“We shall do no such thing!” she exclaimed, sitting up straight as a pikestaff, and clenching her hands into ivory-knuckled fists. “I am sorry for Cooper’s trouble, in coming so far for nothing, but what my father asks is quite impossible.”
Courcy raised his eyebrows. “You understand, Madame Marshall, that this is not a suggestion on His Majesty’s part. Not only is he your father, and thus within his right to command you—”
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” Sophie interrupted him. “You forget that I am a married woman.” She turned to Gray and said evenly, “Gray, do you wish me to return to London?”
Gray sat straighter, conscious of the role which Sophie apparently needed him to play. “I should be loath to forbid you, if you truly desired it,” he said carefully, “but no.”
Sophie turned back to Lord de Courcy. “I am a married woman,” she repeated. “You surely cannot wish me to dishonour my husband by obeying my father’s wishes in preference to his.”
Had Lord de Courcy (or, for that matter, had Sophie’s father) sought Gray’s advice beforehand, Gray might have explained that Sophie’s peculiar upbringing had given her a pronounced contrarian streak; that though she might sometimes seem a biddable young woman, this was only the effect of the dramatic contrast provided by her younger sister; that, in fact, perhaps the most effective means of persuading her to do a thing was to set oneself up in authority over her and command her to do its opposite. Though of course he should not have given anyone any such advice, absent a strong conviction of its being necessary to Sophie’s well-being.
Courcy, however, did not seem cowed either by Sophie’s reasonable tone or by her logic. “You forget, Madame Marshall,” he said, “that His Majesty does not speak only as your father.”
There was a silence as all present contemplated his implication.
“Do you tell me,” said Sophie at last, speaking carefully and quietly, “that in remaining in Din Edin to continue our studies, my husband and I should be expressly disobeying a royal command?”
“No,” Courcy conceded, after another long silence. His expression suggested that he should have liked very much to return a different answer. “His Majesty’s letter is not so phrased as to give you no choices but obedience or treason. But, Madame Marshall, I beg you will consider—”
Sophie held up a hand—the Princess Royal, now, as suddenly as the sun breaking through storm-clouds—and he fell silent.
“We have considered the question at length already,” she said, “and have determined that unless circumstances should change materially for the worse, we had rather remain where we are. And you may tell him, too, that I am considering his reputation. Lucia MacNeill is my friend, and we are very nearly the only British subjects of her acquaintance; what must she think of us, and of my father and Roland, if we turn tail and flee at the least sign of trouble?”
Gray looked at her in some surprise. It was a sound argument, in its way, and one far more sensitive to the political circumstances than he should have expected Sophie to make.
Courcy, for his part, looked very thoughtful, and as he made no move to argue with her, Sophie unbent so far as to say, “I shall write to my father myself, of course, and make certain that no blame for my recalcitrance attaches to you, my lord.”
Courcy’s mouth quirked briefly. “I thank you for that favour, Your Royal Highness.”
“I shall undertake to inform you, my lord,” said Gray, before Sophie could react to this mockery (if mockery it was), “should any circumstance arise to alter our decision.”
“Yes,” said Sophie; more bluntly, she added, “If we wish to depart, in haste or otherwise, you shall be the first to know it.”
“Very good, madame,” said the Ambassador, offering Sophie a little bow. “And now perhaps you will permit Monsieur Powell to provide pen and ink, so that your letter may be conveyed to His Majesty with all possible speed?”
Sophie visibly set her teeth for a moment, then smiled politely at Lord de Courcy and said, “Certainly. I thank you.”
* * *
Sophie held her peace the length of the return journey to Quarry Close, for which Lord de Courcy had insisted on providing his carriage-and-pair, together with the quite unnecessary company of Mr. Powell. The latter made one or two efforts to engage her in conversation, but upon her saying, civilly enough but with great determination, “Mr. Powell, I beg you will excuse me; I am very tired,” instead favoured Gray with a disquisition upon the subject of University politics—one which Gray had hitherto steered wide around, as likely to be hazardous to his health.
“You are very well informed about the University,” said Gray, “for a man who has never so much as attended a lecture there.”
“It is part of my purview,” said Powell, who seemed to have taken no offence, “as milord’s secretary, to keep an eye on the University, which is more my milieu than his.”
He eyed Gray speculatively. “I do not suppose . . .”
“I hope,” said Gray, “that you do not mean to ask me to spy upon my colleagues.”
Powell looked genuinely startled, and Gray at once regretted his readiness to jump to unpleasant conclusions. “I beg your pardon,” he said.
“No, no,” said Powell, waving a dismissive hand. “I am a diplomat, and you are perfectly placed to engage in covert observations; it was a natural enough conclusion, I suppose. But I think you do not understand the unusual status of the University. You will of course have remarked that it was your letter of invitation from the head of your School which gave you passage into Alba?”
“Yes,” said Gray, who had not; they had carried so many letters northward with them—including his brother-in-law’s missive to Courcy, which Sophie had so long concealed from him—that it had not occurred to him to wonder which of them might be most persuasive in the eyes of the guard captain on duty at the time of their arrival.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Sophie had ceased staring out of the window, and turned minutely towards the conversation; there was a listening quality to her silence now, which had not been there before.
