“That will do, Katell,” said the Professor, in the same language; “that will do. Show him in.”
Katell curtseyed again and fled; the Professor and Amelia looked after her, shaking their heads.
Then the door opened again and Gray heard Katell’s voice once more: “M’sieu’ le Vicomte Carteret,” it said, as a dark-haired, slightly stooped man of perhaps forty or fifty sidled into the room.
The Professor was on his feet, ushering in the newcomer while his flustered housemaid brought another chair to place beside Gray’s. “I beg you will allow me to present my eldest daughter, Amelia,” he said; the stranger bowed. “My daughter Sophia; my daughter Joanna.”
Gray fancied that the stranger studied Sophie’s face just a trifle longer than was polite.
“And this,” said the Professor, turning to indicate Gray, “is a student of mine, Mr. Marshall.”
Viscount Carteret—where have I heard that name before? wondered Gray—also turned, and nodded to Gray. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Marshall,” he said.
Gray bowed silently in return. His mind was racing, and he was grateful that the obligatory gesture of respect hid his face, however briefly. For, if he could not recall where he had heard this man’s name, he had not forgotten that insinuating nasal voice.
“Will you not take some refreshment with us, my lord?” said Amelia.
Lord Carteret turned to her with a smile. “I beg you will excuse me, Miss Callender,” he said; “I fear I should be at best indifferent company.”
I did not mistake the voice, thought Gray; it is he, indeed.
“My journey has been long,” their guest continued, “and I am presently more in need of repose than of refreshment.”
So saying, he allowed Katell to lead him away to Callender Hall’s best-appointed guest room.
Gray’s relief at this departure was considerable. Though not unpractised in the art of concealing his state of mind from others, he feared that this shock, combined with the previous evening’s disastrous experiment, might be too much for him. He needed time to think, and certainly, if the Professor’s co-conspirators had begun to pay him private visits, Gray could no longer consider simply running away home.
He sat silent, thinking furiously, while the Professor lectured his daughters on the honour bestowed by Viscount Carteret in deigning to visit them. The oration was a long one, suiting Joanna’s prediction that the honoured visitor would be “desperately dull.” It was also a masterful exercise in saying much while revealing little.
“Father,” Joanna interrupted, drawing an ominous beetling of the paternal brows, “I wish you will tell us who this Lord Carteret is.”
After a pause, during which even she seemed to recognise that perhaps she had gone too far, she added, “If you please.”
Professor Callender drew himself up in his chair. “I had forgotten,” he said icily, “the boundless ignorance of the world in which my offspring choose to bury themselves.” He looked down his large pink nose at Joanna.
This seemed hardly fair. Across the table, Joanna was bristling again, and Gray sent her a silent plea to keep her temper. Perhaps Sophie was at the same time exercising some more concrete form of restraint, for, though visibly fuming, the younger girl held her tongue.
The Professor was still speaking, but his student could hardly credit what he said: “. . . Lord President of the Privy Council, King Henry’s closest advisor.”
The Chief Privy Counsellor? Here, in this house? Gray fought to keep his jaw from dropping open. His next coherent thought—harking back to that dreadful night in Oxford—was, Why should such a man interest himself in the affairs of Merlin College? But that voice . . .
If I have not mistaken his identity, then his loyalties are suspect—more than that!—and this is surely no mere social visit. I must discover what he has come here for.
* * *
In the salver on the hall table was a thick letter directed to Gray in Jenny’s hand. He picked it up and made to take it with him, up to his bedroom to resume his working clothes. Before he had reached the staircase, however, he found himself cornered by his tutor, who wore his bluff and hearty air.
“Well, Marshall,” the Professor huffed, “and what think you of our distinguished guest?”
“I—I hardly know, sir,” said Gray. “I have not yet had leisure to form any opinion of His Lordship.”
“Ah! You have never before been in company with him, then.”
Had Gray had any respect for his tutor’s intellect, it would have sunk under the weight of this clumsy attempt to trap him.
“No, indeed, sir,” he said, with perfect truth. “I have never seen His Lordship before in the whole of my life. My family, you know, is in Town very little.”
