Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “They are, I thank you, as of my mother’s last letter,” said Rory, almost absently. He sipped his tea. Despite the hat, his bright hair was dark and draggled; he put down his cup and saucer, shook his head like a wet sheep-dog, then gave Sophie an apologetic grimace and ran a hand through his hair in a doomed attempt to tame it.

  The gesture was so like Gray’s that Sophie was forced to turn away for a moment to hide her face.

  “And have you heard yet from Gray?” said Rory.

  “I have not,” Sophie admitted; it was true, but felt like disloyalty.

  “I suppose one cannot blame him, when his father is so ill.”

  “Yes,” said Sophie.

  “I must confess,” Rory was saying, “that I wondered at his leaving you all alone here, in the circumstances—though of course I know that the, er, that your father’s envoy is keeping an eye, and I shall do the same. And”—seeing perhaps that Sophie had begun to bristle—“I do understand that you are far from helpless, Sophie!” He sat up straighter, and his face creased in an unexpected grin. “Which reminds me: I did not come out in this dreadful weather only to drip upon your carpets and drink your tea; I have something for you from Catriona.”

  He drew it from an inner pocket of his coat and passed it across to her: a slender octavo volume bound in cream-coloured leather. Upon the front board was stamped a title in Gaelic, which Sophie’s eye took longer than it ought to interpret as Love Songs from the Outer Isles. She opened it at random; on the page before her she beheld the words of Mór MacRury’s song about the boatman, and her heart seemed to turn over.

  “I . . . I thank Catriona, very much,” she said. “She is too kind.”

  Sophie sat before the fire while Rory drank two cups of tea, and they spoke of Joanna, and of Roland, and of Rory’s childhood on Leodhas and her own in Breizh. When at last he rose to take his leave, she fetched his coat (still unpleasantly damp) from the kitchen, and smiled up at him when he awkwardly patted her shoulder and bade her call upon him for whatever she might need.

  When he had gone, she curled up again in Gray’s armchair with a book of odes to Minerva and read determinedly, though to very little purpose, until she fell asleep.

  CHAPTER XIX

  In Which Joanna Is Surprised, and Gwendolen Is Disappointed

  Joanna and Gwendolen arrived at Sophie and Gray’s lodgings as afternoon was just beginning to shift towards twilight and the sinking sun to gild the westward-facing planes of the city. Joanna’s smart rap upon the door of the little row-house went so long unanswered that she had begun to think that Gray and Sophie must be elsewhere, and to ponder what they ought to do instead; she ought to have reckoned, but had not, with the lack of resident servants. At the least, she thought irritably, Lord de Courcy’s guardsmen might have been moved to lend a hand—there was one of the men she had seen with Sophie and Gray in London washing the windows of the house over the road, or pretending to do so.

  At last there came a scuffle and a thud from overhead, followed swiftly by the sounds of rapid footsteps descending an uncarpeted staircase, and of a heavy bolt’s being drawn back; and then the door swung inward and there was Sophie herself, clutching a patterned shawl about her slender shoulders and grinning at Joanna.

  “Jo!” she cried. “I had begun to think you had been set upon by bandits.”

  Joanna flung her arms about her sister, and was gratified to be embraced with equal enthusiasm. Acutely conscious of Gwendolen standing behind her amongst the trunks and valises, however, she drew back much sooner than she might otherwise have done, and said, “Sophie, I am sure you remember Miss Pryce? And, Gwen, this is my sister, Mrs. Marshall.”

  This last because, as one look at Gwendolen’s baffled face confirmed, Sophie at present did not look at all as she had in London at Midsummer.

  They were ushered past a tiny sitting-room half-filled by a pianoforte and up a narrow flight of stairs. As there was no one but their three selves to carry the trunks, carry them they did, but it was an anxious business, and Joanna felt she could hear everything which Gwendolen was not saying on the subject of proper accommodations for the Princess Royal.

