When, therefore, one of the innkeeper’s daughters knocked at her door early the next morning, to inform her that there was a, er, a gentleman below wanting to see you, ma’am, her first instinct was to tear off the boots, stockings, gown, and shift she had just put on, resume her nightdress, and go back to sleep.
“Sophie?” said Lucia, her voice blurred and sleepy. “Is all well?”
“There is another deputation downstairs in the parlour,” said Sophie crossly. They had neither of them slept well. “With another petition, no doubt. I shall just go and tell them to go away.”
She closed the door behind her, descended the stairs as quietly as their tendency to creak permitted, rounded the turning into the parlour, and stopped dead, her mouth falling open in shock.
The man who stood fidgeting nervously by the fireplace mantel was not another Fellow of Merlin—was not, any longer, an Oxford man at all. A man of her father’s age, lean to the point of emaciation, his pallid face surmounted by a sweep of greying hair: Lord Merton, lately of King’s College and friend—or, at any rate, co-conspirator—of her stepfather, Appius Callender.
“Mrs. Marshall?” said his younger, more solid companion. “My name is Henry Taylor.”
After a moment’s gobsmacked silence, Sophie—without pausing further to consider her approach, or thinking the circumstances through—marched across the parlour, took Taylor by the lapels of his ill-fitting coat, and said, “What in Hades have you done with my sister Amelia?”
She did not altogether recognise that she was shaking him—and so preventing him from answering her—until a sharply indrawn breath behind her made her pause, turn, and behold Roland and Joanna standing in the doorway.
“I-I-I have not seen your sister,” Taylor managed. He was green in the face and breathing in shallow gasps. “Not since we parted on the Dover road. I-I tried, I asked her—but she would go.”
Sophie let go of his coat and swung away from him, exasperated.
“Where?” Joanna demanded. “Where would she go?”
* * *
Henry Taylor could not possibly have been more outraged by this turn of events if he had been truly innocent of all wrongdoing. He had never intended to take Amelia to Calais, he said indignantly; he had meant to throw himself on the King’s mercy, and had only wished to speak to Amelia—to bid her a proper farewell—before doing so.
“How came you to be on the Dover road together, then?” said Joanna, deeply sceptical. “And what have you been doing with yourself, in all the time since?”
Had she not said all along that Amelia would not have eloped with the unwashed, uncombed, half-lunatic man she and Gwendolen had encountered in the park? But it was not very satisfying, in the event, to be proved right.
“Hiding, chiefly,” said Taylor, his righteous indignation fading into weariness. “Evading the City Watch. I called at my sister’s house, when she was not at home, and helped myself to some of her husband’s coin—he will never miss it—and a suit of his clothes. And in the end I came back to Merlin.” He shrugged. “I had that in common with Marshall, always, though I do not suppose he knew it; we had neither of us any other home.”
Joanna kept her expression impassive in the face of this bid for compassion. I shall consider feeling sorry for you when we have rescued my sister. On the heels of this thought came another: that she and Sophie, out in the wide world with their vastly expanded families, had begun to think of Amelia as though she were not the eldest of them but the youngest—and, worse, to treat her accordingly.
Roland, who had quietly left the room whilst Joanna’s attention was occupied elsewhere, now returned to stand at her shoulder once more. “I have asked the innkeeper to send for the Watch,” he said, low; then, a little louder, “Sophie, come here.”
Predictably, rather than obeying, Sophie turned to glare at him. Roland sighed. There came the sound of footsteps—coming down the stairs, not along the corridor—and then Joanna felt Gwendolen’s hand on her shoulder, and Lucia was crowding in behind them, peering around Roland’s head.
Roland squared his shoulders and took a step forward. At once Taylor and Merton tensed, wary, and brought up their hands defensively as though to do . . . what? Roland, in any case, seemed quite unintimidated. “I arrest you in the name of His Majesty the King,” he said firmly.
They goggled at him. Roland had always been a good man in a crisis, Joanna reminded herself; it was in the small ordinary difficulties of everyday life that he tended either to forget, or to make far too much of, the dignity of his years.
