“Your mother has told me everything about her,” the mysterious Mr. Dow explained. “Everything you have told her. I’ve been putting bits and pieces of the story together for years. You see, I think one of my ancestors was responsible for the spell on Aislinn House.”
“Spell.” The unlikely word took shape and meaning in Emma’s head, became suddenly comprehensible. “Spell. Is that what it is?”
“I think so,” Mr. Dow said, watching her intently from behind his lenses.
“I don’t—I never thought about such things before. But it does—When you said it, it felt right. It could explain so many strange things.” She heard Mr. Dow gather breath, loose it in a slow, deep, satisfied sigh. She studied him, brows rising again, fretting together. “But what could you do? You don’t know that place. It’s eerie—full of great, noisy, armed knights, flocks of crows that look at you like they’d swarm over you and pick your bones if they didn’t like the expression on your face. What could you do for Ysabo?”
“I don’t know. I can’t know until I’ve seen. Your mother told me you open doors to that secret world, you talk to Ysabo across thresholds. Would you open one for me?”
Emma opened her mouth; nothing came out.
“Mr. Dow just wants a glimpse of Ysabo’s world,” Hesper told her quickly. “He might see a great deal, like you, or very little but the odd detail, which is all I ever see. He won’t interfere. And she needn’t see him at all. He could stand behind the door and peer through the crack along the hinges. Couldn’t you?”
Mr. Dow looked at her, his spectacles reflecting light, hiding his expression. He said quickly, “Yes, of course.”
Hesper nodded encouragingly at Emma, who said dazedly, “But I never know what door I’ll find her behind. Any door, it could be, anywhere in this house, from cellar to attic.”
“Then I’ll follow you while you work,” Ridley Dow said. “Very discreetly, of course; no one will know I’m here. You can try the doors of whatever room you’re in. I promise I won’t get in your way, and I’ll be very patient while you’re busy.”
“And I can help you work,” Hesper offered.
“I could use help,” Emma admitted. “And the house is very quiet, now. There’s only Mr. Fitch, who mostly stays down in his pantry, and Mrs. Blakeley, who hates climbing stairs. Sophie never leaves Lady Eglantyne’s bedroom, and Mrs. Haw never leaves the kitchen except to shop.”
“So there we are, then,” Mr. Dow said briskly. “Where shall we start? What were you doing when we came in?”
“Pulling the dustsheets off the billiards table.”
“And which way is that?”
“Wait,” Hesper interrupted. “You’re both missing what’s under our noses.”
“And that would be?” Mr. Dow asked with alacrity.
“The stillroom pantry door. Right over there. It’s where Emma first saw Ysabo.”
They all looked at it: Mr. Dow hopeful, Hesper expectant, Emma with sudden weariness as she remembered everything in the pantry lying under a decade-old coat of dust that would need to be dealt with, along with a hundred other things that needed ... She moved toward the closed door with a shrug; it had to be looked into, and it was a place to start.
She gave Mr. Dow a moment to position himself at the hinges, then opened the door.
And there was the princess, framed by stones as always at that time of the morning, standing in an arched walkway near the top of the house, with the restless sough of sounds splashing up from the great chasm of the hall behind her. She smiled instantly at Emma. But her speckled eyes seemed wary, oddly secretive.
“I’m exploring,” she told Emma very softly. “I’m trying to understand things.”
“Oh, be careful,” Emma begged.
“I am, I am.” Her wild, curly red hair hung loosely down her back; on her pale, plain face the mark of the knight’s fingers had faded to a startling shade of greengage plum. “I can’t talk now; I must be very quiet.”
“I know; I can’t, either. The house will be full of guests by evening. The heir is coming.”
“Ah—did your lady die?”
“Not yet. But she’s no better.”
Ysabo nodded gravely. Then her eyes shifted. She stared in utter astonishment at what was going on at Emma’s elbow, which was Ridley Dow, touching Emma’s arm gently, and saying, as he eased past her to step across the threshold, “Princess Ysabo, I am Ridley Dow. I believe you might have crossed paths with an ancestor of mine, Nemos Moore.”
“Emma!” Mrs. Blakeley called just outside the stillroom door, and Emma’s bones leaped in her skin like a deer at a pistol shot. Her fingers slid off the door. Mr. Dow reached out, closed it deftly behind him as the housekeeper entered the stillroom.
“Oh, there you are, Emma. And Hesper, too! I do hope you’ve come to give us a hand; I’m sure Emma’s told you what’s happening.”
“Yes,” Hesper said, blinking rapidly at the afterimage of the vanished Mr. Dow. “Yes, I’d be happy to, Mrs. Blakeley. I could give this room a good tidying, for instance.”
“That would be extremely helpful. Emma, the servants’ stairway needs sweeping badly, if we’re to have strangers running up and down them.”
“Yes, Mrs.—”
“And the windows in the breakfast room are appalling, Mr. Fitch discovered when he went to gather up the silver pieces to polish. You’ll need to examine the linen in the drawers for moths.”
