A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  Lucia blinked, confused by this non sequitur; after a moment the mystery resolved itself, and she said quietly, “Ah,” but Sophie’s monologue had run on without her, like a boulder rolling downhill: “—and Jenny and Kergabet will ask me whether the matter might not better wait for a less tumultuous season, and Ned will attempt to reason with me, and say that I need not suppose that all young ladies are as mad for scholarship as myself. And,” she added, folding her hands around one knee, “my mother-in-law will shake her head and tell Gray very sweetly and sorrowfully that this is what comes of marrying in haste, and without due regard to the views of one’s family.”

  “Indeed,” said Lucia. She was relieved by Sophie’s apparent return to sober reason—though pondering, too, the significance of Gray’s absence, and Roland’s, from the list of objectors to her scheme.

  Her relief and her pondering were alike short-lived, however, for at once Sophie smiled widely and said, “And that is exactly why I need your help.”

  * * *

  “There is one thing I cannot understand,” said Lucia to Sophie, when next they met, looking up from An Historie of Lady Morgane College, Oxford. “That is, there are many such things in this affair, but one chiefly: Why, if—someone—were so determined to see the College closed once and for all, should they have left its buildings standing empty?”

  Sophie grinned at her, very much in the manner of a tutor expressing pride in a student’s perspicacity. “Exactly,” she said. “I have been wondering why the buildings were abandoned, when they might have been used by some other college—there has been at least one new-built since Lady Morgan College was closed—or even knocked down so that the land and the materials might be put to some other use.”

  “Indeed,” said Lucia, thoughtful.

  “I thought,” said Sophie, absently summoning her teacup and balancing it on her knee, “that someone must know why things fell out as they did. I had great hopes of a book called The Rise and Fall of Lady Morgan College, which was written within a generation of the College’s closing—most of the others, as you see”—a careless gesture, here, that nearly sent the teacup flying—“are concerned with its founding, or with its foundress, and go no further than its period of flourishing—but I could find only one copy, and that had been badly damaged in some sort of flood.”

  “An odd coincidence,” Lucia remarked. It did not sound to her like anything of the kind.

  “You are no believer in coincidence, I know,” said Sophie, “but I have no evidence, at present, that any mechanism was at work beyond ordinary negligence and ill fortune. At any rate, I have written to a few friends in Oxford, to beg their assistance in locating more books—beginning with any further copies of the damaged one—but have not had any reply. Besides, it is the Long Vacation, of course, and only the Fellows among them are at all likely to be in college at present.”

  “But is it not an odd thing,” Lucia persisted, “that you should be the first in—two centuries, is it?—to ask these questions? If I were a student in Oxford, I should be quite unable to let such a mystery rest, I think; and do not thousands of people see the College before their eyes every day? The dome of the Temple of Minerva, at least, is visible from quite far off, I believe you said. Did you never attempt to explore the place, in your time at Merlin?”

  “Shrine, not temple,” said Sophie absently. Her expression folded up into a thoughtful frown. “I believe I did mean to do so,” she said, slow and considering, “but always I had other demands upon my time—or it was the wrong season, or the wrong time of day, or—” She broke off, staring at Lucia in some strange compound of excitement and chagrin. “I am a fool,” she said. “I am twelve kinds of fool, Lucia!”

  She began a frantic search through the scattered volumes and manuscripts, muttering to herself the while in a hodgepodge of languages, as the fancy took her. Lucia toed off her ridiculous kid slippers, tucked up her feet, and prepared to wait out the fit of investigatory madness.

  She had not long to wait, as it proved. No more than a quarter-hour had passed, by Lucia’s judgement, when Sophie laid down the last codex she had picked up, flung up her hands, and threw herself into an armchair with a frustrated huffing sigh, for all the world like a five-and-a-half-foot child balked of its desire for sweetmeats.

  “You did not find what you were seeking, then?” said Lucia, cautiously.