“The City Watch has been summoned,” he went on; “I should advise you to go with them without argument, when they arrive. In the meantime, however, let us sit down like reasonable people and discuss how we may be of use to one another. Sophie, will you set us a ward?”
Sophie blinked at him (horses, stable doors, thought Joanna) but after a moment nodded, closed her eyes, and began muttering a spell. Roland waited patiently for its conclusion before turning his earnest gaze squarely on his . . . prisoners, Joanna supposed she must call them. They seated themselves, looking rather like stunned oxen, on two hideous armchairs.
“You have information of value to us,” he said. “My sister and I have the ear of the King”—the prisoners’ eyes widened as, belatedly, they recognised to whom they were speaking—“and I, at least, will undertake to intercede on your behalf, should you put us in the way of locating Miss Callender.”
“And tell us who it was that abetted your escape,” Joanna added prudently, from the doorway, “and why.”
“Indeed,” said Roland.
Taylor and Merton conferred in voices too low for Joanna to distinguish. At last Merton said, “How are we to lead you to Miss Callender when neither of us had any hand in her departure from England?”
“We know,” said Sophie, “that my sister left London with the goal of rejoining her father at the court of the Emperor of France. Presumably you must know, or at any rate suspect, who is meant by that epithet, and where he has his court?”
“You will speak for us to the King?” said Lord Merton. “We have your word upon it?”
“You have,” said Roland.
“You sought us out, Lord Merton,” Sophie said quietly. “You sought me out, in fact. Why do so, if not because you have something to say to me? Whatever it is, very soon now you shall have to say it to the Watch Captain, who may be less inclined to compromise.”
“I had hoped,” Merton said, grimacing, “to retain both my life and my liberty, and to give warning without further risk to myself. I am not a traitor, Your Highness—”
Roland and Sophie exchanged an incredulous look.
“What I did,” Merton insisted, “I did for the good of the kingdom, as I saw it. I could not have predicted this consequence. I am acting now from the same motive; I cannot speak for any other person.”
“Go on, then,” said Roland. “And do not be too long about it.”
Merton frowned at him. “The man who calls himself Imperator Gallia,” he said, “is the Duke of Orléans, and Orléans is where you shall find him, unless he be now on the march with his armies. He has anointed himself a second Julius Caesar, and aims to unite all of Caesar’s Gaulish and Frankish territories, and thereafter to build a new Roman Empire. He is collecting mages, as well as the armies of his followers, because he aspires to control sorcerer-centuries such as those which struck terror into the hearts of Caesar’s conquests.”
His auditors digested this for some moments; then Lucia MacNeill ventured, “Is he mad, think you?”
“Quite mad,” said Taylor positively. “He—by way of his agent in London, that is—agreed to aid our escape, and promised that we should be granted posts in his court, in return for information—harmless enough information, it seemed at first—until, before we knew where we were, we were all become his liege-men—his creatures, I
should rather say.”
“For myself,” said Roland, in a distant tone, “I do not think I should seek out convicted traitors as my liege-men.”
“That is because you do not understand the circumstances,” Taylor snapped. “Lord Carteret was Orléans’s liege-man before he was King Henry’s.”
Does this mean, can it mean, that this self-styled Emperor was somehow behind Carteret’s plot? How far down, how far back, does this rabbit-hole extend? And how could the priests of Apollo Coelispex, discerners of truth and falsehood in the minds of men, have failed to discern such a momentous truth as this one?
Into the astonished silence which greeted this revelation, Taylor continued: “Poor Amelia was the go-between—though she believed she was only sending parcels to her papa, of course, along with her own. By the time the day arrived, I had already made up my mind that I wanted no part of the Emperor’s court, and had written to Amelia to beg her to come to London—we should go to Eire, perhaps, I thought, or Alba, or to the Low Countries, and put all of this business behind us. But it was not so easy as I thought to escape from the escape—so to speak—and then . . . well. When the time came to choose, she did not choose me.”
