louis allowed time for Sophie to meet his eyes, “draw attention to ourselves.”

Gordon handed the dead jackdaw to his father before Sophie urged him inside and down the hall.

“Go on, birthday boy, I think you’d better wash your hands.”

When she heard the water running, she looked at Louis, tears welling.

“What can we do?”

“Nothing. Just keep on loving him and keeping him safe.”

Sophie gestured towards the dead jackdaw in Louis’s hand.

“You call this safe? We have to tell him.”

Louis stepped close, leaned forwards until their noses were almost touching.

“Put that idea out of your mind,” he whispered. “Forever. Gordon must never know.”