Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  It was soon clear, however, that she could not provide sufficiently exact information to hold her companion’s interest.

  “I was telling you, my dear,” he said, gently interrupting her stumbling description of the enormous blue dragonflies that frequented the banks of the Thames where it flowed through Oxford, “what an intriguing tale I had from the keeper of the Serpent and Master. It seems there is a local tradition that the Lady Laora ar Breizh, she who was afterward the wife of your King Henry, came to the shrine at Kerandraon—though not that one only—with promises and offerings, to beseech the Lady Dahut to spare her from the illustrious marriage to which her father had promised her.”

  “D-do they say so?” Sophie managed, belatedly remarking that Conall MacLachlan was waiting for her to speak. “That tale is one I never heard at home.” This was, in the strictest sense, quite true; she had in fact heard it much afterwards, from Gray, who had had it from her stepfather’s coachman on the occasion of that disastrous pilgrimage.

  Conall MacLachlan eyed her shrewdly. “They do say so, in fact,” he said. “They say it still, I am told; and I have heard, too, that though the Lady Dahut denied her petition, it was to Kerandraon that Queen Laora returned when she fled her gilded prison in London, and in Kerandraon, or its environs, that she died, leaving her daughter to the care of a neglectful stepfather.”

  Sophie schooled her features—without magick—into an expression of polite interest; beneath the tablecloth, she clenched her fingers in the folds of her gown.

  “Of course, being so lately in London, you must have heard the newest rumours from Henry Tudor’s court?”

  Sophie lifted a forkful of venison to her lips and chewed it, thinking hard. Was the use of her father’s name in place of his title Alban custom or calculated disrespect? And what rumours could he mean? Not her own tale, at any rate; even so far away as Alba, events two years in the past could not possibly be considered new—and clearly Conall MacLachlan knew exactly who she was, or thought he did. What, then? If there had been any interesting rumours flying about London at Midsummer, they had flown quite over Sophie’s head.

  “I fear that I have nothing of that nature to relate,” she said, when she had finished chewing.

  “Indeed?” Conall MacLachlan raised his eyebrows in honest surprise, or a very good counterfeit thereof. “There is no talk, for instance, of a betrothal for one of the King’s sons?”

  “Oh!” said Sophie. “Yes, as to that, the Crown Prince is to marry Lady Delphine d’Evreux—next autumn, I believe. But that is not rumour; it is settled fact.”

  “But Edward Tudor has two brothers, has he not?”

  “His Majesty has two younger sons, yes.” Sophie laid a subtle stress on the Latin title, from a perverse desire to defend the very dignities which she so much disdained on her own behalf. “I have heard nothing of the kind with respect to either of them, however.”

  Conall MacLachlan’s expression suggested that he did not altogether believe her but could not think how to accuse her of dissembling without provoking a scene. As Sophie had been perfectly truthful, however, she had no difficulty in meeting his gaze, and after a moment he turned back to his venison and winter squash.

  Her curiosity getting the better of her, Sophie said, “May I ask, sir, what prompted your question?”

  “I think you know, Domina Marshall.” The slight emphasis on her name and title—her own tactic turned upon her—might be her imagination; the knowing half smile that accompanied it was not.

  “You must have heard many such curious tales in your travels,” said Sophie, for after all she was not eager to give offence to her hostess. “I have travelled very little myself as yet, but I confess I have a great fondness for it. I suppose you must have seen a vast number of strange and interesting places?”

  Conall MacLachlan looked sidewise at her.

  To Sophie’s relief, however, he took up the offered change of subject with no further comment, recounting with some spirit—though with more than occasional pauses to redact elements which, he said, were not for a lady’s ears—his adventures in various parts of the Iberian Empire, until the table turned again with the final remove.

  She suspected him of choosing the locale for the purpose of provoking some reaction from her, and unwilling to concede him this victory, she smiled and laughed at his outrageous tales, and sipped at her wineglass—which seemed perpetually full—and turned over in her mind the question which she had asked and Conall MacLachlan had declined to answer.