  Sophie blinked at her for a moment, blank-faced, as though she were not altogether certain who had spoken or why; then her gaze sharpened, her face twitched back into life, and she said, “On the contrary; I have found exactly what I expected to find. Which is to say, nothing at all.” She pitched forward suddenly, dropping her face into her hands, and between her fingers said miserably, “Oh, Lucia, how could I have been so stupid!”

  It was not a question, exactly, and Lucia could think of no very useful reply. “I suppose,” she said after a moment, still feeling her way with great caution, “that you have had a change of mind on the subject of coincidence?”

  “You suppose rightly,” said Sophie, and raised her head. “I spent two years at Merlin, Lucia, and of course I was not idle—I saw my tutor every other day, because I was afraid of falling behind the other students, you know, and I attended as many lectures as I could, and read everything I could lay my hands on—but that I should not even have time to think, to speculate, after—”

  Again she broke off abruptly, this time to stare vaguely off into the middle distance. When she spoke again, her tone was softer, reminiscing. “When I first saw Oxford—my very first glimpses of it, through the rain, on the day we arrived from Breizh—there was the dome of the shrine, in the midst of those derelict buildings, across the Cherwell, and I felt I had seen it before. And I had, of course; there was a drawing of Lady Morgan College in a book of my mother’s. I had read of it more than once, and had pondered what it might mean, that such a College had existed once, and that it existed no longer—what it might have meant for me, for such a place to exist in the world, even if I could never come near it.”

  Lucia felt that a window had been opened to her, briefly, on the blank untalked-of years of Sophie’s childhood, and was half-afraid to speak lest she break the spell. What must it have been like for that younger Sophie, to know herself cut off from the dearest ambition of her heart? For all the other young women like her—like Lucia, like Mór MacRury, like poor duped Catriona MacCrimmon—who had not had the good fortune to discover themselves to be princesses, with royal fathers willing to reshape the world (or some small corner of it) on their behalf?

  “I should imagine you must have done,” she said.

  “But between times, somehow,” said Sophie, ignoring Lucia’s interjection, “it slipped my mind. And till that day when I saw the dome, I had forgot all about it.”

  Lucia frowned.

  “And when first I saw what remains of Lady Morgan College, I felt . . .” Sophie clasped her hands tight together, squeezed her eyes shut, tilted her face up towards the ceiling. “I felt such sorrow as I had never felt before, nor have felt since—and I have had some cause for sorrow, now and again.”

  Lucia nodded.

  “But—you will understand, I hope, what I mean—it was not my sorrow. Or not mine only. It so overwhelmed me then, I think, because . . . because it was so much larger than myself. I did not understand it at the time, of course. I did not understand anything to speak of, then; everything was strange and wrong and, and simply impossible, and that seemed no different from any of the rest, I suppose. And there was no time, of course. But later—”

  She paused, and looked earnestly at Lucia.

  “Later, when I did have time, when I was there within reach, I did nothing. And not only did nothing, but scarcely thought of it at all.”

  “Sophie, you had other—”

  “You are not listening,” said Sophie, abruptly vehement; Lucia blinked. “As I did not liste
n when I ought to have done. It called out to me for help—I heard that call, when no one else did—and then I ceased to hear it; it simply . . . slipped my mind, as though it were no great matter. Do you not see, Lucia, what this must mean?”

  Lucia did not, and said so. “And I hope you will not take offence,” she added, “when I say that I fear you may be reasoning in advance of the evidence.”

  Sophie scowled at her; then, unexpectedly, chuckled. “That is entirely possible,” she conceded. “But it is also possible—is it not?—for a spell to exist which could produce such an effect.”

  “Do you know of any such spell?” inquired Lucia, who did not. “Spells of concealment, certainly; but what manner of spell could prevent you from thinking of a thing which you are perfectly able to see?”

  “I have not the least idea,” said Sophie. “But, indeed, if my magick can protect me from the notice of other people—can persuade them that I am not worthy of remark, that the person they see is of no interest to them—then why should not a similar effect be possible on a larger scale?”

