The Wonder Tales

Chapter One

Chapter One

In which Dorothea Winthrope fails to drown herself in the River Wyn.

Dorothea Winthrope had become quite the devotee of honeywine.

This was worthy of note because she had never been so before; indeed, she had always been famously teetotal. She could not remember, now, how many years it was that she had lived. Her snow-white hair, bowed back, failing eyesight and lameness attested to its being a good many, however, and her adoption of a regular programme of drinking at her advanced age had certainly set Northtown talking.

Not that she was lame or bowed any longer! The faerie greengages had seen to that (or bluegages, as she tended to think of them, since they were in no way green. She had always been a stickler for precision). A fondness for honeywine seemed a small price to pay for her liberation from these complaints, for she could walk and run and (above all) swim once more and nothing, now, could dim her sunny good temper. Well, excepting the one occasion where she had stupendously overindulged and suffered all the joys of a splitting headache for two days afterwards, not to mention disgracing herself in the gardens behind the Moss and Mist.

She still hoped Tobias had not known about that.

The closing of the Mist had disconcerted her greatly, for no other establishment would do for her. Privately she felt that it was not only the excellence of Tobias’s honeywine that drew her to his tavern. There was some other draw, one she had no way to define, for during the weeks of its abandonment Dorothea drifted listlessly about Northtown and pined sadly for the Moss and Mist.

John Quartermane was no substitute for Tobias Dwerryhouse; on this point, everyone was in full agreement. But at least he had opened its doors once again to the people of Berrie, even if he had begun his period of proprietorship by making a great, noisy to-do about a stolen strongbox. Honestly! The man was a fool. Since the strongbox was not his anyway, the degree of his indignation over its disappearance moved some to question his motives in taking over the running of the tavern at all.

Dorothea wondered whether either Tobias or the strongbox had something to do with her former satisfaction with the Mist, for her appreciation for it was undoubtedly lessened under Quartermane’s stewardship. But though Tobias was well-looking, he had never taken her fancy in that way; and how could a strongbox, or anything likely to be contained therein, be imagined to have any influence over her comfort?

One night a week or two after the reopening of the Mist, Dorothea sat with a glass and a rapidly diminishing bottle of honeywine, listening desultorily to the outpourings of her companions. She had gathered a group of drinkers around herself with the regularity of her visits, folk such as Marmaduke Pauncevolt, Fabian Mallory and Verity Wilkin. They were congenial enough company, but Dorothea could not persuade herself that their concerns were as absorbing to her as they were apparently imagined to be, and her friends were blissfully oblivious to her splendid and total lack of interest.

What she wanted to do was finish her wine, stumble out into the night and make her way to the river, whereupon she would divest herself of her warm and sensible clothing and dive straight in. Autumn had cloaked Berrie in a fine mantle of chilly evenings, drizzling rain and clinging fog, however, and even she could no longer persuade herself that the conditions were well suited to night-time swimming. The river, in point of fact, was perishingly cold. Dorothea knew this because she had last taken a dip three nights before, and emerged blue and shivering and thoroughly miserable. She had almost expired of the chill and had sternly informed herself that there would be no more bathing until the spring.

But her bones ached with the need to feel the water over her skin, and she could think of nothing else. What drew her to the river was as mysterious and unfathomable as her attraction to the Moss and Mist, but Dorothea had given up on her attempts to decipher the mystery. It was as it was, and she accepted it.

She shifted in her seat, restless, as Fabian regaled the company with an account of the petty theft he had foiled two days before. He had told the story twice already and seemed entirely unaware of it, and he was only growing more garrulous with each new tankard of ale.

‘Dulci Seabrooke’s cottage!’ he was saying, exuberantly and with unnecessary volume. ‘Of all the places to go looking for valuables! Oh, ‘tis only brass, she said, grateful as you please. But ‘twas my mother’s and I should be awfully sorry to lose it. And do you know what she said after that?’

Dorothea did not care. She stopped listening, thought once more of the river with wistful longing, and stood up from the table.

Conversation ceased at once, and her companions gazed up at her in surprise.

‘All finished, Dot?’ said Marmaduke. ‘Why, you have yet to finish your second bottle, and haven’t touched a third!’

Gracious, thought Dorothea. Had it come to that? Was she fixed among the neighbourhood as a three-bottle woman at minimum?

Perhaps it would be better to spend a little more time bathing, and a little less time drinking.

‘All finished,’ she said, and it occurred to her distantly that for all her splendid good spirits these days she was perhaps a trifle annoyed tonight. ‘Excuse me.’ She bowed with all the dignity she could muster — which was not so very little, at that, for she was less inebriated than usual. Gathering her shawl about herself, she stepped out into the night, ignoring Quartermane’s importunity to linger a while yet, Mistress Winthrope? and Shall you not be wanting your third?