He did not appear to have noticed how widely this version of his intentions departed from his initial protests of innocence. Wished only to say a proper farewell, indeed, thought Joanna.
“And you, sir?” said Roland, turning to Lord Merton. “What is your tale?”
“Whether or not Orléans is mad, I cannot undertake to say,” said Merton. “But he has certainly an idée fixe on the subject of this restored empire of his, and of the Roman gods. I am a follower of the Roman path myself, like most educated men,” he added, in an explaining tone, “but to speak of enforcing Pax Romana by stamping out the worship of all other gods is another matter altogether, and an aim to which I cannot lend myself.”
He concluded this speech with a decisive nod and sat back in his chair.
“I confess,” said Roland, “that I had rather hoped for more concrete intelligence with which to act upon your warning. What are my father’s generals to do with the information that their opponent has declared war on the old gods? Does he mean to declare war on Britain? When, if so? Is he likely to be amenable to terms? What numbers has he, and how deployed?”
There was a small, stifled sound to Joanna’s left; darting her eyes in that direction, she observed Lucia gazing at Roland in pleased approval. There’s for all your poetical wooing, Roland, she thought, rolling her eyes. You had only to talk to her of tactics and strategy, after all.
Alas, however, neither of their informants had been near enough to Orléans’s councils to acquire any of the intelligence Roland sought.
“I have promised to intercede on your behalf,” he said at last, “and I shall not go back on my word; but when next you decide to throw yourself on the King’s mercy in return for information, I should advise you first to build up a greater store thereof.”
It happened at this moment that the Captain of the Watch knocked loudly on the door of the Dragon and Lion, and Roland, glancing that way to gauge the source of the noise, met Lucia’s gaze and held it. Joanna saw him register her appreciative expression—saw his cheeks flush and his eyes brighten in response. Then the men of the Watch in their heavy boots were clomping along the passage and crowding through the parlour door, and in the bustle of handing over the prisoners and impressing upon the Watch Captain the importance of their being transported at once to London and given into the custody of Lord Kergabet and Lord de Vaucourt, the moment passed.
CHAPTER XXVIII
In Which Lucia Attends a Concert, and Lives to Tell the Tale
Having dispatched both Taylor and Merton, and an explanatory missive on the subject thereof, to Kergabet in London, Sophie’s party sat down to eat their breakfast and take stock. They had by now collected and sorted all the damaged codices from the library of Lady Morgan College, and had pieced together and catalogued most of them, but they had still to explore the Shrine of Minerva Sophia. Further discussion decided them, however, that the following morning must suffice for this endeavour, and that thereafter they should return with their prizes to London, where they might study them in more comfort and be in the way of more quickly hearing any news.
The reclaimed books and maps were packed up under Ceana MacGregor’s direction into a large number of crates and dispatched in a hired cart, tightly covered in oilcloth in case of rain, to the Royal Palace. The box containing the confession of the Princesses Regent, however, and the mysterious map which seemed to belong to it, Sophie wrapped carefully in layers of clean linens and packed into her own trunk. She was not altogether clear, in her own mind, what she meant to do with either of them, but the letter in the box was directed to her, in a way, and she felt a responsibility for its secrets.
Indeed, its secrets weighed upon her like a cloak of lead.
They arrived in Grosvenor Square to find that Mrs. Marshall, disappointed in the matter of Miss Beaumont, had decamped to Glascoombe. Lady Maëlle remained, but to Sophie’s eye she seemed reduced, as though the loss of Amelia—in effect, her last child—had altered her in some fundamental way. Sophie and Joanna, feeling guiltily that they, too, had abandoned her in rushing off to Oxford to go exploring, exerted themselves to demonstrate their affection, but though she smiled at them and called them good girls, as though they had been children once again, nothing they could say or do appeared to make the least difference to her melancholy.
