“It is an extremely tiresome habit,” Joanna muttered, helping herself to more veal collops.
Jenny’s serious expression did not waver, but her eyes glinted at Gray. “Tiresome it may be, but in this case it has been useful, as it encouraged Lady Brézé to inform me that the King and Queen intend returning to Town only on the day before Samhain.”
Sophie looked up sharply from the roasted parsnips which she had been pushing about her plate. “Can we rely on her information?” she asked.
“I believe so,” said Jenny cautiously. “Though her mother is so very ambitious on her behalf, Lady Lisle has known the Queen since they were girls together in Shropshire, and I believe would stand just as much Her Majesty’s friend if she were yet only Lady Edwina Ashley. Her understanding is not particularly good, I fear, but there is no malice in her.”
“You will be pleased to learn, then,” said Sieur Germain, producing from the pocket of his coat, with some satisfaction, a thick engraved card edged in the royal purple, “that we have received an invitation to Their Majesties’ Samhain ball.”
CHAPTER XXIII
In Which Lady Kergabet Receives an Unexpected Caller
Sieur Germain’s announcement fell among his listeners like Thor’s own war-hammer, and produced a stillness very like the moment after a thunderbolt.
It was Joanna who first broke the silence: “A ball? A royal ball? How marvellous! Think what the girls at school will say . . .” Then she seemed to remember that it was mid-October, and she very far from returning to school, and subsided.
Everyone else began talking at once.
“A brilliant stroke!” Master Alcuin exclaimed.
“But, my dear,” said Jenny, “I am by no means fit to be seen—”
Sieur Germain looked at once disappointed and relieved. “You are much mistaken, my dear, if you think so! But of course you need not come with us if you dislike it.”
“Is it wise to expose ourselves so publicly?” said Mrs. Wallis. “Though it may be that we shall be safer in a crowd, and the Samhain ball is certainly the best place to seek one.”
“What is more to the point, madam,” said Sieur Germain, “as we are none of us personally known to the King and Queen”—Sophie could not help glancing at Mrs. Wallis, but she continued perfectly inscrutable—“the circumstances of a ball, and the traditions of Samhain, offer us the best opportunity we are like to have to convey a warning.”
“I must ask once again,” Gray said, “what reason we have to suppose that His Majesty will give any credence to such a warning. And I cannot like a scheme which throws Sophie into the path of persons who certainly wish her ill.”
“To say nothing of their attempts on Gray’s life,” said Sophie, who had awoken that morning panicked and tangled in her coverlet, from a nightmare vision of Gray slowly burning alive in Lord Halifax’s study.
“I am sure there could be no such attempts on any of our lives in such a public venue,” said Gray, looking across at her with what he presumably supposed was a reassuring smile. “And they cannot poison all of us along with the King; nothing could be more suspicious. But you remind me that in Oxford, at any rate, Master Alcuin and I stand accused of murder, and from Oxford to London is but sixty miles.” He grimaced and tugged at his ear. “Still, we must try to warn him; what else can we do?”
“Mrs. Wallis,” said Joanna suddenly, “you are personally known to the King. Or at any rate you were. He could scarcely be expected to recognise Sophie, after all this time, but if you—”
“You quite mistake the nature of my acquaintance with His Majesty,” said Mrs. Wallis dryly. “He is not altogether a fool; he must know that Laora could not have made her escape so thoroughly without my . . . connivance.”
At the same moment Gray, eyes fiercely alight, said, “If you imagine that I—that we should allow Sophie to be handed to him on a platter, to be married off to some Iberian princeling—”
“Indeed not, Mr. Marshall,” said Mrs. Wallis, looking at him in what might almost have been approval. “But, Sophia, your mother believed . . .” She stopped, and was for some moments silent, gazing at nothing and no one.
At last she turned again to Gray and said, “Mr. Marshall, may I trouble you to lift your wards?”
Gray’s eyebrows rose almost into his sandy curls, but he snapped his fingers obediently. Sophie shivered as the magick of the ward evaporated.
Mrs. Wallis rose from the table and quietly left the room.
In her absence, the remains of the second remove were cleared away, and the next brought in—though only Joanna seemed likely to do it any justice.
When Mrs. Wallis returned to the table, she held in her left hand what looked very much like a letter: faded ink on yellowing paper, the two halves of a broken seal in pale wax. She nodded to Gray, who closed his eyes and muttered his warding-spell again.
“Perhaps I erred in so long withholding this letter from you, as it concerns you so nearly,” she said, when the spell was done. Sophie had rarely heard her speak so hesitantly. “But it is . . . I have never wished you to remember your mother as she must have been when she wrote it.”
She held out the paper to Sophie, who grasped it in fingers that shook. The letter was dated to the year following Joanna’s birth.
My dear one, it began.
I have written this letter and hidden it, that you may discover it if anything should befall me. I have kept from you, my more-than-sister, more secrets than even you suspect; if all goes well, then they will out, or I shall take them to my grave; and, if ill . . . But I shall not dwell on such matters.
