He's A Magic Man (The Children of Merlin) Read online

  Tammy continued as Jane smiled and waved. “You see, you sit down and pull your heel up against his side.” She balanced on one leg while she bent the other knee as though sitting on a horse. “You ask for the canter while he’s already cantering, but you use the opposite leg, so he skips and changes the lead hoof.” Tammy, who’d just turned fifteen, skipped around the library, ending at Jane’s armchair, where she scooped up her sleeping kitten. He was black with immense chartreuse eyes. When Tammy had heard that black cats had trouble getting adopted from the shelter, Bagheera had a home.

  “I get the idea,” Drew sighed and closed the huge folio on the reading table before her.

  The flute music that had been floating in from the music room cut off in mid-trill. Impatient strides could be heard down the hall. Drew’s youngest brother, Lanyon, appeared in the doorway, frowning, his black hair spiking out in all directions. “Tammy, leave Drew alone. She’s on a mission.” The whole family knew about Drew’s deal with her mother.

  Tammy stopped in mid-skip. “Oh. Sorry, Drew. I forgot.” Tammy turned, a suddenly determined look on her freckled face. “But you’ve been in here for weeks with all these dusty old books. It isn’t fair. I’m going to tell Mom she should let you out of the deal.”

  Drew lounged back in her chair. Pretty cute that Tammy wanted to protect her. “You know I like old books. I’m a history major. And anyway, I’m done.”

  “Not like you to give up, Drew,” Lanyon said, disapproving.

  “No. I mean I finished.” She pointed to the screen of her laptop, so incongruous next to the worn leather of the huge book.

  “Yay!” Tammy crowed.

  “Have you told Mother the bad news?” Kemble asked, appearing in the doorway. All her brothers looked more or less like her father. Same strong jaw, black hair, broad shoulders. Lanyon was lanky at seventeen, but he was growing into them. And all the girls looked like their mother: porcelain skin, light eyes of green or gray or turquoise, elegant cheekbones. Tammy’s hair was red, but she was unmistakably a Tremaine girl. Only Devin, taken in by the family after his parents had died, was an anomaly, with his brown eyes, blond hair and tanned skin. But Kemble was an actual clone of her father. When had Kemble gotten little lines around his eyes that made him look older than his thirty-one years?

  “Did you ever think it might not be bad news?”

  Kemble frowned. “You’re kidding, of course.”

  “She seems to be right a lot,” Tammy reminded them.

  “A woman’s intuition about her family.” Kemble always acted sure of himself. Didn’t mean he was, though.

  Drew snorted. “So women’s intuition is believable, but the Tarot couldn't have come from Merlin.”

  Kemble had the grace to turn red. But he went on the offensive. “So you telling me that you believe a deck of cards can tell the future?”

  Drew shrugged. “Wait for the big reveal tonight after dinner.”

  *****

  “So why the long face?” Drew’s mother found her alone on the terrace, staring out at Catalina Island across the lawn that sloped down to the cliff above the beach. It was closing in on six-thirty, but it still felt like late afternoon. The sun glinted across the water.

  Drew managed half a smile. “It’s not long.”

  Her mother sat down beside her. “Oh, dear. Roger.”

  Did she have to be so percipient? And did everyone know about Roger?

  Her mother sat down next to her on the teak bench weathered to a gray patina. “Don’t look so appalled. The cards said you were coming into a very difficult time. And you’ve been talking about ‘Roger this’ and ‘Roger that’ for weeks.”

  “I was a fool.” Her voice caught but she managed not to let the tears flow.

  “Honey, we’re all fools sometime in our lives.” Her mother hugged her close. The touch was so comforting Drew almost started sobbing.

  Drew swallowed before she could say, “Everyone else knew what he was. Even Jane.”

  “No one gives Jane enough credit.” Her mother rubbed Drew’s shoulder.

  “I thought he was the One,” she said, finally straightening. “I was sure.”

  “You’re always sure, honey. Remember that French boy?”

  “Yes. But I was eighteen then. I’m twenty-four. Oh, I knew Roger wasn’t perfect. But.…”

  “But you thought you could fix him. There are some things you can’t fix, and one of them is other people. You certainly can’t start a relationship thinking you can fix what you think is wrong with someone.”

