Gray nudged Sophie’s cup of tea towards her hand; she looked at it, shuddered at the thought of drinking it, and looked away again. “Has she heard the news, do you suppose?” she said.
“Surely not,” said Miss Pryce. “Unless Madame de l’Aigle is curiously well informed. We can scarcely be said to have heard it ourselves, and Lord Kergabet was surely the first of His Majesty’s court to be told.”
“Amongst the first, at any rate,” said Joanna. “I agree with Gwen, however: Amelia cannot possibly have heard of it yet.”
She glanced towards the door and went as still as a cornered mouse; Sophie followed her gaze, and saw at once what was amiss.
“Heard of what?” said Amelia.
CHAPTER XI
In Which Joanna Takes Steps
“Miss Callender!” said Gwendolen, too cheerfully. “I did not think to see you so early today. You must tell us all about Mademoiselle de l’Aigle’s ball.”
Amelia frowned very slightly at Gwendolen and—to no one’s surprise—ignored her question entirely. “What is it I have not heard of?” she said, looking steadily at Joanna.
For a long moment Joanna studied her in turn. Framed in the doorway with one delicate hand on the door-handle, Amelia looked beautiful and fragile, her cheeks a little paler than usual, her blue eyes wide.
We are to say nothing to Mrs. Marshall; Kergabet was very clear upon that point. But surely he did not mean us to keep Amelia in the dark also? And, besides, if what I suspect of her is so . . .
“I should sit down, if I were you, Amelia,” said Sophie. She patted the back of the chair beside her own; Amelia’s frown deepened, and instead she took the seat by Gwendolen’s, nearest the door which she had quietly closed behind her. Sophie, apparently taking no offence at this snub, poured out a cup of tea for Amelia and handed it across the table, where it was roundly ignored.
“Joanna,” said Amelia expectantly.
Joanna swallowed; this was more difficult, when it came to the point, than she had had any reason to expect. “A messenger brought word from the Palace,” she said at last, “whilst you were out, that the Professor and the others have escaped from the Tower of London.”
“The professor? Which prof—oh, Mother Goddess!” It was as well that Amelia had taken Sophie’s advice, however ungraciously, for her pale face grew nearly green and she groped for her teacup with a shaking hand. “Father? You mean that Father has—? Joanna, how—when—”
Sophie was up out of her seat and going round the table. Amelia saw her approach and turned from it; Gwendolen met her with a gentle hand on her wrist and a soothing murmur of words, whilst contriving also to meet Joanna’s eye and nod minutely: Go on, then.
Sophie retreated, biting her lip.
“I know nothing more than I have just told you,” said Joanna. Beneath the table, she clenched her fingers in the folds of her gown. “Had you no warning of this, Amelia, truly?”
Amelia’s head snapped up. “Of course not,” she said, in a passably persuasive tone of outraged astonishment. “How should I have done?”
“No one blames you.” Sophie’s voice was gentle and kind, as though she were soothing a spooked horse. “If you will only tell us—or tell Lord Kergabet, or Jenny—what you know, what the Professor wrote to you, or bid you do, then I am sure no blame can attach to you for fulfilling the demands of filial obedience.”
“I’m sure I have not the least idea what you mean, Sophia.” Amelia’s chin lifted in the old familiar way, the better to look down her elegant straight nose; she shook off Gwendolen’s hand on her arm and folded her hands on the table-cloth.
“We know about the letters, Amelia,” said Sophie, still speaking in that gently coaxing tone.
“Which letters, pray?”
Joanna opened her mouth, impatient to have the thing over, but closed it again without speaking when Gwendolen caught her eye and, with another minute shake of her head, warned her off.
“I think you know very well which letters,” said Gray. Like Sophie’s, his voice was calm and gentle, his expression kind; but beneath the placid surface something darker lurked, which made Joanna very glad that her brother-in-law’s level gaze was not presently directed towards herself. Gwendolen blinked at him in surprise; Sophie made a small abortive gesture, as though she considered attempting to restrain him, and held herself back. She was muttering something to herself, too low for Joanna to hear.