  * * *

  It was not the custom here as it was at home, for the ladies to rise and withdraw at the end of the meal whilst the gentlemen remained in possession of the dining-room. Instead, a signal from their hostess produced a general shift from table to music-room, where inevitably, in Din Edin as in London, smaller groups began to coalesce as the guests, no longer constrained by their placement at the dinner-table, sought out those others of the party with whom they genuinely wished to converse.

  The music room was large and well furnished with a gleaming pianoforte, large and small harps, a little group of music-stands, and sensible racks for sheet-music discreetly concealed behind a tall folding screen painted with twining roses. Sophie did not recognise that she was drifting towards the pianoforte until she found herself standing before the closed keyboard with the fingers of her right hand resting upon the hinged lid; she was just snatching her hand away, hoping that no one had remarked it, when from behind her a hearty voice said, in heavily accented Latin, “Oh! Domina Marshall, are you a musician as well as a scholar?”

  Sophie whirled, flushing, and found herself face-to-face with the Erse lecturer whom she had seen at dinner talking with Rory MacCrimmon. She produced a panicked smile and held out her hand, Alban-fashion, then at once wished that she had not. The older woman clasped it, however, with a warm smile of her own, and with a rush of relief Sophie at last succeeded in recalling her name. “Meadhbh Ní Sabháin,” she said. “Yes, I am, in a small way; and yourself?”

  “Sophie Marshall is too modest,” said Mór MacRury, looming up behind Meadhbh Ní Sabháin. Her arm was looped familiarly through Rory MacCrimmon’s, as though they had been two women, or two men; as they were nearly of a height, however, it did not look so odd as it might have done. “She is a very fine musician, and well she knows it.”

  “Mór,” said Sophie, half in greeting, half in protest. The heat that had begun to fade from her cheeks rushed back redoubled. “Rory.”

  Mór MacRury drew away and spoke quietly to Meadhbh Ní Sabháin—not so quietly, however, that Sophie could not hear her. “If you wish to persuade Sophie Marshall to play and sing for you,” she said, with a smile just this side of wicked glee, “the way to go about it is to offer her a song for her collection.”

  Sophie smiled at this portrait of herself, collecting songs as Conall MacLachlan collected butterflies. The giggle that next escaped her, despite her best efforts to maintain the dignity appropriate to a scholar, brought home to her just how much wine she had drunk with her dinner.

  I ought to know better than that. I do know better. Imagine the things I might have said, after two more glasses!

  She took a deep breath.

  “I should very much like to learn a new Erse song or two, Meadhbh Ní Sabháin,” she said, “if you do not dislike the idea.” It occurred to her that this was not her own house, and she added hastily, “And if our hostess has no objection.”

  The Chancellor’s lady was at this moment crossing the room towards them, and—before Sophie had quite come to terms with the situation—gathering her guests before her like a mother duck chivvying her ducklings.

  “Now, Sophie Marshall,” she said, “Mór MacRury has been telling me great things of you. You will not deny us a song, I hope?”

  Ceana MacLachlan—Sophie still found it difficult not to think of her as Mrs. Arthur Breck—was much yo
unger than her husband, though not so young as Sophie; the Chancellor and his wife put her in mind, in fact, of her father and stepmother, though she had no reason to suppose their partnership equally fraught. Ceana MacLachlan’s elegantly dressed hair was the colour of sunrise in winter, a soft gold just touched with rose, and she had her brother’s cornflower-blue eyes and his trick of narrowing them at the object of her scrutiny; but if she shared his desire to extract information from Sophie, she concealed it to much better effect.

  “I—” Sophie faltered. “I thank you, very much—I fear that Mór MacRury greatly flatters me—”

  “Oh, Sophie, sing ‘Ailein Duinn,’” said Mór.

  “Later, perhaps,” said Ceana MacLachlan. “I should like first to hear a song of your home, Sophie Marshall, as we are honouring our visitors this evening. And then perhaps Meadhbh Ní Sabháin may favour us with a song of Eire?”

  “Oh! Yes, please,” cried Sophie, only just managing to refrain from clapping her hands.

