* * *
Selwyn, fifteenth Lord Halifax and Master of Merlin College, was a tall, imposing man of perhaps sixty years, with a mane of greying hair, a hawk’s curved nose, and keen brown eyes. He looked to Sophie as though he should not suffer fools gladly. His study showed an odd mixture of tastes, or perhaps of histories. Tall glazed cabinets covered most of the walls, filled with scrolls and codices, some obviously of great antiquity. Above these, secured by iron brackets all about the room, depended a collection of fearsome weaponry: several longswords and broadswords; a long pike; a grim, businesslike battle-axe. Sophie shuddered a little at this last; the Master of Merlin might be (as Gray had told her) a great and learned scholar, but if he chose to keep these things so close about him, she should not like to fall foul of the man’s temper.
Temper, however, was not to be their difficulty.
Lord Halifax greeted Master Alcuin with a warm handclasp; he exchanged ceremonious bows with “Dunstan” and “Randal”; he frowned momentarily at Gray, as though wondering where he might have seen him before, and slowly dropped an eyelid at Sophie. Resuming his own seat, he gestured graciously for his guests to be seated also; they perched awkwardly on velveted sofas, Gray on one side and Master Alcuin and Sophie on the other.
Sophie had so much to do merely in remaining Arthur Randal that for some time she scarcely heard what was being said—until Gray’s words pulled her back to reality: “Not such proofs as might generally be recognised as such, my lord. I own they are more in the nature of deductions and inferences; the documents we have seen are copies, and name no names, but Master Alcuin agrees with me that the danger to you is genuine.”
It sounded absurd, and Gray must know it, but his tone remained confident, his gaze earnestly fixed on the powerful man before him. Sophie listened, impressed by his composure, as—still firmly in the character of Ned Dunstan, student in good standing of Marlowe College, whom no one had ever believed guilty in a violent death—he relayed the results of their various overhearings, the documents they had deciphered, and the testimony of a scry-mage (whose identity he skilfully evaded mentioning) as to the Professor’s intent.
“It happens, my lord,” Gray continued, “that a former student of Master Alcuin’s is one of those on whose information our account relies. He has had the ill fortune to be suspected by Professor Callender, of knowing what he ought not; and as Master Alcuin will confirm, since receiving a letter on the subject from this man, sent from an inn not far from the Professor’s country estate, he has been watched, and followed, both in College and in the town.”
“This is quite true, my lord.”
“And what of the student himself?” Lord Halifax inquired of Master Alcuin.
“I regret, my lord, that I may not name the man in question,” the latter replied. “I have made a promise to that effect. But I may and do assure you that he is a man on whose integrity you may rely absolutely.”
Sophie fancied that Gray sat a little straighter.
Lord Halifax made no reply to this; instead he turned to Gray and said, “The substance of your theory, then, is a conspiracy by Oxford Fellows and men at Court, whose goal is murder and possible regicide; and the presiding genius of this dread scheme is none other than Appius Callender.”
Sophie had feared that Lord Halifax must see their tale for the tissue of lies it was, but instead—worse—he threw back his head and laughed.
“Callender!” he said, still chuckling. “This is good luck indeed! Of all men, I think I should best prefer that it be he who plots my downfall. An excellent joke, young Dunstan.”
“My lord, he has been ever your enemy,” Master Alcuin reminded his superior; his tone held a note of reproach.
“He has,” said Lord Halifax, sobering a little, “and he has been ever a pompous, small-minded fool—he has not the wit, I think, to be anything more. It has always puzzled me, frankly, that he should ever have achieved either a doctor’s robes or a Professorship. I do not doubt that he would very much enjoy plotting my death, and—who knows?—perhaps that of His Majesty as well. I should be very much astonished, however, if he should succeed in arranging either. You may depend, I think, on its being all a fanciful project of self-aggrandisement.”