You will know already, that in the character of my husband I was most unhappily deceived. For myself, this no longer signifies—I have made my choices, despite all your warnings, and must bear their consequences; but I weep to think of my girls left in his power. Amelia is his own child, and his favourite; I think he will not use her ill. Joanna too—poor unwanted babe!—you cannot take from him; but Sophia is none of his, and her I leave to your faithful guardianship.
Do what you must—you will know best—to keep her safe, in his house or elsewhere, as events decide. I have made him agree that I may teach her the use of her talents, when she is of an age to employ them; but if I know him, he will not honour his word—he has the prejudices of his race, for all his Breizhek birth—and there is none else to teach her, if I be not by. He little suspects how powerful she will one day grow, nor would I have him know it, for he would only seek to make use of her, as he has tried to make use of me. If she is not taught, Maëlle, she will be a danger to all about her; I beg that, so far as is in your power—which I know may not be far—you will put her in the way of learning. I judge her a clever child; it will perhaps be enough merely to give her the freedom of the library. I beg you will not let her be parted from you . . .
There followed a passage so much blurred and spotted that Sophie could not decipher it. She turned the paper over and read,
I spoke of secrets. The most of these concern Sophia herself, and though what I write may seem preposterous, I beg you will not dismiss it. Sophia, you see, is favoured of the gods, and has some great destiny before her. I have dreamed true dreams, and prophetic ones: her father’s life, and the fate of the kingdom, will one day depend on her. I well know how absurd it sounds. You will say I know not foretelling from fancy; but I speak truth, for all that.
If she returns too late to her father, the consequences will be dire—but if too soon, then all these dreadful years will be for naught. The gods grant that she—that we—that you, my dear—will know the moment when it comes.
By the time Sophie reached the end of the letter—or, more exactly, the point at which it stopped, without at all seeming to conclude—the words had begun to blur before her eyes, and the paper shook with the trembling of her hands.
“This . . .” Sophie gestured with the let
ter. “You believe that she knew . . . something? That this is not mere madness or self-delusion?”
Mrs. Wallis sighed. “I have never known what to believe. But as we have all seen for ourselves, she was not deluded with respect to the matter of your talent.”
Sophie looked down again at the letter, which seemed to draw her gaze like a lodestone.
“Sophie,” said Joanna, sounding oddly unsure of herself, “what . . . what does the letter say?”
Briefly Sophie considered handing it over to Joanna, who, after all, was Mama’s daughter too. But to show her those words—poor unwanted babe!—no, it was not to be thought of. Sophie had, the gods knew, made no very great success of protecting her small sister from the vicissitudes of life, but this much at least she could do.
“That Mama believed me fated to save my father’s life one day,” she said instead, low. The weight of Lord Halifax’s death rode on her shoulders, a burden felt now heavily, now lightly, but never long absent.
“And it may be that she knew whereof she spoke,” said Gray, in a simmering tone, “but it does not follow that you need bear that burden alone.”
As Sophie looked across the table at him, one side of his mouth quirked up in a grim half smile.
* * *
Sophie went early to bed and lay for some time under the kingfisher-blue coverlet with Master Alcuin’s primer in Old Cymric open against her drawn-up knees. With the best will in the world, however, she could not force her eyes to take in, or her mind to make sense of it; at last, admitting defeat, she left her bed to replace the battered codex on the dressing-table and stood before the window, gazing down at the street.
What could Mama have been thinking, to write such a letter? Had Sophie not known its author, she should certainly have judged it the product of some sort of delusion; but Mama, though so often melancholy, had never seemed other than perfectly sensible. Yet there were so many other things I did not see . . .
The truth was that she no longer felt sure of anything.
Worse, the Kergabets’ elegant little house—which had once seemed a refuge—was in fact just as much a prison as Callender Hall had been. Her gaolers were kinder, certainly; she had Gray and Joanna always with her, which was as unlike being thrown upon the company of Amelia as a purring cat is unlike a hedgehog; but she was penned here just the same. London itself Sophie found altogether dreadful, noisome and clattering and airless, and the thought of remaining here for any length of time more dreadful yet.
And still there was something worse in store. For either they would fail to save His Majesty—her father, as she supposed she must learn to consider him—and would all be in the conspirators’ power, and worse, known to have acted to thwart them. In such a case, a quick death would be their best hope.
Or, if they should succeed—what then?
Sophie continued as determined as ever to avoid taking up the mantle of Princess Edith Augusta, and she trusted her friends not to reveal her identity without her consent; but with at least three other persons now in the secret, it was all too probable that the choice would not be hers at all. And Mama’s letter . . .
I am very sleepy, she had said, and returned that epistle to Mrs. Wallis to do with as she liked—purely in order to escape the discussion that followed her reading of it, for never had sleep seemed farther off. Could it be true that Sophie herself must somehow intervene to save her father? If so, must she reveal herself in order to do so? Having done so, was there any possibility of retreat, of escape?
And the ordeal had only been exacerbated by Joanna’s evident persuasion that if only the threat of elderly Iberian princes could be removed, Sophie must of course embrace the idea of becoming the Princess Royal—as though no other objection could be made to a life consisting of public scrutiny and private isolation. As though Sophie had not had enough of being locked up.
