After another long moment’s window-gazing, he added,
I understand, too, that the library is very fine, though I have yet to see it.
This was the broadest hint he dared drop that he was prisoner and not guest.
What else was there to say? It would all depend, he supposed, on how Jenny replied; if it were not safe to write openly, if his letter had been tampered with either before or after its arrival, she would discover it and let him know.
Please give my love to all.
Your affectionate brother
G
Gray made a second copy of the letter, then folded and sealed both copies and scrawled directions on their outsides, first to Jenny at Kergabet, her husband’s country seat, and next to their London lodgings, having, to his chagrin, no very clear idea of her present whereabouts. Then leaving them on the desk, he rose and went to the window, where he stood for a long time, yearning for wings.
* * *
From the beginning of his magickal education, what Gray had most desired to learn was the art of shape-shifting, and the warnings of his undergraduate tutor, Master Alcuin—“This is a difficult and exacting magick, Marshall, one that most who attempt it will never master”—had only fuelled his determination to succeed.
The first step—he had learnt by now that this was always the first step—was to study: the anatomy and habits of a wide variety of animals, the histories of other successful shape-shifters, the means by which such transformations may be accomplished.
The second was to choose a shape. For Gray the choice was half made already: His desire to learn this magick had begun as a dream of flight, of soaring out of reach of boyhood tormentors. He pored over drawings of birds and spent hours—both by day and by night—observing the avian species that haunted the College grounds. Finally, on a rare visit to London, he spent a day in the city’s famous Menagerie, and there a marvellous bird caught his eye: a large owl—round yellow eyes framed by rings of white and dark grey, long grey wing- and tail-feathers crossed with pale mottled bands—blinking solemnly on a tree-limb. As Gray watched, fascinated, the owl spread huge wings and dropped off into space, gliding silently across the aviary to alight on another perch. Then its head revolved almost completely, so that it seemed to look directly at him.
“Please, what bird is that?” he asked a passing menagerie-keeper.
Smiling at his enthusiasm, the old man replied, “The Great Grey Owl.”
After months of repeated attempts, Gray’s first successful shift lasted only moments; the second, less than half an hour. But within a fortnight of that first success, he had taken to owl-shape as if born to it.
Only now, when it was lost to him perhaps forever, did he recognise how profoundly he had come to depend upon his ability to escape into the sky.
* * *
Jenny’s answer, when it came several days later, eased Gray’s mind, at least on one subject. Her husband, she wrote, despite disapproving of her disobedient brother and her continued correspondence with the same, was an honourable man who would never dream of opening or reading her personal letters; nor had her scrying detected the interference of any other person, so that Gray might safely write whatever he wished.
And I hope you will take the earliest opportunity to do so, as I have heard much about you this past month that requires explanation.
“I should imagine so,” Gray said aloud, ruefully, as he sat down to answer Jenny’s letter.
* * *
The following week, seizing his moment while both the Professor and Joanna were temporarily silenced by mouthfuls of rabbit with onions, Gray took the unprecedented step of asking leave to go sight-seeing—largely as a means to test the length of his tether.
“I have heard, sir,” he began, “that the Temple of Neptune at Kerandraon is very fine. I wondered whether I might have leave to pay a visit there.”
When the Professor, despite ostentatious raising of eyebrows at this description of the local pèlerinage, did not immediately refuse, Gray, emboldened, went on: “Perhaps Miss Callender and S— and Miss Sophia might be persuaded to accompany me—”
“I should be pleased to act as your guide to our beautiful country,” Miss Callender said, “but unfortunately my duties as mistress of this house keep me far too busy.”
Gray hid his relief behind a look of polite regret.
“However,” she went on, briskly, “I am sure my younger sisters would derive great benefit from such an edifying excursion. Papa, you will of course send them in the barouche, and Mrs. Wallis can easily spare Katell or Gwenaëlle to attend them?”
Gray sighed inwardly. However—supposing that the still-silent Professor consented at all—a Breton maidservant would be vastly preferable to Miss Callender herself, whose chill civility was almost more wearing than her father’s open disdain.
Appius Callender began to look thoughtful.
“Very well,” he said at last, and pursed his lips. “Sophia, you and Joanna may go, and Morvan shall drive the barouche. Amelia, you will speak to Mrs. Wallis about the arrangements . . .”
Gray looked up, astonished at his success, into Sophie’s wide eyes.
* * *
The Professor went out alone after luncheon the next day, driving himself in the phaeton, and returned as the rest were dressing for dinner. Conversation at table, such as it was, gave place to a long lecture on the original construction and the more recent renovation of the temple they were to visit, which might better have held the listeners’ attention had it contained more of history and less of the politics and arithmetic of patronage.
“Had matters been left to the architect,” said he, when Sophie ventured to ask whether it was known who had built the original structure, “there would be no temple to visit. It is men of substance who build temples, Sophia, not architects and stonemasons. Now, the temple at Kerandraon, as I have said, was to have been refurbished by Sieur Guion de Cournouaille; but, however, he was killed by—killed, that is, in an affair of honour, and his heirs refused to support the project . . .”