  “This house has only one guest bedroom,” Sophie explained, opening the door thereof. “I had meant to put you here, Jo, and the bed is certainly large enough for two, if you do not object to share; but as Gray is not here, you may prefer—”

  “Not here?” Joanna exclaimed. “Why not? Where is he?”

  Sophie halted, one hand on a bedpost and the other against her cheek. “Oh!” she said. Joanna did not know what to make of her tone. “Have you not—Jo, when did you leave London?”

  Joanna told her, and Sophie’s face took on the inward look it always wore when she was attempting mental arithmetic. “No,” she said after a moment, rather vaguely; “no, I suppose if it came by express . . .”

  “Sophie,” said Joanna, impatient. “Sophie, tell me.”

  “He had a message from Jenny,” said Sophie. “That is, I suppose it must have been from Jenny; I did not see it myself. Eight days ago it was, and he went off to Kernow that very day.”

  “To Kernow?” Joanna repeated. “Why on earth?”

  “To see his father,” said Sophie, as though this were perfectly evident, and not perfectly absurd.

  “His father.”

  “Perhaps,” said Gwendolen—visibly startling Sophie, who had perhaps forgot her presence—“we might all sit downstairs, and have a cup of tea, and begin at the beginning.”

  * * *

  They trooped down the stairs, perforce in single file, through the sitting-room, and into the kitchen, where Gwendolen turned once about, examining her surroundings, and having located the kettle, at once set about making tea. Sophie, on the other hand, sank into a battered wheelback chair and stared pensively at the large green-glazed teapot which Gwendolen had shifted from the dresser to the table.

  The sight, or perhaps the sound, of the water pouring from kettle into pot seemed to bring Sophie back to herself; at any rate, she blinked and jumped up from her seat, and whilst Gwendolen and Joanna were carrying the tea-things into the sitting-room, they heard her rummaging about in the kitchen.

  Joanna was therefore unsurprised when Sophie reemerged carefully bearing a small, plain, highly polished cup which Joanna had last seen in a similarly book-cluttered sitting-room in Oxford.

  “My welcome to this house,” Sophie said, holding out the cup to Joanna.

  “We thank you for this welcome,” Joanna replied, as she rose and accepted it. “May the gods smile on you, and on this house and”—she altered the supplication on the hoof, to include Gray—“all who belong to it.”

  She drank a little of the wine in the cup, then passed it to Gwendolen, who set her cup and saucer down beside Sophie’s, took the cup from Joanna’s hands, and drained it.

  “That is much better,” said Joanna, resuming her seat and her cup of tea.

  By the time the tea was drunk, they had succeeded in decanting the full story—not that, in the end, Sophie had so very much to tell—and Joanna had begun to be suspicious. Though she was prepared to concede the possibility that Edmond Marshall might have fallen ill between the date of Lady MacConnachie’s departure from London, just over a fortnight since, and the date on which Jenny should have had to dispatch a letter to Lord de Courcy, either by express or via the diplomatic courier, in order for it to be delivered to Quarry Close eight days ago—and it was no more than a possibility—Sophie did not seem to have taken account of the additional distance between Glascoombe and Carrington-street, or of the myriad small delays which might afflict a message between Carlisle and Din Edin, or of the necessity of its being enciphered before sending, and deciphered before delivery. It was frankly implausible, to Joanna’s mind, that, if Edmond Marshall were gravely ill, she should not have heard of it from Jenny before coming away; there simply was not e
nough time.

  And if the illness itself were implausible, the notion of Gray’s being sent for as a consequence of it seemed even more so—though here Joanna was forced to concede that Sophie’s understanding of the circumstances must be far superior to her own.

  But if not a genuine message from Jenny via Lord de Courcy, then . . . what?

  Possibilities chased one another through her mind, each worse than the last. Suppose Gray really had set out for Kernow; there were good roads between Din Edin and London, and between London and points south, but aside from the changeable weather at this season, many misfortunes might befall a carriage making that journey, from bolting horses to overturning to highway robbery and even murder—less common in these peaceable days than formerly, to be sure, but Joanna could with very little effort call to mind several recent instances of which news had come to London. And besides the everyday mishaps that might befall anyone, there existed all manner of dangers particular to mages, and others specific to hangers-on of the House of Tudor in foreign and intermittently hostile lands.

