The Midnight Queen

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  Sieur Germain appeared nonplussed, as well he might. Lord and lady faced one another in mutual defiance; Sophie held her breath.

  Jenny’s husband might have ordered her from the room and thrown the rest of them out into the street; he might have humiliated her before her friends by dismissing her words, or—as any stranger would certainly have done—accused Gray and Sophie of tampering with the keys to mislead her.

  Instead he nodded sharply, raised her hand to his lips, and said, “Of course, my dear; of course we must both help Graham and his friends.” He looked round at all of them. “There will be time later to discuss what it is best to do. For the present—you must all be hungry and weary, after your journey, and we have as yet made you no proper welcome.” At his summons, a servant appeared as if from nowhere with decanter and glasses.

  “We shall have refreshments set out in the morning-room,” Sieur Germain went on, when all had drunk in the rite of welcome, “and, Jenny, perhaps you may like to show our guests their rooms? Miss Callender, Miss Joanna, I understand that you are countrywomen of mine . . . ?”

  * * *

  The recently purchased Carrington-street residence of the Kergabets was a typically tall, narrow Mayfair house whose second-floor bedrooms seemed to the country-bred Sophie to reach Olympian heights; it was elegantly but comfortably furnished, with much bright woodwork and many soft and yielding cushions. The chamber to which Jenny at length conducted her—having duly deposited Mrs. Wallis and Joanna in their rooms and sent Gray on alone to the third floor—was bright and cosy, with wardrobe and dressing-table of some cheerful blond wood, and a coverlet of bright kingfisher blue upon the bed. The shutters were open, and on the outer sill perched several small brown birds, their feathers fluffed out against October’s chill.

  “I hope you will rest comfortably,” Jenny said, smiling so kindly that Sophie had not the heart to tell her how unlikely this was. “I am very happy to see you again, you know, though I should wish that the circumstances were different—I wish I were more certain that you will be safe here.”

  Sophie—to whom Jenny presently seemed, despite all, a beacon of homely comforts—could think of nothing to say that might adequately convey her feelings.

  What little remained of the day was spent mostly in eating (though Sophie, for her part, was too exhausted to feel very hungry) and talking over all that had occurred on either side, since Jenny’s visit to Callender Hall. The Professor had been to Kergabet to seek them, but, it appeared, had first gone to Kemper, following their rumoured trail to the Sisters of Sirona. This unlooked-for piece of good fortune explained why, though travelling alone and openly, able to take a more direct route, he had not reached Oxford before them.

  After dinner the ladies repaired to the drawing-room, and there, gleaming hospitably from the centre of the floor, was the most beautiful object Sophie had ever beheld.

  Her weariness vanished; she only half heard Joanna’s laughter at her eager approach to the pianoforte, the first she had seen since leaving Callender Hall. She had never before been so long without practising, and at first her fingers were stiff and uncooperative. She persevered, however, and soon long habit reasserted itself, and the instrument responded to her touch.

  She found her way into a gloomy ballad which she had loved as a child, and had lost on the day when she made Mrs. Wallis and the housemaids weep, and her parents had confronted her—Mama regretful, Father disapproving—and informed her that well-bred young ladies did not sing common ballads. She had understood from their decree only that, for no evident reason, they wished to take from her one of the few things she loved. But she had known better, by then, than to challenge the Professor, who, though kind enough to Sophie and her sisters when he was pleased with them, grew cross so very easily. Instead she had taken to disappearing from the house for hours at a time, roaming the gardens and, eventually, the park and tenant farms, in search of places where she would not be overheard. Even so, she had never dared to sing that particular ballad aloud, but she sang it now, for herself and for Joanna, feeling dimly that it symbolised an end of her stepfather’s power over the children they had been.

