The Midnight Queen

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  It was very odd, for his first impression of Sophie had been that, though no great beauty, she was at any rate worth looking at and had interesting things to say.

  But this was not the first puzzle presented by Professor Callender’s household and Gray’s own peculiar status there, and would surely not be the last.

  * * *

  Dinner was followed by an uncomfortable quarter-hour’s tête-à-tête with the Professor, Sophie having meekly followed Miss Callender from the dining-room, during which Gray was asked his opinions of the house, the garden, the neighbourhood, and Mrs. Wallis’s cookery. Beyond an earnest commendation of the last, he was not at all sure how he replied; by now, exhausted and sun-touched, he was in constant danger of falling asleep where he sat. But he knew the Professor well enough to understand that the questions were asked pro forma; Gray’s true role was—as it had been for the past three terms—to listen and nod politely while his tutor held forth. In any other company he would long ago have excused himself, pleading some indisposition or simple fatigue, and sought his bed, but being still so uncertain of his standing here, he dared not risk insult to his host.

  Finally Professor Callender tapped the ash from the bowl of his pipe and rose from the table. Gray trailed him apprehensively into the large drawing-room, where Miss Callender sat in state on a rose-coloured sofa, presiding over an ornate silver tea-service. Her father smiled fondly at her, seated himself in an armchair before the hearth, and took up a book.

  Miss Callender looked up with a dimpled smile.

  “Will you take tea, Mr. Marshall?” she inquired.

  Gray nodded absently and looked about for Sophie, whom he spotted at last in a distant corner of the room, in a small circle of lamplight, her head bent over some piece of fancy-work. He was studying her, and contemplating various means of attracting her attention, when Miss Callender said loudly, at his elbow, “Your tea, Mr. Marshall.”

  Gray started violently, causing his hostess to spill hot tea all over her elaborately beaded gown.

  * * *

  Sophie looked up at Amelia’s squeak of outrage, just in time to see her sister drop a teacup and saucer; their guest put out one hand, not to catch them but to summon them, and set them gently on the tea-tray.

  Sophie rose, grinning, and tried to catch his eye, but he was entirely occupied in stammering apologies to Amelia and mopping up tea from the carpet with his handkerchief.

  “I beg you will not trouble yourself, Mr. Marshall,” said Amelia stiffly, and rang the bell. She left off fussing with her gown to pour out another cup of tea, into which she dropped two lumps of sugar before holding it out to Sophie. “Take Papa his tea, if you please.”

  Sophie stepped carefully around Gray and approached her father’s armchair.

  “I thank you, Amelia dear,” the Professor said.

  Then he glanced up from his book, frowned in surprise to see Sophie, and looked past her at Amelia and at Gray, still on his knees by the tea-table, handkerchief in hand.

  “Mr. Marshall!”

  Gray’s sunburnt face flushed redder, and he dropped the handkerchief. “I am s-s-sorry, sir,” he said.

  The Professor shook his head. “When a man cannot drink his tea in peace in his own drawing room—”

  “Certainly you may drink your tea in peace, Papa,” said Amelia crisply. “We should not dream of disturbing you with so slight a matter.”

  “It is all very well to say so, Amelia, but have I not been disturbed already? Am I not beset by noise and upset and inconsequential chatter, everywhere I turn?” The Professor half rose from his chair and cast a baleful eye at Gray. “Mr. Marshall! Have you been so long at Oxford as to forget what is due to a lady’s drawing-room?”

  “Now, Papa,” said Amelia soothingly, “you are tired from your journey, and fatigue has made you cross. Should you like a little music?”

  There was this to be said for Amelia, that she could manage the Professor better than anyone else could. He subsided, grumbling; Amelia directed at her sister a tight-lipped smile that Sophie interpreted without difficulty: You will play your part civilly, it said, or I shall make you very sorry.

  Mrs. Wallis came in, observed Amelia’s trouble, and, hiding a smile, bustled away again to fetch the means of repairing it; Sophie put down the Professor’s tea and went into the smaller drawing-room to open the pianoforte.

  She wondered at her own irritation of spirits. How many of the Professor’s students had lost their heads over Amelia, and done foolish things as a result? Small wonder if this Gray Marshall should do likewise—and small reason for Sophie to be vexed with him, if he did. If I were one of Gray’s sisters, she told herself, by way of excuse, I should not wish him to fall into Amelia’s clutches.

  But when, in the midst of a long, melancholy pavane, she glanced back over her shoulder, she saw Amelia drinking her tea alone, wearing a sour expression, and Gray in the chair Sophie had abandoned, concealed behind a book.

  The pavane freshened into a triumphant little bourrée.

  “Sophia, must you play so loud?” said Amelia, after only a few measures. “You make my head ache.”

  “Indeed, Sophia,” the Professor added peevishly, “there is no call for such boisterous music, so late in the evening.”

  Sophie rolled her eyes and said without turning round, “I beg your pardon, Amelia. Sir.”

  At the end of the phrase she stopped, shook out her fingers, and took up the pavane where she had left off. Though the Professor had returned from Oxford only yesterday evening, the Long Vac. had already begun to seem very long indeed.