  Jane thought people could change. Her mother apparently didn’t. Drew was just confused at this point. She shook her head, helplessly.

  “Don’t worry, honey. You can’t force it. Sometimes you just have to let things happen.”

  Right. “I’m going to need that week at the Ritz-Carlton,” she sighed.

  “And I can hardly wait to hear the results of all your hard work tonight,” her mother said.

  At least she didn’t ask Drew to cheer up.

  *****

  The entire family gathered for dinner, as usual, including Jane. Drew’s mother was uncharacteristically quiet as the various conversations of her boisterous family swirled around her. Drew was glad for once that dinners were so chaotic. It kept the focus off her. No one would miss her if she didn’t join in. At end of the table Kemble and her father were talking about the logistics of deploying relief supplies to Argentina after the earthquake last week. Jane seemed content to listen in. The Kee/Devin consortium had their heads together as usual. It was their last summer before they went off to UCLA. Ah, the excitement of feeling grown up. Kee was going to major in art and Devin in oceanography, which would put them at different ends of the campus. They probably hadn’t been apart that much since Devin had shown up on the Tremaine doorstep when they were both seven.

  “Come on, you can do better than that,” Tris was saying to his new wife, Maggie. “You’re eating for two, now.”

  “If you had your way I’d weigh five hundred and twelve pounds.” Maggie was about five-foot-nothing to Tris’s six-four. “Gotta stay in shape if I’m going to ride in Denver.”

  Her brother looked like he might explode. “No more rodeoing until after the baby,” he sputtered. “I thought we agreed.”

  Maggie grinned. “I’m talking about Denver a year from now.”

  Her brother flushed. “Oh, well, okay then. But I’m not sure you should still be riding.”

  “Tris, I’m only four months pregnant. Doc says I’m good to go until seven.”

  “What do doctors know?” Tris grumbled. It was great to see big, bad-boy Tris a puddle of worry over his tiny, spitfire wife. These two had overcome a lot of emotional baggage to get to true love, but you’d never know it. Now they lived over the garages, next to Mr. Nakamura and his daughter. Her father wanted to build them a house on the estate. There was plenty of room. But Tris and Maggie had simple tastes. Tris would never understand that his father wanted to do something for him as an apology for never quite understanding him.

  Jane got up to get dessert. Tammy and Lanyon’s conversation about the greatest songs about horses ever had descended into an argument about the exact meaning of the Byrds’ “Chestnut Mare.”

  “It’s obviously a song about drugs,” Tammy said with a smug expression.

  “What would you know about drugs?” Lanyon snorted. “You’re homeschooled.”

  “Not my fault,” Tammy said darkly, glaring at her mother with accusation in her eyes. “But any song about some guy riding a horse off a cliff without getting killed is a drug song. Besides, it’s from the seventies. Aren’t you always saying that every song in the seventies was about drugs, Mr. Know-All-About-Music Man?”

  “It’s more in the tradition of a tall tale, like Paul Bunyan,” Lanyon explained as if to a child. No fifteen-year-old wanted to be talked to in that tone.

  Tammy sniffed. “It talks about putting a brand on that lovely horse. I hate that song.�
�

  “It might be about a woman rather than a mare,” Drew observed when she saw Lanyon getting ready for a familiar dissertation about the genius of Roger McGuinn’s twelve-string arpeggios or Clarence White’s killer riffs. That stopped them both in mid-retort. They stared. “Which means I don’t much like the sentiment either, Tammy.”

  “It’s historical,” Lanyon sputtered. “They weren’t enlightened back then.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Drew said dryly. Jane brought out a huge bowl of trifle. “Well, this is as good a time as any,” Drew said, and tapped her spoon on her water glass.

  Kee frowned. “You sound like you’re at some Moose Lodge dinner, or something.”

  “Like you know anything about Moose Lodge dinners.” Devin smirked.

  “It was the worst thing I could think of, offhand,” Kee admitted.

  “All right,” her father said. “Let Drew talk or your mother will have a heart attack.” The family turned expectantly toward Drew. They knew this research meant a lot to their mother. And Drew knew it might change some family dynamics. She had to go carefully.

  “In order not to bore some members of the family—” Drew began.

