The Dark Amulet Collection

Chapter 7

During his lessons the next afternoon, as Jayhan dragged his way through a tedious page of arithmetic - his tutor was not a gifted educator - he thought about crows’ eyes and the village children’s taunts turning to fear. He pondered their reactions, surprised that just looking at them had turned the tables. He was just wondering whether they would have reacted in the same way if his father had not been there, when he was taken to task for having added every pair of numbers when he should have been subtracting.

He was brought abruptly back to the present by Eloquin demanding, “So, are you clear now on what you have to do?”

Guessing and hoping it was what she had said at start of the harangue, Jayhan nodded. “Yes Ma’am,” and began the page of arithmetic all over again, this time subtracting. He was up to the fifth question when suddenly the image of a well-dressed middle aged woman swam into his mind; a woman with eyes like his. Where had that come from?

As he struggled his way down the column of subtraction problems, the woman’s face stayed in his mind. Perhaps he seen her portrait somewhere? Maybe. But where?

“Jayhan, if you want time to play before dinner, you must finish these questions and get every one of them correct.” Eloquin was an attractive, dark-haired young woman who had been forced into the post of tutor as a consequence of her dissolute father gambling away the family fortune. She just wanted her young charge to complete his work in time for her to walk into the village to meet her sister, who was now working as a seamstress, and a rather interesting young man, who apparently worked somewhere in the city. She sighed in exasperation. “Jayhan, are you listening to me?”

JayhanThe boy gave his head a little shake and let the image of the pale-eyed woman drift away as he applied himself to earning some play time.

He woke the next morning to the sound of honeyeaters squabbling in a bush outside his window. The sky was still grey, and colour had not yet crept across the lawn. Flowers and shrubs were shades of grey. Instead of bouncing out of bed in his usual fashion, Jayhan lay back and concentrated on remembering where he had seen that portrait. He let his mind wander the corridors of the house, around the entrance hall, into his parents’ bedroom and, when none of these walls yielded the portrait, he changed tack and began to think of cupboards, spare rooms and the attic. He was just ruing his poor memory and from there, letting his thoughts drift to his difficulty in learning spells from his father when, with a jolt, he remembered where he had seen the portrait. It was in his father’s workshop, the site of so many disastrous efforts by Jayhan to spellcast.

He had spent so many frustrating hours in Sheldrake’s workshop, trying to master even the simplest of spells. Spellcasting did not come easily to Jayhan. He forgot the words or the gestures or some aspect of the spell that could cause problems. Just a week ago, he had levitated himself with a flourish, only to rise sharply upwards and hit his head on a beam. In the shock of the unexpected pain, he had lost control of the spell, sending him crashing to the floor. Sheldrake had not been pleased.

Jayhan waited until he had seen his father leave the house and walk through the front gate towards the village. Then he wandered casually across the back lawn, past the stables checking that Beth was not looking in his direction, and then along the paved path that led to his father’s workshop. Even though the workshop contained many valuable artifacts, books and potentially dangerous chemicals, the door was not locked. A magical ward warned Sheldrake if family members, including Beth and Clive, entered his hallowed ground and immobilised non-family members before they could. Happily oblivious to this, Jayhan lifted the latch and pushed open the wooden door. Once inside, he meticulously closed the door behind him. Ignoring the temptations offered him by fascinating potions, vast arrays of tools and the marvellous scaled model of Carrador that dominated one side of the room, he walked to the back, right-hand corner.

There, partly concealed by a workbench, hung a large oil portrait, dulled by dust, cobwebs and neglect. Jayhan climbed up onto his father’s stool and from there onto the work bench. Sweeping aside tools, nails, screws and bits of wood shavings, he knelt on the dirty wooden benchtop and studied the painting.

The woman in the portrait was standing in front of the side entrance to the stables Jayhan had so recently passed, holding the reins of a beautiful chestnut gelding. The cottage’s front garden, in the full bloom of early summer, was visible in one half of the background. The woman wore a stiffly tailored green riding habit, her black hair swept up under a perky, impractical riding hat. Her straight black eyebrows gave her a stern expression that was lightened by a slight lift at the corner of her mouth. But it was her eyes that held Jayhan’s attention. At first glance, they appeared to be stark white but when Jayhan leaned in closer and brushed a cobweb out of the way, he could see that they were actually, like his, a very pale lavender.

But who was she? Had she been teased by children in the village too? Maybe the lady in the portrait wasn’t a real person, but a picture of one of these make-believe ghouls that ate dead people.

Na, he thought, if someone was going to paint something scary like a ghoul, they wouldn’t put pretty flowers in the background. Anyway, she doesn’t look one bit scary.

Na, if someone was going to paint something scary like a ghoul, they wouldn’t put pretty flowers in the background. Anyway, she doesn’t look one bit scary.Actually, to other people, she did, but Jayhan had lived with his eye colour all his life and thought it looked perfectly normal.

A thought struck him and he peered down the small gap between the portrait and the workbench, trying to see whether there was a name plate at the bottom of the painting, as there were on the portraits that hung on walls in the house. He spotted a small golden rectangle, which he felt sure was the name tag he was looking for. He leant further down the c***k trying to see. Suddenly his left hand slipped on something slimy that had been left on the bench and he plummeted head first into the gap. Then his trousers got caught on a nail sticking out of the benchtop and he was left dangling upside down, unhelpfully facing away from the painting.