  CHAPTER II

  In Which a Prediction of Sophie’s Comes True, and Sophie and Gray Discuss Magick

  As Sophie had predicted, the following day began for Gray with a dressing-down from the Professor, beginning with rhododendrons and progressing in quick succession to Gray’s shameful clumsiness, his idiocy in the matter of sunhats, his lack of intellect, and his general inadequacy. After a full year under the Professor’s tutelage, and three before that as a mildly troublesome Merlin undergraduate, Gray knew better than to protest that he had neither asked to work in the garden (or, for that matter, to be here at all) nor claimed any horticultural expertise whatever. Instead he assumed an attentive and chastened expression perfected during his second university term, murmured “Yes, sir” and “No, indeed, sir” at the appropriate moments, and waited patiently for the torrent to abate. While so doing, he calculated the likely distance from Callender Hall to the home of his sister Jenny, and whether he might soon expect a letter from her in answer to his own.

  He once or twice felt, as he had yesterday at dinner, the familiar little prickling sensation that meant someone was using magick nearby, and pondered what the Professor might be at, deciding eventually that the source must be an ambient spell—a protection, an amplification . . .

  For a moment, then, he went cold with fear: What if there should be some sort of listening-spell in place here? Sophie’s guileless derision of yesterday, which he had thought safe enough because they were out of doors, might well have consequences she could not have foreseen. With this in mind—his attentive expression never wavering—Gray summoned what magick he could to cast his inner eye and ear on his surroundings. Certainly there was something there, but if a listening-spell, it was none that he had ever encountered before.

  “Remember where you might now find yourself, boy,” said the Professor, reaching his peroration at last, “were it not for my intervention.”

  Sent down in disgrace, thought Gray, or dead in the street like poor Arzhur Gautier—or safe in my rooms at Merlin, had your bully-boys left me out of their gods-accursèd schemes to begin with.

  “Y-yes, sir,” he said aloud. “I th-thank you, sir.” He gazed down at his toes, lest his face betray him.

  The Professor had stalked away to resequester himself in his study, an
d Gray was arming himself for a renewed assault on the hated rhododendron bed, when Sophie emerged from the shrubbery, carrying a sunhat even larger and more tattered than her own. This, with a diffident smile, she presented to Gray. “I found this hat for you,” she said.

  Gray took it, rather startled, and turned it over in his hands. “I thank you,” he said. “That was k-kind.” Absentmindedly murmuring a mending-spell, he traced a finger along a rent in the hat’s crown, knitting the edges back together. He was pleased to discover that the effort this required was much less than it would have been a fortnight ago, in the aftermath of his accident with the Professor’s wards at Merlin.

  Sophie seemed disproportionately impressed. “How clever!” she said, scratching the bridge of her nose. “Could you mend mine, also? That is, if . . .”

  “Of course.” Gray reached for it. Sophie watched, apparently fascinated by this simple trick, as he repaired each hole and rent. When he handed the hat back to her, she admired it for a moment, turning it this way and that, before putting it back on her head.

  “I do wish I had magick,” she said.

  “Have you not?” Gray looked up, surprised. He felt rather light-headed now, and knew too late that he had overreached. “B-but—”

  “Not a flicker,” she said wistfully. “The Professor tested all of us when we were small, he says. People do think it odd that two talented parents should have three talentless children; but there it is.”

  “Then your mother—”

  “Her talent was a minor one, by all accounts. And of course, being female, she had little training, for she was not a healer. And then . . .” There was a pause, and Gray waited for Sophie to elaborate; instead she said, “Still, I should think it must have been better to have it than not.”

  “Well,” said Gray, “magickal talent is sometimes less helpful than you might suppose.”

  She tilted her head, politely sceptical, but made him no reply.

  Pellan, the Professor’s head gardener, emerged from the potting-shed and directed Gray to the thinning and weeding of a floral border on the far side of the house. Sophie, instead of retreating indoors, fell into step beside him.

  Which were plants, and which weeds, Gray could not reliably determine, and the floral border seemed interminable. Sophie observed his efforts with every appearance of interest, and from time to time she reached out a slim brown hand to pluck up some small green thing; he wondered how much she must detest her sister’s company to prefer his, and made Herculean efforts not to utter ill-bred imprecations with every other breath.

  “I fear I am quite out of my depth,” he confessed at last.

  Sophie’s brown eyes danced, but she refrained from smiling. “I had begun to suspect it,” she said kindly. “You had only to ask. Look: This one is hawkweed, you know, and that is calendula. Can you not—that is—magick the weeds away?”

  “No, indeed,” said Gray. “Living, growing things . . . their magick is like healing—a very specialised one. Which is not where my talent lies.” Assuming that I have still any real talent to speak of. Am I doomed now to spend my existence summoning teacups and mending hats?

  “Which explains, of course, why the Professor has put you to work in the garden.” Sophie cast up her eyes. “He means to show you that he has the whip hand of you, and can exercise it as he likes.”

  So precisely did this assessment echo Gray’s own that he cast a sidelong glance at her, wondering whether, after all, she did have some magickal talent—of the sort, which he had once read of but never seen, that can be used to hear other people’s thoughts.