  Lanyon interrupted with a “Puh-lease, Lord.”

  Drew frowned at him. “I’ll give you the abbreviated version.” No one touched the trifle. “A mention of what might have been a predecessor of Tarot occurred in 1227. You can look it up on Wikipedia. Bern, Switzerland, issued an edict against playing tarot games in 1367.”

  “So tarot was an actual game?” Kee asked.

  “Italian. Called tarocco back then. Most sources say using it for divination didn’t come in until a lot later.” Drew glanced to her mother and saw her disappointment. Drew took a breath. Might as well get through the hard part. “There are a lot of hokey origin theories out there: that the decks were based on the cave paintings in France (which were pictures of aliens, of course) or that they were given to Egyptians by the god Thoth.”

  “So, all hoo-ha?” Lanyon asked, casting sidelong glances at his mother.

  “I knew this was a waste of time,” Kemble muttered.

  “Thank you, Drew,” her mother said, her features under tight control. “You worked so hard on this.” For all her towering strength, their mother could be vulnerable.

  “Hold on.” Drew put up her hands. “Genius at work.” She leaned forward. “I wondered why a Swiss city was so upset over Italian cards. Was it just wasting time, or was it sin? So I looked at Church documents. Lo and behold, a Father Valeré preached a whole sermon on the evils of trying to understand God’s will through the use of tarocco cards. That means they were used for divination even in the fourteenth century.”

  “Okay, so they were hokum back then too.” Lanyon shrugged.

  “Doesn’t mean they came from Merlin,” Kemble said.

  Drew frowned at them. “Okay, okay. Here’s the big reveal.” She leaned forward. “Father Valeré said the cards were a revival of the evil of the pagan Germanic invaders in the sixth century. That’s why everyone was so upset.”

  “So what?” Devin asked. “I don’t get it.”

  She’d known this was going to be hard, but really! “Well. It might mean tarot cards were used for divination in the sixth century by Germanic tribes.”

  “I thought you said this was the short version,” Lanyon accused.

  “Anglo-Saxons were Germanic,” she said slowly, and carefully. “Merlin and Arthur were fighting Saxons.”

  Recognition started to light fires in the eyes around the table. “So. I started researching Anglo-Saxon interactions with the local Britons. At a burial site in Cornwall, they found Saxon references to something called ‘the Arcane’ that told the fate of men.” Drew grinned. “And this ‘Arcane’ was said to come from a powerful local wizard who had died a hundred years earlier.”

  “The trump cards of the tarot are called Arcana.” Her mother’s voice held excitement.

  They all stared at each other. “That wizard could maybe be Merlin,” Maggie said, in her forthright way. “Didn’t Arthur live about a hundred years before the sixth century? Not that I’m a scholar or anything.”

  “I agree,” Drew’s father said thoughtfully. “The wizard could be Merlin. The cards were used to tell the future even back then. And he gave the cards to the German tribes, who took them to Europe, where the Church was outraged, at least in Switzerland. Looks like I owe you an apology for what I’ve been thinking, Brina.” His expression was rueful. “The cards do come from Merlin. That may be why you have such an affinity for them.”

  “I guess we should all apologize,” Kemble said, sheepishly.

  Drew’s mother shook her head, her eyes full. “You’re sure?” she asked Drew.

  “Hard to be positive about things that happened that long ago, and you know the historical existence of Merlin is not certain at all. But the part about the tarot being used for divination by Britons at the time of Arthur is supported. I could publish.”

  “Uh, that might not be wise,” her father said. “If it does predict the future, it could be used for evil as well as good.”

  “I know.” Drew sighed. “And there’s one other strange thing.”

  “Hard to beat that for strange,” Tris said, now digging into the trifle to serve Maggie.

  “One of the early priests who came to Britain to convert the locals wrote about four objects he called Talismans. Each symbolized one of the tarot suits and were said to confer incredible power on the owner.”

  “What are the suits again?” Devin asked.

  “Swords, cups, wands, and pentacles,” her mother said. “They were physical objects?”

  “Apparently.” Drew shrugged. “But they were separated and lost. The Church has sent out several expeditions down through the ages to find them, but it now considers them myth.”

