The Bell at Sealey Head

by Patricia McKillip

  “Best it be a knight, then,” she whispered. Maeve’s fingers found her chin, drew up her face to see her eyes.

  Before her grandmother could speak, Aveline whirled away from the window, demanded, “Has your life here been so terrible? You have wealth and status; everything is given to you, done for you. All that is asked of you is the ritual, and most of its movements are no more onerous than steps in a dance. You can do this one thing without complaining.”

  Maeve turned her head, said sharply, “Be merciful to her. You at least were loved.”

  “Yes.” The brittle word made Ysabo turn, too, to look at her. Aveline stared out at the dark again, her jeweled fingers working, tightening and loosening, on the stone ledge. She moved abruptly, went to Ysabo, and leaned over her, drew her so close that Ysabo felt her mother’s tears on her cheek. “But,” she whispered, “I did not love. I don’t know which is harder. Then I had you, and I loved as I had never learned before.” Ysabo lifted her arms, groped blindly for Aveline, who dropped a kiss on her brow that burned on her flushed face like the knight’s fingers. “Best it be a princess who will never leave your heart.”

  Ysabo lay awake for a long time that night, watching the moon in its changeless ritual and trying to remember the knight’s face. Just before she fell asleep, she realized ruefully: I don’t even know his name.

  Emma found her the next morning, when Ysabo was returning from the crow tower with the empty bowl. The maid opened a door somewhere in her world and saw the princess in one of the long, empty stone passageways, just about to turn the heavy, iron ring of the latch on her side. Emma said nothing, just gazed at her over the tray in her hands, her eyes as dark and searching as the crows’.

  Ysabo gave her a crooked smile, and said, “Can we talk?”

  For once, and for a wonder, time and privacy stood with them on both sides of the door. Emma put the heavy silver tray with its ornate handles on the floorboards and sat down beside it. Ysabo hunkered down to the cold stones on her side.

  “I’m just bringing Lady Eglantyne’s breakfast down. The doctor has already been and gone; nobody else will come up here this morning.”

  Ysabo studied the remains: a triangle of buttered toast with a crescent moon of a bite missing from two corners, most of an egg congealing in its fine flower-strewn cup, a dab of porridge in a bowl that had not been disturbed, an untouched half of a pear in syrup. A strange, dour thought flashed through her head: the crows would have that eaten in a breath.

  “I’m bringing the scrap bowl down,” she said. “No one needs me until noon, now. She’s still eating, your lady.”

  “Very little,” Emma sighed. “Mostly she just wants to dream.” Her soft, chestnut brows were knit in her pretty face, with its bright, full lips and warm, burnished skin that the princess had never thought to envy before. Perhaps, if she had that face instead, the knight might have loved her?

  “What happened on your birthday?” Emma asked baldly; she had never been taught to be afraid of questions.

  Ysabo’s thin mouth twisted wryly. “I got betrothed.”

  Emma sucked a horrified breath. “Why?” she kept asking, as Ysabo described the supper and its aftermath. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Ysabo kept answering. “I must not ask. It’s the ritual.”

  “You don’t even know his name?”

  “Well, there are so many of them, and they come and go. The faces seem to change so often. Anyway, I never paid much attention to them since they hardly see me when they look at me. I am only there as part of the ritual. I pour wine into some of the cups but not others. I am chosen to escort one, but never the same one twice. They talk among themselves, but not to me. As though I don’t really exist.”

  “It’s fantastic,” Emma exclaimed, and then, after thought, “It’s monstrous.”

  “Is it?” Ysabo asked, suddenly, intensely curious.

  “It would be in my world.”

  “It doesn’t happen there?”

  “No. Well, yes. Anything happens here. But even I can choose who I want to marry, and I’m only a housemaid.” She paused, her brows peaking again. “I mean, in the best of circumstances. As I said, anything happens here. People marry those they don’t know, they’re forced into it for money or status, they lie to each other about being in love, they make all kinds of mistakes. Even being obliged to marry someone who hits you before you know his name—I’m sure it does happen here. But why should it happen to you?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the way things are, here.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Emma’s lips tightened; she glanced up and down the wainscoted hallway as though the painted faces along the walls might be listening. “Run away,” she said abruptly. “Just walk through this door. Come into my world. I’ll find you a place here.”

  Ysabo felt herself smiling for the first time in days. “You know I can’t,” she said softly. “I can’t abandon the ritual.” She lifted her hand, held it in the air above the exact center of the threshold. Emma raised her own hand, frowning and smiling ruefully at the same time. Between doorways, their palms and fingers touched. “This is as close as I can come.”

  “I know that. But—”

  “I may not question. But no one has told me not to think, or look for answers on my own, as long as I break no rules. Maybe there is a way to find out why.” She paused, then shrugged lightly. “Maybe, if I can change nothing anyway, it’s better not to know why.”

  Emma started to speak. Ysabo heard a voice, a door opening, somewhere in the dim, quiet house; the maid turned her head toward the sounds.