The night was every bit as cold as she was hoping it would not be, and she sighed. Undeterred, she trudged through the streets until she reached the broken Wynspan, focusing upon the marvellous flexibility in her once-lame leg instead of upon the biting chill in the air. Leaving her garments in a neat pile upon the bank, she jumped into the river at once, giving herself no time at all to quail at the iciness of the water.

The cold bit fiercely into her thin, shrinking limbs and she shrieked.

‘Mistress Winthrope?’ called a familiar male voice, and Dorothea grumbled something under her breath about interfering apothecaries.

Malachi Amberdrake stood upon the north bank of the Wynspan, right next to the pile of clothes she had left awaiting her return. How he had learned of her night-time bathing habits she did not know, but when she left the Moss and Mist every evening he had apparently taken to following her.

‘Mistress Winthrope, are you quite well?’ he called. ‘I do not wish to interfere, madam, but I must advise against night-bathing! I really must! The water is far too cold!’

Which was a fair point, Dorothea reflected as she swam with furious, shivering strokes. Why did it have to be night bathing? She could not remember ever feeling the urge to swim the waters during the day. In fact, she could not remember feeling any particular urge to do anything during the day.

‘I am well!’ she called at last, exasperated when Amberdrake declined to desist with his nagging. ‘When I wish for you to look after my health, I will pay you for the trouble!’

He had brought a pile of blankets to wrap her in, she noticed, which meant he had prepared for this moment. Planned his interception of her bathing adventure! Huh! And there he stood, holding them out in hope, his face partially averted, trying to watch for her removal from the water while simultaneously respecting her nakedness.

It was awfully kind of him, but he could hardly be expected to realise how terribly inconvenient it was as well. For it was distracting. Sometimes, when she came here alone and swam under the stars and relished the silence of the night, her mind went to other places entirely. It was that, she thought, more than the water itself that she loved.

He would not be deterred, so she took a deep breath and dropped beneath the surface. Amberdrake’s voice faded into blissful peace, and Dorothea closed her eyes against the intense blackness underwater.

Her mind drifted.

Dorothea was airborne. She was a bird, perhaps, sailing aloft upon spiralling currents of air. The skies were dark around her, glittering with stars, and she felt an overwhelming tenderness for each bright mote of light in the velvety firmament. All was fresh and clear and bright, and Dorothea felt a soul-deep serenity which she had never otherwise known.

She felt younger, too; no longer age-withered, nor weary in spirit and limb. In fact she felt ageless, invulnerable. Nothing could ever touch her up here, nothing could harm her.

She did not know how long she dwelt in her beautiful daydream, but the icy-cold of the water penetrated her consciousness at last. Dorothea came to herself with a gasp, forgetting that she was a few feet underwater.

Curses, she thought distantly as water filled her lungs. Come to think of it, the cold ought to have killed her the last time she had bathed at night and lingered too long. Why had it not? And just how old was she, at that?

Dorothea was grateful for the care of Malachi Amberdrake after all, as he hauled her from the water and turned her upon her face. She did not altogether enjoy the force with which he pounded her upon the back, berating her for her foolishness all the while, but since it expelled the freezing water from her lungs and restored her ability to draw in air, she could not fault him for it.

‘Thank you,’ she spluttered at last, her throat raw and her chest hurting. She accepted the blanket Amberdrake handed to her and pulled it gratefully around herself, leaning briefly against his leg in a rare moment of weakness.

‘Why do you do it, Dot?’ he asked her in a gentler tone, his more forceful remonstrations at an end.

Dorothea wiped the water from her face with a sigh and sat shivering, feeling oddly forlorn. ‘I do not know,’ she said. She could have reprimanded him for his curiosity, for they were not close, and he had no real right to question her habits. But he had just saved her life — probably, for she could not say she had felt at all likely to expire from the experience, however much her lungs had protested against her ill-usage of them.

It was more that some impulse prompted her to answer the question honestly. She had not had anybody to talk with in so long — not the real, open conversation of friends. And it was the truth: she did not know why she sought the river, nor why her mind produced such strange and delicious visions when she did.

She did know that she could not give them up. Now that her lameness was gone and the river was restored to her at last, she would keep going there, and she would continue to immerse herself in the drenching cold. Even if it killed her, but she did not really believe that it would.

For Dorothea felt a lurking suspicion that she had lingered in life for rather more years than her neighbours realised, or than she herself could count. She had been young once; she must have been. But if she had, those days were so far lost in the distant past that she could no longer remember them at all.