  Lucia considered this. As a theory, it was not implausible; all manner of things might exist in the world, without one particular person’s knowing of them. “But the books,” she said, waving a hand at them.

  Sophie frowned. “What of them?” she said—not dismissive, but inquiring.

  “What I mean is—well, that they exist at all, surely, is evidence that the College is worthy of remark?”

  “No,” said Sophie positively. “Not at all; only evidence that its history is worthy of remark. That is what I could not find, you see: None of these authors has anything whatever to say about why the College was closed, or what became of it thereafter—though some of them at least must have been there to see it—and until just lately, Lucia, I had never wondered why that should be so. Does that not suggest to you some manner of magick at work?”

  Lucia nodded slowly; it was difficult, indeed, to imagine any other explanation. Except—

  “But why now, in that case?” she said.

  Once more Sophie rummaged about amongst the codices, and extracted a battered volume upon whose front board was stamped the title A Dove amongst the Peacocks.

  “This,” she said. “My mother’s book—that is, another copy—which I found by chance in my father’s library, not long before you and Sìleas Barra MacNeill arrived in London. If it was chance,” she added darkly. “Finding it made me remember; and I have kept it by me since, so I have gone on remembering. It has taken me all the time since to lay hands on these others, for apart from that plan, they are not in the catalogues, and none of the archivists knew of their being here.”

  Lucia examined the book’s flyleaf, upon which was written, very small, the single name Julia, then turned to the title page. This repeated the title, and below elaborated, Being the Tale of the Founding of Lady Morgan College, Oxon. The author, it appeared, was one Charlotte Octavia Boucicault, D.Phil.; the date, more than two hundred years past.

  “Well,” she said at last. “You may leave the other books, and I shall undertake to read them.”

  Sophie beamed at her.

  “But,” said Lucia, “I hope very much that you have got a better plan this time than haring off alone, without telling anyone where you are going, and hoping for the best.”

  “Well! As to the where,” said Sophie, taking this rebuke in good part, “of course we must go to Oxford; but not yet. I am sorry to say it, but we shall have no chance at all of doing anything—even so much as making the journey, though it is not more than sixty miles—unless I can persuade my father that nothing dreadful will come of it.”

  Lucia looked from Sophie to the codex in her hands, and back again.

  “Sophie,” she said slowly, reluctantly (for, as Sophie had correctly deduced, she was no less eager than her friend to escape the Royal Palace), “how can you be sure that it will not?”

  “I suppose,” said Sophie, “it depends upon what you mean by something dreadful.”

  CHAPTER X

  In Which Lord Kergabet Receives a Letter

  Amelia, with Lady Maëlle for chaperon, was gone to a ball given by Madame de l’Aigle in honour of her daughter, with whom Amelia had been at school; Mrs. Marshall (who had not been invited) had complained of a sick headache, and, declining all offers of assistance, shut herself up in her room.

  The rare dinner en famille—more or less—which resulted from this conjunction of circumstances was a relief to Joanna, who had felt for some time as though she walked on eggshells and would be penalised by the Fates for breaking any. The relief, she fancied, was more general also; the family in Grosvenor Square, and Gray and Sophie, had been let into the secret of Roland’s alarming brush with magick shock, and of the cryptic warning he claimed to have received from the trees in the King’s maze, and to their vivid anxiety for Roland’s welfare had been added the strain of keeping these secrets, and the details of Sophie’s recent visits to her brother, from their guests.

  The conversation over the soup and the fish course, unsurprisingly, had been continually circling back to these subjects: Was it, could it be, true that Roland—that anyone—was capable of communicating with trees? And, if so, how much store ought to be set by a warning received in such a way?

  “This business of talking to trees,” said Mr. Fowler, in a now let us be sensible tone which at once put Joanna’s back up, “seems altogether too fanciful to me.”

