The Bell at Sealey Head

by Patricia McKillip

  “Never mind,” Aunt Phoebe said with unexpected gallantry. “Is it the fish-jaw lantern, I hope? Leave it. We can’t stay in here with that dreadful smell. Let’s join Toland in the library. Gwyneth, help me with the tea trays. Pandora, you call Ivy to clear it—Pandora? Where is that child? Always vanishing, the pair of them. Gwyneth, you call Ivy, and Mr. Cauley will help me with the tea things.”

  “Are you sure you trust me with them?” Judd asked, wending his way cautiously around a spiky bamboo chair.

  “Of course. You would not dare drop my second-best teapot.”

  In the library, Dr. Grantham snared Judd to ask about his father; Raven and Daria gravitated toward Toland to question him further about this friend of his who flowed in the bright wake of the heir to Aislinn House. Gwyneth, pouring fresh tea, found herself gazing into Ridley Dow’s parched cup.

  She refilled it, aware of his dark, speculative gaze behind his spectacles. She set the teapot down and met it, every bit as curious as he.

  “Judd told me you think the bell has to do with magic,” she said. “When he said the word, I realized I had no idea what it means. Outside of a fairy tale, I mean. What might magic be in the prosaic little world of Sealey Head? When a fishing boat sinks into the deep, not a wish or a word will bring it up again. You’d think if magic were around, that’s one of the first things people might do with it.”

  He nodded. “Bring the dead to life. Surely that would be an enormously powerful impulse.” He sipped tea, went on slowly, “I tend to believe that there are varying degrees of power.”

  “Power.”

  “Magical ability. When you learn to read, you begin with very simple words, very short sentences. So, I think, magic is learned. One small word at a time.”

  “What word?” she asked, entranced. “Give me an example.”

  “Well. For instance, the bell. Suppose it has nothing at all to do with the sea.”

  “Oh,” she said, disconcerted, thinking of her latest tale.

  “In theory,” he assured her. “In life, anything is possible.

  Suppose, in some complex world just beyond our eyesight, the bell is rung by someone very much alive and not at all wet.”

  “Oh,” she said again, disappointed now. “But I’ve written such things many times, Mr. Dow. The only true magic is in my pen. You can no more find that world within Sealey Head than you can dive headfirst into a piece of paper.”

  He smiled. “I would like to read those stories, Miss Blair.”

  “You are changing the subject. Is magic so difficult to define?”

  “Perhaps the bell isn’t a good place to start. It is subject to all kinds of explanations, none of which can be proven or disproven.” He took another sip of tea, meditated a moment. “Think of some action you never think about doing, you just do. Lighting a candle. Shutting a door. Putting your cup down on your saucer.”

  “Yes,” she said, doing it.

  “Suppose you could learn to look at a candle and kindle a fire in your mind that will light the wick across the room.”

  “Well, that’s not—How could that be possible?”

  “How, indeed? That would be magic.”

  He smiled, and she saw the reflection of candle fire in his lenses.

  She turned swiftly, nearly spilling her tea. One of a pair of candles on her father’s desk beyond the potted palms burned in the shadows. He had forgotten to extinguish it, she thought, when he was summoned to tea by Aunt Phoebe. But she did not convince herself; her fingers had gone cold. She looked back at Ridley, blinking; he said nothing, his eyes hidden behind the reflection.

  Then the fire was gone, and there was Raven at one of her elbows suddenly, and Daria at the other, intent on the stranger who had come to Sealey Head.

  “Tell us what you know of Miranda Beryl,” Daria pleaded. “Likes, dislikes, gossip—any scrap at all. We are fascinated. It is the most exciting thing ever to happen in Sealey Head. You will be here for our party, won’t you? Judd said he thought you might be staying for some time.”

  “Judd said he hoped you might be,” the innkeeper amended, joining them, and added to Ridley, “I must get back to see to my father, and any stray guests who might have ventured in to alarm Mrs. Quinn.”

  “I’ll bid you good evening, too, then,” Ridley said promptly, setting his cup on the table.

  “But you were going to tell us tales of Landringham,” Daria exclaimed. “You must stay!”

  “Don’t let me take you away from such agreeable company,” Judd protested, at which Ridley cast one of his opaque, light-glazed glances.

  “Even I have business to attend to,” he answered amiably. “I like to work in the evenings.”

  “Then you must come to supper at Sproule Manor,” Daria said firmly. “Our cook is the second-best along this part of the coast. Our mother will send you an invitation very soon, and you can tell us everything there is to know about life in the city.”

  “I look forward to it.” He met Gwyneth’s eyes again. “I hope to explore your thoughts about the bell much further, Miss Blair.”

  “Yes,” she said a trifle dazedly. “Though in the light of—ah—your own reflections, mine seem strangely insubstantial.

  Good night, Judd. Please come again soon. We forgot to talk about books.”

  “Fish oil intruded,” he murmured. He hesitated, wanting to say more, she sensed, and she smiled encouragingly. But Raven spoke first, and suddenly she was watching Judd’s back, accompanying the astonishing Mr. Dow out the door.

