Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  With a little sniff that she was coming to know of him, Skander unfurled his own napkin with a violent flick and said, “I was reading Dante’s first instalment of his Comedy. I don’t advise doing so before a nap. It gives one the most curious dreams.”

  Margaret, who had never read but had heard of the Inferno, canted her head politely and opened her mouth to ask about the dreams, when Rupert interrupted.

  “I don’t know why you read such rubbish.” His voice, though low, was rather cutting. With a deft flick he had the ladle out and was curling a bit of soup round-wise into the curve of his own bowl. “I don’t know why I still have it. It’s so full of lies.”

  The air crackled between the cousins. The light, amiable nature that hung so well about Skander’s big shoulders seemed to slip away like a cloak: the man sat heavily, broodingly in his chair, spooning out his own soup, but watching Rupert sidewise from under his brows. Rupert was busy making his own cup of tea with a bit of brandy to stiffen it, but he took the time to raise a daring look at his cousin, a look that was to Margaret like a rapier, so light it was, so cold and bladed.

  Livy took the soup tureen from Skander and set it down on the table, making the little fish-mottled patches of light dance.

  “Why,” said Skander, picking up his teaspoon and putting it back down for his soup spoon, “do you say it is all lies?”

  The rapier darted away, put back in its sheath for now. Rupert closed up the brandy bottle and, by way of Livy, offered it to Margaret. She declined. The bottle was put back up on the sideboard where it cast its own little shards of light, gold and amber-coloured, jinking from the movement of Livy’s hand. She watched it in that long silence that Rupert made, her head turned from the two of them, but she did not see what lay under her eye. She was waiting for his answer.

  “Is it that you must get rid of everything?” Skander demanded in a low thrusting tone.

  She looked back at them. Rupert had begun to drink his soup in a thoughtful sort of way, but even she caught the smile that was playing at one corner of his mouth. She hoped a bit of soup slid out of that smile, just for the indignity of it. But no soup did.

  “When your father died, you made changes to Lookinglass. It is not that I ‘get rid’ of things. This is my house, and it is mine to do with as I please. Also, it is my own opinion that Dante was a liar, and that, too, is an opinion which I am free to hold.”

  “Then hold it!” Skander said, rocking back in his chair. “And don’t pass it off on me.”

  For a moment, a heartbeat, the time it takes a candle to flicker just one way, the blade was in Rupert’s eyes again. And then, just as quickly, it was gone.

  With a sigh very like exasperation, Skander turned to Margaret. In that moment she was achingly grateful for his presence. Without him the meal would have been unbearable.

  “Do you have riding things for tomorrow, Miss Coventry?”

  She scooped up some soup and set the spoon to her lips. “I believe so. My closet seems to be quite large. I am sure to find something suitable inside it.”

  “Excellent. And remember, we leave early, and it is bound to be chilly and fog-some. Dress warmly. We can’t have you catching cold.”

  “No…” mused Rupert.

  Skander kept her busy, detailing her with facts about his harriers and alaunts, and particularly about his falcon Thairm who was kept upstairs on her perch, but would be coming with them in the morning. He surprised her by relating the story of a big doe the falcon had taken down once, her talons and beak in the poor brute’s eyes. Margaret would never have thought such a small creature could fell something so much larger than itself.

  “We have always been good hunters, we Capys men,” he added. “When you come to Lookinglass, I will show you the ballroom floor that is tiled in the pattern of our falcon displayed. It is really quite pretty, and very well done, though I say so myself—it was put down generations ago, so I can’t very well take much credit for it.”

  “That’s really very remarkable,” said Margaret a little bewilderedly, “about Thairm. How did you teach her?”

  “I didn’t, my falconer did. She is a gyrfalcon, a rather rare bird, caught on a migratory flight four years ago. She was quite the haggard at first, but she has done well and I rather trust her. She has the sweetest way of purring after you feed her, though she is pure devil beforehand.”

  It was stirring to listen to the warm, round pride that shimmered beneath Skander’s tones as he spoke of his falcon, making her sound more like a pet than a creature to put food on the table or a fury bred to kill. Margaret saw her again, bating madly on Skander’s fist—and she saw Skander hushing her softly, gently, lovingly. Something twisted in Margaret’s gut and the smile on her lips became forced.