The Master of Merlin sat back in his chair, folding together his long, sensitive fingers. “Alcuin,” he said, smiling kindly, “and you young men, I thank you for your concern for my welfare; I am touched indeed. I assure you, however, that I am quite safe, and beg you will not worry yourselves further on my account.”
It was unmistakably a dismissal. Sophie was half inclined towards one last, desperate outpouring of truth, in order to convince him, but what could she do but tell him what Gray had left out? And this would be a desperate stroke indeed; now he was amused, but if he should discover their deception, and, worse yet, the clandestine intrusion of a woman into Merlin’s sacred groves . . .
Lord Halifax’s manservant showed them out, and they retreated with all seemly haste to Master Alcuin’s rooms. The latter again took up his informative patter, but his heart seemed no longer in it—nor could Sophie contrive to rekindle her fascination of only an hour before.
As she trailed the two men back through the oaken door, Master Alcuin stretched up to whisper something to Gray, who stooped down to hear him. “Your cariadferch has done you a world of good, my boy,” he murmured, and Sophie, straining her ears, frowned at the unfamiliar word. “You stand much straighter now than you used, and your stammer has quite gone.”
Quite unaccountably, Gray’s ears went pink.
* * *
Gray slumped dejectedly into the long-legged wheelback chair he had been used to frequent as an undergraduate, which seemed to sigh a little and welcome him back into its embrace. “I brought that humiliation on all of us myself, I suppose,” he said.
“Ought we to have told him the whole truth?” Sophie asked, hesitant. She had taken off her coat and rolled her shirtsleeves up to her elbows, and sat perched on the edge of an armchair with her chin in her hands. “He must have been angry, I know, but perhaps he might have been . . . startled into considering the threat more seriously . . .”
Gray sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I was so certain,” he said, disgusted with himself. “How could I have thought—”
“That is quite enough, Marshall.” He had rarely heard Master Alcuin speak so sharply. “Self-pity does no good to anyone. We must think what is best to do.”
“I must go back again, of course.” Gray had not meant to express his impatience so clearly. “The question is—”
He stopped abruptly. What ailed him, that he should be prey to such stupidity? It was not only for the Sapientia Delphi that they had wanted Master Alcuin’s bookshelves.
“Magister!” He caught feverishly at his tutor’s sleeve. “Have you still your collection of works on poisons?”
* * *
Sophie busied herself at the hearth and in Master Alcuin’s spartan pantry, producing at length a pot of tea and a plate of bread-and-butter. She was not particularly hungry, but after an hour’s frustrating attempts to help in the search for whatever the others might be looking for, it had seemed wiser to make some other use of herself. To find herself, in any collection of three people, the one most inclined to such domesticity, ought to have amused her; as it was, she was merely flustered and annoyed by her burnt fingers and indifferent success, and regretted that she had not appreciated Mrs. Wallis as she ought.
Carefully, balancing a heavy wooden tray laden with teapot and crockery and the heaping plate of bread-and-butter, she shouldered open the door of the study. The hinges creaked, but the sound drew no notice from the two men who sat on either side of the desk, leaning their elbows on strata of open codices and half-unravelled scrolls. Master Alcuin absently wound the end of his beard round one finger, first one way and then the other; Gray held a fistful of hair in his right h
and, on which rested the weight of his head, and chewed the knuckle of his left forefinger in an abstracted manner.
Sophie cleared her throat, to no effect.
“Master Alcuin. Gray,” she said loudly. “I have made tea. Shall I pour some out for you?”
At hearing their names both of them jumped, and despite herself Sophie had to suppress a chuckle at the symmetry of their movements.
“I should very much like some tea, Miss Sophie,” Master Alcuin said after a moment, rising from his seat and smiling at her with anxious eyes. “And I thank you. I dare say it would do us all good to rest from our labours for a little.”
“Yes,” said Gray, who was staring again. “It is here somewhere, I know, but we can neither of us find it, and my eyes are quite . . .” He rubbed at them with one hand.