* * *
Some days after their return to London, the Grosvenor Square family, together with Roland, Lucia, Edward, Delphine, and Harry, attended a concert at the Apollonium. The mood in the city was oddly buoyant, following the very public return of two of the escaped conspirators to the Tower of London, in consequence of which—and of the private knowledge that the others were almost certainly hundreds of miles away—Lord Kergabet had relaxed his strictures on public appearances by Sophie and Joanna. Delphine (who was very fond of music) had lobbied strenuously in favour of this engagement, as had Edward, who was to depart with his regiment but two days hence and therefore was more than usually inclined to indulge his wife.
It was not precisely like being amongst friends; it was not the Royal Palace, however, and the company was in general a younger and more carefree set of persons than were to be met under the careful chaperonage of Queen Edwina. Alas, Sìleas Barra MacNeill had insisted upon Lucia’s wearing one of her new gowns, a stiff and thickly embroidered creation in which sitting was uncomfortable (and dancing nearly impossible), but the music, when it began, was very lovely, and it was pleasant—if very odd—to be reunited with the Oxford party, in this altogether less consequential atmosphere.
At the first interval, they rose from their seats and moved out to the terrace. Roland and his brothers trooped off to fetch glasses of wine for the ladies of the party; Sophie, Delphine, and Gwendolen had their heads together, comparing notes on the performances they had just heard, whilst Joanna propped her shoulders against a pillar and studied her programme with an abstracted air. Lucia stepped away from them a little and leant her elbows upon the balustrade, gazing out at the busy river Thames below.
“Lady Lucia?” The speaker, when she turned to look at him, proved to be a dark-haired young man, not much taller than herself, with bright hazel eyes. He wore, if she did not mistake, the uniform of a cavalry lieutenant.
“I am she,” she said, cautiously.
“I beg your pardon,” he said in Latin, with a bashful smile which, despite herself, Lucia found rather charming. “I know we have not been introduced. My name is Arzhur Kermorgant. I have a most particular reason for wishing to speak with you—”
Lucia did not see the threat until it was very nearly too late: His arms had closed behind her, mimicking a lover’s embrace, and what later proved to be the tip of a tiny clasp-knife was nosing gently at the fabric of her stif
f, uncomfortable new gown, scraping amongst glass beads and gilt thread and seeking the best opportunity to slide in between her ribs.
It was fortunate—for both of them, as it transpired—that Ceana MacGregor had insisted on teaching her the rudiments of self-defence, and fortunate too that Lucia’s instinct, when events moved too quickly for thought, had always favoured magick over force. The heiress of Alba did not panic, did not cry out, did not for a moment lose her composure; she was reaching for her magick, flinging it out around her on the words of a shielding-spell, almost before her conscious mind had acknowledged the danger.
And then her assailant was flat on his back at her feet, the knife (so small, honed so deadly sharp) skittering across the polished floor, and other people (so many people!) exclaiming and running about and shouting for someone to call for the Watch. Lucia stared down at the man who had attacked her, dry-eyed and perfectly steady but for the painful hitching of her breath, and concentrated on slowing her heartbeat.
He lay motionless, his eyes closed. Dead? He looks very young. Almost a boy. His chest rose and fell. Not dead. Hail Brìghde! Lucia did not shrink from the notion of killing, when killing was required—a chieftain who did so (as she had tried to explain to tenderhearted Sophie) was no chieftain at all—but he was so very young, this would-be assassin, and in any case it had not been required. Besides which, had you killed him, he could not answer your questions.
Running footsteps approached from several directions—the patter of dancing-slippers, the thump of heavy boots—and Lucia raised her head, slow and careful, and took a wary step backwards, then another, pressing her spine against the pillar that interrupted the balustrade.
“Lucia!” Sophie’s voice, breathless and worried—then Roland’s—Joanna’s, Gwendolen’s—and finally a gruff familiar baritone: “My lady! Are you hurt?” Conall Barra MacNeill, Ceana MacGregor’s second-in-command. Whose head Ceana MacGregor would certainly have, and his guts for bowstrings, if any harm came to Lucia through some negligence on his part.
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