The Bell at Sealey Head

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Then Phoebe raised her head, said briskly to him, “Gwyneth has been invited to go riding tomorrow with Raven Sproule and his sister to visit Lady Eglantyne.”

  “Really.” Her father glanced at Gwyneth. His mustache twitched at the expression on her face.

  “He seems quite interested in our Gwyneth.”

  “Really,” he said again, still gazing at his daughter. She widened her eyes abruptly, crossed them. He looked away, clearing his throat noisily.

  “Well,” he said only, “there is another tale in the making. Let’s see what she does with this one.”

  Three

  Emma found Ysabo in the closet under the grand staircase, where she kept the cloths and the brass polish for the carpet rods on the stairs.

  From long experience, she kept one foot stuck out to hold the door open, and a good grip on the polish, while the vast hall shimmered into shape far beneath her. Ysabo was standing on a narrow stone landing, from which steps zigzagged forever, it seemed, down the wall. She smiled quickly, while Emma, her head reeling, stared down at knights in their black leather and armor and bright surcoats, so far below that the words in their deep voices echoed and bounced across the walls, became distorted, incoherent, voices in a dream. They had grown up together, the princess and the housemaid; they had known each other nearly all their lives.

  “Sorry,” Emma whispered, an ear cocked for footsteps on the worn floorboards on her side. “I was just putting things away.”

  “It’s all right. I’m always happy to see you.”

  “Yes.” She allowed herself a rare smile, wondering that she remembered how in those sad, quiet days. “It’s good to see you, too. You look beautiful. Is it some special day?”

  The princess was dressed in sage green, old lace, pearls as yellow as the foam that piled up on the shore sometimes in winter. The mass of her red, tightly curling hair had been pulled back into a cone of lace and gold wire. Amber the strange, speckled green-gold of her eyes hung from her earlobes and her neck. She made a little wry face at Emma’s words, a twist to too-thin lips, an arch of carroty brow in her colorless skin.

  “My mother says I’m a goblin-child,” she had told Emma long ago, when they were both very small. She had added something that even now Emma wasn’t sure she understood. “Well, she would know.”

  That day Ysabo answered, “It’s my birthday. Aveline says something wonderful will happen at supper tonight. All the knights will be celebrating with me.” The noise was increasing, crashing upward in waves against the stone walls. “I must go. The bell will ring soon, and, for one night in my life, instead of doing my usual supper rituals, I must go down in the company of Maeve and Aveline. I hope next time we will be able to talk.”

  “Oh, so do I. It’s been too long.”

  Ysabo smiled again, her face so bright that surely, Emma thought, in some other world it would be considered rare and hauntingly beautiful. She closed the door carefully. When she opened it again a moment later, she put the polish and the cloths on the shelf, hardly starting at all when the unexpected steps creaked across the floor toward her.

  It was Mrs. Blakeley, the ancient housekeeper. “Oh, there you are, Emma. The doctor is upstairs with Lady Eglantyne. There is a tea tray ready for him in the kitchen. He’ll have it with some brandy in the library when he comes down.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Blakeley.”

  The old lady gave a gusty sigh. Her hair and her skin had faded all one color over the years; her face looked like an ivory cameo. Or a cracked and yellowing map, Emma thought, to some wonderful realm that everybody had long forgotten existed. “Sad times, Emma,” she murmured. “Sad times . . . And a new mistress at my age.”

  “Maybe it won’t come to that, Mrs. Blakeley,” Emma said quickly, stricken by the sorrow in the pale, sunken eyes. “Dr. Grantham will coax her better.”

  But Mrs. Blakeley only shook her head silently, turned away. Emma closed the closet door and went down to get the tea tray.

  In the kitchen, the cook, Mrs. Haw, was weeping silently as she boiled a pot of seafood shells for stock. Crab, shrimp, scallops, and mussels stood in neat little piles, waiting their turn; the kitchen smelled of root vegetables and brine. The cook, a massive mangel-wurzel of a woman, stirred with one hand and dabbed her tears into her apron with the other. She had a long braid of gray-brown hair and expressive hazelnut eyes, which, at the moment, were red and welling over and salting the brine.

