“And yet, knowing this,” Mr. Powell said indignantly, “you insisted upon staying here—”
“My sister will not leave Alba without her husband, and I have certainly no notion of leaving Alba without my sister,” said Joanna.
“—and thought nothing of taking matters into your own hands, in a foreign city, hundreds of miles from London, essentially alone—”
“That will do, Einion.” Courcy’s voice was low, even, and impossible to be disobeyed, and Mr. Powell shut his mouth with an almost audible snap. Joanna’s heart sank.
Lord de Courcy turned back to her. “Both you and your sister appear to be in the habit of taking foolish risks for the sake of those who have earned your loyalty,” he said, “and I suspect that I have not yet seen the last of yours.” One corner of his mouth quirked up minutely. “I do hope that your guardians will refrain from punishing you for it; the kingdom needs young people with your species of talent as much as it needs mages.”
Joanna blinked at him, too gobsmacked even to flush at the unexpected compliment. “You . . . you do not intend to send us back to London? . . . sir?”
“Certainly not!” said Lord de Courcy. “On the contrary: I intend to take you—and your sister, if she can be persuaded—to see Donald MacNeill.”
“Sir!” Mr. Powell protested, but weakly.
“And as soon as the thing can be managed. For the first time we are in possession of genuine evidence of wrongdoing, and as the matter now so nearly concerns the Princess Royal, Donald MacNeill would not thank us for keeping him in the dark.”
CHAPTER XXII
In Which Joanna and Rory Draw an Unsettling Conclusion
Even for the envoy of King Henry of Britain, to arrange an audience with Donald MacNeill of Alba was not the work of a moment. The next several days, therefore, Joanna, Sophie, and Gwendolen spent quietly—or unquietly, as their several humours dictated—at home in Quarry Close, awaiting a summons from Lord de Courcy.
On the afternoon of the third day, and for at least the fifth time since Mór MacRury’s unexpected visit, Joanna came out of the kitchen to find Sophie curled on the sofa with her arms about her drawn-up knees, staring sightlessly at a faint tea-stain upon the sitting-room carpet. Joanna put a hand on her shoulder; Sophie acknowledged neither the gesture nor, indeed, her sister’s presence. Joanna set her teeth and counted to ten in Greek; then she said quietly, “Sophie, Donella MacHutcheon has left a ragout and an apple tart for our dinner.”
Sophie deigned to acknowledge this, but only by turning away into the back of the sofa.
Joanna stared for a moment at the wings of Sophie’s shoulder-blades, sharply visible through nightdress and dressing-gown as they had not been whilst she retained the habit of dressing for the day and the season.
“Sophie,” she said, “I beg you will exert yourself! I do not blame you for worrying over Gray—I am very much worried myself—but you must see that you are not helping matters by— by—”
Sophie raised her head. To Joanna’s dismay, her sister’s dark eyes filled with tears, which overflowed unnoticed and ran in shining tracks down her face. “I cannot help it, Jo,” she said softly. “I have tried—I am trying—but I cannot help it.”
Joanna sank down on the sofa and drew her sister into her arms. Sophie’s head sank onto her shoulder, but she did not return the embrace.
“Sophie,” Joanna whispered. “Sophie, please.” She was near to weeping herself, in terror and exasperation. “I cannot bear to see you wasting away. Promise me you will eat a little dinner, at the least!”
Sophie drew a great breath and sat up, extricating herself from Joanna’s embrace. “I am not hungry,” she said distantly. Her face was pale and damp, her eyes reddened, and she made no effort either to wipe the tears away or to conceal them by magick; Joanna, hiding her own alarm as best she could, got out her own handkerchief and gently blotted her sister’s face.
“Please?” she said. “To oblige me?”
Sophie sighed. “To oblige you, Jo,” she agreed.
She allowed herself to be led away to the dinner-table, and—to her credit, and Joanna’s relief—made a visible effort to consume the delicately flavoured ragoût de veau which Donella MacHutcheon had concocted for the express purpose of tempting her palate. More than half of her portion still remained, however, when she laid down her fork and declared, in a voice wrung thin with exhaustion, that she could eat no more.