Sighing, the tears to which she refused to yield by day coursing silently down her cheeks, Sophie turned from the window and crept back to bed, praying to Morpheus for peaceful dreams.
Her prayers were not answered; even the sleeping-spell Gray had taught her, though she fell swiftly enough into sleep, brought her no peace.
In the morning, feeling as little rested as though she had not slept at all, she drank her morning tea and dragged herself down to the breakfast-table, where she sat silent, hovering at the verge of tears, while the others ate and debated. They looked at her—anxious, puzzled, sympathetic; she willed their attention away, and, obligingly, they turned it elsewhere. All but Gray, who continued to cast a worried glance at her every few moments; they were not placed near enough to one another for any private conversation to be possible.
After breakfast, she joined Master Alcuin and Gray as usual, and they started for the cellar, but even before they had reached the top of the staircase Sophie was having second thoughts, and at last she said, “Magister, if you will excuse me . . . I have not slept very well . . .”
He stopped, and his blue eyes studied her keenly under the snow-white brows. “I think,” he said after a moment, “that we should all be the better for a rest from our labours. Both of you have made commendable progress, and have earned a holiday.”
Avoiding Gray’s eyes, Sophie gave Master Alcuin a grateful smile.
So it was that all of them were with Jenny, Joanna, and Mrs. Wallis in the morning-room, and not safely out of sight belowstairs, an hour before noon.
* * *
Gray and Master Alcuin were discussing antidotes, a miscellany of books stacked between them on the chessboard, and Sophie apparently trying to keep awake long enough to finish stitching together a baby’s nightdress, when Joanna turned from her station at the window, her round face gone as pale as the pages of the codex open in Gray’s hand.
“Gods and priestesses! He has found us,” she whispered.
Sophie’s head jerked upright; Gray dropped the book, which fell splayed facedown across the carpet, and sprang up from his chair; Mrs. Wallis put down her mending and looked up at Joanna, alert but unalarmed. The others seemed not to take her meaning immediately, but all were gathered round her station at the window in time to see the stout, elegantly dressed figure stop before the Kergabets’ door and raise the brass knocker. Two taller, slighter figures loitered on the pavement opposite, whom Gray recognised with unpleasant conviction as Taylor and Woodville.
“Apollo, Pan, and Hecate!” said Gray. “Horns of Herne!” said Master Alcuin. Sophie, clutching at Gray’s arm with trembling fingers, whispered, “We are undone.”
After a longer delay than he seemed to expect—for he paced about impatiently, even knocking a second time—the door was opened and the visitor admitted to the hall. Then Jenny turned from the window and said briskly, “Nonsense! I have only to ask Treveur to say that we are not at home, and he will have to go away.”
Mrs. Wallis nodded, evidently satisfied. For a moment, indeed, it seemed that this simple and elegant solution might suffice, but the servant who opened the morning-room door a few moments later was not the formidable Treveur but the young housemaid, Daisy, who had been in the household only a month. She curtseyed swiftly and not very neatly to her mistress, darting frightened eyes at the various occupants of the room, and announced in a terrified whisper, “’Tis a Professor C-c-callender, the M-m-master of Merlin C-c-college . . . I asked ’im to wait b’low, m’lady, but ’e would not . . .”
* * *
Jenny, moving more quickly than Sophie had thought possible, propelled Daisy back out into the corridor, whispering in her ear, and shut the door. Whirling to face the room again, she began hurrying her guests away from the window and across the room, where, disguised by potted shrubs and an ornately carved wooden screen, a connecting door led into the breakfast-room. They tumbled through the doorway—first Joanna and Mrs. Wallis, then Master Alcuin; then Gray, a stack of incriminating books swept haphazardly up in his arms; and
at last only Sophie, whose feet seemed as staggered and dazed as her mind, tripping over each other and hampering her efforts to flee, remained in the morning-room with Jenny.
Just as Joanna was reaching for Sophie’s hand to pull her through after the rest, the other door opened again, and poor Daisy, stammering more than ever, repeated her announcement.
Jenny, her flushed cheeks the only indication that anything was amiss, sailed back across the room to greet her importunate caller. Behind the carved screen Sophie stared, frozen, ignoring Joanna’s outstretched hand and Gray’s increasingly frantic whispers. Just in time she spied the book Gray had dropped, and summoned it to her hand. When her fingers closed about the worn leather binding, she found them clutching at it like some sort of talisman.
The Professor was now actually in the room, and he was, she found, not so terrifying here as he had been in the abstract. Though her first thought had been to flee, she had now a strong desire to see how her erstwhile paterfamilias conducted himself, and to hear what he would say. Batting the reaching hands away, therefore, she pulled the breakfast-room door to as quietly as she could, before ducking down behind the rose-tree.
After all, if she could not conceal herself from one overconfident and unimaginative man, whom she had been used to regard as supremely stupid, what hope was there that she and her friends could somehow foil the more formidable part of his confederacy?
“Professor Callender,” said Jenny calmly, “this is a most unexpected honour, indeed; I had not thought to meet you again so soon. Will you not sit down?”
The Professor was evidently not in a temper for polite conversation. “You have something of mine, Lady Kergabet,” he said.
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