The Midnight Queen

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  It had soon become clear that of the two versions of events presented for his consideration, Henry was strongly disposed to favour his chief counsellor’s. Still, if one party could not prove their case beyond doubt, no more could the other.

  The King now resumed his seat, flanked by Captain Prichard and Lord de Vaucourt, in whom Sophie now recognised the sharp-nosed man who had stood with the King at the altar on Samhain-night.

  “My lord of Vaucourt reports that a poison has been detected in the dregs of the chalice, and on the stones before the altar, such as Master Everard Alcuin has described,” the King announced to the room in general. Sophie breathed a sigh of relief. “This circumstance is much in favour of the explanation offered by my lord of Kergabet.”

  Protests arose from the Professor’s side of the chamber, which the King quelled with a look.

  “However,” he went on, “there is no evidence to suggest whose hand placed the poison therein—whether some person here present, or some other person unknown. Neither can we be certain whether Professor Callender’s knowledge of”—the King’s voice faltered for the first time—“of his stepdaughter’s identity is of recent date, as he claims, or of long standing, as alleged by Lord Kergabet. There is also the matter of the death of Lord Halifax, Master of Merlin College; and, as Lord Carteret has reminded us, of the apparent attempt to sow dissent among our subjects.”

  No one spoke.

  “That the truth of all these questions may be known, and this matter settled expeditiously, therefore, we have determined to beg the assistance of the gods. From the Temple of Apollo, Watcher of the Heavens,” said the King, “we have summoned those priests, renowned as truth-seers, who judge where the King’s Magistrates declare themselves defeated. These holy men, I trust”—looking sternly from Sieur Germain to Lord Carteret—“you will neither of you consider liable to corruption by the other?”

  Sieur Germain joined so readily with this drastic proposal that Sophie felt sure he must have had the same in mind all along; she saw, too, how neatly their opponents—believing their influence with His Majesty so steadfast, as must in the end win him to their side—had been trapped. An impartial truth-seer would have no choice but to declare against them, and well they knew it, but so too would a refusal to submit confirm their guilt.

  The ordeal was nearly over, then, and could surely have only one end. For the happy fortune by which those she loved had won through in safety, or soon would, Sophie gave thanks to every god, great and small, whose name she could recollect. Still she felt she would go mad with waiting; when at length the great oaken doors swung open, she leapt to her feet as eagerly as any prisoner sighting freedom from his chains.

  * * *

  Three tall white-robed priests of Apollo there were—two crowned with flowing white locks, and the third perhaps in the middle thirties, whose striking good looks were spoilt by an arrogance of expression, which quite undid the effect.

  Sophie had sprung up at their entrance and now stood quivering with tension; at her side, Joanna shifted from foot to foot, scarce able to contain her impatience. Gray’s skin prickled. He glanced across to where the conspirators had gathered in an anxious bunch; he fancied a storm-cloud of despair forming overhead and was seized with fear lest they—lest Woodville, in particular—should make some last, desperate attempt. It would be calamitously foolish, before so many witnesses, but, if they had nothing to gain from defiance, neither had they much to lose.

  Just as this thought occurred to him, the gooseflesh-prickling of his skin intensified, and he saw Sophie rub furiously at the bridge of her nose. He reached for his magick, ready to work a shielding-spell—and felt only a sickening jolt as it failed to answer his call.

  I know this feeling. Knew it but too well, and too lately. Alarmed, he looked down the room at Sophie, whose face had gone tallow-white, and across at their enemies. Only Lord Merton and Woodville appeared to have noticed anything amiss, but their identical expressions of outrage confirmed Gray’s hypothesis that someone had lately worked an interdiction on this chamber. Catching Sophie’s eye again, in a silent effort at reassurance, he turned to look at Master Alcuin.

  The little don smiled up at him, and winked.

  The priests addressed to their King a bow just deep enough to avoid offence, and, straightening, the first of them looked down his long nose at all present and began, “Your Majesty has, I hope, some good and pressing reason for summoning us here?”