It was at this unfortunate moment that the door was flung open and Sheldrake stormed in. He had worked himself up into a lather of outrage, liberally laced with fear for his son’s safety.

“What are you doing in my shed?” he roared, fully intending to give his errant son a reprimand he would never forget. Then he saw the legs sticking up from the back of his workbench and stopped short. “What on earth are you doing?”

Jayhan’s heart lurched as he heard his father’s roar, knowing full well he shouldn’t be in the shed on his own. He knew his father could be stern but not deliberately unkind and as Jayhan was a plucky little lad, he said from his upside down position, “Hello Dad. Sorry Dad. I’m a bit stuck. Could you help me please?”

With amusement fast dissipating Sheldrake’s anger, he managed to say sternly, “I should leave you hanging there as punishment for coming into my workshop when I have expressly f*******n you to enter on your own.”

“Please don’t, Dad. I’m starting to feel sick.”

Sheldrake shook his head in fond exasperation. “You, young man, are a rapscallion of the first order.” He leaned over the bench, grabbed two handfuls of Jayhan’s trousers and pulled. This succeeded in detaching the trousers from the nail that had caught them but, from where he was standing, Sheldrake found it was impossible to lift Jayhan high enough to get him clear of the back of the workbench. “Right. I am going to have to lower you down, then you’ll have to crawl out from there. Be careful of those boxes. Don’t knock anything over on your way out.”

Once this operation had been completed, Jayhan stood before his father and dusted himself off.

“And just what were you doing in my shed?”

“Nothing, Dad.” When Sheldrake looked sceptical, he shrugged. “I just came to look at that picture.” Jayhan pointed. “See? She has eyes like mine… Do you think the village kids teased her too? Did they say she was a ghoul too? I don’t reckon she was. She doesn’t look like she eats dead people, do you think?”

“Who told you what a ghoul is?”

“I asked Beth.”

“Hmph.” Sheldrake looked into the cheerfully determined little face, as he realised that his son had sought his own answers when his father had dodged them. “You have an enquiring nature which is an asset in a mage… but no more sneaking into my shed. Understood?”

Jayhan beamed. “Yes sir.”

Sheldrake turned to lean his elbows on his workbench to study the portrait and Jayhan copied him, although it meant his elbows were above shoulder height.

“That lady there is my grandmother, your great grandmother. Her name was Madison… and now you mention it, yes, I expect she was teased, though I must say I hadn’t thought of that before… Perhaps that was one of the reasons she…” He looked sharply at Jayhan and stopped what he was saying. “Jayhan, we have all been teased by village children. They are envious of our lovely house, our well-cut clothes, our money and our status. Their parents are polite and respectful towards us as a general rule but the children, especially those who live on the streets beyond their parents’ control, can be openly resentful and unkind.”

“Really? You got teased too. What did they say?”

Sheldrake gave a short laugh. “I was a skinny little kid. They called me String, Slim, Stick, Scrawny, Pole… things like that. I disliked it intensely. I wanted to be big and strong and bulky.” He looked down at himself. “But I never got any broader. I’m still as skinny as a rake.” He gave a slow smile. “But I am strong now, though I mightn’t look it.”

Jayhan smiled at him. “Of course you’re strong. You’re my dad.”

At that, Sheldrake actually put an arm around him and gave him a squeeze.

Jayhan thought about all the times people had recoiled from his eyes and knew the children’s envy wasn’t the only reason. “You know it’s not just the kids in the village. Everyone hate my eyes, except maybe you and Beth and Clive. What’s so spooky about them? Do dead people have white eyes? Is that what’s wrong?”

“Your eyes are pale lavender, not that anyone notices. So were Madison’s,” replied Sheldrake. “And no, dead people’s eyes stay the colour they were in life, Jayhan, just the cornea goes a bit cloudy after a couple of days.”

“Hmph. Then why, Dad? I know you know.”

Sheldrake heaved a sigh. “Ah Jayhan. Sometimes you are too inquisitive for your own good. I want you to be older before I tell you.” Seeing Jayhan’s face tighten, he held up a warning hand. “I will give you a compromise. I will tell you this much: People fear you because they feared your great grandmother.”

“But that not fair. I’m not her,” Jayhan protested hotly.

“Life is not fair, Jayhan.”

“Humph.” The boy looked down and scuffed his shoe back and forth along the ground, watching it drag a groove in the dirt floor. After a minute, he looked up and, rather to Sheldrake’s surprise, smiled. “I guess that’s true. It’s not fair that we have a better house than the people in the village, is it?”

Having a sense of entitlement, Sheldrake was tempted to take issue but decided not to. “That is what the villagers think and why they take delight in teasing us.”

“So why was Great Grandma so scary?”

“I won’t tell you that. Instead, I will give you several books which contain information about her. Only you may read them. Do not ask Beth or Clive or your mother to help you. Discuss their contents with me, as you need to.”

“But Dad. I’m only just learning to read. I can’t read big books.”

Sheldrake gave a triumphant, mischievous smile. “Exactly. So now you have a reason to work hard at your reading.”