The Bell at Sealey Head

by McKillip, Patricia

  Leave the room. Quickly.

  Climb up the stairs of the east tower, and unlock the door you locked earlier. Go into the room at the top of the tower. Turn one page of the book on its stand in the middle of the room. That page will be no different from the one you turned the day before, and the day before, and the day before that. A blank book of days. Lock the door when you leave.

  Don’t ask who unlocks it after you have gone, who reads the blank page.

  Cross the parapet walk to the west tower, where, this morning, you fed the crows. Put on the apron someone has left there. Take the bucket of water and the brush. Scrub the leavings of the crows off the stones, their discarded scraps, stray feathers, acrid droppings. Ignore the crows when they line the walls and watch you. They approve. They like a clean house. And with them there, you won’t be tempted to lean over the battlements and watch the wood for a flash of armor, a flow of color through the trees, whose lengthening shadows portend the waning of the day, the return of the knights, the bell.

  Go to your chambers, take off your soiled clothes, bathe, and dress for supper.

  Wait for it, the ringing of the bell.

  When you hear it, open your door to the sounds of the knights’ voices welling and booming up from the great hall, the sound of stray pieces of armor clanging on stones, dogs barking welcome, musicians beginning to play.

  Hurry down to place their chairs, fill this cup but not that, to see which pair of eyes might linger on yours.

  Hurry down to meet your fate.

  The feast that night began like every other in her life. Four long tables were set end to end down the hall, across the stones where the knights had knelt earlier that day. Cloths of gold and red and blue were spread over the tables. The chairs were lined against the wall, beautiful things with arms and spindles carved of ash and oak and bone, the seats and backs fashioned of brilliant tapestry whose threads never seemed to fade. Goblets as bright and varied as the chairs stood at each place, beside plates round and white as the moon. Sharp, gleaming knives with handles of horn lay across the moons, on napkins red as the blood that would run from the great haunches of meat whose smells of drippings and herbs pervaded the hall. The knights gathered at the two huge hearths, one at either side of the hall. They stood on the hides of deer and soft white sheepskins, telling tales and jesting with one another. Dogs milled around their legs, stirred by the heat and the deep voices as the knights waited for the servants to place their chairs. Ysabo moved among the servants, watching for those they left untouched. The chair with the griffin tapestry she pushed to the place at the table with the goblet whose stem was a griffin rampant, its wings opened to enfold the cup. The chair with the mermaid tapestry matched the mermaid whose uplifted arms carried the cup. The lion tapestry, the unicorn tapestry, the tapestry man with his enigmatic eyes and rack of horns, these she shifted to their proper places. Chairs done, she filled the cups: griffin, lion, mermaid, horned man, with red, spiced wine.

  A horn sounded. Ladies entered, Maeve and Aveline among them. The knights moved to greet the ladies, led them to their places, where they would mostly be ignored for the rest of the meal. Ysabo, finished with her ritual chores, looked for her own chair.

  Someone took her arm. She started. A knight looked down at her briefly, his eyes as dark and secret as the eyes of the horned man. He was very tall; she could feel the strength in the hard fingers at her elbow. His pale hair was tied back from his young, proud, clean-lined face. His brows were black. She had no idea, she realized with amazement, if he was the knight who had proposed to her, and then left the brand of his fingers on her cheek. She didn’t remember him at all.

  But he must have been: he led her to her chair, the one with the tapestry turtledoves surrounded by a ring of flowers. The stem of her goblet was a thick silver rose stem with blunted thorns, upon which the gold flower opened to accept the wine. He sat in the fiery salamander chair beside her. She had poured his wine; she remembered that much. She had placed his chair. Someone else had placed hers beside him, where he seemed to think she belonged.

  He said nothing to her then. She glanced bewilderedly down the table at Maeve, who was watching her. Maeve’s ringed forefinger rose, touched her lips. Don’t ask. The trumpets cried again; the knights rose to their feet, cups splashing wine in the ritual salute of the woman who never showed her face.

  “Queen Hydria!”

  A second, unexpected blast of the trumpet made Ysabo jump.

  The knight at the head of the table rose again, holding his cup. The chair he sat in changed every evening, Ysabo knew, because she placed it herself. The last chair left along the wall went to the head of the table. That night it was the tapestry wolf, leaping to catch the moon in its jaws; a silver wolf held the ivory wine cup balanced between its teeth.

  The knight’s voice was very loud in the silence; it echoed as he spoke, bouncing back and forth along the walls. Ysabo understood a word here, two words there. Her own name. Y-sa-bo-bo-bo. She blinked, rigid with surprise. The knights lifted their goblets again, shouted something.

  Then they gave attention to their plates, which the servants were filling with meat, bread, roots, and greens. They ate as busily and intently as the crows, but far more noisily. The ladies, separated from one another by the men and by the broad tables, never spoke.

  At the end of the meal, the knight whose name Ysabo still did not know, turned his eyes again to look at her.

  “At the full moon, then,” he said. “Princess Ysabo. Attend to it.”

  He rose amid the clatter of chairs, the music that began to flow more freely, more wildly, the hum of women’s voices as they drew together once again and began to leave the hall. Ysabo opened her mouth impulsively, bewilderedly to ask: Attend to what? Aveline, beside her suddenly, pulled her into the drift of women.