  And Sophie had not even seen the letter, or the messenger who brought it . . .

  “Sophie,” said Joanna, “are you . . . are you quite sure there is nothing odd about Gray’s going away so suddenly?”

  Sophie looked acutely uncomfortable; she frowned at Joanna and darted her eyes at Gwendolen.

  Joanna sighed. Sophie’s scruples were inconvenient and irritating, but it was after all her house, and Gwendolen and herself guests in it. “Gwen,” she said quietly, “perhaps you might be very kind, and clear away the tea-things?”

  Gwendolen shot her a darkly amused look over Sophie’s head, but nonetheless straightened and reached for her cup and saucer.

  “Well?” Joanna said, as soon as Gwendolen had gathered the tea things and gone (to listen from the kitchen, she had no doubt; it was what she should have done herself). She was tempted to speak in Brezhoneg, to thwart said listening, but Gwendolen had left the room only to oblige her, and in any case she should only have to explain everything later on. “You do think it odd—I can see you do, and so do I. Had anything unusual happened, just before? Had you . . . quarrelled?”

  “No,” said Sophie instantly. “That is—”

  She embarked on a long and confused explanation of a dispute between herself and Gray, in which he had attempted to persuade her to leave Din Edin for her own safety, and she had refused even to entertain the idea of a separation. Joanna—moving about the room with a candle to light the lamps, for night had fallen without—listened patiently, and carefully refrained from rolling her eyes. It was even odds, she reflected as she took her seat again, which of them was the most exasperating; but certainly this did not seem the sort of quarrel which might lead to a husband’s departing in a huff, even had the husband in question not been Gray Marshall.

  Sophie went on to describe the attempts of her father, by way of Lord de Courcy, to drag her and Gray back to London, and with shining eyes related Gray’s staunch support of her refusal.

  “But suppose,” she said at last, her slender fingers clenching in the fringes of her shawl, “suppose he has thought better of that decision?”

  “Nonsense,” Joanna said, more sharply than she had intended; had Sophie lost her wits along with her husband? “Gray, run away to Kernow—or anywhere at all—and leave you here alone? You must be raving, Sophie, to conceive such an idea.”

  A thought occurred to her; frowning, she stood up from her chair, crossed to stand in front of Sophie, and laid one hand across her brow. It was cool and dry. Not the delirium of fever, then . . . but there were other sorts.

  There was a faint sound of clinking crockery from the kitchen, suggesting that Gwendolen was washing up the tea-things—and doing so as slowly and as quietly as possible, the better to hear all that was said in the next room.

  “Gray left a letter, you said?” Joanna prompted.

  Sophie nodded. “I suppose he was too much distracted to think of using a finding-spell,” she said; “and certainly I could not have been quickly found by any other means, for I am sure Catriona and I were in more than a dozen shops and merchants’ warehouses in the course of the day.”

  Yet this too seemed entirely uncharacteristic: Gray might be heedless and forgetful of days and hours, but never of Sophie or her sensibilities. Joanna debated whether she might ask to see the letter without giving offence. Before she could make the request, however, Sophie rose from her seat and went to the other end of the small room, where two writing-desks were wedged into a corner at right angles to each other. She rummaged briefly in a pigeonhole, extracted something, and returned to place a folded paper in Joanna’s lap.

  “Read it,” she said, when Joanna hesitated. “There is nothing in it that will offend your delicate maiden eyes, I assure you.”

  Joanna gave her a small, wry grin—concealing the faint ache occasioned by Sophie’s affectionate mockery, which she had not heard for so long—and unfolded the first letter.

  Having read it, she frowned thoughtfully. She had received very few letters from her brother-in-law, and had certainly never before seen one directed to his wife, but apart from its being very brief, there was nothing in it which did not seem entirely characteristic of Gray—and, after all, its brevity might be only the effect of haste. Am I too suspicious? Perhaps; very likely. But it is all so very odd.

