The Midnight Queen

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “Oh!” Gray said, as the possibilities unfolded before him. Often and often, he had been baffled by the meaning of a passage until, by some minute shift of the context in which it appeared, a tutor or fellow student had cast just the right light upon it to change everything. His brother-in-law had just done the same. “They have been encouraging him,” he went on, his gaze unfocused on the shining curve of the wineglass in his hand. “He was making plans which Lord Carteret and his friends did not like, and they have hit upon this means of distracting and discrediting him. If all the world believes that he has lost his senses, if he seems to have no thought but of his lost child, then who could fault his closest advisor for taking the reins in his stead? Of course any political move His Majesty makes will seem crackbrained to those who believe him to be acting under the influence of such an obsession, and Lord Carteret can then do as he likes.”

  “But if that were so,” said Sophie, “why should they wish him dead?”

  Gray looked up and saw her frowning in puzzlement. “How old is the Crown Prince?” he asked Sieur Germain.

  “Rising fifteen,” said the latter.

  “The sooner he takes the throne, then,” said Mrs. Wallis, “the more time his regent will have to consolidate his influence over the new King, and what better regent for young Edward than his father’s faithful advisor, who so ably kept the kingdom afloat when we might all have run aground on the rocks of Henry’s obsession?”

  “Oh,” Sophie whispered. “Yes, I see.”

  “And if Lord Carteret does mean to marry Sophie off for some advantage of his,” said Joanna, “he will have an easier time of it as regent to King Edward than as advisor to King Henry.”

  “I do not see how it could be any easier,” said Sophie bitterly, “considering how our present predicament came about.”

  There was a silence, then, which ran on too long to be entirely comfortable—except, apparently, for Joanna, whose enjoyment of her ragoût de veau continued unabated.

  “His Majesty is presently at Caernarfon,” said Sieur Germain at last, “and does not return until shortly before Samhain; and we know that Callender and M are at Oxford, and Lord Carteret here in Town. W we may suppose to have gone to Caernarfon with the royal family, as Lord Carteret clearly meant to order him thither—” He broke off with a soft Oh! and a pained expression.

  “My lord?” Jenny’s voice was low, but such was the tense, expectant silence around the table that all eyes turned to her. “Are you well?”

  “Quite well, my dear,” said her husband, but he scrubbed the knuckles of his right hand against his brow as though his head pained him. “I have had an idea which I do not much like. My dear, do you remember the man whom you danced with at Lady D’Aubigny’s ball, just before you and I were introduced?”

  Jenny’s expression said quite clearly that she did not.

  “A fair-haired man,” Sieur Germain prompted, “not tall, and not much younger than myself. You told me, I recall, that he thought very highly of himself.”

  “Ah!” said Jenny, her eyes lighting in wry recognition. “Yes, I do remember him. The Earl of Wrexham, yes?”

  “Yes,” said Sieur Germain. “Brother to Queen Edwina, and presently in Caernarfon with his sister and her husband and sons.”

  There was a long, thoughtful silence.

  “If Lord Wrexham is the W of Lord Carteret’s diary,” said Gray, “or even if he is not—so long as W is at Caernarfon with the King, it is of no use to send a warning to the King there; it would only be intercepted and destroyed.”

  “And in any case,” Sieur Germain said, “we cannot approach His Majesty—or anyone at Court, for that matter—and simply tell him that his closest advisor and his brother-in-law are plotting an attempt on his life; we should only be laughed at.”

  Gray winced at this unintended allusion to the late events at Merlin; Sophie had now stopped eating altogether and was staring down at the veal, carrots, and parsnips congealing on her plate.

  “And as there are five mages among us,” said Master Alcuin, “it will be taken as read that any evidence we might offer for scrying has been tampered with by one or other of us.”

  “But if W travelled into Cymru with the royal family, or soon thereafter,” said Gray, thinking aloud, “then he was already there before Lord Halifax’s death, and has had no opportunity to lay hands on the poison. Caernarfon, if I do not mistake, is His Majesty’s place of retreat from the duties of the throne?”