  “I’d best go,” she said, getting to her feet. “I have my own rituals to attend to. Our lives won’t end if I don’t dust, but that’s what I’m paid for.” She picked up the tray, hesitated, gazing fretfully at Ysabo.

  The princess smiled, hiding her own apprehensions. “Maybe next time I can tell you his name.”

  “I hope so,” Emma breathed, and pushed the door shut on her side with one elbow.

  Ysabo opened it again, a breath later, and the tidal wave of noises in the great house welled up, echoing against the walls of the hall below with laughter, calls, dogs barking, the clatter of armor against stone, clink of crockery and goblets, distant music. She paused before she gave the bowl to the kitchen maid waiting for it. She could hear, even amid the tumult, the desolate silence on the other side of the door, as though that Aislinn House had already begun to die.

  Questions filled her head, crowded like strangers into a room not big enough for them, kept coming, until fear itself, pushed far back against the wall, became scarcely recognizable in the crush.

  Six

  Luck, Gwyneth wrote in her impetuous, untidy hand, was a ship.

  It sailed into Sealey Head harbor on a fine spring day when another roof beam had fallen into the middle of Anscom Cauley’s best guest room, when Lord Aislinn received half a dozen stiff and threatening letters from the lawyers of two wine merchants and a boot maker in Landringham, from a certain Mr. Grimm to whom he owed a substantial gambling debt, and a very private, perfumed letter from a woman with whom we need not acquaint ourselves. On a day when Mr. Blair, receiving no word either of his missing ship or the ship sent out to find her, sank deeper into gloom, and in Magnus Sproule’s fields, crows were busy ravening every seed that might possibly have been missed by previous flocks of hungry birds.

  The ship, which caused the despondent merchant to sit upright in his chair, was extraordinarily beautiful. It was long and lean, its three tall masts raked back to suggest its speed and power. It was superbly painted in the glossiest of cream, finely trimmed with gold and airy blue. It took the difficult channel into the harbor with a nonchalant roll. A bell sounded as in greeting: a single toll. Mr. Blair was quite relieved to see, as it sailed into the harbor, that it was not armed. Turning his telescope upon it, he was among the first to notice that its crew was most unusual.

  St
eps pounded up the little stairway: Crispin, she recognized, and glanced out the window. The sun had set already, she saw incredulously; she hadn’t heard the bell except in her story.

  A palm thumped against the door. “Gwyneth! Come down. You have the most extraordinary visitors.”

  She must, indeed, if Crispin had bothered to come to tea; the twins usually hid at the sight of Raven and Daria. She called back in answer; the footsteps receded. She put her writing away and hurried after them.

  Ridley Dow, in a dove gray vest and a plain black coat whose exquisite cut needed no other adornment, had completely captivated Aunt Phoebe and the twins. Gwyneth, watching him chat eagerly and articulately about nothing—the weather, his dogs in Landringham—blinked suddenly at the gleaming black hair and dark, dark eyes, the warm, vivid smile. She touched her own hair vaguely, wondered if she had ink on her face. Then she caught sight of Judd in the shadows, with a cup and a saucer in one hand and a cake in the other, and not sure what to do with either.

  She went to him, smiling. The little, wistful look on his face vanished when he saw her.

  “Has Mr. Dow solved the mystery of the bell, yet?” she asked.

  “Not even close,” Judd answered, glancing around for someplace to put his cup. “He keeps talking about magic.”

  “Magic,” she repeated, astonished. She slid a lantern made of the jaws of some toothy fish to one side on a shelf otherwise cluttered with bone bracelets and strands of tiny colored shells. He looked at the raw mahogany doubtfully; she took his saucer, set it down for him. “What does he mean by magic?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet.”

  “Tell me when you do.”

  He smiled finally, bit into his tea cake. He looked slightly less careworn than he had in the stationer’s shop, but not much. His coat was neatly patched at one elbow; the glossy polish on his boots didn’t hide the cracks and scars. An image of a roof beam thudding into the guest rooms of her story glanced through her head; she wondered suddenly how close it hit to truth.

  “How is your father?” she asked. Never, Aunt Phoebe had told her more than once, ask a personal question at tea for which you are ill prepared to hear the answer. Embarrassment is a distressing sight to others trying to enjoy themselves with cakes and commonplaces. But she and Judd were old friends, and she truly wanted to know which might weigh more heavily on him: his father or his roof.

  Not his father, evidently. “He’s very cheerful,” Judd answered composedly. “Very patient, on the whole, except with our dreadful cook, who stays with us out of the goodness of her heart, though I do fervently wish that she would abandon us and flee.”

  Gwyneth swallowed tea too quickly, stifled a cough.

  “Really? Is she that bad? No wonder she stays: Who else would have her?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Your poor father.”

  “Yes. Her boiled beef makes him miss my mother sorely.” He raised his cup again, still smiling. But the crook of his pale brows, the line above the light, summery blue of his eyes, made her own gaze focus clearly behind her lenses.

  She said softly after a moment, “Yes. So do I. Miss my own mother, I mean.” He nodded, vanished behind his cup. “We must have lost them both at the same time. How strange.”

  “You were away at school.”