  “I’m not so much afraid of having nowhere to go,” she explained to Emma between sniffs. “Amaryllis Sproule has been trying to steal me away from Lady E for years. But I grew up in this house. It’s all I know.”

  “Maybe—” Emma began helplessly.

  “I was scullery maid when my mother was cook, barely old enough to hold a chopping knife, I was. Oh, the size of strawberries, then! Oh, the radishes! And the late suppers among the gold candlesticks and crystal decanters. Now it’s enough if a half cup of bisque comes back on her tray with a lowered tide line in the bowl.”

  Emma murmured something, picked up the doctor’s tray, and escaped. The house, as far as she remembered, had been growing quiet and empty for years. Her mother, before she took to the woods, had charge of the stillroom in Aislinn House. Everyone consulted her, from Lady Eglantyne to the townspeople, who came knocking after twilight at the boot room door. Hesper taught her daughter her letters, her numbers, and how to copy the odd scribbles of stillroom doings, the concoctions, the requests, the various success and failures into the records book. When she was four, Emma had opened the pantry to lay a bundle of herbs to dry, and found the wild-haired little princess instead, with her homely face and enchanting smile. Such richness Emma had glimpsed, such space, such bustling, before she had slammed the door so hard the jars rattled on the stillroom walls.

  Her mother, measuring some odd purple powder into a bowl, said only, “Don’t be afraid. But don’t talk about it, either, except to me. It will be our secret.”

  “But what is it?” Emma whispered.

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ll tell you when I know.”

  Emma had begun her training then, learning to care for the ancient house, and using every door it possessed in the process. Doors opened only one way, she realized soon enough, as she and Ysabo became friends. The princess rarely opened her own doors, for one thing. And even then, she never inadvertently found Emma carrying a mop down the hall or winding a clock. It was always Emma, with an armload of folded linens, or heading in to make a bed, who opened a door and found the princess.

  Neither ever crossed a threshold. Ysabo was not permitted to leave her house, though, from what Emma understood, it was all part of Aislinn House. And Emma was wary of the doors that only opened one way. They might let her through, but would they let her back? The noisy, brilliant world she glimpsed through randomly opened doors frightened her with its dizzying walls, the strange rituals she sometimes found Ysabo performing, the gruff voices of the knights, the lovely, passionate voices of the ladies, the echoes of quarrels, booming laughter, the magnificent, outlandish feasts where an entire stuffed deer with flaming tapers and crows among its horns might be paraded, accompanied by hunting horns, through the hall before everyone got down to the business of eating it.

  Her Aislinn House only got quieter as Emma grew older. The younger servants left or were let go as rooms were shut up; visitors came more and more rarely. Even Emma’s mother left, went to live in a tree in the wood. Someone had built a tiny cottage in a great hollow trunk; Hesper added a hovel here, a lean-to there, and trained some flowering vines from her garden up the walls to give it charm. There she continued her stillroom business, which gave her an income of sorts, mostly in the tender of a cheese or a fish or whatever was ripening in the fields. She encouraged old books, too, as payment, handwritten histories out of people’s attics, for choice.

  “I’m still puzzling,” she told her daughter, when Emma asked about them. “I’ll let you know.”

  By then, Emma ha
d grown into a young woman in a sparse houseful of the aged. Occasionally, the more absentminded among them, like Fitch the butler, or Sophie, Lady Eglantyne’s antique maid, confused Emma with her mother. She wore her dark hair in the same tidy braid they remembered down her back; she had the same sloe berry eyes and calm voice. When they called her Hesper, she wanted to laugh, for her neat mother now had frosty hair as wild as Ysabo’s, and she only wore shoes when she walked into town. She ran barefoot as an animal in the wood and sometimes slept where she dropped under the stars.

  Emma kept an eye on her, leaving a coin on her table now and then, bringing her fresh bread from town and news from Aislinn House. But nothing her mother concocted seemed to help Lady Eglantyne, who spent most of her days in a waking dream.