  Sieur Germain nodded.

  “Then,” said Jenny, catching at Gray’s line of argument as she always had, “if we cannot reach him there, equally he is beyond the reach of . . . others. Whatever their plan may be, they cannot put it into execution until His Majesty returns to London.”

  “But that is only half true,” Gray said, speaking the thought as it came to him. “His Majesty may be inaccessible at Caernarfon, but Sophie is here.”

  He could not, he reminded himself sternly, pack Sophie into a hired carriage and flee to Alba or Eire; no one else here present had witnessed the conspirators’ conversation in the Professor’s rooms, the finding of the ciphered documents, the brawl in the Master’s Lodge. Besides, in so doing he might well only be drawing her into further danger. But just at this moment there was nothing he wanted more.

  “That is so,” said Sieur Germain, “but all of us are here with her, Graham. Miss Sophie,” he said, turning to her, “you may be assured that we shall not let you come to harm.”

  Then turning again, he met Gray’s eyes with a firm, determined nod.

  * * *

  Gray considered his brother-in-law.

  His parents had not invited him to his sister’s wedding; alerted by a letter from Jenny and Celia, however, he had prevailed upon Crowther to lend him the price of the journey to Kernow by the mail-coach, and thus contrived to appear at his father’s house in time to see Jenny Marshall become Lady Kergabet, and to join in the procession that accompanied the new bride to her husband’s temporary lodgings in Truru.

  He had been reassured, on making his new brother’s acquaintance, to find that Sieur Germain seemed genuinely enamoured of Jenny, and to hear him speak as admiringly of her talent and her wit as of her beauty. He would have been much the happier, however, for any evidence that Jenny was likewise fond of her bridegroom.

  “And are you happy, Jenny?” he had asked her anxiously, when they contrived a few moments alone. “I should not mind about Father, and your going so far away, if I could think of your being happy there . . .”

  “He is a good man, Gray,” said Jenny. Her fond, sad smile had given him the sudden vertiginous sense that their ages had been reversed. “And he has been very kind to me—and to Mama, which you know is not always very easy. I beg you will not be unhappy on my account; I shall be quite as well contented in my new home as I could possibly be elsewhere. And”—she caught Gray’s arm—“and you will write to me very often, will you not? And come and visit me, whenever we may go up to Town?”

  Gray had given her as reassuring a smile as he could manage, and stooped to embrace her. “I shall certainly do so; you shall hear of all my doings, till you are quite weary of me. Though I do not know if your husband is quite as eager as yourself to give me house-room . . .”

  At this, he remembered, Jenny had stood a little straighter and said firmly, “I shall persuade him.”

  Gray rather wondered, now, whether Sieur Germain had in fact required so very much persuading; the first shock being over, he seemed as game for an adventure as Joanna.

  CHAPTER XXII

  In Which Sieur Germain Makes Himself Very Useful

  In the days that followed, Sophie became drearily familiar with the four walls of the Carrington-street cellar, and was so much occupied by day, and so thoroughly exhausted by night, that she had little opportunity for anxiety and a merciful, if partial, release from seeing t
hose she loved die bloodily in her dreams. She and Gray, under Master Alcuin’s tutelage, practised summonings and shielding-spells, spells to fling small objects at putative foes and to move large ones (more sedately) at need, spells to confuse, spells to call blinding light. In the absence of other opponents, they soon began sparring against one another, for the straw-and-canvas targets on which they had begun, as their teacher pointed out, could not return fire, and he was continually urging less caution.

  “You have much to learn of elemental magick,” Master Alcuin said, thoughtful. “For earth-magick I see no application suited for our purposes, but the control of water, air, and fire may prove invaluable—and the last particularly. To begin with we shall try a few useful fire-spells . . .”

  Sophie tried to conceal her shudder.

  They settled themselves against one wall to listen while Master Alcuin expounded the uses of fire in battle. At last Sophie, seizing the opportunity offered by a brief pause in the spate of theories and exempli, raised her voice a little to say, “Magister, if it is all the same to you, I think I had rather forgo the practical side of this lesson.”