  And I’ll watch all o’er his child while he’s growing, she sang, ending the burden of the ballad’s final verse, and looked up into an unnerving silence. Without her noticing, the men had come in to join the ladies; tea had been poured, fruit and cakes brought in and eaten; and now Mrs. Wallis and Master Alcuin sat on one sofa, and Sieur Germain—with one arm quite openly curled about Jenny’s shoulders—on another, and Gray in an armchair with Joanna curled catlike at his feet, all of them watching her. For a long moment no one spoke, and then Jenny seemed to rouse herself and said softly, “I see that Gray was right, Sophie; yours is a rare talent indeed.”

  Sophie’s cheeks warmed, and she wished their rapt attention away. “I am sorry,” she whispered to no one in particular. “I—I am very tired . . . if I might retire, now . . .”

  “Of course.” Jenny nodded. The three men stood, and there was a chorus of good-nights, and Sophie slipped out of the drawing-room and escaped up the stairs.

  * * *

  At first Gray thought he was hearing things—hearing again, perhaps, whatever odd manifestation had afflicted him in the temple at Kerandraon. Almost at once, however, he recognised that this sound was a physical voice, and a voice he knew.

  As before, he was helpless to resist it.

  The song—not so much a song as a low, mournful keening—drew him out of his bed, out of the room, down the stairs, until he stood before Sophie’s closed door. While his conscious mind shrieked at him to escape this compromising position with all possible speed, his left hand seemed to raise itself unbidden and gently rapped its knuckles against the polished wood.

  The singing stopped abruptly, and with it vanished Gray’s feeling of compulsion; and now, at last, wide awake and gobsmacked by his own stupidity, he understood.

  He turned on his heel, prepared to flee, but before he could do so, the door opened, and he turned back to see Sophie’s blotched and tearstained face blinking up at him. Her hair hung in a thick plait over one shoulder, dark against her white nightdress.

  Even in the half moonlight he could see the dark smudges under her eyes.

  “Gray?” she whispered. “Whatever are you doing here?”

  “Your spell drew me,” he replied.

  “What spell?”

  “The one you sang.”

  As Sophie only looked more bewildered, he went on: “I see now how the magick works, and I promise to explain everything in the morning—I shall ask Master Alcuin to help me confirm—but I cannot stay here, Sophie, you must see that—if anyone heard, or saw—”

  “No!” The desperation in that syllable belied her almost inaudible tone. To Gray’s astonishment, she took hold of his dressing-gown and pulled him through the doorway, nearly cracking his skull against the lintel; then she released him, closed the door, and leant her weight against it. The moonlight showed her face more clearly now—the evidence of weeping, the lines of exhaustion that she hid so effectively by day. She looked desperate and defeated.

  “I cannot sleep,” she confessed, as Gray moved out of range of the window. “The nightmares have begun again, and worse than ever. I am frightened even to close my eyes. Mrs. Wallis offers to spell me asleep, but . . .”

  “Why do you not let her?” he whispered fiercely. “You will do yourself harm, Sophie—”

  “Will you do it? Please? I think . . . I think I should not mind it, if it were your spell.”

  He stared at her in silence.

  “Please,” she repeated, low. “I cannot trust her, Gray. You cannot ask it of me—not after all of her lies to me, all these years . . .”

  “Yet you follow her,” Gray said stupidly. “All this way—”

  “I follow you.”

  The implications of this simple avowa
l made Gray dizzy with hope and despair. But what does it matter what she thinks of me, if she drives herself mad with nightmares? “Go back to bed,” he said. “I know a spell.”

  He could almost feel Sophie’s relief as she crept under the eiderdown, curling up like a child with her hand under her cheek. They had all grown used to her habit of nodding off at odd moments, and Sophie had always, after that first night on the road, refused to discuss the matter; but surely he—who loved her, and had sworn to serve her—ought to have seen how she suffered.

  Crossing the room to kneel beside the bed, he laid one hand against her brow and, gathering up his magick, began to croon a spell for dreamless sleep. Slowly, Sophie’s eyelids dropped; even after her deep, even breathing told him that the spell had done its work, he kept his station for some time, his gaze rapt upon her sleeping face.