“The University,” said Powell, slowly, “is under the personal patronage of Donald MacNeill, and of Clan MacNeill as present holder of the chieftain’s seat in Alba, but it also functions as a sort of quasi-independent clan-land—you do understand clans and clan-lands?”
“Yes,” Gray repeated, more truthfully this time.
Powell nodded. “So: The University is in many respects its own clan, and its own clan-land, with the Chancellor as its chieftain, if you like; and thanks to the patronage of Clan MacNeill, and to the circumstances of its founding by Ailpín Drostan, in the first days of the Kingdom of Alba, it can act on its own behalf to grant admission to lecturers, fellows, and students from abroad—subject always to the will of Donald MacNeill, of course,” he added conscientiously. “In this it is very different from, say, Merlin College, which may accept applicants, or invite guest lecturers, from outside the Kingdom of Britain but has no power to secure or even influence their admission to the kingdom itself.”
Gray frowned. “I do not perfectly understand the distinction,” he said. Nor did he understand what had led Powell to broach this subject to begin with, but it had caught his interest now, in spite of himself. “If Donald MacNeill can override the decision of the Chancellor . . .”
“Ah.” Powell held up an admonitory finger, looking for a moment exactly like the teaching fellow whom all of Merlin had expected him to become. “Any of the Colleges at Oxford, in such a case, must seek permission from the Crown, and obtain letters of passage in the prospective visitor’s name.” Gray nodded his understanding, and Powell went on: “The University in Din Edin, on the other hand, may—as you have seen—issue such letters on its own behalf, without reference to what I shall for convenience call the Crown of Alba. The Crown may order the expulsion of a person to whom th
e University has granted entry, provided that it can show just cause for so doing—that is to say, some grounds such as a history of criminality, which render him undesirable.”
There must be some reason for this very decided turn of the conversation, but Gray could not for the life of him make it out.
“This also means,” said Powell, “that the University has more power than Merlin College, to protect its own, but that power is nonetheless finite. For example, should a visitor’s own sovereign demand his extradition, the University may refuse it—as Merlin, of course, could not—but such refusal may be overruled by the Crown.”
Ah. “Yes,” said Gray, firmly. “I understand perfectly.”
Had Courcy dispatched Powell with instructions to read them this lecture along the way? Or had Powell conceived the idea himself? In any event he now seemed satisfied, and allowed a pensive silence to reign for the brief remainder of the journey.
* * *
The supply-waggons of which Joanna had written had duly crossed into Alba, and their arrival raised the gratitude of some, and the ire of others, as anticipated. Donald MacNeill issued a very gracious public proclamation on the subject, which thanked King Henry (or, as Donald MacNeill styled him, with more poetry than precision, Henry Tudor the Twelfth) for his generosity to a brother in arms, and confidently promised a like generosity should Britain ever find herself in similar difficulty. Sophie felt it had been very well done, and could not herself regard her father’s bride-gift with anything but uncomplicated gladness; that there were men, women, and children in the hinterlands of Alba who should not starve before the end of the winter, or in the course of the next, seemed to her a benefit worth any amount of wounded pride.
She remained acutely aware, however, of the resentment which so many in Din Edin seemed to feel, and thus was not altogether surprised, though very much dismayed, when on a chill and fiercely bright afternoon late in February, her journey home from the University was interrupted by a river of people marching along the eastern edge of Ogilvy Square, up Stewart-street, and in the general direction of Castle Hill, chanting variations on the general theme of Keep the Britons out! She retreated into the dubious shelter of an oak-tree at the edge of the square—black and leafless, but for a sad brown curl here and there amongst its branches—and watched the marchers pass by.
They were a very mingled lot—every age from babes in arms to their grizzled great-grandparents, to all appearances; men and women; clerks and labourers and students—and in the midst of them, unmistakably, the grey-robed priests of the Cailleach.
Some of the marchers, inexplicably, carried tree-limbs over their shoulders as one might carry a pitchfork or a spade; a few bore lumpy bundles which looked distressingly likely to be filled with stones. Floating above the heads of the crowd—no, not floating, Sophie saw, but carried atop long poles like pikestaffs—were roughly human figures clad in a peculiar assortment of clothes. Peering up Stewart-street and down the edge of the square, Sophie counted four of them. A strangely attenuated figure, faceless and vaguely feminine in outline, attired entirely in what appeared to be ribbons and streamers: rowan-berry red, white and black and grey like winter-bare branches, dun and gold and the crimson of autumn dogwood. A barrel-chested man-thing—its torso was in fact, she saw as it drew near her, an age-darkened barrel missing several staves—dressed in a kilted plaid whose pattern seemed to be woven mostly of greens and blues. A slighter figure dressed in breeches and coat, whose rough, faceless head was surmounted by a bright shock of straw—
Mother Goddess! It is meant for Roland.
And the last figure, also clad in coat and breeches, its head a mop of grey wool: My father.