  She was glad when the meal was over and she could fall back on social habits. She took her leave of them—both gentlemen rose as she left her seat—and, thanking Skander for his conversation, took herself back up to her room. It was a relief, in many ways, to get away.

  To her surprise the maid Rhea was waiting for her when she arrived. She had forgot about the dress and about the measurements that needed to be taken. She stood in the doorway to her room, staring at the sewing box and the coil of measuring tape laid out beside her dressing table, and felt a swift jerk of rebellion in her chest. She could tell the maid to go…but that fight had been fought and Rupert had won it—much as it galled her to admit. She stepped into the room and shut the door with a meaningful thump.

  Rhea emerged from behind the brass and silver changing partition. She was a little thing, put together rather finely but strongly, and it struck Margaret how tall-seeming she was, though she reached only to Margaret’s shoulder. There was something smooth and quiet and uncanny about the girl’s dark eyes, like a pool in a forest, a pool whose depths she could not guess.

  “If my lady is ready,” said Rhea, “we will do something with her hair first, and then we will see to the measurements.”

  “Your lady is not ready,” Margaret replied archly, breezing past the maid. “But that does not much matter in this case, does it?”

  Rhea said nothing, though in the reflection on the mirror’s face her eyes seemed darker still and still more secret, and for a long while there was nothing but silence between lady and maid as the maid unpinned the lady’s hair and began to brush and braid it. Margaret thought that if she shut her eyes she might be able to pretend it was Amy brushing her hair, and not this strange, witching maid at all—but then the thought seemed inexplicably treacherous, and she did not shut her eyes.

  Rhea finished and took a step back, hands at her sides. “If my lady is ready,” she said, still in that same low, husky tone which was like the warmth of earth, “we will take the measurements now.”

  Margaret was not ready, but this time she did not say so. She undressed and stood rigidly on an ottoman, moving when told to move, holding still when told to hold still, staring ever straight before her with the constant movement of her heartbeat just on the rim of her vision. It was most pounding when Rhea stepped around and looped the measuring thread around her bust and pulled it tight, tight like a noose, and it was something of a struggle not to throw both off. There was one last hesitating moment as Rhea took the measurement, then the thread fell away and the maid stepped back, saying,

  “Small wonder that the master took a fancy to you. You have an excellent figure.”

  Margaret looked down and around at the cool, dark eyes of the maid. “Is it resentment that I hear?” she asked daringly, cuttingly. “And was your figure to his fancy too?”

  The eyes flashed back at her with a dark, mirthless laughter. “No…but it might have, had it been in my mind to make it so.” She broke off her gaze to turn to the table and begin wrapping up the contents of her sewing kit. “But I am my lord’s maid, and it is well enough to me that you are fit in his eyes.” And suddenly she turned back on Margaret with a look like anger. “Mind that you are sure you do not disappoint him.�
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  She was tall-seeming still, for all that Margaret stood on an ottoman and was some ten inches her superior already. A dark chill crept over Margaret, and not merely because she stood in a room that was feeling autumn in its shadows: there was a likeness between Rhea’s look and that which Rupert gave slywise to Skander: a dark, half-murderous look that ill-bore reproach and hindrance. But Rhea was only a maid, so Margaret said scornfully, “Well, I am not your lord’s maid, and as fit as I may be in his eyes he is not fit in mine.”

  The young woman seemed to retreat back into the earthy dark of her own eyes; it was as though a veil were dropped between the two of them, and Rhea was suddenly some distance off, though she stood just below Margaret. “Mayhap it is,” she said coolly, “that you are blind.”

  The hot colour flushed in Margaret’s cheeks. Not even in a neighbour’s house had she ever suffered such insolence from a maid. But the Norman in her, which had long ago mingled with her Saxon Coventry blood, forbade her from rising to the blow. She withdrew into herself, giving back look for look, and watched the maid pack up her kit and retire to the door.

  At the door she turned, head up, eyes hooded like a merlin’s. “Will my lady be needing any more assistance tonight?”