Amelia, however, had either more nerve or less perception than her sisters (or, perhaps, both), for she appeared able to confront him without quailing. “You may think what you please,” she said. “It is no business of mine.”
“I think,” said Gray pleasantly, taking a sip of tea, “that whatever your father and his cronies are about may pose a significant danger to the kingdom—to His Majesty personally—to Sophie and Joanna, and to my sister and her family—and I should not like to believe you, Amelia, so lost to compassion as to protect a quintet of convicted traitors at the cost of your own sisters’ safety—to say nothing of your duty to your king.”
He paused for another, more leisurely sip, his gaze steady on Amelia’s increasingly tension-taut face. The expectant pause stretched out; Joanna dug her close-trimmed fingernails into the palms of her hands, consumed with the effort of restraining her questions, her impatience, her peremptory demands.
“I have done no wrong to anyone,” said Amelia at last. She was composed, her voice steady, but her hands, too, were clasped so tightly that her knuckles showed bone-white through the skin.
“No one has said so,” said Gray—still calm, still perfectly reasonable. “But your father and his co-conspirators have done a considerable number of wrongs to a considerable number of persons, and we have all of us a duty to do whatever we may to prevent their continuing to tread the same path.”
“My father—”
“Your father,” said Joanna, furious and unable any longer to bite her tongue, “has poisoned a man in cold blood, for his own gain, and conspired in an attempt to repeat that achievement on a larger scale. Your father ought by rights to have been beheaded as a traitor. Your father—”
“He is your father as well as mine, Joanna Callender!” Amelia cried. She was out of her seat in a trice and leaning towards Joanna, both hands flat upon the table.
Joanna sprang to her feet, almost without intending it, and mirrored her posture, distantly annoyed at being still half a head shorter. “To my everlasting regret, he is,” she replied; and, surprising herself by the honest laughter that bubbled up from her chest, she continued, “That is, he was; I find I am disinclined to acknowledge him. Do you know, Amelia, I begin to believe that it was my gift from the gods to be wanted by neither of my parents, loved by neither, so that I might be free to steer my ship to a better harbour, amongst people whose good opinion does not depend upon my parentage, or my sex, or the circumstances of”—she faltered momentarily, then amended—“of my birth.”
A shocked and ringing silence followed this outburst—Joanna was as deeply shocked at having spoken such thoughts aloud, as any of the others could possibly be to hear them—whilst the two sisters stared at one another across Lady Kergabet’s breakfast-table.
This time it was Amelia who broke the stalemate; drawing herself up tall, arms folded, she said, “It was not Papa’s fault, any of it; it was hers.” She turned to Sophie. “Your precious mama’s. We should have gone on quite happily, the two of us, if—”
“You cannot possibly know what might have been,” said Sophie, with a surprising lack of heat. “You were not above three years old when they were married; you knew no more than I did that we were not sisters born.”
Joanna, distracted from her own concerns, looked from one of them to the other with narrowed eyes; this exchange had all the earmarks of a debate continuing after some earlier interruption.
“In any case, Amelia,” sa
id Gray, “no one supposes that the original notion was your father’s; the priests of Apollo Coelispex established at the time that he was recruited into an established conspiracy by Lord Merton, at the instigation of the late Viscount Carteret, because he was a mage of Merlin College and could help them to an appropriately subtle poison for their purposes.”
“But—” Amelia’s befuddled expression reminded Joanna that she had not been present whilst the rest of them (together with the conspirators) were examined by the truth-seeing priests; impossible to say what she might know, or believe, about the events leading up to her father’s arrest and imprisonment. “But it was her they wanted, as bait for the King.”
“Is that what the Professor told you?” said Joanna. “It was not the whole truth, if so. And I do not suppose he happened to mention that he had promised you in marriage to one of his students—he had not yet made up his mind which of them to favour—in return for their assistance with his part of the scheme?”