  “She’s old,” Dr. Grantham said simply, when Emma brought the tea tray into the shadowy library, with its scents of polished oak and leather, and asked after her. “She’s not in pain; she only wants to sleep.” He poured brandy into his tea, gazed into it a moment before he sipped. He had been a young man when Emma had been born and Lord Aislinn had died; now she was grown, and he was middle-aged, and Lady Eglantyne was dying. “Someone must send for her heir. I’ve told just about everyone in the house, but nobody really wants the change. I’ve told her solicitors. Even they seem reluctant.” He raised the cup to his lips, eyed Emma speculatively, as though she might take pen to paper and summon the missing heir. “Mrs. Blakeley keeps promising to write, then doesn’t. Is there something ominous about this heir?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir,” Emma said gently. For lack of anyone else in the house to talk to whose wits weren’t intermittently woolgathering, Dr. Grantham tended to forget Emma wasn’t part of the family.

  “What is she? A granddaughter of Lord Aislinn’s brother, is that it? Lived in Landringham all her life?”

  “I think that’s right, sir.”

  “City girl.” He took another sip. “What about your mother? Has she got anything more up her sleeve?”

  “Nothing that works any better than what you’ve got.”

  “She’s old,” Dr. Grantham said again, sighing. “None of us has a cure for that. Unless there’s some magic your mother stumbles across.”

  “I know she’s still trying.”

  He set his cup in the saucer, still frowning at it. “Good.”

  The sundown bell rang. He didn’t hear it, Emma guessed. Nobody did, really; it was just another noise they lived among, like wind or tide. But he turned abruptly, reached for his bag, as though someone, somewhere, had called to him. She picked up the tray, listening to Fitch tugging the cranky front door to let him out, while all around her, the vast secret house seemed to reverberate with the dying echoes of the bell.

  The next morning they had visitors.

  Emma was in the library dusting the windowsills, the preferred spot for bluebottles to die, it seemed. There was some kind of bulky, colorful flow across the glass; she looked up, saw horses moving past to stop at the broad fan of stone steps in front of the house. The riders waited. Emma, her cloth motionless, watched them. There had been no stable kept for years. No Andrew or Timothy to help them down, take their horses. And no Fitch, either, she realized, to open the door for them. He must be down in the pantry, polishing the corkscrew or some such. One of the ladies laughed at the persistent silence. Emma recognized her then, and the young man as well: nobody else in Sealey Head had quite the parrot profile of the Sproules.

  She scrambled out from behind the leather couch, tossed the dead flies into the fireplace, and hurried to the door.

  She tussled it open finally, saw that the young master Sproule had dismounted, and was helping his sister down. The other woman had not waited for him; she slid a bit awkwardly to the ground, flashing a length of pretty mauve stocking to the watching trees.

  Emma recognized her flighty golden hair, her spectacles. Miss Gwyneth Blair, the merchant’s daughter, out riding with Raven and Daria Sproule. She started a curtsy, caught sight of the dust cloth still in her hand, and pushed it into her pocket. Daria Sproule gave her bright laugh again, an unexpected sound around the house those days.

  “Good morning,” Raven Sproule said affably. “Fine morning it is, too.” He surveyed it a moment, complacently, as if he owned it, and then took a closer look at her face. “Emma, isn’t it? Your mother lives up a tree or something.”

  Emma nodded stolidly. “Emma Wood, sir.”

  Daria rolled her eyes reproachfully at her brother, then swooped her lashes toward Emma. “Our mother sent a little gift or two for Lady Eglantyne. Trifles, really. A couple of light novels, a scented cushion. Is there any chance we might give them to her ourselves?”

  “I’ll—”

  “Oh.” She tugged her tall friend forward. “This is Miss Blair.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  Miss Blair was puzzling something out between her brows as she gazed at Emma. They sprang apart abruptly, as she smiled. “That’s where I’ve seen you. You come to my father’s warehouses sometimes, for odd things. Plants, rare herbs and teas, dried—” She checked herself, her eyes widening, and ended tactfully, “oddments.”

  Emma, remembering the monkey paw, swallowed a sudden bubble of laughter. “Things for my mother, miss. Please come in. I’m sorry there’s no one to take the horses.”

  “No matter; we’ll just tie them here,” Raven said, fixing their reins to some iron rings embedded in the step railing. “We won’t be long.”