  At last, regretfully, he levered himself to his feet and looked about him, confronting the far greater problem of how to regain the safety of his own bed. For if any of Jenny’s household were to find him here, barefoot and clad in nightshirt and borrowed dressing-gown, nightmares would be the least of Sophie’s worries.

  * * *

  In the morning, Sophie was awakened by a knock at her door: one of the Kergabet housemaids, bearing morning tea. She felt disoriented and groggy, as though she had slept too long—though when the housemaid threw open the shutters, she saw that the sun had only just risen—and an odd impression nagged at her, of strange doings in the night. Still, she had slept more soundly here than in any bed since her own at Callender Hall, and, having been spared the usual nightmare procession of bloodied bodies and twisted limbs and dead, staring eyes, she felt it would be churlish to complain of how strange it was not to have dreamed at all.

  Once washed and dressed, she leant her elbows briefly on the windowsill, looking out at the chill, bright October day. How peculiar to be surrounded by so many houses! But she felt oddly safe here, as though protected by the anonymity of this house, so like all the others.

  She ran against Gray in the first-floor corridor that led to the breakfast room; he looked at her in a way she could not interpret and asked in a low voice whether she had slept well.

  “Very well, I thank you,” she replied, puzzled, and was more puzzled at his smile.

  The morning’s post was brought in by a parlourmaid, who deposited a large stack of letters before Sieur Germain and handed on a salver a single thick epistle, sealed in violet wax, to his wife.

  “This letter is from my mother in Kernow,” Jenny said, turning it over. She hesitated briefly, perhaps reluctant to exclude her guests by reading it at table, but in the end curiosity seemed to get the better of her; she broke the seal and read the letter through, while the conversation went on around her.

  “My mother’s news is most interesting,” she said at length, when the talk lagged for a moment.

  “Indeed?” Her husband raised a sceptical eyebrow. “How so?”

  “She writes of her efforts to arrange a betrothal for her unfortunate second son.”

  Down the table, Gray choked on his bread-and-butter.

  After a moment he drained the remaining contents of his teacup and said to Jenny, “And what result have these efforts yielded, then?”

  “None, alas,” she replied, calmly. “It seems that my father refuses to involve himself in the business—maintains, you know, that he has no such son—and she has ‘found it impossible, thus far, to persuade any respectable family to consider such a regrettable alliance.’”

  “Regrettable!” The word had left Sophie’s lips before she could stop it; her teacup shattered, its contents overflowing the saucer and spreading a pale brown stain over Jenny’s fine linen tablecloth. Every eye at the table came to rest on her.

  “I do apologise, Lady Kergabet,” she muttered, too flustered and furious to concentrate on deflecting their attention. “I . . . if Gray were my brother, I should be very angry to hear him slighted in such a way.”

  “Jenny is quite accustomed to it, Sophie,” Gray said kindly, “as am I. You need not fret over the blow to my vanity.”

  She caught his bitter half smile in the instant before he schooled his expression to neutrality, and her heart seemed to miss a beat. For a moment she forgot the others at the table, plunged into a vivid memory of the past night’s events, and she and Gray might have been alone in her moonlit chamber again.

  Then his half smile grew into a crooked grin, and she looked down at her plate, her cheeks burning under Joanna’s speculative gaze.

  “She asks,” Jenny continued after a moment, as collectedly as though she had seen none of this, “for my help, and my husband’s, in convincing someone to allow his daughter to marry Gray.”

  I, cried a voice in Sophie’s mind whose existence she had not till now suspected. I will marry him, with all my heart . . . She kept her gaze fixed on her plate and pleated the edge of the tablecloth between her fingers.

  “Marriage need not be such a very dreadful prospect,” Jenny was saying now, gently teasing.

  “Jenny, must you?” Gray spoke quietly, but his voice held a warning note that Sophie had heard before, and Jenny must have recognised it also, for she quickly steered the discussion to other subjects. Sophie, preoccupied by her efforts not to make a scene, hardly knew what the others talked of.

  “Sophie?” said Jenny’s voice at her ear.