Joanna suppressed a sigh and forbore to comment.
* * *
Her conversation with Gwendolen after Sophie had gone upstairs to bed, however, was less restrained.
She had never doubted that Sophie and Gray loved one another—had herself, with Jenny, schemed and manoeuvred to force them into confessing their feelings—but that this was the truth of love, this desperate dependence, had not before occurred to her. Sophie, single-handed saviour of her king and kingdom, reduced to moping by day and sobbing into her pillow by night, by the absence of her husband: It did not bear thinking of.
“Is it this that young girls dream of and sigh over, truly?” she demanded at last. Gwendolen’s eyebrows flew up at her savage tone. “If I was ever so foolish as to harbour such dreams myself, I shall certainly not do so again.”
“It seems to me,” said Gwendolen mildly, “that you may be drawing too strong a conclusion from too small a set of observations.”
Joanna gave her a long, repressive stare, and they went up to bed in silence.
* * *
When Rory MacCrimmon called late in the following afternoon, on his way home from the University, with yet another stack of books, to ask after Sophie—who had not so much as left her room today, and had consumed nothing but half a bowl of oatmeal porridge and a cup of tea—Joanna could not help answering him candidly, that Sophie was very ill, and she herself at the end of her tether.
Rory MacCrimmon gave her a long, considering look and invited her to walk with him for half an hour.
“Walk with you, where?” Joanna said, suspicion for the moment overruling gratitude.
Rory MacCrimmon waved a careless hand. “Nowhere in particular,” he said. “It appears to me that you should be the better for some fresh air, and perhaps when you have had your outing, I may escort your friend likewise, whilst you take your turn at dancing attendance upon your sister.”
Gwendolen, somewhat to Joanna’s surprise (though it was true that Gwendolen was no great respecter of proprieties), encouraged this plan, and so she found herself walking along Grove-street with her gloved hand tucked into Rory MacCrimmon’s arm, and talking at great length of her anxiety over Sophie.
“Is your sister often subject to such despondency?” Rory MacCrimmon inquired. “Some people are, I know.”
Joanna considered this question. “I . . . do not think so,” she said slowly. “Of course I have seen her unhappy”—desperately unhappy, indeed, and with cause enough, the gods knew!—“and it is a very trying situation, but this is beyond everything. What alarms me most is that . . . I am not sure how best to explain . . . that she is concealing nothing from me.”
“But surely you should not wish her to conceal—”
“You misunderstand me,” said Joanna, clenching her free hand to keep her voice even. “Sophie, you see, practises concealment as naturally as breathing. But I am explaining myself very ill! I do not mean that she lies or misleads—indeed, she is tiresomely truthful!—I am speaking only of her magick. She has done nothing to conceal how wretched she is, from me or from anybody else; I must conclude, then, either that she does not care who sees it, or that she does wish to hide it, and cannot. If you knew Sophie as I do—”
“Cannot?” Rory MacCrimmon said sharply. “Do you mean that you believe her magick to be affected?”
“I am the last person to consult on such a question,” said Joanna, rather bitterly. If only Master Alcuin we
re here! Even Lady Maëlle would know better than I what to do. “I have no more magickal talent than that lamppost, and I dare say you should do better to ask the oak-tree we passed in the little square a few moments ago.”
“But you know your sister,” he persisted.
“I knew my sister once,” said Joanna. Ought she to tell this very new acquaintance what she was thinking about? But he was a mage, and thus likely to understand things magickal; and he was a friend of Gray’s, and thus unlikely to be either a bounder or a fool. And it is not as though I am spoilt for choice.