  “I didn’t understand,” Ysabo murmured finally, carefully. Aveline knew exactly what she meant.

  “Your wedding.”

  Ysabo received that news numbly. Why? turned somehow into Why not? in that incomprehensible world.

  She said, feeling suddenly insignificant, lost, and very plain, “I still don’t know his name.”

  But Aveline had turned away to greet someone. Ysabo moved with the gentle, inexorable tide of women across the threshold.

  Eight

  On her rare half-days off of work, Emma went looking for her mother.

  That morning, she brought Lady Eglantyne and Sophie their breakfasts. Then she cleaned the grates, laid new fires, and tidied their rooms. Lady Eglantyne, her pink, sunken eyes filmy with sleep as she sat up in bed, murmured a few words now and then to her teacup or to her toast, which she politely refrained from eating. Sophie coaxed a few spoonfuls of porridge into her and a couple of strawberries. Dr. Grantham was shown up, in time to keep her from nodding off into her poached egg.

  “No word yet,” Emma heard him tell Sophie before she took the tray back down.

  “Nothing yet,” she told Mrs. Haw in the kitchen, and “Not yet,” to Mrs. Blakeley and Fitch, who were in the butler’s pantry polishing silver that hadn’t been used in years. Ever since the doctor had sent his letter posthaste to Landringham, Mrs. Blakeley had been obsessively counting things. Bed linens, towels, plates, forks, wineglasses, chairs. She vacillated between tearing the dust covers off the furniture and airing the rooms, or leaving such matters until the heir had given them a definite date of arrival.

  “No use undoing what we’ll only have to do over again if she doesn’t come for months,” she kept saying. And, with panic in her eyes: “What will we do with their horses? The stables have been empty for years. To say nothing of the garden.”

  “Worry when it’s time to worry,” Mrs. Haw told her, sighing resignedly. “I can’t fret over cooking meals single-handedly for guests I can’t even count yet. Besides, we don’t even know if we’ll be kept on.” Mrs. Blakeley was rendered speechless at the thought. Mrs. Haw shrugged her massive shoulders, working her way around a
potato skin with her knife. “Let’s wait to worry until we’re told why we need to.”

  In the midst of such uncertainty, nobody remembered that it was Emma’s half-day off. She didn’t remind them. Mrs. Blakeley was liable to find a dozen things for Emma to do, and a dozen reasons why she should give up her half-day and do them. At noon, Emma took her apron and cap off, put her walking shoes on, and slipped out the boot room door.

  She walked through the woods in the direction of the tree house first, though she had no real expectation of finding Hesper there. She could be anywhere on that sunny, genial day. The trees, maple, elm, birch, busy leafing out among the coastal pine after a weary winter, preened their leaves in the wind like birds flaunting their colors.

  Anything—wild ginger, mushrooms, hawthorn, violets, honeysuckle—might have caught her mother’s eye, or tantalized her nose, sent her clambering over hill and dale, filling the many pockets of her apron. As well, she might be napping under a bush. Or walking to town in her old clamming boots to buy a fish or a book. Sometimes Emma missed her completely, had to leave a gift and a message on her table in greeting.

  That afternoon, Hesper was easy to find. Emma saw her from a distance among the trees, working the debris out of a new patch of garden near her house. Her arms and legs were bare, golden; the hoe wheeled and flashed around her in the light. Her hair, a mass of long, gray-brown curls, streamed in the wind like the tree boughs. She wore an old dress with the sleeves torn out, and the skirt raggedly shortened to her knees. As though she sensed someone’s eyes on her, she let the hoe drop abruptly, turned, shading her eyes with her hand. Emma heard her voice, deep and delighted, blown up the hill by the wind.

  “Emma!”

  “Dr. Grantham has sent for Lady Eglantyne’s heir,” Emma said breathlessly after they hugged, news tumbling randomly out of her, for she hadn’t seen Hesper for nearly a month. “Mrs. Haw thinks we might all be discharged.”

  “Good,” her mother said, washing her hands in a bucket beside the door. “Then you can come and live with me.”

  “Lady Eglantyne is still alive, though she hardly eats, and mostly sleeps. The doctor said if you have anything left for him to try, bring it up to the house.”

  “I will.” She dried her hands on an old apron, smiling at Emma. The lines were deep around her eyes and mouth in her lean, sun-browned face. But her smile seemed younger than ever. “How are you, girl? You look a little shadowy around the edges. Come in, and I’ll make you a tea for that.”

  She disappeared into the crazed house, the huge, hollowed tree trunk with a thatched roof, smaller huts and lean-tos built up around the openings hewn into its bole, the whole looking like a weird colony of mushrooms burgeoning off one another and held together by climbing roses and flowering vines. A chimney smoked improbably amid the thatch, attached to the thick stone hearth within the tree. One of the lean-tos, Emma knew, was entirely filled with books and papers.

  Emma followed. A thought shook her as she stepped across the threshold, and she froze. “The princess. What will happen to her if I leave? If someone else—some stranger wanting towels—finds her behind the linen closet door instead?”