  “We have sought your Lordships’ assistance,” the King replied, “in a matter of vital import—for us, and for all our kingdom.” His tone was frosty. The priests of Apollo showed signs of curiosity, and His Majesty was beginning to explain the facts of the case, when the doors again burst open to admit a breathless and dishevelled woman and three half-grown boys.

  “Henry!” the woman cried. One of the boys stopped to gape a moment at Sophie and Joanna before joining in his brothers’ futile attempts to restrain their mother.

  Queen Edwina was a little woman, plump and pink-cheeked and scarcely taller than Joanna; in her striped muslin gown and knitted shawl, she looked like nothing so much as a flustered country gentlewoman. But the passionate terror in her face and voice permitted neither amusement nor contempt. “My lord—Henry,” she went on, “you surely cannot suspect Edric of any intent to harm you? There is some mistake, there must be! Please, my lord, this is madness!”

  The King continuing resolutely silent, she appealed to Lord Wrexham: “Edric, please, you must explain! Tell Henry, tell him that you did not mean any harm! Tell him there is some mistake—”

  But her brother silenced her with a savage exclamation, and, defeated, she stood staring from one of them to the other, before at last suffering her eldest son to put an arm about her shoulders and help her to a seat. As they passed him, Gray heard her murmuring, “But Edric would not, Ned. You must know that he would not. It is all some terrible mistake . . .”

  Lord Wrexham was still and white with fury.

  “Your Lordships will pardon this unseemly disruption,” the King continued. Gray wondered at his monarch’s collected manner until, chancing to see the man’s clenched white-knuckled hands, he began to grasp the effort of will that lay behind it. “The Queen, I assure you, is as eager as I to see truth told and justice done . . .”

  But his tale proceeded to the accompaniment of a low, disconsolate weeping.

  “Then,” the priest declared at last, “let us proceed. You”—levelling an imperious forefinger at Master Alcuin—“will first lift your interdiction on this chamber, if you please.”

  Here Woodville so much forgot himself as to use language that even Joanna blushed to hear, and Master Alcuin queried mildly, “Is this wise?”

  The priest folded his arms and glared Woodville into silence; then, turning to Master Alcuin, he replied, “Until Apollo Coelispex has revealed to us the truth of this affair, we may take no position as to the innocence or guilt of either party. Civility is no sure token of good intent; nor do the chosen of Apollo Coelispex require the assistance of mere scholar-mages.” He paused, then repeated, “You will lift the interdiction, if you please.”

  Master Alcuin raised his eyebrows and shook his head, but he began to murmur in what eventually became discernible as archaic Cymric. When after some moments Gray felt the upwelling of magick that meant the spell was at an end, he reached immediately for the strongest shielding-spell he could think of, lest any danger threaten, but at once the three priests set up a strange chant—half spell, half prayer—that effectively forestalled him.

  With the first repetition, intoned in unison, Gray found himself gently divested of the power of speech, and, glancing at his companions, saw them all likewise affected. The chant was begun again on parallel fifths, this time producing a sort of stillness: neither the heavy, lethargic pull of Arachne’s Web nor the stiff insensibility of a freezing-spell but simply a lack of mo
tion, disconcerting but not unpleasant. Had His Majesty known of this magick, Gray wondered, when he sent for help to the Temple of Apollo? But of course he must; was it not close kin to that magick that he had himself bequeathed his daughter?

  Gray had rather expected that they would all be directed to supply some personal article to be scried. The methods of Apollo Coelispex, however, proved considerably more direct.

  The priests separated to move among their prisoners—only the King himself remaining free of their spell. The youngest approached Sophie, who stood nearest, and, laying one hand on her shoulder and the fingertips of the other against her brow, spoke to her in a low murmur. Gray could not see her face, nor, even at such close quarters, clearly distinguish what the priest said to her, or what she said in reply. But he could see her back and shoulders stiffen and then, slowly, relax, before she again lapsed into that curious bespelled stillness; he derived from this the comforting conviction that, at any rate, she had suffered no permanent harm from the ordeal of speaking truth to divine power.