Please, All-Father and Great Mother, let him not ask whether I’ve heard him.
Those deities for once answered his prayer fully and promptly: The Professor nodded, apparently satisfied, and Gray made his escape up the front staircase, Jenny’s letter in hand.
A quarter-hour later, he descended by way of the back stairs, having no longer any reason to haunt the front drive. Pellan was waiting for him, grim-faced as ever, with buckets of compost and two spades. That afternoon, under Pellan’s direction, Gray and the undergardener shovelled compost onto the roots of every tree in the vast grounds—or so it seemed to Gray.
At last Pellan deemed their task complete, and Gray was left to his own devices for the hour before dinner. Idly fingering a long scratch left on his wrist by a rose-tree, he let himself in at the garden door, hung up his hat, and wearily climbed the back staircase.
As soon as he entered his bedroom, he saw that it had been searched. Though the physical signs were subtle—not the neatness imposed by a housemaid’s labours, but a disorder just perceptibly different from that which he had himself created—the air was thick with upheaval.
At once he crouched down to retrieve, from beneath the overbearing wardrobe that filled one corner of the room, the spell-locked case, brought from his College rooms, in which he had been keeping the more revealing of Jenny’s letters. Scratches about the keyhole showed that the lock had been tried, but the searcher had not forced it. Gray breathed a sigh of relief; nowhere else in this room was there anything to show that he was not a voluntary and perfectly contented guest in this house. And the latest letter, by purest happenstance, he had still in his trouser-pocket. He took it out and broke the seal.
Gray dear, he read in Jenny’s confident hand, I hope you are well. I wish that you would write to my mother; she tells me often that she has heard nothing of you these many weeks, and is anxious for news of you. Of course I have assured her that you are safe and well, but she would be easier in her mind could she read the same in your own hand.
Gray snorted; how like Jenny to put such a complexion on things, to attempt some sort of reconciliation, when in fact she herself had for some time been the only member of their family to spare him a kind thought.
He folded the letter away with the others and tripped the lock with something like relief; though his rooms had been searched, surely there had been nothing much to learn from the exercise. But though the incident had shaken him, it had also given him an idea. Two can play at that game, my Lord President.
* * *
For some days no opportunity offered itself for discreet investigation of Lord Carteret or the Professor; Gray was kept always at work, and under supervision, by Pellan or by the Professor himself. At last, however, having done his best to present an appearance of blithe innocence (not to say bovine stupidity), and having seen the Professor and his guest exit the house and pass by him in the general direction of the stables, he waited until Pellan’s back was turned and his attention occupied by a molehill, then stole back into the house, via the kitchen, to put their absence to some use.
He crept as silently as h
e could down the dim, wood-panelled corridor that led past the Professor’s study. Pausing outside the door, he pressed his ear against the polished oak just above the uppermost hinge, listening. He heard nothing but the thump of blood in his own ears, however, and so judged it safe to turn the door-handle.
Here Gray met his first check, for—not surprisingly—the door was locked and warded.
The lock first, he decided. He knew a number of spells for unlocking doors, as a result of his own unfortunate habit of losing keys; he had one hand on the door-handle and was preparing to spread the other over the lock when someone behind him said, “Mr. Marshall!”
Gray started guiltily and turned to look; one of the housemaids—Gwenaëlle, who had gone with them to Kerandraon—was coming up the corridor towards him, wearing a linen apron and an expression of surprise. Mrs. Wallis’s bristling key-ring was in her hand, and Gray had a sudden idea.
“Gwenaëlle, perhaps you help me?” he said, speaking in halting Breton with what he hoped was a winning smile. “The Professor sends me to fetch something from his room, and says the door is open, but I find it locked. But if you have got another key . . .”
Gwenaëlle looked up at him, her fine dark brows drawn together. Gray prayed to Janus, god of gates and doors and decisions, that she might see nothing to decide her against him. At last she said, “No one but Professor Callender has the key to this room, Mr. Marshall. Mantret on.” I am sorry.