  Meadhbh Ní Sabháin smiled at her. “Certainly,” she said.

  At their urging, Sophie sat down to the pianoforte. Her hands arranged themselves upon the keys, almost without her conscious intention, as she considered: A song of Breizh? Of London? Of Oxfordshire? The melodies that presented themselves to her mind were those she had been learning from Donella MacHutcheon, from Mór and Rory and even Catriona, and she chuckled again, ruefully; had she indeed become a collector of songs?

  Well, it is a more sensible occupation than collecting butterflies, at any rate.

  Behind her, a sudden gust of wind rattled against a window-pane.

  “Oh!” said Sophie abruptly, straightening her spine.

  She resettled her hands in the necessary positions, and began to play.

  The trees they grow so high, and the leaves they do grow green,

  she sang.

  And many a cold winter night my love and I have seen.

  Of a cold winter night, my love, you and I alone have been;

  Whilst my bonny boy is young, he’s a-growing.

  This song of Somersetshire was one she had loved from a child, one which her stepfather had forbidden—for reasons obscure to her until much later—and which she had reclaimed, in some sense, as a badge of her freedom from him.

  When, at the end of the burden, she struck into the interlude, Sophie became aware that the hum of conversation had grown quieter, and eyes were turning towards her. She knew, of course, that her playing and singing were not altogether easy, and not only because Ceana MacLachlan’s pianoforte was stiffer than her own well-worn instrument in Quarry Close. Amongst her close acquaintance, it might be no great matter if her singing should transmit her mood to her listeners; here, however, it would not do, being just the sort of uninvited, unacknowledged influence which Dougal MacAngus, the lecturer in magickal ethics, called an unjustifiable violation of the subject’s will. So far as she was able, therefore, she exerted herself to convey nothing in her singing but the songs themselves.

  It was astonishingly difficult.

  She reached the final verse at last and slid into the refrain:

  I’ll sit and I’ll mourn his fate until the day I die,

  And I’ll watch all o’er his child while he’s growing . . .

  Then, slumping a little and briefly closing her eyes, she lifted her hands from the keyboard and folded them in her lap.

  She had just time to notice that the room was very quiet—quieter than she could at all account for—before the company erupted into applause.

  When pressed for another song, she ceded to Mór MacRury’s reiterated request for “Ailein Duinn,” and then in turn petitioned those listeners who had gathered round the pianoforte to contribute a song to her collection—having decided that if she were to be known here in any case as a collector of popular songs, no great harm could come of embracing the title.

  Meadhbh Ní Sabháin obliged with an unaccompanied song which she called a caoineadh. The music-room fell silent, little by little, as she sang; Sophie, coming back to herself at last to find tears drying on her cheeks, was not in the least astonished to be told that the caoineadh was a mourning-song. The one she had sung, Meadhbh Ní Sabháin explained, had been made by her own grandmother, upon the death of her first husband, and sung in the family ever since.

  “We have had a song of mine, Mór MacRury,” said Meadhbh Ní Sabháin, smiling across the pianoforte despite the almost sombre mood of the room; “will you give us a song of yours?”

  “Oh, yes, Mór, do,” said Sophie eagerly. “‘Fear a’ Bhàta,’ perhaps? That is Gray’s favourite, you know.” Sophie did not sing it for him often; though Mór called it hopeful, it seemed to her almost as boundlessly sad as “Ailein Duinn.”

  Mór, having surely anticipated some such request, accepted it gracefully, though there was a shadow of something in her bright blue eyes that looked very like anxiety. “You will play for me?” she said, moving to stand at Sophie’s right, and Sophie nodded.

  Mór MacRury, by her own admission, was an indifferent player upon the pianoforte, and only a little more skilled upon the harp, having had no opportunity to learn either as a girl. She had a sharp ear, however, and had learnt to show her voice to best advantage. It was a rich contralto, warm and deep, the colour of burnt sugar; and she invested the words of her song—composed, she had explained to Sophie, by a young woman whose betrothed had been feared lost at sea—with a yearning beauty that made Sophie wonder whether Mór had herself lost a husband or lover. Sophie could scarcely imagine asking such a question of anyone, however, and of the formidable, self-contained Mór MacRury still less.