There was more in this vein, to which Sophie could not attend. She did succeed in collecting that the work on the temple had at length been paid for by the then Duke of Breizh, to whom a memorial stone had afterward been erected, on the seaward colonnade. This the Professor particularly commended to Gray’s attention as being of great historical interest.
“Yes, sir,” said Gray, in the tone Sophie had come to recognise as indicating thorough absence of mind.
* * *
The following morning, the five of them—Sophie and Joanna facing Gray in the barouche, with the luncheon hamper on the floor between them, and Gwenaëlle perched beside Morvan on the box behind the horses—departed early for Kerandraon, a market town along the coast.
The moment the carriage moved beyond sight of Callender Hall, Joanna left her seat beside Sophie to slide in next to Gray, and Gwenaëlle clambered down from the barouche box into the space thus vacated.
“We are leaving the park now, and see—here is the first of our farms,” said Joanna to Gray, a little farther on.
As she spoke, and as his eye fell on the white and green of sheep and meadow, Gray’s heart lifted strangely, as though freed from some oppressive weight; the three girls grew cheerful and voluble, chattering in Breton and occasionally glancing sidelong at their male companion amidst flurries of laughter.
The whole undertaking had assumed a glad and carefree air, and Gray smiled, at first, to see Sophie for once looking like any girl of seventeen, enjoying an outing with her contemporaries. As he could now understand only one word in ten of their conversation, however, he soon felt distinctly left out, and—as they had perhaps intended—turned from them to study the passing landscape.
He had wondered often that the Professor should choose to spend his holidays in such an out-of-the-way place, fond as he was of rich
food, influential society, and the sort of entertainments more easily found in Oxford or London than on an isolated estate in Petite-Bretagne. With such income as the Callender estate must supply, surely one need not live halfway to Cape Finis Terra, unless by choice.
On the other hand, Gray could easily imagine living here himself. The country was so beautiful—richly green to the south, with the wild scent of the sea gusting from the cliffs to the north—and so like his native Kernow, even to the half-familiar sounds of the local language, that a wave of homesickness assailed him, such as he had not felt in many years. The few people they passed in the fields and pastures were hale and deeply tanned; they paused in their work, first to study the approaching conveyance and then, once it drew near, to greet “Dim’zell Zophie” and her entourage with every appearance of friendliness. Sophie, Joanna, and the servants returned these salutes with smiles and cheerful greetings of their own.
* * *
The Temple of Neptune, aptly enough, perched at the cliff’s edge on the southern side of the cove in which nestled the town of Kerandraon. Originally built in the style greco-romain of so many centuries past, with a broad, gently pitched roof supported by Doric columns on two sides and (in deference to the local climate) thick stone walls on the other two, it had gradually acquired decorative additions of a more local bent, so that now it might just as well have been dedicated to the Breton sea-queen Dahut as to Neptune. This Gray supposed to be the reason the Professor had described Duke Gaël’s refurbishments as insufficiently ambitious; a man more convinced of the superiority of Roman worship, law, and custom he had never yet encountered.
“This is a chancy place,” said a quiet voice at Gray’s elbow, speaking in strongly accented Français; Gray turned to see Morvan, the Callenders’ coachman, nodding his grizzled head. “The old magicks are strong here. Some can feel them—if they know what to look for.”
Gray studied the old man—Breton born and bred, thrice his own age at least, but lean and spry and strong, with a glint of sharp intelligence in his dark eyes. “Oh?” he said, in an encouraging tone.
“They say,” Morvan continued, lowering his voice still further, “they say as Lady Laora made pilgrimage here, to try if the Lady Dahut would save her from being sent away to marry the Saozneg King.”
Gray blinked. Lady Laora? Yes, the second bride of King Henry the Twelfth had been the daughter of the Duke of Petite-Bretagne, he recalled—very likely a distant descendant of Duke Gaël. Perhaps it was only natural that she should seek the gods’ help in a place with such a connexion to her family. Though everyone knew of her mysterious disappearance, Gray had never before heard it said that she had gone unwilling to her marriage-bed; might that explain—if not excuse—what she had later done?
“But then, they likely say that of every temple along this coast,” Morvan went on; he grinned briefly, his air of mystery quite vanished. “Draws the pilgrims, y’see.”
Gray thought he did see; the Breton queen’s notoriety had faded in England since his childhood, but perhaps here her fame persisted. Joanna had scampered away up the steps; Sophie and Gwenaëlle were filling their arms with the dahlias and lilies for which they had begged the head gardener before setting out that morning. Before Gray could collect himself to pursue this interesting topic, Morvan had thrust an armload of flowers at him and moved away, trailing the girls up the temple steps with the rest. Gray followed more slowly, pausing to admire the elaborate knotwork carved into the temple’s supporting pillars.
He reached the entrance well behind the others and lingered there, listening to their footsteps and letting his eyes adjust to the relative darkness within, striped slantwise by the bars of sunlight admitted by the seaward-facing colonnade. It was here that he began to hear the voices.