Amelia blinked at her, the very picture of maidenly outrage. “Mr. Taylor had nothing to do with any of it!” she exclaimed. “Nor dear Mr. Woodville, either. And I shall never believe such a thing of Papa; the very notion is ludicrous.”
Gray and Sophie and Joanna exchanged a look of grim surmise. Gwendolen looked on in patient bafflement, trusting presumably that Joanna would enlighten her at some less frantic moment.
“That was not the verdict of the priests of Apollo Coelispex,” said Gray, reasonably, after a moment.
“Then, evidently,” Amelia retorted, speaking with great precision as though she feared what might spill out if she relaxed her vigilance for a moment, “the priests were mistaken.”
“Amelia, the priests of Apollo Coelispex are truth-seers,” said Joanna. “His Majesty called upon them precisely for the purpose of ensuring that there should be no mistake in the verdict.”
“But Mr. Taylor was not present to be examined!” Amelia protested.
“All of his confederates were questioned, however,” said Gray, “as were your sisters and I. Of course I cannot say precisely what testimony was given by any other person, but I can state categorically that one of Apollo’s chosen heard me tell of Woodville’s part, and Taylor’s, in procuring . . .” He paused, glanced uncertainly at Sophie, then continued: “in procuring, through highly suspect means, a key ingredient of the poison, at Professor Callender’s direction; and that Apollo Coelispex judged my account a true one.”
Amelia’s mouth was set in a hard line, and she gazed steadily at a point somewhere between Gray’s arm and Joanna’s shoulder.
“I am sorry to further tarnish your image of your father,” said Gray at last, more gently. “But is it not better that we should see the world as it is?”
“I beg you will excuse me,” said Amelia, stiff and formal, to no one in particular. Still meeting no one’s eye, she rose from her seat (Gray rose also, as though by reflex), turned away from the table, and set her hand to the door-handle.
It rattled, but would not turn. Gray sank back into his chair. Was it he who had tampered with the door? Or Sophie?
Amelia turned back, strung tight with fury—Joanna flinched away from her venomous expression—and apparently quite free of any such doubt. “How dare you!” She pointed a shaking forefinger at Sophie. “Let me out.”
Sophie flinched also, but when she spoke, her voice was steady. “This is not some petty quarrel over a doll or the seat nearest the fire on a chilly evening, Amelia,” she said. “I dare, as you put it, because you have information which may be material to the welfare of the kingdom—”
“As though you cared two pins for the kingdom!” Amelia’s cheeks were flushed, two bright spots in her pale furious face, and her blue eyes burned. “As though you cared two pins for anyone but your precious self! How could I have thought you truly wished for peace between us? It was this you wanted all the time, of course it was. It is not enough that you should have taken my father from me—my home—every prospect of a good marriage—now you mean to take even this—”
Even this? Even what? What in Hades is she talking of? Joanna tried to catch Gwendolen’s eye, but Gwendolen had no attention to spare for her at present; like the rest of them, she was riveted by Amelia. Amelia could not hold us more in thrall if she were working some dire magick upon us.
“—and I tell you plainly, Your Highness, I shall not let you do it.”
They regarded one another for a long moment—Amelia stiff and bristling and furious, glaring for all she was worth; Sophie visibly labouring to maintain her calm façade, and only just managing it—and Joanna began genuinely to fear that words had now been spoken which could never be called back. If she did not love Amelia as she loved Sophie—indeed, Amelia had more often been a burr under her saddle than not—once upon a time Amelia had stitched clothes and bonnets for Joanna’s dolls, had acceded to her pleas for yet another game of hunt-the-slipper, had held her close and said nothing when, on that first long and difficult night at school, Joanna had slipped out of her own bed, crept about in the dark, and clambered up into her sister’s.
“Sophie,” said Joanna quietly, “let her go.”
Sophie turned to her, mouth opening on some protest or denial. Joanna raised a hand to forestall it and, carefully rising from her chair, edged round the table to Sophie. She felt Amelia’s eyes on her, burning; and Gwen’s, full of anxious care.