  Well, she thought, during a little moment of silence while Raven and Daria bit into tea cakes simultaneously. Well, then. I shall just have to borrow a book.

  Seven

  Ysabo brought the scrap bowl down from the tower.

  No one else was allowed up there, not even the kitchen maid who carried the bowl up the kitchen stairs to the hall every morning and met the princess to give it to her. She waited there while the princess fed the crows, then took the bowl from her with a curtsy and vanished back down into the depths. She kept her eyes and chin lowered, never presumed to speak, and never expected the princess to acknowledge her existence by a word or a glance.

  But Ysabo was in a mood to examine everything that had to do with the ritual. Since the moment when she saw herself as part of a pattern, as vital as the ringing of the bell or the daily gathering of the crows, she had been consumed with a strange, desperate need to understand. What exactly was the pattern? And exactly whose pattern was it? Before, filling cups and tossing scraps, she had felt useful but replaceable. Anyone could do what she did every day. Now, seeing her fate in the ritual, she wondered suddenly, intensely: How far back in time did that line of children go who had inherited this piece of the pattern? How far forward into the future would the unborn children go?

  What would happen if everything stopped?

  So, that morning, she started to scrutinize the details of her days. Beginning with the scrap bowl. It changed daily, she had thought, according to the amount that filled it. For the first time, she realized that the bowl itself never changed; only its size varied. The bowl was silver and copper, always gleaming; it must have been polished daily. Still, it seemed very old, with its odd lumps of uncut jewels decorating the sides, the ribbons of copper wandering randomly over it, the shadow, here and there, of age that no care could remove.

  What were these crows that must be fed each day from that magic bowl?

  Who had made the magic?

  She studied the averted face of the kitchen maid as well, wondering if they changed randomly, or if it had been the same one all Ysabo’s life. She had pretty eyelashes, the princess noticed, long, thick, and black as crows’ feathers; her pale, thin, milky face looked quite young. But who knew? Maybe she was as ancient as the bowl.

  “Do you bring the bowl to me every day?” Ysabo asked. “Or are there others?”

  The maid’s eyes flew open. The princess’s words seemed to bounce off the stones around them, tr
ansform into words spoken underwater, words shouted from a distant hill, fraying as they flew. Ysabo glimpsed eyes as green as newborn leaves. Then the maid screwed them up in terror, clapped the scrap bowl over her head as though to hide herself from the princess, and fled.

  Ysabo sighed.

  Don’t ask.

  She had no other task until noon. She spent the morning with Aveline and Maeve in Maeve’s chambers overlooking the sea. Ysabo, docilely embroidering, kept feeling their eyes on her, swift, wide-eyed glances, as though her silence disturbed them more than if she had raged again, or wept, or dared again to ask a question. She sent her needle in and out of the linen, making yet another length of colorful flowers and vines to hang over the cold stones around them. Through the open casement she could see trees, the distant profile of the headlands, the sparkling blue-green waves bursting into froth against the cliffs. Emma had told her that people lived among the rocks. Fishing boats and ships sailed into the harbor below Aislinn House, which Ysabo could see out a different window: a stretch of blue beyond the wood as placid as a mirror. But no matter which window in all of Aislinn House she looked from, she never saw what Emma saw, only the wood, the cliff, the sea, as though her Aislinn House existed before the human world began.

  Why?

  Aveline and Maeve, whose silence never lasted long, had listened long enough to hers. Their voices pricked the air with little isolated stitches at first, then longer threads. They drifted into reminiscences; some threads seemed to have no end, just ran into the fabric of memory and disappeared. Others, unexpectedly colored, snagged themselves on Ysabo’s attention.

  “No, it was still autumn. The last day of it, I remember, the color of iron, and as cold as. Little flecks of snow in the wind, and the last black bitter leaves falling into the lake, where the cold silver shield and the torn pennant still lay on the tiny island in the middle of the water. The end of a world, it seemed. He said it was important. A sight to haunt this world through the centuries. I didn’t understand; I was too young.”

  What memory? Ysabo thought. What worlds?

  “And then he went away.” Maeve’s voice was thin as frayed thread.

  “But he came back. He always did.”

  “Until then.”

  “No—he came back again to take us to supper with Queen Hydria in her great court. You must remember, Maeve! The knights’ banners hung from the ceiling, all the rich threads of red and blue and gold glittering in the torchlight. Blagdon himself was there beside the queen, an old man as hale as a tree, bearded with moss, tussocks for eyebrows and ears like dried leaves. I was older then.” Aveline’s voice grew dreamy, rich as cream. “I wore pale green and dark blue, with gossamer over my hair. I remember the queen’s eyes, how beautiful they were. The colors of my gown, blue and green together. Do you remember?”

  “Yes. Now I do.” Ysabo heard Maeve’s needle pierce the taut fabric in its frame. It was another mystery, the queen whose name Ysabo had heard every day of her life but who remained invisible except in her mother’s and grandmother’s stories. “I do remember that wonderful feast. Twelve stuffed swans floating on platters of polished silver and twelve fat salmon on platters of gold . . . I don’t remember eating any of it, though. Did we? Do you remember?”