  “Roland may be rather fanciful, I grant you,” said Sophie (something of an understatement, in Joanna’s view), “but Lucia MacNeill tells the same tale, and Lucia is no more fanciful than you are, Mr. Fowler. It is not impossible, I suppose, that they should both be victims of the same illusion-spell, or some such thing, but—”

  “But if both Roland and Lucia can be preyed upon by a mage powerful enough to craft such an illusion, on the very doorstep of the Royal Palace, then the enemy is at the gates indeed,” said Joanna, and Kergabet and Mr. Fowler nodded in rueful agreement.

  Treveur and Daisy came in with the joint of beef and its companions, and discussion of unexpectedly communicative topiary was suspended until their departure.

  “I fear Lucia has put the cat among the pigeons rather,” said Sophie, when the door had closed behind Treveur. Rather than expanding upon this cryptic remark, however, she fell silent, and began tracing one finger round and round the rim of her wineglass to make it sing.

  Joanna’s mouth was full, but Gwendolen prompted, “How so?”

  “Your pardon?” Sophie blinked at her for a moment, then seemed to catch up the dropped thread of her thoughts. “Oh! Why, because she would insist on sitting up with Roland all night, not only at first—which might have been excused, in light of the circumstances—but for several nights afterwards. Her Majesty said nothing to me about it, of course—or about anything else, for that matter—but Edward begged me to intercede, for the sake of propriety; as though I should do anything of the kind!”

  “Her Majesty would do better to thank her for saving Roland’s life, in my opinion, than to fret over the proprieties,” said Jenny, with unusual asperity; and, observing the raised eyebrows around the table at this departure from her usual staunch support of Queen Edwina in all matters not related to her fragile détente with Sophie, she continued, “Well, and where should you be now, all of you, if I were inclined to set propriety above—”

  “Above rearranging all of our lives for our own good?” said Gray, lifting his glass to his sister with a small smile. “Where indeed.”

  He looked at Sophie, seated across the table between Joanna and Mr. Fowler, and the smile grew tender, crinkling up his hazel eyes. Joanna hastily looked away; but this did not at all answer, for now her gaze crossed Gwendolen’s, and she found her own face rearranging itself likewise.

  “I have had a letter from Roland,” said Sophie unexpectedly. “He is feeling quite h
imself again, he says, and I think—reading between the lines, you know—is growing very impatient with being treated as an invalid. And Lucia has told him of our scheme for Lady Morgan College, and my notion of beginning by exploring what remains of it, and he is eager to assist in the enterprise—or so he says—and volunteers his help in whatever capacity I may deem most useful.”

  “Does he, indeed,” said Sieur Germain, thoughtful.

  “He is only trying to impress Lucia MacNeill,” Joanna scoffed. The notion of Roland as a champion of scholarship was too ludicrous for words, and as a champion of scholarship for women—

  Sophie smiled. “Gift horses, Jo,” she said mildly. “What of it, if so? At any rate,” she continued, “I have engaged to go with Lucia tomorrow to call upon Madame de Courcy in Half-moon-street, to tell her of our plans; Jo, Miss Pryce, I wondered whether you might wish to come with us, as Mademoiselle de Courcy is such a particular friend of yours?”

  “Why Madame de Courcy, love?” said Gray, looking up from the plate of roast beef and greens which he had been systematically demolishing. “I did not know that you were at all acquainted with her.”

  “Because,” said Joanna, before Sophie could reply, “Madame de Courcy is clever and well read, and has travelled to Eire and Alba, and to Flanders; and because she has three clever and well-read daughters, who would like nothing better than to be afforded the same opportunity as their brothers.”

  “I wonder that Courcy does not arrange for them to study in Din Edin, then,” said Gray. “As he has a home for them there already.”

  Joanna had often wondered the same; Agathe was very young, of course, to be sent to live with her papa in a foreign city, but surely Mathilde and Héloïse, nineteen and seventeen respectively, might perfectly well have gone—with one of their brothers for escort, perhaps.

  “If you were a mother of young daughters,” said Jenny, resting one hand (perhaps unconsciously) upon her middle, “should you rather send them sixty miles to Oxford for their education, or four hundred miles and over the border to Alba?”