Sophie set out to pour the tea, only to remember that she had not been able to find any milk. As she began to apologise, their host waved a hand at her and said, “Please, do not trouble yourself; I shall fetch the milk.” He murmured something under his breath and held out his right hand; there was a small sound from the direction of the pantry, and a moment later a little crockery milk-jug sailed through the door and floated neatly onto his outstretched palm. Sophie grinned, delighted. “An unseen summoning! You must teach me to do that next,” she told Gray.
“Must you, Magister?” Gray rebuked his teacher, but there was the ghost of a smile in his eyes. He helped himself to a slice of bread-and-butter, appearing not to notice that the bread was an inch thick at one end, and almost translucent at the other.
While they munched and sipped contentedly, Sophie, teacup in hand, drifted over to the desk and began idly turning pages. A small, ancient-looking codex had become almost entirely buried under its larger fellows, so that only a corner protruded from the mass; curious, she tugged at it gently. When at last it came free, she regarded its hand-tooled leather binding with a shock of recognition.
* * *
“I have seen this book before!” Sophie exclaimed, holding up a little leather-covered codex, crumbling at the edges. “In the library at Callender Hall. Not this book, I mean, but another copy of the same one. I remember noticing it because—”
Gray swallowed a mouthful of bread-and-butter and deposited his half-empty cup precariously on the top of a bookcase. “What is it?” he demanded, holding out his hand. “Let me see.” Master Alcuin had put down his cup, too, and come to look over Sophie’s shoulder. “Fascinating,” he said. “I believed this to be the only copy extant.”
Silently she handed over the book, and Gray looked at it in consternation, for he too had seen it before, atop a stack of codices on the Professor’s desk in Breizh. “Treatise . . . on the uses of . . . what is that word? both . . . and . . . deadly? . . .” Defeated by his imperfect knowledge of the language, he returned the book to Sophie and inquired penitently, “Could you translate, please?”
She smiled a little. “Your Brezhoneg has improved,” she commented, and then turned her attention to the volume in her hand. “Treatise on the uses of poisons, both noxious and deadly, with the methods of procuring and compounding them . . .” she read. “It is the only book in this language that I ever saw in the Professor’s library that was not my mother’s, and the only book of any sort devoted to poisons. And when last I looked for it—I had read only a little of it, you see, and meant to read the rest—it was not there. I thought it mislaid, but suppose the Professor had taken it, like the Sapientia Delphi?”
“He had,” said Gray. “I saw it in his study, whilst I was—” He cast a guilty glance at Master Alcuin, and cleared his throat. “During Lord Carteret’s visit to Callender Hall.”
“Then . . . you think the ‘method’ Lord Carteret speaks of is something in this book?” Sophie turned it over, then back again.
“Well,” said Gray, “why else should he have such a book? I have never known him to take any interest in poisons, or seen any books on the subject in his rooms here, and by your own account he had none in Breizh either. And I think we may be sure that poisoning is what they plan. We know that they wish to ensure that no connexion is apparent between themselves and Lord Halifax’s death, and what other sort of method could possibly take such a time to prepare, or—”
Oh. Oh.
“Whatever Taylor and Woodville were after,” he said, “on the night Gautier died, was something the Professor needed for . . . this. Something he could not otherwise acquire without arousing suspicion.”
* * *
“The name of this one means ‘heart’s delight,’” said Sophie, some three-quarters of an hour and twenty pages later; she underlined the words with a finger as she read. Absorbed in the work of translating, she was so close to Gray that his every breath brought him the faint, heady lavender-and-rosemary scent of her hair. Master Alcuin sat at her other side, taking rapid notes of Sophie’s translations.
“A sort of horrible joke, I suppose,” she went on. “The victim’s heart, it says, ‘will appear to have stopped quite naturally’; a few drops only are needed, and it can be given in any draught of wine, ale, or mead.”
“If that is so,” said Master Alcuin, “we have found the Golden Fleece of poisoners.”
“‘To brew it requires—’” Sophie paused, frowning; after a moment her expression cleared, and she continued: “‘To brew it requires three separate distillations, carried out over a period of several months . . .’”