  “No. I remember music, though, but not the musicians; it was as though the music came out of fire and air.”

  Their voices trailed silent; their threads spoke, pushed and pulled, in and out. Ysabo felt again their little, fretting bird glances. So she turned to the musicians playing old ballads softly on harp and flute near the hearth.

  “That was lovely,” she told them, though she had scarcely heard what they had just finished. “Play it again.”

  Their music wove its own thread into the morning. Maeve and Aveline’s voices added texture, soft at first, then gaining depth as they misjudged the reasons for Ysabo’s abstraction.

  “I remember having trouble with that, too,” Aveline murmured. “I couldn’t wait for supper to begin, so I could see for certain which it was.”

  “And did you?”

  “Not at first. You know how they are. Not one face told me anything. They were lost in their own ritual. Do you remember?”

  Ysabo felt Maeve’s gray eyes, cold as cloud, drift over her face, away. “Very little. The ones you do remember—”

  “Yes,” Aveline said instantly. “Yes. The ones you remember are the ones you never meet during the ritual. Those you meet outside of time, in a stray hour, before beginnings, after endings ...”

  “Who? Tell,” Maeve commanded, her hands dropping onto her work, between stitches.

  Aveline’s voice went very soft. “The one who taught the young knights how to fight. He had the most amazing eyes.”

  Maeve’s hand rose, covered her mouth. “You didn’t.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “You went down there? To the training hall?”

  “That’s where the young men were when I was young. He talked to me, he wrote me poetry. Best of all, he saw me when he looked at me.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing. For all I know, he’s still down there. But I got married.”

  Maeve’s voice leaped out of her like a frog. “You weren’t—” “A virgin? No.” Aveline’s voice had resumed its normal volume, in case, Ysabo guessed, her daughter needed to hear this. “It didn’t seem to matter at all.” She added, a bit defensively, “You never told me it might.”

  “Well, how was I to know—” She rocked forward, laughing suddenly, her hand back over her mouth. “I remember this much: neither was I.”

  “Tell,” Aveline demanded then, and Maeve picked up her needle, her voice going soft again. Ysabo heard Aveline suck breath sharply.

  “Nemos himself?”

  “Sh,” Maeve breathed, softer than smoke from a dying candle. “Sh . . .”

  Ysabo stitched the name into her memory.

  At noon the knights rode out. The household gathered in the great hall to watch and pay honor, as two long lines of knights in their silvery mail and white cloaks threaded with red knelt together on the flagstones. They held their unsheathed swords point down on the stones, both hands folded on the hilt. Their heads were bare, bowed. Sun from the high narrow windows crossed them in blades of light.

  Ysabo stood between Maeve and Aveline at the head of the lines. The three of them held gold goblets ringed with jewels along the rim. Ysabo’s cup held water; Aveline’s red wine, and Maeve’s a murky, bitter potion that smelled of herbs and dead insects. One by one the knights rose, came forward, chose their cup, drank. They could drink what they liked; if all the knights chose the same cup, it never emptied. Courtiers, old knights, ladies and their ladies, all of whom Ysabo rarely saw except at supper, surrounded the lines, each holding a long, thick, burning candle. Trumpets sounded at each sip. The enormous doors opened wide to the courtyard, where the horses in their caparisons waited restively. The knights mounted as they left the hall. The doors were closed after the last knight had crossed the threshold.

  No one saw by what gate they left the yard; there were none when Ysabo looked out. No one saw them ride beyond the walls of Aislinn House; no one saw them return. In the time between those two pieces of ritual, Ysabo had to work her way through a labyrinth of small, strange, and bewilderingly meaningless tasks.

  Open this window; light this candle there, though, on such a day, light itself rendered the flame nearly invisible.

  Lock the door at the top of the east tower.

  Unlock the door on the bottom floor in the west corner of the house that leads to the underground chamber.

  Light this candle; place it into the holder. Light this lantern from the taper; carry both into the dark of the subterranean chamber, which was chilly, dusty, and as far as Ysabo could see in the frail, ragged light, entirely empty. The black water that ebbed and flowed silently with the tide in its stone channel caused her some excitement when she first saw it. She finally gathered e
nough courage to follow it. The water led her not beyond the walls and into the wood around Aislinn House, but to another locked gate. An ornate iron grate was bolted to the sides of the channel; it ran up to the ceiling and down into the water as far as Ysabo could feel. She had been late finishing her tasks that day, and Aveline was furious.

  Leave the lantern on the prow of the boat chained to the stake in the stone shore at the water’s edge. Return the way you came, and lock the door behind you.

  Don’t ask who takes the lantern back to its hook beside the door, puts it out, and hangs it up again.

  Just do it.

  Go to the armory near the practice yard. No one will be there at that time of the day. Take the sword with the single red jewel in the bronze hilt out of its scabbard, and leave it lying across the arms of the wooden chair with the cracked leather seat, the worn back where the figures stamped into the leather and painted have become pallid ghosts of themselves. Rest the scabbard against the wall beside the chair.