“When we were children,” she said at last, very quietly, “she threw stones at a pair of grown men, to try to stop them hurting our mother.” That tale carried many a bitter memory, and she swallowed back a furious half sob. “For years she stole out of her bedroom at night, in the dark, to study in my father’s library, because she was only a girl and he would not let her learn magickal theory, and when at last he caught her at it and set out to stop her, she smashed the drawing-room to flinders—well, she did not mean to do exactly that, of course—and ran away from home, and married Gray. It is not like Sophie to sit moping at home like—like a fair damosel in a minstrel-tale, when someone she loves may be in danger. I do not at all know what to make of it.”
They walked on some way without speaking; glancing up, Joanna saw that her companion was frowning, apparently lost in thought.
“Joanna Callender,” he said at last, “you were at your sister’s wedding?”
“Of course,” said Joanna, turning to frown at this non sequitur. “Why do you ask?”
“I collect,” he said, “that it was rather a hasty affair?”
“Well . . . yes,” she conceded. How much does he know already? “Very hasty, in fact. We— There were reasons to proceed without delay.”
“I suppose it was not a Roman rite, then.”
“Oh! No, it was terribly Roman,” said Joanna, and was astonished when her companion abruptly stopped walking, dropped her arm, and seized both of her hands in an urgent grip. “Because . . . because if they were only handfasted, Lady Maëlle said, then—”
“Will you describe the rite for me?” Rory MacCrimmon interrupted urgently. “As exactly as you can?”
He tucked her left hand into the crook of his arm once more, and they resumed their interrupted trajectory.
Still frowning, she marshalled the details in her mind and told the tale as clearly as she could manage: the irritable and slightly furtive-looking priest of Tamesis, the declarations and the vows, the wedding-cord and the offerings . . .
“A cake of spelt?” he demanded. “They shared a cake of spelt?”
“Yes,” said Joanna, baffled; “and then Sophie said, Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia, and Gray said the same—only the other way about, you know—and then the thunderstorm stopped.”
Rory MacCrimmon looked down at her, his face very grim and a little pale beneath its dusting of freckles. “A marriage confarreatio,” he said softly, as though to himself. “It would have to be that.” And then, in almost a shout, “Brìghde’s tears! What did that priest think he was playing at?”
As this outburst only increased Joanna’s bewilderment, she had no answer to give, and they walked on for a little time without speaking; they were no longer walking leisurely and aimlessly, but going somewhere with all reasonable speed. Joanna wondered which of Sophie’s guardsmen was following her now, and she made a mental note to apologise to him later for leading him such a merry chase to no purpose.
At last Rory MacCrimmon said, “Marriage confarreatio is a form of marriage that the gods make—the conqueror-gods, the gods of Rome—and only they can unmake it.”
“Well . . . yes,” Joanna conceded. “That was the general idea.” Throwing caution to the winds, she added, “It was the most important idea, in fact—that Sophie should not be free to marry anyone else.”
He gave her an odd look. “Perhaps,” he said, “but—in old Rome it was only the patrician class who married in that way, and then very carefully, with due attention to lineages and talents, because if both parties to such a marriage are mages, the rite does not only bind them but also binds their magicks.”
“Binds their magicks . . . to what?” Joanna said.
Rory MacCrimmon looked surprised. “Why, to one another,” he said. “I—somewhere I have got a book which explains the matter properly—”
They stopped before a small, neat house in Drummond-street, and Rory MacCrimmon opened the front door—it was not locked—and ushered Joanna inside. He called a greeting in Gaelic to someone within, and a woman’s voice answered him; but whoever it belonged to, Joanna was evidently not to discover, for Rory MacCrimmon waved her to a seat in a formal and evidently little used sitting-room and disappeared.
When at length he returned, he carried in his left hand a thick octavo codex, whose spine was faded to a watery pale blue.
“Here,” he said, and handed it to Joanna. The leather binding which was so badly faded on the spine remained deep green on the front board, across which was stamped in gold the title On the Laws of Matrimonium and Familia from the Days of the Caesars to Our Own, and below it a name—Charles Augustus Beauharnais, Mag.D.—and a date which showed the book to be nearly a hundred years old.
