The Midnight Queen

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “Oh! As to knowing the difference between one gown and another, certainly not. But a man ought to take notice of one’s appearance, Sophia, even when he does not understand what it is he is taking notice of.”

  Indeed, his behaviour on that first evening notwithstanding, Gray had quite failed to offer Amelia the abject admiration she considered her due. Sophie could not be certain whether Gray’s indifference to her sister’s charms indicated (as she rather hoped) unusual perspicacity, or whether it was mere absence of mind; its result, however, was that Amelia had quit the field altogether, giving Sophie, for almost the first time, both opportunity and leisure to study the ways of young men—at any rate, of one young man. What manner of life had he led, that she so often saw him look fearful or unhappy? What made his stammer come and go? Why should the Professor bring him here, only to disdain him, and why should he bear so meekly the Professor’s ill-natured, often ill-deserved rebukes?

  Sophie found this philosophickal study an absorbing one; Gray, she concluded, was a far more interesting person than either he or the Professor wished her to believe.

  * * *

  “Sophie! So-phieeee!”

  Gray, dressing himself for dinner in his bedroom, wondered at the cheerful cry. The voice was one not known to him, and, of all the household, only he himself used the name Sophie preferred, and then only when no one else was present. As he tugged a comb through his thick sandy hair, still damp from washing—trying as he always did to force it into some semblance of respectable neatness—he listened closely for a reply.

  It came soon enough, in Sophie’s familiar voice: “Joanna, do be quiet! Come in, come upstairs. If the Professor hears you screeching like a fishwife, we shall be read lectures for a month.”

  Joanna. This, then, was the youngest Callender daughter, home at last from school in Kemper. Heedless of her sister’s admonition, she chattered eagerly all the way up the stairs.

  “If only you would walk as quickly as you speak,” Sophie said. She sounded harassed, yet there was an affection in her tone that Gray had never heard when she spoke to her father or Miss Callender.

  He abandoned his hair as a bad job and stepped out of his room just as Sophie was shepherding the newcomer, and a stableboy laden with valises, across the landing. Joanna—a stocky, open-faced girl of perhaps thirteen, who bore no evident resemblance to either of her sisters—stopped short at sight of him, looking him up and down with candid grey eyes.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Joanna!” Gray came very near to laughing at Sophie’s outraged tone but restrained himself to spare her dignity. “Mr. Marshall, may I introduce my sister Joanna? Joanna, Mr. Marshall is one of Father’s students, and our guest for the summer.”

  Joanna curtseyed haphazardly, revealing to Gray that her petticoats were edged in mud and her scuffed boots half-unlaced.

  Gray bowed gravely in return. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Joanna.”

  “You have the most enormous boots I have ever seen,” said Joanna.

  * * *

  Joanna’s presence enlivened that evening’s dinner conversation considerably. She seemed to have made a project of provoking her father and eldest sister; in the face of her continual efforts in this direction, and Sophie’s to school her to silence, Gray could think of almost nothing to say that would not make matters worse.

  Over the second course Joanna announced her intention to seek a university place on leaving her school. Sophie frowned and muttered, “Do be quiet!” Miss Callender, displaying a most uncharacteristic want of poise, choked on her wine. The Professor, to Gray’s surprise, said only, “You will find that you think very differently in a few years’ time, Joanna.”

  “Indeed I shall not,” she retorted, with the sort of defiance Gray wished he himself could bring to bear against his tutor. “It is quite absurd that only boys are allowed to do anything interesting, when everyone knows that girls are much cleverer.”

  From Sophie, Gray had learnt that Joanna, far from being a keen scholar, was in fact much despaired of by the headmistress of her school, being prone to gaze out of the window during lessons that bored her and to involve her fellow pupils in nocturnal escapades of various sorts. He wondered whether this apparent shift of interests was genuine or whether, as he very much suspected, it was simply the latest in a series of calculated attempts to shock her father.