  “Your lady will not.”

  Rhea smiled mirthlessly. “I did not think so.”

  “Stay a moment,” Margaret said suddenly.

  Rhea, her hand upon the latch, stayed obediently, but there was no light of obedience in her eyes.

  Margaret sought her words carefully, and all the while made herself to appear careless. “I am going hunting tomorrow. Are you native to this country?”

  “I am.”

  “Tell me, are there wolves in these parts?”

  “There are fox and red deer,” said the maid, slowly, consideringly, “but no wolves have yet got wind of the sheep we pasture on these slopes. Good-night, my lady.” The door clicked softly shut.

  Margaret stood on the ottoman with her hands clenched at her sides, cold but ignoring the cold for the low smoulder of velvet-soft anger that kept her warm inside. She had hated before—her mother and her sisters, and even her cousin in a small, shapeless kind of way—but never before had she hated like this, with a warm and passionate hatred, a hatred that like dragon-fire kept her alive inside.

  She slipped off the ottoman and stalked back to her vanity. It was a good face that stared darkly back at her, far different and fiercer than the face she had reflected on that noon before dinner. Anger had touched her cheeks with colour, anger had made the low golden flecks of her eyes stand out with a sparking snap.

  Well, Mother, she thought, I hope you are very happy now!

  The clock on the bureau read five to ten. Heaving up the mantle of a dressing gown about her shoulders, Margaret folded up in an armchair with The Tempest, for with her own temper up she did not feel at all tired. The room withdrew into itself, a little shell of gold candlelight around her where she sat, and she let the tiring word-figures dance across her vision to charm her into sleep.

  Under the quiet of the house there woke a sudden thunder-murmur of sound and she stopped reading, sitting up to listen. With a jewel-vividness she recalled the heart-wrenching howls of last night and the desolation with which she had answered the call. She sat poised on the edge of her seat, expecting to hear it again, her eyes fixed on the pictures around the walls. But nothing began to rattle, and the surf-murmur of angry sound rose and fell in muffled tones but never became the train-roar of last night. It was somehow less frightening thus and without turning back Margaret rose from the chair and crossed to the door, unlatching and opening it to look out on the dark hallway.

  It was no hell-hound crooning. From the direction of the library came the sound of men’s voices, men’s voices raised in a heated discussion. On carefully planted bare feet, Margaret left her room and stole closer, her eyes ever on the shadows of the hallway lest a servant step out and take her by surprise.

  She could hear Skander Rime’s words before she had reached the door.

  “She does not care for you, Rupert! There is not even a spark of affection in her for you.”

  And Rupert’s voice, low and panther-like: “I know what you are doing, Skander, and you had better stop it. I am a jealous man and I do not take kindly to people tampering with my things.”

  “Ah—!” Skander’s voice was momentarily choked off by his own incredulity. “She is not your thing—she is not your thing! You see, this is exactly the sort of behaviour I was talking about. You look on her as though she were some kind of pawn: something for you to own, to move about to your own ends.”

  Rupert’s voice did not change, which made it somehow more terrible. “You do me very little credit, Skander. That’s very uncharitable of you.”

  “Charity!” There came a scornful snort. “What do you know of charity?”

  Unwilling to hear more, Margaret retraced her steps to her room and shut the door behind her, leaning against it, feeling at once sickly cold and furiously hot. With her head back against the roughness of her door, she stared unseeingly at the barred earth-light that came in through the cracks of her curtains. In the glow of her candles, the earth-light was very like the white claw-marks of a tiger on the floor.

  “I would not call her a precocious little chit. I would call her a force to be reckoned with.”

  She let out a shaky, uneasy breath. Her fingers, questing along the wood, found the cold iron protuberance of the lock and twisted it until it clicked sweetly into place. A door slammed somewhere in the house. A dale wind boomed suddenly round the house, rattling the shutters, then all dropped back into that familiar eerie silence.

  “…a force to the reckoned with.”

