Isabella felt increasingly that she was managing two lives, her ‘normal’ go to school and be the only child in a grieving household and her life at the big house. She never mentioned the big house to anyone else, for reasons she herself hardly understood. It seemed like a betrayal to open up the big house to the curiosity of others who would not understand and anyway, as long as there was the faintest possibility of a reunion with Raven, the least said the better because people would consider her crazy, or in denial.
Since Raven’s death she felt no longer a child and more a young woman. Her visits to the big house left her wondering about life after death and about the stories of all the people that had gone before her. She had started to pay attention in her history lessons and wondered if one day she would meet someone in the big house who had been famous in their time. Even if she did meet someone she could hardly turn up at school the next day and announce she had met King Herod, or Lady Macbeth now could she? ‘Was Lady Macbeth real, or just a character in a play anyway?’ she asked herself.
The boundary between what was real and what was make believe was beginning to shift, experiences like: her reappearing brother, the smell of cardamom and the sound of his flute on the breeze, Simmi the Indian servant with a sad story to tell and an enigmatic Icarayus who appears out of the mist and disappears again without a trace, all felt as real to her as her supposed ‘real’ life, with her friends who were like quicksilver, never mentioning Raven one minute and doling out false pity the next. A group bound by the anxiety of pressing exams for what seemed to be an ever diminishing world of work.
After the loss of her brother, her soul mate, she felt she could not trust anything in life to be permanent anymore. She decided she could take nothing for granted anymore. She was determined to live each experience to the full because she feared facing more loss, or turning her back on something that could make her loss more bearable.
However all was not to go smoothly for Isabella. One day when she was heading for the tree she met a man who was walking his dog and the dog started barking at her with such ferocity that she stopped in her tracks. The man did nothing to call off his dog and so there was this stand off in the woods. The man had a hood covering most of his face and he averted his face from her. ‘He is too old to be wearing a hoodie.’ she thought to herself, ‘what is he hiding?’
After a few minutes the dog calmed down and Isabella went to pass by and as she did so the man asked her if she was going to the big house? She did not reply as she was surprised that he knew that the big house existed. His energy was angry and she associated the big house with calm and peaceful energy, he did not seem like someone that would caress the Spectas back into life, or tread carefully around the fruit trees.
So she pretended not to hear his question and walked on, past her own tree and deeper into the woods where she had rarely been before. As soon a she reached a thicket she hid and watched the man and his dog circle the Tree of Heaven and then, to her absolute horror, climb the branches as if looking for something. She feared he might find her secret hiding place and felt a rising terror that her crystals, which were so personal to her, might be taken.
She had to stifle a laugh, when he fell very painfully and ungainly before reaching the hand of branches where she normally sat. He was so angry he picked up some lose branches and whipped the tree as if it was its fault that he fell and then stomped off in the direction of the big house with his dog cowering behind him. She wondered how often the dog had been the victim of his rages.
However, the fact that a stranger knew of her tree and the big house was very unsettling and as she approached the tree later she did so with some apprehension. She climbed into the hand and dug deep into her hiding place to retrieve her two crystals and felt that she was rescuing two dear friends as she did so. She feared for the big house and what he might do if he found it, so with her crystals firmly grasped in her hands she transported herself to the iron gates, or at least transported herself to the place where the big house stood and it was nowhere to be found. Nowhere.
There was no blue mist, no iron gates, no iron circle, no Spectas flying overhead, no scent of cardamom and no strains of flute music. There was was just rustling of leaves and the silence of the forest, which was not so much a silence as a hum.
She searched, she checked and double checked her bearings, she searched with her eyes open and she searched with them closed, she searched with her nose and she searched with her ears and there was no response. Nothing, she felt abandoned, bereft and a little scared. The sky had become menacing during her time of searching and hiding and she no longer knew her way home. She was cold and hungry and suddenly tired, so tired that she considered bedding down in the Tree of Heaven but knew that her parents would go spare.
She started to find her way home, but in the dark the familiar landscape took on a more sinister disguise and there were times when she felt that she would never find her way home again. This made her shiver with fear and she started to recall the fairy stories like Hansel and Gretel and that made her even more nervous as she did not even have Raven to keep her company when she was lost and terrified.
Eventually out of the evening mist the iron gates did appear, but firmly shut this time and she noticed that the blue mist was radiant. She had never seen it at night before, and the whole of the night sky was reflected in the mist. One star in particular shone out, it had six points and was brighter than all the rest, ‘My star of hope,’ she thought to herself and looked up into the night sky to see if it really existed, and it did, its bright golden stream of light was visible for the first time in her life and illuminated in that light was her home.
She lost no time in following the star and arrived home in no time at all bedraggled and shaken. Her parents were ashen with worry, the loss of their second child was something they had clearly been considering during her absence, but their joy at her arrival overcame their fears and they all settled back into their new found comfort. When her parents had relaxed again she retreated to her bedroom and found an old box that Raven had given her for a birthday. The image on the lid shocked her, for it was of a frozen lake with boats tied up in the centre, just like the lake ... ‘Let’s not go there’ she told herself, it is just a coincidence. She reached for an old silk scarf and wrapped her crystals up so tightly they would never be at risk again.