  In the kitchen, something quietly splashed.

  “The words seem to me like Gray’s,” Sophie said, after another long silence. Again she stood and crossed to the desks, then lifted the topmost pages from a neat stack nearly half a foot high. “And it is certainly his hand; look.”

  Joanna rose to join her.

  The page in Sophie’s hands was a list of some sort—books, it appeared, for here and there amongst the strings of unintelligible words in what must be Gaelic was the name of an author Joanna recognised, or an erudite-sounding title in Latin. Even these, however, seemed to have no words in common with the brief letters.

  “Have you anything with more Latin in it?” Joanna said.

  Sophie riffled through the pages she held, then deeper into the stack on the desktop. “Here,” she said at last, extracting a single sheet and holding it out.

  On the history of shape-shifting in the Roman world, it read, in blessedly clear Latin. Lecture the First. Read by G. V. Marshall at the University of Din Edin on . . .

  “Yes, much better,” said Joanna.

  For some time they studied the two samples, eyes darting back and forth from the known to the suspect. At last Joanna was forced to agree that the letter was indeed in Gray’s own hand, or (though she did not mention this notion to Sophie) very skilfully forged indeed.

  “Have you any scry-mages amongst your learned acquaintance, by any chance?” she said.

  * * *

  That night, one so chilly that it might have belonged to midwinter rather than mid-March, Sophie woke with a bitten-off sob and sat bolt upright, staring about her with wide eyes and pounding heart.

  At first the solid ordinariness of the bedchamber reassured her. The little oak dressing-table whose oval looking-glass was obscured by stacks of codices, the moonlight-silvered folds of a dressing-gown hanging untidily from the half-closed door of the wardrobe, the curtain blowing in the half-open window: all was entirely as usual—except, of course, that Gray had gone.

  But, if this was the case, what was it that had woken her?

  She had, she recognised at once, been hoping—half expecting—to open her eyes and find him home again, caught in the act of removing his boots, perhaps, or settling his wings on the window-sill preparatory to shifting back into his own shape. But stare she never so long into the moonlit darkness, no creature besides herself could she discern.

  Instead, she began to remember her dreams.

  Sophie had suffered from nightmares much of her life, an
d she had long thought that nothing could torment her more than the dream-memory of her mother’s death; but whatever deity or baleful shade had sent this latest manifestation was proving her badly wrong. The more she lay awake in the darkness, the more she feared to sink back into sleep, for every eye-blink cast her back into her torment, or—worse, and more exactly—into Gray’s.

  They are only dreams, she told herself, over and over. No matter how many times she repeated the words, however, they grew no easier to believe.

  At last she did succumb—only to dream again and again, in the long hours before dawn, the same distressing scenes. Just before dawn she woke again, heavy-eyed and weary, and knelt for some time with her elbows on the window-sill, waiting for daylight to disperse the fears of night.

  The sun was well above the horizon when at length she gave it up; her dreams had lost none of their immediacy, surrendered none of their power over her imagination, and she was frightened for Gray, and for herself, as she had not been (had not allowed herself to be?) until today.

  They had been separated before, of course, and on each such occasion she had felt vaguely discomfited, slightly askew, as though nothing were quite as it ought to be. But the grim, sickening dread of these speaking dreams . . .

  Joanna is right; this cannot be what it seems. What ails me, that I did not see it at once?

  * * *

  “What should you like to see today?” Sophie asked her guests the next morning, with a sort of determined cheerfulness. “The weather is fine, but I expect it is still a great deal too muddy for climbing Arthur’s Seat; perhaps you may like to go down and look at the Firth, however, and the ships coming in—or to see the University Library?”

  “Sophie,” said Joanna, frowning, “I think we had much better call upon Lord de Courcy.”

  “What? Why? Oh—do you mean that you have letters for him?”

  “No—that is, yes, I have, but they are not such as might not be handed to his secretary. I meant that you ought to tell him about Gray.”