  Master Alcuin paused and looked at her consideringly.

  “Fire is like magick,” said Gray softly, for Sophie’s ears alone. “Controlled, an invaluable tool; uncontrolled, a catastrophe. I pray you need never use this knowledge, but you are wiser and safer for having it.”

  Sophie could not deny the truth of this, but a memory loomed of Lord Halifax’s study, and Gray staggering through a wall of flames.

  Her fingers clenching against the flagstones, she looked up again at Master Alcuin. “But I cannot—please, do not ask me—”

  “Of course you can, Sophie,” said Gray. “Did you not master unseen summoning in a single afternoon? Perhaps you do not recognise how unheard-of . . . I was your age, or thereabouts, when I learnt that spell; it cost me a week’s effort, as I remember.”

  “It—that is quite different,” said Sophie, distracted by this turn of the discussion. “I had no idea of—and I was abed nearly two days, afterward . . .”

  Her voice trailed into silence as she stared, puzzled, at Master Alcuin; he was chuckling, shaking his white head. “How long, Marshall, Miss Sophie, how long would you guess that it took me to master that working?”

  Sophie looked at Gray, who looked back at her with equal puzzlement. “Perhaps . . . three days?” he said.

  “A se’nnight?” Sophie hazarded.

  Smiling, Master Alcuin shook his head.

  “A month,” he said, “less perhaps a day.” He looked earnestly from one of his apprentices to the other. “Do you begin to see, now, what power the two of you might one day command?”

  * * *

  “What do you see, Jenny?” Joanna asked eagerly.

  Sieur Germain was away from home, visiting some mutual acquaintance of himself and Lord Carteret, and Master Alcuin resting upstairs; the rest of the family were gathered in the morning-room.

  Jenny shook her head as she laid the Professor’s key-ring upon her worktable. “These have been too long parted from their owner, I think,” she said, “or I have exhausted them; there seems nothing new to be gleaned today that was not there before. Your stepfather is very angry with you, Sophie,” she added. “It makes anything else difficult to see.”

  Sophie lifted her chin. “He has been always angry with me, more or less,” she said, “when it suited him to take notice of me at all. I should be the more surprised if he were not.”

  “I am not afraid of Father,” said Joanna.

  “Then you would do well to be afraid of his friends,” said Gray, rather sharply.

  Mrs. Wallis, hitherto silent over her work, looked up at this. “Wise advice, Mr. Marshall,” she said.

  “I wish,” said Sophie, in a voice of suppressed passion, “I wish there were something we might do. I am half mad with waiting. And it is all very well to learn to defend ourselves, but surely . . . surely if things go so far, we shall have lost already.”

  Jenny rose from her seat and went to the window, where she stood looking down into the street.

  Sophie turned to Gray and went on, “I read once of a king who wore rings and jewels spelled to resist poisons, but perhaps it was only a tale, for I cannot at all remember where I read it.”

  “It was Henry the Great; he of the many wives,” said Gray at once. It was that Henry, it occurred to him, who in a sense had begun the story of Sophie’s exile, when by divorcing his first Queen, Catherine of Aragon, he had given such gross offence to what were then the several courts of Iberia. “There is a brief account in Tavener’s Historie, and I believe one of Master Alcuin’s books—the poisons, you know—describes how the magick was managed by his Court mages. Only—”

  “Yes, I see.” Sophie looked discouraged. “We should have to borrow some piece of jewellery from His Majesty, or send him one and make him wear it, and how should we ever manage that?”

  They subsided for a time into a disconsolate silence.

  “We are marching towards our battlefield in the dark,” said Gray at last, “on the strength of last month’s intelligence.”

  Gray had been used to consider himself a prudent and sensible man, but sequestration in Carrington-street had begun to wear away his prudence and good sense. “Sophie,” he said, dropping his voice and leaning towards her, “what do you say to a little reconnaissance?”