  “I was. And missing Sealey Head abominably.”

  His eyes appeared again, wide with surprise. “You were among all the delights of the great city. How could you spare us a thought?”

  “You’d be amazed what sentiments the smell of the Landringham fish market could summon in me.”

  “Really?” He put his cup down abruptly, ignoring the tremulous rattling as he gazed at her. “Does that mean you’ll stay here? But what if your writing makes you famous?”

  She opened her mouth, found herself wordless. She could only laugh with delight and longing at the preposterous idea, a sudden, merry peal that brought Dulcie scampering toward her, and, following, Aunt Phoebe.

  “My dear,” Phoebe said, amazed, “what can Mr. Cauley have been saying to you?”

  “He worried that my literary efforts will make me so famous I might leave Sealey Head and wander about the world like my father.”

  “Litterforts!” Dulcie cried, pushing her face gleefully into Gwyneth’s skirt.

  “Indeed,” Gwyneth said, swooping the child up into her arms. “Say good day to Mr. Judd Cauley, whom you last met, I believe, when you were a bubbling infant. Most days, I do not believe, Mr. Cauley, that my litterforts will find their ways out from under my bed.”

  “Fortunately,” Aunt Phoebe said, her voice abruptly booming like one of the conch shells, “your father will be able to provide for you, in any event, so you needn’t—Ah.” The door opened behind Gwyneth. She watched, amused, as Phoebe’s face rearranged itself into a familiar pleased expression before she remembered the amiable and wealthy Mr. Dow, and her pleasure wavered into sudden confusion.

  “The bird,” Dulcie announced briefly, chewing a finger thoughtfully over Gwyneth’s shoulder. Daria’s sprightly laugh preceded them into the company.

  Dr. Grantham joined them a little later, on his way back from Aislinn House. Aunt Phoebe summoned her brother and a bottle of sherry, for which the doctor seemed most grateful.

  Toland, bypassing commonplaces, asked the question on everyone’s mind: “How is Lady Eglantyne?”

  Even Daria was silent, blinking moistly at the doctor. He sipped sherry and sighed.

  “This is wonderful. It brings out the sun in your veins, even in a windowless room.”

  “The grapes on the tiny island where it is made have nothing to do all day but grow fat with light.”

  “Perhaps it might benefit Lady Eglantyne,” Daria suggested, herding them back to the topic.

  Dr. Grantham sighed again, put down his glass. “Very little change,” he said bluntly, “and none for the better. She seems content to dream her life away. I have warned the family solicitors that if they don’t send for her heir immediately, I will. An idle threat, since I have no idea where to write. I thought you might know someone, Toland, who knows someone?”

  “Indeed I do,” Toland said quickly. He plucked the bottle off the tea tray. “Come with me to the library; I have an address there for someone closely acquainted with the young lady. Quite a glitter she sheds in Landringham society, I’m told. I suspect Sealey Head will be a shock to her.”

  The silence he left behind was broken by Daria’s slow, tidal flow of indrawn breath. “Oh,” she cried, trembling with the idea, “we must give a party for her!”

  “Surely not on such a sad occasion,” Aunt Phoebe said doubtfully, and Raven nodded shortly.

  “Great-aunt dying in her bed and all that,” he murmured.

  But their expressions disagreed with them; they were silent again, seeking ways around the unfortunate event.

  “A quiet party,” Daria said. “To welcome the newcomer to Sealey Head, acquaint her with her neighbors. You shall all be invited, of course. And Mr. Trent, and all the Trevor boys and everyone else who is agreeable, or with whom she might do business. And you must come, Mr. Dow! Being from Landringham yourself, you must know her.”

  “I know of her,” Ridley Dow said, after a tiny, surprising hesitation. He seemed oddly wary, Gwyneth realized, still affable, but choosing his words with care. “As Mr. Blair intimated, she travels in exalted circles, generally unfrequented by dull scholars. Anyway, I am away from the city much of the time.”

  “Surely not,” Daria murmured, smiling and surveying him under her eloquent lashes. “Surely never dull.”

  “Can you at least tell us her name?” Gwyneth asked. He seemed reluctant to do even that, she saw with sudden, avid interest.

  “Miss Beryl,” he answered briefly. “Miranda Beryl.”

  “Soon to be Lady Beryl,” Daria breathed, “of Aislinn House. Please tell us you’ve met her!”

  “I believe we have met,” Ridley concede
d, after a swift, wordless appeal across the room to Judd. “Once. At least once. Very briefly. I doubt she would remember.”

  “But you do? Tell us, Mr. Dow, is she very beautiful?”

  Something hit the floorboards near the mahogany shelves. Glass splintered. A smell of fish oil pervaded the room. Judd, his face scarlet, bent to rescue the fish jaws, and sent strands of seashells clattering off the shelf with his elbow, then bumped a tall wooden shield balanced against the wall. It rapped him back and landed with a bang in the pool of oil.

  “Again!” Dulcie instructed with delight. Gwyneth put her down quickly, went to help the besieged innkeeper.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured, shaking with what looked like acute embarrassment or an imminent explosion of laughter.