  “I can bring you tea in the library. It’s a bit dark in there, but the furniture is covered in the parlor and the drawing room; they’ve gone unused for so long. Then I’ll ask upstairs if Lady Eglantyne is receiving.”

  Their faces sobered at that, the reminders of silence and sadness within. Daria gave an inarticulate coo, and Raven a sort of a reassuring bleat. Gwyneth said more clearly, “Thank you,” her spectacles flashing curiously back at the ancient, random assortment of upstairs windows.

  Emma got them settled in the library, where Daria began immediately to chatter and Raven sat stunned wordless by all the books. She hurried down to the kitchen, found Fitch sitting in his shirtsleeves, polishing silverware and trading memories with Mrs. Haw.

  “There’s Sproules in the library, asking to see Lady Eglantyne,” she told them. “And Miss Blair. Tea for three, please, Mrs. Haw, while I go up to look in on her ladyship.”

  “Visitors!” Mrs. Haw exclaimed, astonished. Fitch got up hastily, wrestling himself into his jacket.

  “I’ll take the tea,” he told Emma firmly; no reason she should have all the excitement.

  She left it to him and went upstairs, where the shadows clung to the walls like tapestries, and the old boards creaked underfoot as though wind were shaking the house. Most of the upper rooms were locked; only Lady Eglantyne slept there, lived there now in her great canopied bed festooned with lace, and her maid Sophie ensconced in the elegant room adjoining hers.

  Emma tapped gently on the door with her fingertips. Perhaps Sophie was in the next room, and Lady Eglantyne asleep, for no one answered. She turned the latch soundlessly and peered in.

  The princess stood on top of the highest tower in Aislinn House. Trees, sea, sky sloped dizzyingly around her. Emma could feel the wind blowing the morning scents of salt and earth, wrasse and wrack, newly opened flowers. Ysabo was surrounded by crows, a gathering so thick they covered the tower floor, a living, rustling, muttering pool of dark, consuming what looked like last night’s leftovers, the remains of a great feast, crusts and bloody bones, withering greens, the drying seeds and bright torn peels of exotic fruits.

  The princess, her bright hair unbound, flying on the wind, turned her head; a dozen crows raised their heads here and there among the crush, cast black glances at the interloper. Emma put a finger to her lips quickly as the speckled amber eyes met hers. The princess nodded, but without her usual answering smile, only a swift, silent acknowledgment of Emma, as more bird heads turned, eyes catching light, dark-
bright, little bones cracking in their beaks. Emma started to close the door. Then the wind pounced into the tower and away, sending Ysabo’s hair streaming in its wake, and Emma saw the red blaze on her pale cheek, like a brand, of four thick, blunt fingers.

  Emma almost made a sound. But the princess only gazed at her steadily, not moving, while at her feet beaks began to clack. Emma, trembling a little, shut the door.

  She stared at the dark, heavy wood a moment, then drew a breath, blinking, and opened it again.

  Sophie sat beside Lady Eglantyne’s bed. She was dressed as usual in the loose, flowing pastels Lady Eglantyne liked to see, gowns that were decades out of fashion. Her ivory hair was parted and combed with doll-like precision into an hourglass shape on the back of her head, topped with a little pancake of lace the light blue of her dress.

  Beside her, the neatly folded lace-edged sheets and the silken counterpane rose minutely and fell on the breast of the slight figure in the bed. Lady Eglantyne dreamed. The stuff of her dreams, silence, shadows, diffused light, indeterminate shapes behind thin curtains, within mirrors, seemed to crowd the air, fill what could be mistaken for space.

  Emma came softly to the bedside; Sophie, who had little enough company besides the sleeper, smiled behind the finger at her lips.

  “Good morning, Hesper,” she whispered.

  “Good morning, Sophie,” Emma said, resigned to answering to either name she heard. “Has she been awake this morning?”

  “Only long enough to drink a little milk and to allow me to change her nightdress. Then she fell back to sleep.”

  Emma looked at the thin, distant face, almost lost in the floppy white bed cap.

  “She seems peaceful.”

  “Doesn’t she? Perhaps she’s getting better. Must I wake her? Is the doctor here?”