Where were all of these people going? Where—this was perhaps the better question—were the priests leading them, and for what purpose? And what, after more than a month’s relative peace, had prompted what looked very like an escalation from peaceful manifestation to mob violence? There was anger simmering very close to the surface—there were men with weapons to hand, or at any rate objects which might be put to use as weapons. Or as fuel for a fire? Actual violence might or might not be intended; but in either event there seemed a very strong likelihood of the gathering’s ending in grief.
The prudent, the sensible, the obvious course of action, then, was to await its passing and then, in the company of her father’s guardsmen, to continue with all possible dispatch her interrupted journey to Quarry Close, where she should be safe.
Sophie swallowed, straightened away from her oak-tree, and, wrapping herself in her mother’s magick, stepped out into the crowd.
* * *
The torrent flowed up Stewart-street, through Teviot Square, up Candle-makers’ Row to the Grassmarket, where it surged and eddied around the priests in a manner that suggested they had reached their intended destination. Sophie hung back, wary, until the rising murmurs of the crowd and the efforts of those closest to her to peer over the heads of those ahead of them persuaded her that there must be something of significance afoot in that direction. She wove her way slowly towards the centre of the crowd, dodging elbows, and found herself at last almost within arm’s reach of four grey-robed priests—and the effigy of her brother.
Close to, it was more crudely made even than it had appeared from a distance, but for the avoidance of doubt, it wore about its neck a placard on which had been painted—with more skill than was evident elsewhere in its construction—what were recognisably the golden lions of England and the dragon of Cymru. (Some part of Sophie’s mind wondered dimly why those two symbols and not any of the rest, but they were certainly sufficient for identification.)
The branches and the makeshift sacks of stones—they were indeed stones, Sophie saw, as their bearers laid their bundles down and opened them, and some quite large enough to do significant damage, should anyone be so moved—had also migrated to the centre of the crowd. A sort of clearing had opened up, and the priests moved about it almost in the manner of players on a stage, directing the men who carried the four figures on their poles and the men, women, and children who bore branches and stones as they disposed themselves about the edges of the space.
One of the priests raised his arms, and a hush fell over the crowd.
Then another of them—a man of perhaps five-and-thirty, with a long plait of red-gold hair and a long beard a shade darker—stepped into the centre of the cleared space, then raised his head and began to speak.
Sophie’s facility with Gaelic had grown by leaps and bounds over the course of her months in Din Edin, but she was by no means so easy or fluent as in her other languages, some of them familiar to her from childhood. Her own acquaintance, when not making use of her to practise their scholarly Latin, were accustomed to slow their speech very slightly, and acceded graciously to her requests for repetition or explanation—less frequent now than formerly; even the shopkeepers of the University district, resigned as they were to the perpetual presence of foreigners, made a habit of speaking slowly and clearly.
Of the rapid, dramatically inflected speech of the priest, therefore, she at first caught no more than one word in a dozen, and those not very enlightening: Donald MacNeill, heiress, Sasunnach, betrayal, enemy. Nothing, in other words, which she had not heard stated or implied a dozen times before. Gradually, however, her ear grew more attuned, and she began to pick out whole phrases, and at last to understand at least the purport of everything she heard.
The more she understood, the colder seemed the raw February air, and the farther removed from the strangers pressed close about her.
At last the other priests appeared to have arranged everyone and everything to their satisfaction, and an anticipatory ripple ran through the onlookers as the four of them stood together in the centre of the cleared space, shoulder to shoulder, each facing one of the cardinal points. This must be some signal, though Sophie could not divine what its meaning might be.
The eff
igies, it transpired, were to be puppets of a sort; the priests were staging a play, in which the principals were the Kings of Britain and Alba, the hapless Sasunnach Prince, and the Cailleach herself, Queen of Winter. From this much reduced distance, Sophie could see that the figure representing this last had been carefully and lovingly made; its proportions were strange, its face almost featureless, but its head and limbs had been carved from some pale wood and sanded smooth, and its arms were jointed at shoulder and elbow, so that the two men whose charge it was (and for whom it was evidently not a new one, so smoothly did they work together) could produce graceful, almost natural movements. By contrast, the other three figures were rough, crude, hastily jury-rigged things, but their wielders made the best of their lot and contrived to endow them with some—entirely fabricated—personality.
The players did not speak; rather, their dumb-show illustrated the tale told by the four priests.
“In the Castle at Din Edin sits Donald MacNeill in the chieftain’s seat of Alba. He seeks among his children and his sisters’ children for an heir to his powers and his charge, and settles upon his daughter Lucia MacNeill. He seeks a husband for his daughter and heir, and passes over one chieftain’s son after another . . .”
The plaid-wrapped figure of Donald MacNeill passed from man to man along the edge of the crowd.
“In a palace in London sits the Sasunnach King, and he casts his greedy eyes north and north to the fair hills of Alba. His father and grandfather tried and failed to march over our wall or to land their armies on our coasts, but he is a crafty King, and sees a means to succeed where his forebears failed—not with the arrows of Mars but with the arrows of Cupid will he conquer us.”
Sophie was so startled to hear the gods of Rome invoked—even so flippantly—by the priests of Alba’s presiding goddess that she was a beat behind the rest of the crowd in grasping precisely what he had said. Surely not, she thought at once; and then, uneasily, but . . .
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