“Stairway,” Emma repeated mindlessly. “Windows, linens—”
“And—oh, I know there is so much we depend upon you for, but please remember Lady Eglantyne’s lunch tray. Though why we bother when she won’t eat—” Mrs. Blakeley finished worriedly.
“I can take that up,” Hesper offered quickly. “I’d like a look at her, to see if anything comes to mind to help her.”
“Yes, Hesper, please do. I just don’t know, all this turmoil, and the poor woman trying to die peacefully.”
“I’m sure you’re doing your best, Mrs. Blakeley.”
“Well, we are, and I’m glad to see you back, Hesper.”
Emma waited until the housekeeper turned finally, and the last of her black hem fluttered through the door. Then she flung herself at the pantry door, her mother close behind her. She wrenched it open.
Nothing but shelf after shelf of dusty bottles and jars, dried herbs and cobwebs hanging overhead, a couple of bluebottles banging away at the small, high, grimy windows.
She and Hesper stared at one another wordlessly. Then Hesper said sharply, “I’ll finish the game room and clean the stillroom. You go and open every door you see.”
She did, all through the house, pitting herself as desperately and randomly as any bluebottle searching for its freedom, at all the doors in the house.
Not one opened to Ysabo’s world.
THE carriages rattled down the cobbled, weedy drive in the early afternoon. Emma, sitting on the breakfast-room carpet, awash in a pile of tablecloths and napkins upon which the moths had feasted without remorse, heard the sound with horror. Here they all were, with Miss Miranda Beryl, and nothing would ever be the same again. She scrambled out of the linen pile, threw everything into a laundry basket, and shoved it behind the first door she passed: the cupboard under the stairs, which gave her a good look at brass polish and cleaning cloths, and nothing at all of either Ysabo or Mr. Dow.
She pulled her apron straight, hitched up a stocking, and ran to the open front door to join the rest of the staff of Aislinn House on the steps to welcome the heir. Mr. Fitch, in his black and looking stately, had a cloth stained with silver polish hanging out of his back pocket. Mrs. Blakeley gestured sharply to Emma, who hurried into the gap between the housekeeper and Mrs. Haw, whose annoyance at being pulled out of the kitchen was rapidly melting into terror.
Even Hesper had been given an apron and pulled into the receiving line. The ruffled apron hem dangled oddly between her torn skirt and her bare feet in their clogs.
Seven carriag
es, a dozen men on horseback, filed down the drive, came to a halt at the front steps. Emma watched numbly as steps were placed, carriage doors opened, ladies placed a satin slipper, a gilded shoe upon the first step and came out in streams and clouds of color, their hats completely veiled in swaths of flowing net and lace. They stood on the drive, faces hidden within their private clouds, turning this way and that to examine the ancient, tired house, the overgrown lawns and tangled gardens, the stables no one had remembered to open, the dry fountain and the fish pool so murky that even the frogs had abandoned it.
Mrs. Haw gave a weary sigh, flung up her hands, and lowered her bulk heavily onto the steps. “Might as well just walk straight into the wood,” she muttered. Mr. Fitch hissed at her; Mrs. Blakeley gave a small, despairing moan. Even Hesper shifted, backed up a step, as though she wanted to yield the house to its fate and go take off the ridiculous apron.
Then the head carriage trembled on its axle; a streak of cobalt blue filled the doorway. A white kid boot with a heel like a spindle positioned itself upon the wooden steps amid the flurry of white lace underskirt and dark blue. A head, startlingly bare in that company, ducked under the lintel, tilted upward to survey the motley assembled on the porch. They stared at her; she gazed back at them. She had ivory hair with shades of gold in it, done up in a bouquet of curls on top of her head with a violet tucked into each curl. She looked like something out of a fairy tale, Emma thought: skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood. Great eyes the color of her name, green as sea on a turbulent day, but no expression in them at all; no telling what she was thinking.
She unfolded a tall, slender body and descended gracefully to the ground. Nobody around her moved. They simply watched her silently, as though waiting for a sign that they would stay or go.
She walked up the steps, stopped in front of Mr. Fitch.
“I’m Miranda Beryl,” she said, as though he hadn’t guessed. Her voice was deep, cool, and crisp. “I wish to see my great-aunt.”
“Yes, miss,” he said quickly, and turned his head. “Emma. Take Miss Beryl upstairs.”
“Yes, Mr. Fitch,” Emma said, her own voice so high and tight in her head she sounded like the hinges on the boot room door.
Miranda Beryl said nothing more, gave no instructions to the world suspended outside Aislinn House. She followed Emma inside, barely glancing at the house, the broad rooms opened for the first time in years, and respectably tidy, except, Emma noted, for the dust cloth dangling over the marble head of somebody in the drawing room. But no time left to deal with it now. They went up the grand staircase, polished and dusted until the old rosewood gleamed; the painted faces of Miranda Beryl’s family along the walls seemed to watch her with interest as she passed.
Emma opened Lady Eglantyne’s door. Sophie, startled out of a nap in her chair beside the bed, rose, blinking with wonder at the astonishing woman in blue. She curtsied suddenly in confusion, as though to the fairy queen. Miss Beryl flicked a glance at her, then ignored her. She went to the bedside, stood looking down at her great-aunt a moment. She laid her long fingers on the bird-bone wrist, and Lady Eglantyne’s eyes fluttered open.