Rory MacCrimmon opened the book to the place he had marked with what appeared to be a length of fingering wool and tapped a forefinger halfway down the recto folio, saying, “There.”
The text, to Joanna’s relief, was printed clearly in perfectly ordinary Latin, and thus was not difficult to decipher:
Marriage confarreatio. See also coemptio, usus; marriage sine manu; handfasting and lesser forms of marriage.
Whereas the law of Rome originally dictated that only the offspring of marriage confarreatio could marry by this rite, no such requirement now exists, to the author’s knowledge, in the territories of the former Empire, which nevertheless maintain a form of the rite confarreatio. In their original forms, the rite confarreatio and the rite coemptio were more sharply delineated than the rites known by these names today, the modern rite confarreatio having absorbed, for instance, the vow “ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia” from the rite coemptio, and the rite coemptio the requirement of witnesses and offerings from the rite confarreatio—
Rory MacCrimmon turned the page impatiently and ran a long forefinger down the following verso folio, then the succeeding recto.
“Aha!” he said, tapping his finger on a paragraph halfway down the latter. “Here we are.”
Joanna bent her head again and read:
The chief distinction of the rite confarreatio—and, concomitantly, the reason for which it is now so seldom employed—is the strong legal link which it forges between husband and wife. In the time of the Empire as today, a marriage confarreatio, once consummated, could not be dissolved by mutual agreement of the families party to the betrothal, but required in addition a countervailing rite of dissolution or divorcement, conducted by a priest of the same order (cf. Flamen Dialis). It is for this reason considered, in practical terms, a binding form of marriage (cf. marriage usus; marriage coemptio; handfasting).
Roman records suggest that one use of the rite confarreatio, in its original form, was the preservation of bloodlines possessed of strong or unusual magickal talents, to prevent their dilution, and its use for this purpose has continued, albeit sporadically, to the present day. There is a legend, hinted at in several sources but nowhere verifiably documented, that, perhaps in service of this purpose, the original rite confarreatio, when used to join two persons both possessing magickal talent, created a species of aetheric channel between the partners’ sources of magick, along which ran thereafter a sympathetic link.
This link was said to permit the magick of each to magnify and replenish that of the other, so that the powers of both were increased by virtue of propinquity, and the risk of injury to either, by the overu
se of magick, materially decreased. The same contemporary sources, however, also refer obliquely to a corollary effect, namely, the link’s being attenuated by distance, such that the parties when separated ceased over time to feel its beneficial effects; and, if the separation were of too long continuance, might be materially weakened by its absence. One source (though it must be emphasised again, that its veracity cannot be relied upon) explicitly describes an instance in which a prolonged separation led to the death of both parties to a marriage confarreatio.
Joanna looked up, shocked into silence. Rory MacCrimmon gazed earnestly into her eyes—his, she remarked in a sort of daze, were at present the clear green of willow-leaves—and said, “Do you see?”
“I . . . I think I do see,” Joanna managed to say. “But you must remember that I have neither studied magickal theory nor ever so much as called light for myself. This Dr. Beauharnais appears to be positing that—to apply his conclusions to our own case—Sophie is ill, truly ill, only because Gray is missing. Do you—you do not think . . . ?”
Rory MacCrimmon looked momentarily nonplussed. “I should not ordinarily counsel you to believe everything you read in books, especially books whose authors concede that their sources are suspect. But, given the evidence of our own eyes: Yes. I fear that I do think so.”
Joanna felt suddenly very cold.
“Sophie used too much of her magick once,” she said, remembering, “when she was so furious with my father—that is what I meant, you know, when I spoke of her smashing the drawing-room—and Gray was angry with her, she told me, and said she must never do so again, because it was only good fortune that she had not died of it. Magick shock, you know; I have seen them both suffer it, because they will do idiotic things. Is this . . . might this be anything like?”
Rory MacCrimmon nodded soberly. “In respect of its effects,” he said, “I should expect it to be very much like. But magick shock, as you must know, can be cured by rest and sleep and good food, while this . . .”
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