  Sophie looked up eagerly.

  “Mr. Marshall!” Mrs. Wallis had evidently much keener ears than Gray had supposed. “Have you forgot already what befell your last reconnaissance mission?”

  Gray sighed, and sighed again as Sophie’s eager interest visibly deflated. “No, ma’am,” he said.

  * * *

  Gray and Sophie grew more skilled both at attacking each other and, to everyone’s relief, at shielding themselves from attack. Sophie assured Gray that she was no longer troubled by nightmares, even as signs of sleeplessness grew plain upon her face. He began to feel shut in, and he longed to go flying—just once—but a large woodland owl in the middle of London would no doubt draw a quite unwelcome degree of notice, and so he remained resolutely earthbound.

  Mrs. Wallis absented herself from the house most mornings and declined (whilst tending grimly to their various injuries, in the interval before dinner) to go into any detail as to where she had been. Jenny meanwhile entertained a steady stream of morning visitors, although, pleading fatigue and indisposition, she contrived to decline all proffered invitations to dinners and evening parties, apparently without giving offence.

  “I cannot accept all of them,” she explained to Gray, “or we should be never at home, and I cannot accept one without offending all the others, which I dare not do at present.”

  These visitors were full of gossip, and many of them—or their husbands—were regularly at Court. Though few had anything really interesting to say, the King’s search for the lost Princess Royal was a popular topic, which meant, so Jenny said, that she was at least as likely as her husband to learn something of interest to Sophie. Thus far this approach could not be said to have borne any very valuable fruit, however, unless it were useful to know that the Queen was rumoured to have sought a famous healer’s advice on what she might do to conceive a girl—surely the first British queen to do so at least since the time of the Romans.

  Once or twice Gray detected in his sister’s glance the familiar sympathy that made him yearn to pour out his heart to her. Whenever a proper moment offered itself for doing so, however, there arose some interruption to prevent his beginning; and so he spoke of everything but what most occupied his mind.

  They had been in London an interminable se’nnight when, the company being all at dinner, Sieur Germain watched the last servant out of the dining-room after bringing in the second remove and, turning to Gray, said in a low voice, “May I trouble you once more to secure us aga
inst eavesdroppers?”

  Startled and intrigued, Gray paused with fork halfway between plate and lips to begin a warding-spell, and when he had nodded to Sieur Germain, indicating that he might safely speak, the latter said, “I have news.”

  A taut silence fell.

  “I believe I have discovered a fifth member of the conspiracy,” he said grimly. “I have been to see an acquaintance of mine, a neighbour of ours in Breizh, who was at Court all the summer, and just now returned from a fortnight at Bath. He agrees with others I have spoken to, that His Majesty’s desire to locate the lost Princess has led him to keep some very inadvisable company—priests and priestesses of the cult of Arawn, dedicates of Hecate and of Taranis, and all manner of foretellers, and even a man reputed to be a necromancer.”

  Gray shuddered. Sophie, across the table at Jenny’s right hand, looked positively ill. What would be the effect of this new intelligence on her goodwill towards the father she had never met?

  “But he told me also,” Sieur Germain continued, “that the King is almost constantly attended, even one might say shadowed, by one of the Royal Healers, a Lord Spencer, who whispers in his ear and is said to brew him sleeping draughts and tonics.”

  “And is he gone to Caernarfon, too?” Sophie asked him urgently. “This Lord Spencer?”

  “No,” said Sieur Germain, “or, at any rate, he has certainly been seen in Town since His Majesty’s departure.”

  In the face of Sophie’s evident relief, Gray revised his opinion of her feelings towards her father.

  “Joanna and I have not been idle, either,” said Jenny unexpectedly. “This morning we—Joanna being of course a young cousin of my husband’s—entertained Viscountess Lisle and her mother.” When no one gave any sign of recognition, she elaborated, “Lady Lisle, as you may know, is a close friend of Her Majesty’s, and her mama—Lady Brézé, you know—is very fond of telling people so.”