  The same emissary of the oracle-god next questioned Master Alcuin before approaching Gray himself; meanwhile Gray had also had ample opportunity to observe, though at an uncomfortably oblique angle, the rather different effect of the experience on Lord Carteret and Lord Merton. The priests who spoke to them wore the same impassive look, spoke in the same low murmur, but whereas Sophie had appeared to be replying willingly—or at any rate voluntarily—to her interrogator, both Lord Carteret and Lord Merton seemed under some compulsion, which they were at pains to resist.

  Then the tall priest repeated his ritual gesture, and Gray was suddenly freed from his enforced silence. He could not help at once inquiring of his captor, “What is the name of your song-spell?”

  “We do not deal in spells.” The priest accorded the syllable all the contempt with which another man might speak the word night-soil. “This is the power of Apollo Coelispex, which his chosen exercise by his favour.” And seeming to recollect that Gray and not he was under interrogation, he demanded a full accounting of the events of Oxford and of the royal ball.

  This Gray was happy to supply. The chosen of Apollo listened in earnest silence; when the tale was done, he looked hard at Gray and demanded, “What part did you play in last evening’s display of disloyalty, which Lord Carteret has characterised as an attempted rebellion?”

  Gray, startled, said, “None whatever!”

  The priest gave a brief, terse nod, declared himself satisfied, and, by a murmured phrase and some gesture that Gray could never afterwards remember, silenced his latest victim once more before moving on to the next.

  At last the priests, having questioned all those present, returned to the top of the room. Here they conferred, briefly and in apparent silence, after which the eldest of them turned to face the King. “Apollo, Watcher of the Heavens, has deigned to render us his verdict,” he intoned, in the most formal and florid Latin Gray had ever encountered outside the pages of Gaius Aegidius, “and it is now in our power to reveal to Your Majesty the truth of this unfortunate affair.”

  * * *

  They had reasoned correctly, it appeared, on the subject of Lord Carteret’s motivations. The notion of an alliance with the Iberian Emperor had been his own more than King Henry’s, and he had taken Laora’s departure with the infant Princess to heart for strategic reasons that, in the intervening years, had grown gradually more personal.

  “Lord Carteret had many plans for the furthering of such an alliance,” the priest explained, “any of which, in his view, must have been jeopardised by any such devolution of powers as His Majesty has lately been contemplating, in the provinces of Cymru and Breizh. Iberia is a valuable ally, but empires do not become such by respecting the borders of their neighbours’ possessions. What might the Emperor offer the Duke of Breizh, in return for turning the military forces newly under his control in another direction?”

  The outraged exclamations of the Breizhek contingent were silenced with a look.

  “To discredit His Majesty required no very great effort on Carteret’s part. The kingdom had embraced Queen Edwina and rejoiced in the arrival of each of her sons, hale and hearty and, best of all, male. The succession was not in doubt. No good could come of wishing the Princess back again; surely, if she were not dead, she must have reappeared by now. To seek her was throwing good coin after bad; what manner of king spends his time seeking a dead girl-child to the neglect of his living sons? The more Carteret secretly encouraged His Majesty’s search—while meanwhile the Queen and her brother openly protested it—the more the kingdom began to doubt.”

  Gray felt vaguely that he ought to derive some intellectual satisfaction from this confirmation of so much of his own prior reasoning, but could not.

  “Carteret had long planned to arrange His Majesty’s death, and take advantage of the general doubts as to his competence to install himself as regent to Prince Edward, but he wished very much to avoid the disruption of an assassination, even one which he could safely blame on some unconnected party. He had already consulted a healer, Lord Spencer, who could tell him only that poisons exist to mimic a natural death. But a mage of Merlin College, having the run of the most comprehensive magickal library in the kingdom, surely could discover what those poisons are and how to create one. Lord Merton knew of this interest on Carteret’s part and befriended Appius Callender as a means to gain access to that library; only later did he discover, because Callender is foolish and boastful, that he had another card to play.