  “Some girls may indeed be very clever,” said the Professor, still uncharacteristically calm, “though I must say that, alas, those present at this table are all uncommonly silly.”

  Even Miss Callender looked mildly annoyed at this. Gray bristled, silently, on Sophie’s behalf, and shot her a sympathetic look across the table; she would not meet his eye, but gazed without expression at the silver epergne in the middle of the table.

  “No matter how clever a woman may be, her mind and temperament remain ill suited to such advanced study as must be undertaken by a university undergraduate.” He turned to Gray, smiling the smile that always portended something unpleasant for its recipient, and added, “I am sure you will agree, Mr. Marshall?”

  “As you say, sir,” Gray muttered through clenched teeth, looking at his plate.

  * * *

  “You told me he was clever,” Joanna said accusingly, when the sisters had removed to the drawing-room after dinner.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Sophie.

  “Your Mr. Marshall,” said Joanna, scowling ferociously up at her. “You said he was clever, and kind, and interesting, but he is exactly like Father.”

  “You are mistaken, Jo,” Sophie said. “I have known Gray far longer than you have, and I am sure you—”

  “What is there to mistake?” said Joanna, impatient. “When one man professes an opinion, and another man replies with As you say, what are we to think but that his opinion is the same?”

  “I cannot think any such thing,” Sophie replied staunchly, thinking of Gray’s gritted teeth and downcast gaze, but as she was equally unable to explain his apparent endorsement of the Professor’s views, Joanna remained unpersuaded.

  The next morning Sophie set out immediately after breakfast and searched the gardens until at last she ran Gray to earth.

  “Joanna believes that you agree with the Professor,” she told him without preamble, lying prone at the edge of a gravel path in order to peer at him through the box hedge. She had lain awake half the night fretting over her quarrel with her sister; never before had their opinions of any person been so much at odds.

  “I imagine it possible that such a thing might occur,” Gray said. His head was bent to his work, so that she could not see his face. “In theory.”

  “That women’s minds are not suited to advanced study, I mean,” she said impatiently. “Do not be obtuse. I told her that she was quite wrong, of course, but . . .”

  Gray at last put down his trowel and looked at her. “But . . . ?”

  “But . . . if you do not agree, why not say so?” She paused again, biting her lip. Amelia would call this sort of inquiry prying, but Sophie felt that she must have an answer. “And not only that. It is perfectly clear that he loathes you, and you loathe him. I do understand that you must put up with him during term time, but I cannot any way see why you should come here and let him treat you as he does, as though the laws of welcome meant nothing. Mother Goddess, Gray! He treats you with more thorough contempt than he has ever shown even to me.”

  Gray looked angry—but not, she thought, at her—and perhaps a little ashamed.

  “I came here,” he said quietly, looking down at his filthy hands again, “because your father gave me no choice; and I hold my tongue because if he were to throw me out, I should have nowhere else to go.”

  Sophie could not at once think how to reply. She sat up, wrapping her arms about her knees, and considered. After a moment, she heard again the soft chunk
of the trowel.

  Very quietly she said, “I am glad you are here.”

  The sound of trowelling stopped. Sophie lay down again and peered through the hedge. Gray looked at her with a sort of astonishment in his face; then he smiled slowly, tentatively, and said, “So am I.”

  * * *

  Sophie dreamed that night, as she often did, of blood and fire and broken limbs, and of death falling from the sky.

  On such occasions, it was her habit upon waking to creep down the servants’ stair to the library, where for some years now she had been systematically working her way through the Professor’s collection of basic works on magickal theory. Most lately she had begun on the Elementa magicæ of Gaius Aegidius; it was very slow going, for although notionally meant for novices, it was written in a style so ornate that Sophie found she must read each individual period at least three times before she could parse out its meaning.

  She persevered, however, until the words began to swim before her eyes. Then she climbed the library stair and from the top shelf over the door retrieved another book. This one was smaller, old and worn, with the marks of small fingers upon it; the title stamped on its spine—it was a book of minstrel-tales for children—was in Brezhoneg, and on the flyleaf was written, in a child’s uncertain hand, Laora.