  “I’d worry more about the stranger,” her mother said cryptically and pulled a stool made of unstripped white birch saplings out from under an oak door laid on trestles for a table. “From what I can tell, that’s a very dangerous house.”

  Emma sat down on the stool, staring at Hesper. “For Ysabo?”

  “For any stranger that chances in.”

  “What have you found out about it?”

  “Well, for one thing it’s very old magic,” Hesper said, putting this and that from her jars into the teapot. “I don’t know how old, and I don’t know whose.” She paused, a spoonful of rose hips suspended above the pot; lines rippled across her brow. “There’s so little to be found . . . It’s all secrets, between lines, allusions in letters, hints in diaries. But for at least a couple of centuries, if not longer. People writing about stories their children invented, ghosts their servants or some lord in his cups saw. Doors open, they get a glimpse—but nobody sees the whole of it. Ever.”

  “How much did you see?”

  “Enough to astonish me. Enough to make me wonder . . .” She turned to unhook the steaming kettle hanging above the fire, added water to her mix. She hung it back up, then sat down herself, elbows on the table, gazing at her daughter. “You be careful, girl. Don’t even think of crossing into that.”

  Emma shook her head vehemently, braid bouncing on her shoulder blades. “No. I did invite the princess here, though, after the knight hit her. She said she couldn’t abandon the ritual.”

  “What knight?”

  “The one she asked why. Why she had to marry him.”

  Hesper, absolutely still on her chair, echoed the word silently, “Why?” Then she said abruptly, “Wait. Wait. I have to write this down.”

  “You didn’t know this part?

  “Not the part where anybody ever asked why.”

  Emma told her that part, sipping tea with a dollop of honey in it, holding the warm cup against her cheeks, her forehead, like a soothing hand.

  “I guess I wouldn’t mind so much,” she said, while Hesper scribbled the last of her tale into the end papers of an apothecary’s remedy book.

  “Mind what?”

  “Leaving Aislinn House, after Lady Eglantyne dies. I could get a job in town, take care of us both. Especially if there’s nobody I know left in the house after the heir comes and brings her own staff.”

  Her mother gave her a skewed look above her raised cup. “You don’t really think Miss Miranda Beryl of Landringham would settle herself into this backwater.”

  “How do you know her name?”

  “Ah, gossip. It holds the world together. The doctor’s been asking around town about her, who might know her.” Hesper took another sip. “Strange that even Lady Eglantyne’s own solicitors are reluctant to write to Miss Beryl. As though they know she’d never stay, and Lady Eglantyne’s death might mean the end of the family affairs in Sealey Head.”

  “She’s Lady Eglantyne’s family. She should be here.”

  “Have you heard Lady Eglantyne talk about her great-niece?”

  Emma sighed. “No. She doesn’t talk much at all. She mostly dreams. Maybe nobody wants Miranda Beryl here. Nobody wants any changes.”

  They ate bread and curds and a spicy beef sausage someone had given Hesper in payment. Then Emma took off her shoes and stockings, tucked up her skirt, and helped her mother clear the garden for cabbages, carrots, spinach, beans, and radishes. Hesper had already weeded the herb garden; scents of rosemary and sage teased Emma’s nose as she worked.

  “You should walk into town,” Hesper protested as the sun, going its way, began to shift the patterns of tree shadows around them into the garden. “Breathe the sea air, see some younger faces.”

  “Right now I’m doing this,” Emma answered, attacking a prodigious burdock root with satisfaction. “I’m seeing you.”

  Later, when they had downed tools, washed off the dirt, and perched themselves on a sunlit log for cups of mint tea and a bowl of wild strawberries, Emma asked her mother, “Why did you leave Aislinn House if you were only going to sit in the tree house thinking about it? There, you could just open a door and see more pieces of the mystery.”

  Hesper shook her head. Her thick, springy hair had collected an assortment of petals, twigs, a couple of insects trying to find their way out, sprigs of herbs she had tucked behind her ear for later. One of the insects, a tiny red beetle, flew away at the movement; Emma reached out and brushed the spider off.

  “I never saw like you did. I caught glimpses of a great many people doing incomprehensible things. Some of them made me uneasy. The knights fully armed. That great pack of crows flying rings around the tower. Once when I opened the stillroom pantry, I thought they would come streaming through the doorway after me. I couldn’t say for certain that anyone even saw me.
Except the crows. Maybe it’s a rare thing in her world that your friend Ysabo sees you as clearly as you see her. I left Aislinn House because I wanted more time of my own to find out about it. And because—” She smiled, tilting her face into the light. “I like being outdoors. I guessed that people would come seeking my remedies no matter where I kept myself. And out here, I can go barefoot.”

  Emma stayed for supper, which was great fat dried mushrooms plumped up with water and fried in butter, a salad of dandelion and violet leaves, and the curly tips of ferns, fish from the market her mother had smoked, and ale—another payment. Emma, a bit sore from her exertions and pleasantly relaxed from the ale, heard the bell on her way through the woods. The light faded around her. The trees thinned, opened to reveal the unkempt hedges and overrun gardens of Aislinn House, all but lost in wildness.