Gray shrugged and let his smile twist sidewise, rueful. “No harm,” he said. “Trugarez deoc’h.” Thank you.
He could not now linger there without her finding his behaviour suspicious; unfortunately, nor could he, as he had planned, climb the stairs to try the door of Lord Carteret’s bedroom. Instead, therefore, he put his hands in his pockets and trudged away in the direction of the kitchen, as though returning empty-handed to the Professor.
Gray had intended only to avoid arousing suspicion; it appeared, however, that his dejection had instead evoked Gwenaëlle’s sympathy for a fellow sufferer from her employer’s caprices, for she said quietly, “Mr. Marshall, wait.”
Gray turned; she gave him a small smile and held up a key. “Mrs. Wallis’s master key opens most of the doors in the house. This one too, it may be.”
Gwenaëlle looked carefully up and down the corridor before trying the key in the lock. For a moment it stuck fast, and she frowned; then she wiggled it gently, and with a soft click it turned.
Gray thanked her, and to his great relief she withdrew the key and went away about her business, leaving him to deal in solitude with the Professor’s wards. This he had expected to present the more difficult challenge; releasing another mage’s wards was always a tricky business, and Gray’s present limits did not encourage optimism. To his surprise, however, the wards proved to be of the most basic kind, sufficient probably to protect the room against eavesdropping but, despite his very questionable intentions, offering no resistance to his crossing the threshold.
Gray had never been invited to enter this room, but it reminded him strongly of the Professor’s study at Merlin: well stocked with claret, port, and brandy, a small selection of books tidily arrayed in glass-fronted cases, busts of Pythagoras and Apuleius. He had not time for a thorough search—even if he were fortunate and the Professor did not soon return to the house, Gwenaëlle might pass by again at any moment and hear him rummaging in drawers and pigeonholes—but he cast his eye over the contents of the desk and opened each of the drawers. The exercise was rendered less efficient by not knowing what it was he sought. There might have been a letter half written, a book open for consultation, some object concealed in a pigeonhole that resisted easy explanation, but there was not. There were, however, several codices stacked on one corner of the desk, and at the top of one stack a small leather-bound codex with a title in Breton stamped upon the cover—which surprised him a little, for he had never heard the Professor speak so much as a single word of that language. There was also a broken pen, one anomalous brown-and-tawny feather tossed carelessly in among the white goose-quills that were recognisably the Professor’s. Might this have been abandoned by Lord Carteret? Gray pocketed it on the chance.
His hurried but systematic rummage concluded with the pockets of the powdering-gown that hung from a hook on the back of the door. Here at last he found something, or what might be something: a folded sheet of note-paper, at the top of which was written, in the Professor’s careful hand, the words lightly the gods’ gifts, and below it, in a different hand altogether, a long series of figures. Gray frowned at it. Could it possibly be of any significance? Surely, if it were, the Professor would not have been so careless with it? But he kept his study locked, and no doubt considered this a sufficient precaution.
Gray could not, he decided, take the chance of missing what might be a clue to the Professor’s intentions. Stealing it would draw too much attention; was there time to make a new copy for himself? Quickly he collected pen, ink, and writing-paper from the desk and began copying the document. When he had finished—his copy scrawled so quickly as to be only just legible, but as accurate and complete as he could make it—he tucked the original back into the pocket where he had found it, and the copy into the front of his shirt.
After closing the door behind him, he spent an anxious few moments standing in the corridor with one hand spread over the lock, leaning his forehead against the oak and muttering first another prayer to Janus, then a locking-spell that he had read in the Acta Societatis Magicam, a few months and a lifetime ago. Though it was a small spell, he could not at first catch the trick of it, the shaping of his magick to persuade the tumblers to turn—the point was not to lock the door by magick, as he had planned to unlock it, but to induce it to lock itself as if with a key. On the third repetition, however, just as his hands were beginning to shake and his ears to imagine footsteps approaching behind him, the lock yielded with another soft click.
Gray exhaled raggedly, scrubbed his sleeve across the keyhole, and hastened away to the back stairs.