  The name notwithstanding, the book had belonged to Sophie’s mother, who had used to read to the girls from it when they were small.

  Sophie chose a page at random and began to read, intending only to refresh her eyes and her mind for a renewed assault upon Gaius Aegidius, who appeared to be working himself up to an interesting discussion of spells relating to water. Instead, however, she found herself leaning her chin upon her hand and considering her mother.

  Sophie had been three years old, or thereabouts, when, escaping from the nursery one summer night to look at a beautiful full moon, she first overheard one of her parents’ ugly arguments. The words eluded her—they were too distant, and spoken in a language imperfectly understood—but the voices, chill and venomous, sent her fleeing back to her bed, where she lay long awake before succumbing to a sleep beset with nightmares.

  The next day she had watched them carefully. But all seemed as usual: Papa kept to his study, except when walking the gardens with Pellan, and patted the girls’ heads absentmindedly when they passed by him in the shrubbery; Mama heard Amelia’s lessons, spoke with Mrs. Wallis, watched Sophie and Amelia play in the garden with their dolls. Sophie splashed Amelia with water from the fountain, and Amelia cried; it seemed to Sophie now that Mama had moved more carefully and spoken more sharply than was her wont, but at the time she had been outraged by the unfairness of being scolded for such a trifle.

  Soon enough the summer was over, and the Professor back to Merlin College for the Samhain term. The house, as always, had worn a more cheerful air when he had gone, but this time Mama seemed not to share it. She had begun to grow round, and had dark smudges under her eyes.

  “Mama, why are you sad?” Sophie remembered asking one day. She had escaped from the nursery-maid again and found Mama weeping silently over her fancy-work: a tiny white bonnet, like the ones Amelia sewed for their dolls.

  Mama had smiled sadly and stroked Sophie’s hair. “You shall understand one day, dear heart,” she said, which meant—Sophie had known this much already—that no more answers would be forthcoming, however many questions she might ask.

  A few days before Beltane, the nursery-maid had brought Sophie and Amelia to see Mama in her bedroom, where Mrs. Wallis showed them, not a doll, but a tiny, pink-faced baby girl with wide-open slate-blue eyes. “This is your new sister, my dears,” she said, smiling.

  The servants exclaimed and cooed at the baby, but Sophie saw that Mama was weeping quietly.

  “The gods withhold their gifts from me,” she muttered, as though to herself. “I was so certain, and yet it is another girl-child, the poor thing. He will be back again, and again, the brute, as long as he has no son . . .”

  Mrs. Wallis’s smile had vanished as Mama spoke, and Sophie had heard no more, for the nursery-maid was hurrying her and Amelia out of the room.

  * * *

  Sophie could not recall exactly when, or how, she had discovered herself to be her mother’s favourite child. But certainly by the age of seven, she had come to understand this truth and was beginning to grasp the unfairness of it. If Mama should love her better than Amelia, that was only just, since Amelia was Father’s favourite; but it was too bad of Mama (and Father, too) to spare no love for Joanna—who, besides, was not much more than a baby and could scarcely have done anything to deserve it.

  Sophie could not pretend that she had not adored her mother, but from the beginning of Joanna’s life she had also loved her small sister fiercely—and not only for the sake of Joanna’s answering devotion. Not that Joanna was difficult to love. All the servants, and Mrs. Wallis in particular, found her round, solemn face and disconcertingly astute questions rather endearing than not, and tended to spoil her, and even Amelia, in those days, had been, if not precisely doting, at any rate very fond of her. So it was not that Joanna lacked for love, exactly, and Mama had never been unkind to her; only . . . Joanna followed Mama with her wide grey eyes, candid and sad in her stoic little face, so happy to receive even an absent half smile, and Mama might have made her so happy with a kiss or a caress, or by admiring her adorably wobbly little dances—but Mama never had. Joanna had never cried, of course—Joanna was known even then for never crying.