  “Callender’s apparently absurd claim to be harbouring the lost Princess Royal,” the priest continued, “presented an opportunity too perfect to ignore. Having confirmed that the girl existed, and could at least pass for the Princess—he did not greatly care for the truth of her claim, you understand, for at worst he could credibly argue that her parents’ magicks were latent in her and might be expected to resurface in a later generation—Carteret recognised that by furnishing the promised bride at last, he could avoid months of tedious negotiations and attempts to arrive at an equally acceptable quid pro quo. Moreover, he would be giving up something on which, by this time, no one appeared to place much value; best of all, he would have his revenge upon Queen Laora by foiling her scheme as she had once foiled his. In fact, of course, Callender’s claim was perfectly true.

  “The poison itself presented some difficulties. Chief among these were its long maturation period—in excess of two months—and the requirement that the blood used in its manufacture be added directly from a beating human heart. Carteret had no wish to take responsibility for this aspect of his plan; eventually it fell to Callender, who delegated it to two students whom he trusted, one of whom you see before you.” With a long finger, the priest indicated Woodville. “These men recruited others, among them this man.” The finger swung towards Gray. “There were three others, one of whom perished in the course of the expedition; only Henry Taylor and Alfric Woodville, however, knew the nature of their errand. To their credit, the heart with which they returned, eventually, to Merlin College belonged to a man already condemned to death for killing his wife and son.”

  Gray was not as much comforted by this as he might have expected, though at least it did obviate the lurking nightmare image of Woodville and Taylor with their hands in the bloodied chest of a dead child.

  The priest reported Gray’s frantic flight to the College, Gautier’s death as witnessed by Woodville—as Crowther had suggested to Gray, an unlucky accident that no one present could have prevented—and the Professor’s decision to protect his own reputation by laying the blame for the entire débacle on Gray.

  “Carteret is a cautious man; Callender, in his way, is cautious also. While Carteret insisted on meeting the putative Princess to judge her fitness for his purposes, and on testing the efficacy of Callender’s poison, Callender—though drawn to Carteret’s plan for its own sake, as an indication of his importance in the
world, and for the opportunity it offered of exchanging his troublesome stepdaughter for what seemed a guarantee of future advantage—demanded a reward of his own: He wished to be Master of Merlin College, and Lord Halifax stood in his way.

  “The test of the poison—which is to say, the murder of Lord Halifax—was to take place after the beginning of the Samhain term, when the College would be busy and the Fellows disinclined to brangle over the election of a new Master. Callender commissioned Mr. Woodville, who has what is apparently a well-justified reputation as a forger, to create a letter purportedly from Lord Halifax, suggesting Callender as his successor.

  “Unfortunately, several events took place during the College’s Long Vacation which led to alterations in both of these plans. The first was Mr. Marshall’s inconvenient failure to perish in an ‘accident’ which Callender had arranged for him to suffer in the Temple of Neptune at Kerandraon; instead, the accident befell Miss Joanna Callender, whose life Mr. Marshall subsequently saved. The second was his theft of two letters written by Lord Carteret and a portion of his personal diary, copies of which were later deciphered by Mr. Marshall, Mrs. Marshall, and Master Everard Alcuin, also of Merlin College. The third was that Mrs. Marshall—Miss Callender, as she then was, and of course originally the Princess Edith Augusta—discovered herself to possess considerable magickal talent, and the fourth was that, as a result of these circumstances, Madame Maëlle de Morbihan”—here the priest nodded at Mrs. Wallis—“determined that Callender Hall was no longer a safe refuge for the Princess Royal, and therefore aided and abetted Mr. Marshall and Miss Callender in fleeing to England.”

  The priest paused and looked about him as if to judge the effect of his words on his various listeners.

  As Master Alcuin had surmised, the Professor and Lord Merton had killed Lord Halifax—the poison had been in his wine—several days earlier than planned because they feared he might after all take Gray’s warning to heart. The Professor had been in bad odour with his co-conspirators as a result of Sophie’s disappearance, and the noisy catastrophe of Lord Halifax’s death persuaded them that he had become a liability to their cause, but he remained their best chance of locating Sophie.