  She looked up, startled, to find the table deserted; during her silent internal struggle, the others apparently had finished their meal and gone their separate ways. Jenny stood beside her chair, one hand on the curve of her belly and the other on Sophie’s shoulder, smiling down with every appearance of compassion. “My dear, you look quite overset,” she said. “And I should like to talk with you a little. Might I persuade you to help me with my fancy-work . . . ?”

  Numbly, Sophie nodded and rose to follow her out of the breakfast-room.

  * * *

  “You are angry with me,” Jenny said, when they had settled themselves in her airy, pleasant little sitting-room.

  “Not with you,” Sophie protested. Though the baby’s gown whose hem she was embellishing gave her an excuse to keep her eyes focused on her work, it offered no escape from probing questions.

  “With my mother, then,” said Jenny. “I understand your feelings perfectly.”

  “I cannot see how,” Sophie said, her voice strange and choked in her own ears.

  “You love and admire Gray,” said Jenny, “and believe no one else values him as you do.” She appeared not to notice Sophie’s discomfiture, but calmly continued, “I have loved and admired my brother far longer than you can have done, Sophie, though perhaps not better.”

  “I am sorry—I meant no disrespect—” She broke off, affronted by her hostess’s expression of amusement.

  “I do beg your pardon, Sophie,” Jenny said. “I know that this must all be very trying. I had hoped, you see, that we might become better acquainted—that we might, perhaps, be friends . . .”

  She spoke so kindly. She had put herself forward, had perhaps endangered her family, for their sake, when she might so easily have turned them away; not least, she was Gray’s loyal and beloved sister. Sophie had a sudden, mad urge to kneel at Jenny’s feet and confess everything—even acknowledge aloud, perhaps, this morning’s new discovery. Jenny, she was sure, would not laugh at her. But had Sophie not done enough already to turn Gray’s life on end?

  Instead, therefore, she forced herself to smile calmly, to set her stitches neatly as she said, with perfect though greatly abridged truth, “I should like that very much.”

  * * *

  They spoke, as they worked, of inconsequential things, and Sophie was surprised to find herself enjoying the conversation; it was a relief from poisons and treason and shielding-spells to turn her hands to fancy-work, and her thoughts to considering the relative merits of green vel
vet and blue lustring.

  She and Jenny were laughing happily over the latter’s tales of kitchen prankery when, to Sophie’s astonishment, the door burst noisily open and Gray, breathless and frantic-eyed, ducked under the lintel. “Jenny!” he exclaimed. “Have you seen—”

  Then his gaze lit on Sophie, and his whole bearing relaxed—then stiffened again in something very like accusation. “Why do you hide in here?” he demanded. “Joanna has been quite frantic, and Mrs. Wallis—”

  “I am not hiding,” Sophie retorted, holding up her embroidery. “I am helping Jenny.”

  Gray frowned at her, and, blushing, she dropped her eyes.

  “I asked Sophie’s help, Gray,” Jenny said. “She has had far too much of excitement and distress of late, and she needs quiet and peace, and a little female company. If you persist in worrying her,” she went on, more severely, “I shall be forced to ask that you amuse yourself elsewhere.”

  There was a brief, tense silence. Then Gray said, very quietly, “I shall be in the library, Sophie, with Master Alcuin. What we have been discussing concerns you very directly. When you have finished your work, perhaps you would join us there.”

  “Of course,” Sophie whispered; her hands trembled as she set stitch upon stitch. She did not look up, however, until she had heard the door close, and then she found Jenny studying her with such a lively interest as made her drop her gaze to her work again, gritting her teeth in an effort to restrain her tears.

  CHAPTER XXI

  In Which Are Discussed Magick, Plots, and Counterplots

  Gray returned to Sieur Germain’s library in a morose temper. Quite why he felt so disappointed in Sophie and Jenny, he could not exactly make out; he had no good reason to take umbrage with either . . .

  “Marshall?” Master Alcuin looked up from his energetic note-taking at the sound of the closing door. “You have not found her?”