  Sophie had said to Amelia one day, “When I am grown up, I shall have six children; and I shall love them all alike, and play with them as much as they wish, and never lose my temper or scold them.”

  “You shall have to get a husband first,” replied Amelia, tossing her head. “It is a great pity that you are not pretty. Still, Papa will find someone to marry you, I suppose.”

  And Sophie had snorted derisively, and said, “I shall find someone myself, I thank you.”

  * * *

  Then Mama had died, when Sophie was eight and Joanna only four. Joanna had seemed to go on very much as before; she did not mope and weep as Amelia and Sophie did. But Sophie had much more dreadful nightmares now, and was often enough awake o’ nights to know that Joanna suffered likewise; she knew, if no one else did, that there was a hurt, bewildered child hidden behind that stoic façade. But she could find no opportunity to kiss and comfort Joanna, who would not, except in sleep, admit to feeling anything.

  Instead, taking advantage of the disorder into which Mama’s absence had temporarily thrown the household, Sophie had taken Joanna with her when she fled the melancholy house to ramble around the park. They searched for frogs and water-snakes; they picked flowers and wove daisy-chains; they sang together (Sophie tunefully, Joanna in her small, earnest monotone); and Joanna seemed to feel happier. Sophie, after a time, had begun to feel happier also.

  * * *

  Sophie blinked, stretched, and rolled her cramped shoulders with a sigh. It was a relief to have Joanna back again, however uncomfortable she might make things with the Professor and Amelia. Joanna did not mock her interest in magickal theory and, unlike Amelia, could be relied upon not to reveal her reading habits to the Professor. Unfortunately, Joanna was also unlikely to be helpful in her quest to decipher Gaius Aegidius. Now, Gray, on the other hand . . .

  The sound of footsteps in the corridor outside warned Sophie that dawn was approaching, and with the ease of long practice she replaced the codex on its shelf, slipped out of the door, and crept back up the stairs to her bed.

  CHAPTER III

  In Which Gray Writes a Letter and Makes a Pilgrimage

  My dear Jenny, Gray wrote, I hope this finds you very well.

  Sighing, he put down his pen and raised his face to the window. It was late evening, and all over the grounds of Callender Hall darkness was absolute. At the moment Gray wanted nothing more than to be out in th
at darkness, flying. He knew very well that he was not yet recovered enough to execute a shape-shift and would only tumble to his death on the flagstones below. But he yearned towards his broad wings and round owl eyes, the loft of an updraught, the tiny night sounds—despite the disastrous ending of his last such flight.

  Grim-faced, he picked up the pen.

  You may have heard distressing tidings of my doings, Jenny. I hope you have not been anxious on my account. Be easy: I am well and mostly whole, and I believe no permanent damage has been done.

  As I wrote from Oxford, my tutor has invited me to be his guest in the country—your country, I should rather say—until the next term begins. His house and gardens are situated in a most beautiful part of the country, as tranquil as one could wish—a charming prospect all in all. I am as well occupied here as I could possibly be elsewhere.

  Gray looked up again, chewing the end of his pen. The number of things he could safely write about was pitifully small compared to the many more interesting subjects which he would have liked to discuss with Jenny—with any friendly and sympathetic person, for that matter. If only such a person were to hand!

  He longed to confide more fully in Sophie. But of what use—beyond relieving his feelings—could such a confidence be to either of them? A poverty-stricken student mage, estranged from his parents, who (so ran the Professor’s tale) had had to be rescued through the kind offices of his tutor from rustication—or worse—was no suitable acquaintance, still less a suitable friend, for the daughter of any respectable man. Sophie would wish to help him, he knew, but he saw no means for her to do so—only myriad opportunities to antagonise her father, which would do Gray no good, and might do Sophie harm.

  There was nothing to be done, then, but write to Jenny and wait to see what came of it.

  I have told you before of my tutor, Professor Callender. Also in his household are his three daughters, among whom is one at least whose acquaintance I think you might very much enjoy.