  She switched her gaze to the clock. Six past eleven. If she was to go hunting in the morning—and she hoped Rupert owned no hell-hounds to accompany them—she had better get to bed at once. She slipped the figure that Rhea had called excellent out of her dressing gown and approached her bed, but with her clustered the ghosts of looks and words and something like the way light played bright and dark within Rupert’s brandy. Pawn and mouse! mouse and pawn! She flung back the covers with a vicious flick and crawled in under them, pulling them up close as if to shut off thereby the thoughts that jostled about her head. But she was no longer a child, and the coverlet did not shut off the thoughts that jostled about her head. She lay in the darkness of the lowering candles and stared up at her thoughts that shifted like dark water on her vision. She knew only two things with certainty: firstly that she hated Rupert, and secondly that she was glad for Skander’s words in her defence, for without them she would not have felt like a force to be reckoned with at all, but a pawn and a mouse between Rupert’s hands.

  She turned on her side and closed her eyes against the ghostly sights. She would teach his panther-smugness! Her cheek lay against one of the many velvet pillows and her fingers traced the embroidery of a fine white rose. I am English, she thought with a similar white fierceness. I am English, and I will not be moved by him.

  In the pearly dark of the morning, clad in a riding habit of scarlet which seemed to shout out through the mists, Margaret stood in the great semicircle of the stable yard, adjusting her gloves while the stable hands brought out the horses. Rupert, too, wore scarlet: a fine coat of it with tails like a cardinal’s fluttering behind his legs. He stood at some distance from her, fondling the ears of an enormous chequered alaunt and talking in low undertones to Skander. Skander seemed oddly sullen-quiet, and stood stooped a little over his own bulky frame, wrapped up birdwise in his sullen red cloak, Thairm perched and hooded on his fist. Rupert was incongruously in a good mood, which worried Margaret.

  Through the stable doors stepped the first of the horses. It was the Master of Marenové’s, as was fitting: a beautiful amber champagne creature with loose white feathering about the fetlocks and the soft mizzle striking white sparks off the copperiness of its hair. It shouldered in and stood by quietly as Rup
ert swung up, suddenly very high and very far away, etched in darkness and scarlet against the mucky sky.

  Next came Margaret’s own horse, a darcy-coloured grey palfrey that seemed, emerging from the dark interior of the building, to emerge from the otherworld itself. It was unnerving at first, but as her fingers closed about the familiar roughness of the reins and the stable-hand was holding the stirrup-cup steady for her, the solid mortality of the creature warmed her with reassurance. She heaved herself up and settled her skirts as Skander’s hunter was brought out.

  When all was ready the three horses and the alaunt, joined by a shaggy, lithe grey creature that melted into the mists as much as Margaret’s horse did, struck out through the stable yard gates and turned down the lane, moving at an easy lope under the dripping autumn boughs of the damson trees. And Margaret, quite against her will, found it enjoyable. The warm body of the palfrey pulsed under her, rocking with the curious but water-smooth gait of its breed; the shuffing of its breath boomed quietly around her, mingling with the knife-edged whistle of the wind through which they moved. And all around her was a jinking silveriness of grey early morning, a cool clear waking in the nearly bare trees and lawns. In the east the horizon began to pale, and from time to time as they rode, breaking off from the lane and following a cow-path up the side of the fell, the sunlight would break through a crack in the clouds and set a patch of grass and trees ablaze with gold. The light came through more and more the higher they went, and the higher they went the thinner and more hawk-piercing became the air. At last, Margaret in the rear, they skirted a downward curl of blackthorn, scrambled up a broken slope, and stood at the first shelving of the steep fellside just as the sun was burning around the ceiling of cloud.

  Rupert paused on the overlook and Margaret’s mare, perversely, chose to pause as well, though Skander’s hunter clattered on along the slope with the alaunt and the greyhound behind him.

  They had come up very high, higher than she had thought; Margaret found herself looking out over a stupendous drop. The fellside rolled steep and far down to the dale where the river lay, a tangled web of silver water on the valley floor. She narrowed her eyes against the sun’s sidewise level rays. Harvest was in full swing; the crab-apples were in their last days. The paddocks, meads, orchards and ploughlands mingled together in motley greens and ruddy tawnies and rolled together westward into a smoky-blue where the great sharp-edged arm of the far fell sloped to an abrupt halt.