The guest rooms allotted to Viscount Carteret were neither locked nor warded. It would have looked suspicious, Gray supposed, to lock one’s door in a house in which one had been welcomed as a guest; did the lack of wards—even against listeners—suggest that Lord Carteret had not sufficient talent to set them?
Given the lack of such precautions, it was not to be supposed that Gray would find any incriminating object or document lying about in plain view. Having shut the door behind himself, therefore, he began his search with the sorts of hiding-places he might have used himself. There was nothing interesting on the top of the wardrobe, beneath the bed with the necessary, under the washbasin, or tucked between the dressing-table and the wall; nothing in the pockets of any of Lord Carteret’s coats or concealed among his linens. There were no stacks of books that might have concealed papers; the small escritoire had but one drawer, which proved to contain only perfectly innocuous writing-paper, ink-bottle, and pounce-box.
Gray carefully avoided passing before the window, which faced backwards, lest he be seen from without, but suspended his search periodically to cast an eye down into the park. To do so he approached the window from the side, on his knees, and peered through the pane in the bottom corner. He was glad of this precaution when he spied the Professor and his guest, still some distance away, walking unhurriedly back towards the house; in his hasty retreat from the window, his glance fell upon a lacquered dispatch-box which had been secreted in the narrow space between the wardrobe and the outer wall, on the far side of the window.
Gray scuttled across the gap and drew the box from its hiding-place. It was locked, of course, but as he had managed to relock the door of the Professor’s study . . .
The small lock yielded without protest to one of his collection of unlocking-spells. Inside were what appeared to be a letter, folded but unaddressed and still unsealed, and a small leather-bound codex. Gray extracte
d the letter and studied the close, crabbed script. His heart beat faster; it was another inexplicable series of figures, written, he was almost certain, in the same hand as those he had found in the Professor’s dressing-gown pocket.
He crept back to the window and, seeing Lord Carteret and the Professor still strolling about the gardens, apparently absorbed in conversation, took pen and ink and added this new series of figures to his copy of the first set. When he had finished, returned the original to the dispatch-box, and tucked the copy back into the breast of his shirt, he turned his attention to the codex.
It appeared to be a diary; dates and engagements were recorded in the same crabbed hand, with occasional names but a preponderance of initials. Gray’s pulse quickened as he found the date of his expedition with Taylor and the others noted together with the initials AC and M, though in fact it left him none the wiser—AC must be the Professor, but M might be anyone in the kingdom. Gray was unshakably persuaded, however, that whoever M was, he would speak in an imposing basso.
He turned the pages eagerly but found nothing that, even to his mistrustful eye, presented the least appearance of suspicion, nor the least clue to the identity of M. It was immediately evident, however, that any passage longer than a few words was written in some private cipher—not the same one used in the letter, for rather than figures it consisted of roughly word-sized groups of Greek characters.
Gray knew an agonised moment of indecision. Nearly every page of the diary was filled with cryptic or enciphered notations, which at present he could make nothing of. He had certainly not time to copy the whole of it and did not dare take it away with him, but still less could he see any way to determine which passages, even should he succeed in deciphering them, might be of use to him. The entire exercise, moreover, had begun to make him uneasy, for the gods knew what state secrets might be quite properly concealed in the papers of a man with responsibilities such as Lord Carteret’s. Gray had no business here that he could defend. Still, Lord Carteret had been in the Professor’s Oxford rooms, had certainly spoken of some plan to harm the Master of Merlin in some way, whether bodily or not. And so Gray, despite his misgivings, found the most recent additions to the diary, one of them dated to the previous day, and transcribed them onto another sheet of the Professor’s writing-paper before carefully replacing the book in the dispatch-box. The box was locked by the same expedient as the Professor’s study—the spell was easier to work this time, whether because of that prior success or because this much smaller lock required a proportionally smaller expenditure of magick—and restored to its place of concealment, and Gray was half out of the room before, with a stifled “Horns of Herne!” he turned back, retrieved the dispatch-box, and polished away the handprints from its glossy surface with the tail of his shirt.
The Midnight Queen Page 7