As he listened, a series of hitherto baffling details slipped into place in Gray’s mind, and he went cold with dread.
“. . . too much groundwork left to lay . . .”
“‘Many of the ingredients are readily available,’” Sophie read, “‘but three there are that may be more difficult to obtain: the foxglove, which must be fresh and not dried or otherwise preserved; the distilled venom of . . .’ Whatever can that be? Oh—‘of the Africk cobra’—I should not like to think how one obtains that; and . . .” She paused again, evidently puzzled, and Gray’s feeling of dread deepened so that he half expected his teeth to begin chattering. “Look at this word,” she invited, “and see if it looks like Cymric or Kernowek or . . .”
Gray looked, and thought, and clamped his lips shut against a rising wave of nausea.
“A great pity your students failed you so badly, Professor . . . I know that you were counting on them to provide—”
To provide what?
The answer presented itself to Gray’s mind in the form of Henry Taylor, clasping a carved teakwood box protectively against his chest.
“Yes,” he said bleakly. “It could certainly have been that.”
Master Alcuin leant across to look at the place marked by Sophie’s finger. He blanched and clasped his hands together. “Do you truly believe this, Marshall?” His voice was low and urgent. “Are you absolutely certain? To accuse a Senior Fellow of such barbarity—”
“We have accused him already of plotting murder, regicide, and treason, sir,” Gray reminded him.
“What barbarity do you mean?” Sophie demanded.
They looked at her, and then at each other; neither spoke. “The man has been my father—well, stepfather—these sixteen years,” Sophie said caustically. “I should like to believe I know the worst of him already. Tell me: What does that word mean?”
There was silence for some moments; and at last Gray said, very softly, “It is Old Cymric. It means ‘beating heart.’”
CHAPTER XVI
In Which Several Persons Are Unpleasantly Surprised
Sophie regarded the two pallid, green-tinged countenances before her, and her outrage at their secretiveness vanished in the face of this new horror. “‘Beating heart,’” she repeated, in an appalled whisper. “Does this mean . . . must it be . . .” She could not quite bring herself to speak the word human.
The little leather-bound codex was still in her hand. Abruptly horrified
by the very sight of it, she flung it across the desk and stood up, backing away and scrubbing her hands against her trousers like a child.
“Taylor had it,” Gray said, in the same low, despairing tone. “The night the Professor sent us into the town. Taylor and Woodville were the only ones trusted to go into the place; the rest of us stood watch, outside the door and in the street below. I believe they had a great deal of coin with them, and so they must have done, if I am right, and there was murder done that night . . . When they came out again, Taylor was carrying something else”—here his long fingers mimed carrying something small and delicate—“and he told us we must make haste. It was abuzz with magick . . . spelled, I suppose, to keep it . . . beating.” They all shuddered. “Did Taylor and Woodville . . . ?” His throat worked; he wet his lips. “They must have known—may the gods all curse them! If only I had asked—demanded—but we were set upon in the street almost at once . . .”
Sophie had sat down again, feeling as ill as the others looked. Gray gave her a grim sort of half smile. “I remember now that I heard one of them say we must be up to ‘nasty magicks.’ It was truer than I should ever have thought. Apollo, Pan, and Hecate!” he exclaimed suddenly, both fists striking the desk with a deafening crash. “Taylor dared lay Gautier’s death to my account. Yet he knew what we were after doing, all the time he knew . . . I wonder all the rest of us did not die that night, once we had served our purpose.”
Sophie stared at him, seeing but not quite crediting the gleam of tears in his eyes.
“We must go back again and warn him,” she said after a moment. “Lord Halifax, I mean. But what if he still will not listen?”
Master Alcuin sighed. “Then we shall at least have done our best,” he said grimly.
Gray drew one shirtsleeve across his eyes and sat back in his chair to look at both of them. “I shall go alone, then,” he said. “Sophie, Master Alcuin will see you safely back to the inn, and I shall join you—”
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