What first came to his ears as a single blurred muttering soon resolved into several distinct voices—one deep, slow, and resonant; another higher, a sad repeated keening; others that ranged the octaves between, rising, cresting, and falling like the waves of the sea. And, indeed, what he heard might have been merely the crash of surf against the cliffs below, magnified through the temple, whose seaward wall was open to the elements. But Gray, who had lived near the sea for much of his life, was not long in recognising these voices as something other—something more.
The old magicks are strong here . . .
Stepping cautiously forward into the temple proper, he at once beheld the great altar to Neptune but found it deserted. Farther in, and at length he discovered Sophie, Gwenaëlle, and Morvan, kneeling to present their offerings at a smaller, humbler shrine set into the left-hand wall. Gray tried to recall what he had read about Breton gods and goddesses of the sea, but by now the voices were so loud, so urgent, that he had little attention to spare. He could hear just well enough to be sure that some of them spoke or sang words—but not words he understood, though he could hear their kinship to the local language and to the Kernowek and Cymric he had heard spoken all his life. He shut his eyes and concentrated intently, bending both mind and magick to the task of understanding just one word, just one, just one . . .
But just as he felt he was about to catch hold of something, Joanna screamed.
* * *
A priest and two acolytes came running as Joanna’s single shriek, abruptly stifled, echoed around the great stone hall, confounding Gray’s efforts to locate its source. The flowers fell unheeded, scattering across the stones, as he looked about, frantic, for some sign of her. Finding none with his unaided eyes, he drew on his talent to seek her, never stopping to think that the magick might not answer his call.
The words of the finding, as familiar as his own name, flew out in all directions and sank into the stones, setting the very air humming with his magick. He recalled them, focusing all his being on the mental image of Joanna’s round, defiant face, and the magick pointed the way for him, just as it always had. He followed its urging at a run, his long legs covering the length of the temple in a few strides—only barely registering Sophie, Morvan, and Gwenaëlle following in his wake, or the priest shouting at them to come away.
Joanna teetered at the seaward edge of the temple floor, one foot suspended over empty air where there had so lately been solid stone, her body pressed back against one of the supporting columns. Her face was ashen, her lips pressed together in a vain effort to quell the chattering of her teeth. Gray gestured to Morvan, who braced him firmly as he leant out towards her, caught her arm, and slid his own about her waist to pull her back.
When Joanna had collapsed, mute and shivering, into Sophie’s arms at the foot of the altar to Neptune, Gray and the priest returned to the scene of the near-catastrophe and lay prone to examine the place where a segment of the ancient, weathered stone had given way.
The priest was not much older than Gray, and his face nearly as white as Joanna’s. “I cannot understand it,” he said, over and over.
And, indeed, it did seem inconceivable that this structure, which had stood here—so the Professor said—for some fifteen centuries, should so suddenly crumble under the weight of a thirteen-year-old girl.
Gray muttered brief prayers to Neptune, Dahut, and anyone else who might be listening, lest the incident represent some manifestation of divine displeasure.
This ought not to have happened, surely.
It was not until their much-subdued party had nearly reached Callender Hall that he remembered what else ought not to have happened as it had. If Gray could not set wards, could not shift, could only just call light enough to see by . . . then how had he so effortlessly produced that powerful finding-spell?
* * *
Amelia blanched at their tale, her blue eyes round, and rang for shawls and hot toddies. The Professor, who had looked aghast at their bedraggled return, grew increasingly dour.
“Mr. Marshall has exposed you both to unconscionable dangers,” he declared. “You may be sure he shall not be permitted to d
o so again.”
“But, Father!” Joanna exclaimed. “Did you not hear me? It was Mr. Marshall who found me and came to my rescue!”
“From a predicament, Joanna, in which he himself had placed you.”
“But—”
The door of the sitting-room opened to admit Mrs. Wallis, bearing a tray of steaming cups, and Katell with an armful of winter shawls. Sophie accepted a cup of hot toddy, grateful both for its warmth and for Mrs. Wallis’s timely interruption. The Professor was quite capable of confining them both to the house for the remainder of the summer, simply to punish Joanna’s insolence; to be forced to circumvent such a restriction, as she knew from past experience, would be tedious in the extreme.
“Sophia!”
“Sir?”
The Professor regarded her with narrowed eyes. “Have you anything to add to your sister’s tale?”
Sophie considered pretending that she had had Gray under her eyes all the time and could swear to his innocence. But the Professor would question Morvan and Gwenaëlle, and though either would lie without hesitation to protect her or Joanna, she could not trust that they would do the same for Gray. She could point out again that Joanna had ventured so near the colonnade only to look at the memorial stone, which yesterday the Professor had told Gray was so much worth examining—
Sophie shut her lips tight on that disquieting thought. Surely she was imagining things—and the Professor would not thank her for making such a suggestion.
“Nothing, sir,” she said instead. “I can attest that Joanna’s rescue was just as she tells it, but no more.”
The moment the Professor looked away, she cast a pleading glance at Mrs. Wallis.
“Professor, sir,” said the latter. “’Ad not Miss Sophia and Miss Joanna best be put to bed? They ’ave ’ad a dreadful fright and are not themselves.”
“Indeed, Papa,” said Amelia, “I think Mrs. Wallis is quite right.”
The Midnight Queen Page 5