Her sunken, cloudy eyes gazed back at her grandniece. Did she see her? Emma wondered. Or only a dream?
She breathed something, a half word, the beginning of a comment, the beginning of a name. Her eyelids fell again, closed.
“H’m,” was all Miranda Beryl said before she turned and walked out of the room. She went downstairs again, the amazed Emma following, and out the front door. To all the silent figures turning to her, including Mrs. Haw still sitting on the steps, she announced,
“She’s alive. We’re staying.”
Thirteen
All sound ceased in the great house when Ridley Dow closed the door behind him. It was as though the ocean itself had stopped dead in the middle of its thunder. So Ysabo felt, as the strange abrupt silence buffeted her ears. The young man, still looking at her, opened his mouth to speak again. Then he simply dissolved into nothing, and the world started speaking around her again.
It sounded familiar enough: no vast rumblings of astonishment and rage, no raucous rattle and clamor of crows pouring like black wind among the stones. The house had ridded itself of the stranger that easily. It had swallowed him. It had blinked him out of sight. No need for disturbance, except in Ysabo, whose trembling would stop eventually, whose terror would recede. Who would compose herself, for the sake of her days, and continue on her way.
Which she did, when she could finally bring herself to move, to step through the place where the man had vanished. Her eyes still burned dryly; her heart still pounded at the memory. He had looked at her; he had given her his name and hers. And for that, he had ceased to exist.
It might have been Emma, she realized dazedly. Stepping so easily, in curiosity, across the threshold, the first time she had seen Ysabo’s world. But they had always been wary, both of them, of the random, capricious threshold across which they met. So it had not been Emma, blinked out of existence in front of Ysabo.
It had been a stranger who knew her name.
Who had he said? Crossing paths . . . an ancestor . . . Something urgent had brought him to that door. But what?
She drew breath, loosed it wearily. Another question without an answer.
She had no more courage for exploring, for wondering, for asking. The incident had stopped her heart; she wanted no more surprises. She went upstairs to where it was safe, to Maeve’s chambers, where her mother and her grandmother spent their mornings. It was not yet noon; she didn’t have to be elsewhere. Maeve and Aveline gazed at her absently as she entered, their eyes full of some interrupted discussion. Ysabo sank into her chair near the windows, took up the needlework she had left on the small table beside her.
“Where have you been?” Aveline asked. It was more a greeting, an acknowledgment of Ysabo’s presence than a question demanding an answer. She went on without waiting for her daughter to cobble a half-truth. “We’ve been planning your wedding.”
“Oh.” She straightened in her chair, remembering it herself then, and tried to assume an interest. “I don’t know what happens. What must I do?”
“Just say yes to anything you are asked,” Maeve said. She glanced dubiously at Ysabo. “You will, won’t you? You won’t argue, you won’t ask why—”
“No,” Ysabo answered softly. “I promise. They frighten me, the knights.”
“Well, that won’t last. And, of course, he may begin to love you. That has been known to happen. Usually, they forget who you are within the year. I mean,” Maeve amended, at Aveline’s indignant stare, “you become as necessary as all women here: you have your place, you are seen, you become part of the ritual of their lives. It is not an encumbrance as long as you ask nothing unreasonable of him.”
“May I ask his name?”
Maeve and Aveline consulted one another silently.
“Nieve?” Aveline guessed.
“I thought it was Zondros.”
“You don’t know?” Aveline said a little fretfully to Ysabo. “It seems the kind of thing one should, at such a time.”
“He only said it once. And then he asked the question. I was so surprised that his name flew out of my head.”
“Well,” Aveline said, pushing a needle trailing black thread into her frame, “somebody should know. I’ll ask among the ladies. Now. As for your wedding. You will be married in the great hall with all the knights and lords and ladies attending. You’ll wear my wedding dress. Rose-colored satin with webs of pearls all over it. The ceremony is ancient and simple. You pledge yourselves to one another, drink from the same cup, and kiss. You’ll marry in midmorning, after you feed the crows, who, of course, will be watching, too. That way the rituals will not be disrupted. That evening there will be a sumptuous wedding feast. You will wear the dress to that, and you and your knight will sit in places of honor at the table. Then, for that night and until you conceive, you will sleep together in the marr
iage chamber. After that, you will both be free to return to your own chambers; your husband will come to you or not, as you both decide.”
“I don’t go to him?” Ysabo said faintly.
“It’s as you decide,” Aveline repeated. “But your chambers are more private than the knight’s. You see?” She smiled at her daughter. “Nothing difficult, nothing confusing, nothing to fear. And sooner than you can imagine, you’ll have a child of your own to love.” She paused; her perfunctory smile grew deeper, more genuine. “For us all to love. Can you do all that? Without causing trouble?”
Ysabo sank deeper into her chair, tried to vanish into the tapestry. She gave the only possible answer. “Yes, Aveline.”
The Bell at Sealey Head Page 12