  Catching his glance, she further startled him by saying, “That was no magick. Only, I have known the Professor all my life, you see. It is not only you and I who know what he is, but most people have not the temerity to say it.”

  “But you have?”

  “That,” said Sophie quietly, appearing to scrutinise her fingernails, “depends very much on who might be listening.”

  There was a pause, in which only the sound of Gray’s mattock could be heard.

  “And what do you think of him?” asked Sophie.

  Gray snorted. “It is not my place to think anything. He is my tutor; I follow his advice on what I ought to be reading, and how to pass my examinations for Mastery. And at the moment I am beholden to his hospitality. Hence the gardening.”

  Sophie frowned. “You must have an opinion,” she said. “Being so very much cleverer than he is.”

  She spoke with perfect gravity, and appeared surprised by Gray’s hoot of derisive laughter.

  “It is quite true,” she said. “The Professor is an old fraud. Only so blessed distinguished and well connected, and so full of sage aphorisms and pronouncements, that nobody thinks to ask whether he really knows what he is talking of, or can do anything at all. But you”—she nodded slowly, eyes narrowed—“you can do things. I’m sure of it.”

  Gray put down the mattock and sat up straight, stretching out his arms above his head. “Nonsense,” he said. “I am a hopeless ignoramus of no learning and very little talent. Has not your father told you?”

  Sophie made a most unladylike noise.

  “Sophie, take care,” Gray said then, his voice low and urgent. “Whatever he may lack, he has influence and ambition—mind you do not underestimate him. He is not kind to his opponents.”

  Then, recognising how much he had nearly revealed, and to whom, he set his teeth and grimly picked up his mattock. Bending his head to his work, he nearly missed Sophie’s sharp, appraising look.

  * * *

  For the next se’nnight Sophie applied her mind with some energy to the problem of Graham Marshall.

  Gray was unlike any student the Professor had previously brought home; not only was he not pompous, superior, or condescending, he also very obviously (did he know how obviously?) disliked the Professor—who equally obviously despised him. When Appius Callender invited a student to stay for the Long Vacation, that student was invariably as much like the Professor himself as a man of eighteen or twenty could well be—well born, well dressed, and generally well looking, more interested in the University for the influence, advancement, and connexions it could afford him than for what he might learn there—and was accompanied by a servant or so and an assortment of well-appointed luggage.

  Alasdair Wickliff, for example, who had been the Professor’s guest for the Long Vac. when Sophie was fourteen, and Amelia just seventeen—a senior undergraduate of nineteen or twenty, middling tall and handsome, with vivid blue eyes and fair hair. Like most young men, on first encountering Amelia he had exerted himself to impress her; Amelia, for the first time, had become so besotted as to begin daydreaming of marriage proposals in her sisters’ hearing.

  Sophie had taken a more than usually strong dislike to Wickliff. Ten-year-old Joanna found him desperately dull, he having little interest in horses and none whatever in flying kites or catching frogs. Sophie soon remarked that he flirted not only with Amelia but also with nearly every other young woman, whatever her station, who crossed his path. This she mentioned, cautiously, thinking to put Amelia on her guard, but Amelia only tossed her head and said accusingly, “I ought to have known you would be jealous!”

  In the end, Sophie remembered Wickliff so vividly because he had vanished abruptly from Callender Hall after coming to grief over a pretty Breizhek kitchen-maid. Neither Amelia nor the Professor had ever again mentioned his name, and there had been a coolness between Amelia and Sophie since that summer.

  Gray, unlike Wickliff and all his fellows, had arrived quite alone, with one battered trunk, which apparently was half filled with books, and even Sophie, though growing to like him very much, could not honestly describe him as other than plain.

  The Professor, moreover, issued such invitations with only two purposes in mind: to provide sycophantic company for himself or eligible suitors for Ame
lia. Gray was self-evidently neither—and, indeed, it appeared to Sophie that her father was not only avoiding Gray’s company himself but attempting to discourage any closer acquaintance with Amelia.

  Yet here was Gray, and here he remained, in a condition that—though he shared their meals, as a guest ought—was very like servitude.

  Further, he spoke and behaved like a gentleman, if an awkward and diffident one, yet his coat-sleeves were an inch too short for his arms, his boots worn down at the heels. Those of his possessions which Sophie had had occasion to see were in a similar state—sturdy goods long used, well kept but often mended. Was he a fraud? An interloper? A gentleman fallen on hard times?

  “I do think it very kind of Papa to attempt to improve Mr. Marshall,” said Amelia one morning, when Sophie and she were working together in the morning-room. “But I fear his efforts are quite wasted.”

  “Oh?” Sophie kept her eyes on her crewel-work, lest her expression reveal how much this subject interested her. “How so?”

  “Oh! I do not think Mr. Marshall improves at all,” said Amelia. “I begin to believe he is not worth the trouble. I certainly do not intend to take any further trouble about him; a young man who does not so much as remark when one wears a new gown . . . !”

  “But, Amelia,” said Sophie, with as much gravity as she could muster, “young men cannot be expected—”