A Dark Dividing Read Free Page A

caught and frozen for ever.’
    ‘And then to balance it you’ve got this.’
    He thought she hesitated for a second, but then she said, ‘That’s a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century mansion. It’s meant to illustrate the past dying—the place has been neglected for years, in fact it’s decaying where it stands. Actually, it’s a vanity thing to have included that one—it’s a shot I took when I was about twelve with my very first camera and I always felt a bit sentimental about it. But I thought it was just about good enough to include as contrast in this sequence.’
    ‘It is good enough. Where is it?’ said Harry, leaning closer to see the title.
    ‘It’s called Mortmain House,’ said Simone. ‘It’s on the edge of Shropshire—the western boundary, just about where England crosses over into Wales. I lived there for a while as a child.’
    ‘Mortmain. Dead hand?’
    ‘Yes. Somewhere around the Middle Ages people used to transfer land to the Church so their children wouldn’t have to pay feudal dues after they died. Then the heirs reclaimed the land afterwards. It was a pretty good scam until people tumbled to what was happening, so a law was drawn up to prevent it—the law of dead man’s hand it’s sometimes called and—Am I talking too much?’
    ‘No, I’m interested. It looks,’ said Harry, his eyes still on the place Simone had called Mortmain House, ‘exactly like the classic nightmare mansion.’
    ‘It does rather, doesn’t it?’ Her voice was just a bit too casual. ‘I haven’t exaggerated its appearance, though. It really does look like that.’
    ‘Filled with darkness? With nightmares?’
    ‘Well, nightmares are subjective, aren’t they? We’ve all got a private one.’
    Harry looked down at her. The top of her head was about level with his shoulder. He said, ‘“I could be bounded in a nutshell and still count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”’
    ‘Yes. Yes .’ She smiled, as if pleased to find that he understood, and Harry wondered what she would do if he said, ‘We all have a secret nightmare, but what you don’t know, my dear, is that I’m here to see if I can wind back Time or find a pathway into the past…’
    He did not say it, of course. Never blow your cover unless it’s a question of life or death.
    He said, ‘Is it a particular quality of yours to see the darknesses in life?’

    Simone hoped she had not banged on for too long about darknesses and Mortmain House and everything, to the journalist from the Bellman . But he had seemed to understand—he had quoted that bit about nightmares—and he had appeared genuinely interested.
    So it was vaguely daunting when Angelica, conducting a breathless post-mortem on the opening two days later, reported that Harry Fitzglen had phoned to ask her out to dinner.
    ‘How nice.’ Simone refused to be jealous of Angelica, who was giving her this terrific opportunity. People hardly ever mentioned Angelica without adding, ‘She’s the Angelica Thorne, you know—one of the real It girls in the Nineties. Dozens of lovers and scores of the most extraordinary parties. There’s not much she hasn’t tried,’ they said. But one of the things that Angelica was trying now was being a patron of the arts, and one of the people she was patronizing was Simone, and for all Simone cared Angelica could have tried necromancy and cannibalism. She refused to be jealous because Harry Fitzglen was taking Angelica out to dinner, even when Angelica, smiling the smile that made her look like a mischievous cat, said they were going to Aubergine in Chelsea.
    ‘If he can afford Aubergine, he must be pretty successful.’
    ‘I like successful. In fact—Oh God, is this the electricity bill for the first quarter? Well, it can’t possibly be right—look at the total ! We can’t have used all that heating, do they think we’re orchids or something, for pity’s sake!’
    They were in the upstairs