“Truly,” she said, standing a-tiptoe to murmur in Sophie’s ear, “there is no victory to be had here. Whatever she knows—if indeed she knows anything at all, and is not again an ignorant victim of others’ machinations—you are only making her the more determined never to tell you.”
Sophie sighed, a soft and almost silent exhalation, and her eyes closed briefly. “I know it,” she said, very low. “I—”
Whatever she had been meaning to say, however, she evidently thought better of it.
Joanna clasped Sophie’s shoulder—whether to comfort or to restrain, even she herself was not altogether sure. Sophie, at any rate, made no attempt at escape. At length she drew in a breath, let it out, and raised her head to look squarely at Amelia.
“I have never had any wish to hurt you,” she said, “though I do not suppose you will believe me when I say so. But, Amelia—” She paused; Amelia stood straighter, if that were possible, and glared harder. “If you insist on protecting your father—on protecting men whom the gods themselves have declared guilty of treason and deliberate murder—that is for you to decide; but we shall none of us help you do it.”
Then she snapped her fingers.
Amelia did not deign to reply but turned so quickly back to the breakfast-room door that her skirts swirled out behind her. The door-handle turned smoothly under her hand, and half a moment later the door closed behind her with a decisive snick.
Sophie sank into the nearest chair, staring after Amelia; the others, warily, stared at Sophie.
At last, with a soft rustle of skirts, Gwendolen straightened in her chair and leant her elbows upon the table. “Ought I to go after her, do you think?” she said.
“To what purpose?” said Sophie dully.
Gwendolen deflated.
Joanna frowned down at the top of Sophie’s head. “Later, perhaps,” she said, smoothing out the frown with some effort, so as to direct an encouraging half smile at Gwen. “It is a good notion, but . . . not just now, I think.”
Unless she was much mistaken, Amelia had been mere moments from giving way to angry tears, and woe betide anyone who might happen to witness them.
Sophie flung herself up out of her seat and paced two rapid circuits of the breakfast-room.
“Cariad, we cannot even be certain that Amelia knows anything to the purpose,” said Gray, catching her hands as she rounded a corner of the table.
“And we cannot be sure that she does not,” Sophie retorted.
“Bu
t in any case,” said Joanna, restraining her impatience with some difficulty, “there is nothing to be done about the matter now.”
* * *
Sieur Germain de Kergabet was not seen again in Grosvenor Square for several days, or at any rate not in daylight. On the third evening he at last reappeared—grim-faced and pale with fatigue, with Mr. Fowler, arms full of dossiers, drooping in his wake—well after dinner, and though Sophie and Joanna darted downstairs as soon as they heard the front door opening, Jenny was there before them, bundling her husband off to, in her words, sleep until the sun is up again. Sophie, Gray, Joanna, and Miss Pryce had thus to contain their impatient questioning—and, worse, to entertain Jenny’s mama—for the remainder of the evening.
This they managed well enough for the first half-hour, as Amelia had a great deal to say of the milliners’ shops she and her friend Mademoiselle de l’Aigle had visited in the course of the day, and of Mademoiselle de l’Aigle’s brother who had escorted them. Amelia, it appeared, was keeping the ill news to herself, and the recent acrimony was not to be acknowledged outside the closed circle of its participants—for which small kindnesses, after several days’ stony silence, Sophie was grateful. But Gray’s mother (whatever Sophie might privately think of her from time to time) was neither stupid nor inattentive, and it was not long before, despite the others’ best efforts, Mrs. Marshall turned to her elder son and said, “Whatever has Genevieve been doing upstairs all this time? I hope Lord Kergabet is not unwell? Perhaps I may be of some help?”
Gray shot Sophie a look of pure panic, and Joanna began to talk, very brightly and rather too fast, about a fine pair of grey carriage-horses she and Miss Pryce had lately had sight of, almost the equal of Jenny’s; to which conversational breeze Miss Pryce trimmed her sails willingly enough, but which failed signally to engage its target.
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 15