  The final verse of the song flowed into its refrain, and Sophie could not help adding a soft descant above the melody. Mór’s vocal range was so much lower than her own that it was very like singing in harmony with Gray, though entirely without the characteristic shiver of magick passing between them.

  Fhir a’ Bhàta, na hóro eile,

  Fhir a’ Bhàta, na hóro eile,

  Fhir a’ Bhàta, na hóro eile,

  Mo shoraidh slàn leat ’s gach àit’ an téid thu!

  Their listeners applauded, and Mór retired from the field, wearing an expression of quiet satisfaction.

  The impromptu concert seemed then at an end, and the gathering round the pianoforte dispersed. Before the end of the evening, however, Ceana MacLachlan sought Sophie out in her husband’s library—where she was pleasantly engaged with Gray, Rory, and Professor Maghrebin in comparing two versions of an ancient atlas of the Mediterranean coast—to request another song.

  Sophie, still fearful of giving offence, acquiesced with her most pleasant smile, though she had begun to feel rather like a performing bear.

  “Perhaps a duet?” she suggested, catching at Gray’s hand as they passed out of the room.

  “Oh!” Ceana MacLachlan turned to him with a delighted and slightly acquisitive smile. “You are a musician, also, Magister?”

  Perhaps Ceana MacLachlan is a collector, like her brother, thought Sophie, but of useful dinner-guests rather than Lepidoptera.

  When they regained the music-room, a debate was going forward between the Chancellor and several of his local guests—for the benefit of their Erse colleagues—as to whether the best views of the city were to be obtained from Castle Hill or from the peak of Arthur’s Seat.

  Sophie resumed her former seat at the pianoforte, and Gray stood at her back, his left hand resting on her right shoulder.

  To assuage her nerves, Sophie fell back on their first and favourite duet, the song of the Border Country which they had sung together long before either had any suspicion of what they should one day be to one another.

  Gray’s resonant baritone carried the melody, steady and clear; the chord progression was so familiar that Sophie’s fingers could execute it almost without conscious thought, lea
ving the most of her attention to the more interesting question of devising an obbligato. Though she had devoted many hours and a great deal of paper and ink to the annotation of melodies acquired from other sources, Sophie had never tried to pin her improvised descants to the page; it was part of the joy of singing with Gray—unshakable in any melody, once learnt—that she need never sing a descant the same way twice.

  Gray’s hand on her shoulder warmed her skin, a tangible connexion mirroring the ephemeral link that hummed between them. Sophie forgot their audience entirely, forgot that she was surrounded by near strangers, and surrendered to the joy of the song.

  When the final chord died away, she came full awake once more to a deep, unnerving silence.

  Gray’s fingers tightened along her collar-bone, in warning or in reassurance; she blinked, with a small reflexive shake of her head, and raised her eyes to look about her.

  Apprehension seized her at the sight of a dozen faces staring wide-eyed back at her. Had she set her magick loose, even briefly, without intending it? Or unknowingly committed some breach of custom, some insult to the Chancellor’s hospitality?

  At last Arthur Breck himself cleared his throat and said gruffly, “That was well sung; I congratulate you.”

  Sophie bowed her head again in pleased relief, and Gray relaxed his hold upon her shoulder.

  The silence having been broken, conversations again struck up around the room. Sophie rose from her seat, flashed a brief, tense smile at Gray, and took shelter in the corner behind the standing harp—which was taller than herself and thus offered the best possibility of concealment—to regain her composure. Her back against the oak panelling, she pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and took a deep breath.

  Hearing footsteps, she raised her head, expecting to see Gray—but instead beheld Mór MacRury, approaching with her slim hands clasped about her elbows and a tense, troubled expression on her face.

  “Mór—” Sophie faltered. “Are . . . are you quite well?”

  Mór’s blue eyes studied her, uncomfortably sharp. “I do not understand you, Sophie Marshall,” she said at last.