  There was a minute of silence. Everyone looked to her father for his reaction. He seemed a little amazed by the whole thing. “I … I guess that was good work, Drew.”

  Drew felt the old anger welling up. “Surprise, surprise, even a girl can be useful?” Her father was always all over the boys, pushing them to excel, but he never pushed Drew or Kee. Once Drew had thought she was just lucky, until she got older and realized that her father didn’t expect much of his daughters.

  “Now, honey,” her mother said, playing the smoother as always.

  “I won’t spoil the moment,” Drew muttered, rising. “I bet Mother feels like celebrating how right she was. And I’m celebrating a week at the Ritz-Carlton. That was the deal.” Her father’s brows drew together, but he didn’t say anything. Drew was pretty sure her mother had bullied her father into submission on this one. “I’ll be without any of my beloved family for a whole week. Not that I don’t love living at home when I’m twenty-four. So I put a couple of bottles of champagne in the fridge.”

  “And we all get to drink crow,” Lanyon pouted.

  “Not if crow is alcoholic. You four get fruit juice,” her mother said.

  “I’m eighteen,” Devin protested. “That’s legal drinking age in some states.”

  “And I’m almost,” Kee cried. “Next month.”

  Their father suppressed a grin. “Just this once, anyone who actually likes the taste of champagne can have some.”

  “Even me?” Tammy squeaked.

  “Even you,” her father promised. “I’ll personally get you a glass.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tammy didn’t like champagne. Drew was hardly surprised. Kee made a big pretense of sophistication but only took a couple of sips. Lanyon didn’t even pretend to like it. He felt the words “dog slime” applied. Devin drank up. Guys who just turned eighteen would drink anything. Now Maggie and Tris had gone back to their quarters with heat in their eyes. No mystery about what they’d be doing. Kemble had some biography he was reading and her parents were talking quietly in the living room. The kids were in the den watching TV as Drew walked through, feeling lost. She didn’t e
ven have an excuse to hide in the library anymore.

  “Dancing with the Stars isn’t on until tomorrow,” Lanyon protested, grabbing the remote.

  “Maybe Idol? Or America’s Got Talent. Give me that.” Tammy stretched to where he held it away.

  “How about Survivor? I think this is the week someone has to eat bugs.”

  “Not on your life.” Channels flipped by as Lanyon fended off Tammy.

  “Hey! Here’s a show called Treasure Hunter,” Lanyon announced. “That sounds right up our alley tonight, what with everybody hunting for lost Talismans, and such.”

  “I agree.” Drew plopped down between them. She could spare some time for her little brother and sister. Otherwise she had zero prospects of doing anything but moping tonight.

  “O-kay,” Tammy sighed. “I always lose.” Lanyon turned up the volume.

  “You and I watched Dancing with the Stars last week,” Drew reminded her.

  “And now, we’re live out of Key West as we talk to Brandon St. Claire, newcomer to salvage, about what drew him to this expensive game.” The guy holding the microphone approached a large boat that looked like it was meant for fishing, swaying gently in its moorings at a dock. The name of the craft was clear on its hull: The Purgatory. The sky was blue behind the white of the boats. They were in some kind of a marina. The tilting masts made a spiky background for a guy in a navy yachtsman’s jacket and white slacks. He was clean cut with a beefy build and a ruddy complexion. His blondish hair was beginning to thin.

  “Well, Jim, for a man like me, who’s competed in yacht races and circumnavigated the globe, there just wasn’t much to be excited about anymore....”

  The camera panned to a guy jumping down off the boat to the dock. He stumbled and then righted himself.

  Drew sucked in a breath. The interview faded into silence. Tammy and Lanyon seemed to recede until Drew was in a darkened place, alone, gazing at the figure on the flat screen. The man who’d stumbled was big and muscular, with dark curling hair and what were probably brown eyes. His skin was either tan or naturally olive-colored. He had movie-star stubble. Exceedingly handsome, she felt herself realize, as though from a distance. His prominent nose wasn’t quite straight. Didn’t matter. Still gorgeous. He was dressed in khaki cargo pants and boat shoes and a white, wrinkled shirt that stood out against his skin. His features burned into her brain as another man steadied him, and the camera quickly panned back to St. Claire.