Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  The rite proceeded more quickly this time, for Lucia did not pause either to explain herself or to seek Sophie’s consent for each separate step. Again the borrowed magick surged through Sophie, swift and sharp and hot, but she was ready for it now, and gentled it down more quickly than before.

  She looked up at her deliverer, hoping that her expression might be capable of conveying her gratitude, for she could find no words adequate to the task. Whilst Lucia was smiling at her, beginning to clean her knife and tidy her materials away, the front door opened once more as Gwendolen Pryce appeared in the sitting-room, pink-faced and breathing hard, with Joanna on her heels.

  “Do you see?” she panted over her shoulder. “What did I tell you?”

  “Sophie, what are you about?” Joanna demanded, reverting to Brezhoneg; as she drew closer, she exclaimed, “Your hand is bleeding! Sophie, what—”

  Lucia frowned—whether because she could not understand the words or because the tone was only too comprehensible—and Sophie shifted into Latin to reply: “Is this not what you wished for, Jo?”

  Joanna could not reasonably deny it—though demanded might be a better term than wished—but she looked as though she should have liked very much to do so, and Sophie’s belly clenched: She had been right, then, that Joanna had never wished for this at all. That, in fact, in setting such a condition on Sophie’s participation in whatever rescue attempt she might be concocting with Gwendolen, her aim had been to strand her sister in Din Edin, safely out of the way under the eyes of Lord de Courcy and her father’s loyal guardsmen.

  “I wished—that is, I thought—”

  Did you think, can you truly have thought, that I should send you off into certain danger to rescue my husband, and myself stay here and rot?

  Lucia had finished packing away her things; she rose to her feet with her arms full of books, saying quietly in Gaelic, “I must go. May your gods keep you, Sophie Marshall of Britain.”

  She bent and kissed Sophie’s upturned brow; their shared magick flared minutely at the point of contact, like—

  Sophie resolutely set aside the thought of what it was like.

  “And may your gods smile upon you, Lucia MacNeill of Alba,” she said.

  Lucia straightened her back, pulled up the hood of her cloak, and sailed past Joanna and Gwendolen like a small, imperious ship of war.

  “I am coming with you, Jo,” said Sophie, the moment she heard the door close behind her visitor. “I beg you will not waste precious time in attempting to stop me.”

  “Sophie—”

  “No.” Sophie surged up from the sofa, drew herself up to her full height, and fixed her sister with the most daunting stare she could muster. “You do not know me very well, Joanna Callender, if you thought I should sit quiet and safe in Din Edin whilst you risked your life and Gwendolen’s for the sake of my husband.”

  “And you do not know me at all,” Joanna retorted, standing on tiptoe to glare directly into Sophie’s eyes, “if you imagine me capable of dragging you into mortal danger when you are already half dead.”

  The worst of it was that Joanna was quite right—for a certain value of right which was calculated from prudence and logic and sober good sense, taking no account of constancy, or heartache, or love. She should regret this, she knew, when her borrowed magick faded—her mind might now be sharp again, the fug of melancholy cleared away, but after nearly a month’s debilitating lethargy, her body could not recover its strength in an instant, and was running on pure nerve—but the very notion of leaving Gray to his fate, when she might have helped him . . . ! Not to speak of sending her younger sister into a danger which ought to have been her own to face.

  But if logic were to be Joanna’s weapon, then Sophie should try her hand at wielding it also.

  “The closer I am to Gray,” she said again, “the less I shall be ‘half dead.’”

  Joanna’s silence was not concession, but neither was it an objection.

  “And I am not helpless now,” said Sophie, encouraged; “I can do things. Useful things. If the plan is not to be taken prisoner, then you shall need concealment; they will all be on the alert now. And,” she concluded, carefully keeping the triumph out of her voice, “you are speaking of a journey all the way to Mull, and I am the only one of us who can speak Gaelic.”

  “That much is true, Jo,” said Miss Pryce. She spoke slowly and reluctantly, and when Joanna turned to glare at her, she shrugged one shoulder and said, “I do not like the thought of it any more than you do, but . . . we have few enough arrows in our quiver, and I should be a liar if I estimated our odds of success any lower with Mrs. Marshall than without her.”

  I thank you for that ringing endorsement, Miss Pryce, thought Sophie dryly, but she held her tongue.

  “That has nothing to do with the case,” said Joanna furiously.

  “It has everything to do with it, Jo.” Sophie kept her voice low and even. “You need me, and I need you; and Gray needs all of us.”

  * * *

  Joanna sat down at Sophie’s desk (no one—not even Sophie herself—being permitted to use Gray’s) and, after several false starts, closed her letter to Jenny with vague reassurances which, however, were not so vague as to raise suspicion.

  Or so I hope.

  “Well, it will have to do,” she said aloud, and folded the letter up to seal it.

  She looked thoughtfully at Sophie’s paper-knife. After a moment, she slipped it into her pocket and went down to the kitchen to look for a whetstone.

  * * *

  Joanna woke very early next morning, after a restless night, and found herself alone in the Marshalls’ spare bedroom. This circumstance was not unusual—Gwendolen was an early riser by nature as well as by habit and, upon finding soon after their arrival that Donella MacHutcheon did not generally arrive in Quarry Close until well after sun-up, had appointed to herself the task of making the morning tea—but Joanna’s unpropitious dreams lingered, and she admitted to herself that she should have been glad of the tangible evidence of life provided by Gwendolen’s quiet breathing on the far side of the bed.

  She washed and dressed with brisk efficiency, descended the staircase (avoiding the creaky step, so as not to risk waking Sophie), and made her way into the kitchen.

  “Good morning,” she said, and stopped dead.

  There was a strange boy sitting at the kitchen table, eating an apple.

  They looked at one another for a moment—the boy nonchalant, Joanna silently frantic. Who in Hades was he, and by what magick, trickery, or violence had he got into Sophie’s house?

  Then the boy swallowed his mouthful of apple, gave Joanna a cheerful grin, and said in Gwendolen’s voice, “Good morning, Jo!”

  Joanna sat down heavily on the nearest chair, for her knees seemed no longer willing to do their office.

  “Your hair,” she said, without altogether intending it. Last evening Gwendolen’s hair, plaited for the night, had hung down nearly to her waist, a dark rope against her pale nightdress; now her face was framed by a mass of loose curls, which softened its angular lines without at all detracting from the graceful curve of her throat. “How did you—”

  It was astounding how well she carried off her masquerade: the hair, indeed, scarcely registered beside the confident set of her shoulders, the careless sprawl of her trousered legs, the rakish tilt of her head.

  As Joanna stared, Gwendolen’s smile faded. “Do you dislike it so much?” she said. “It will grow back, you know. If I only put it up under a cap, I should be forever in danger of the cap’s falling off.”

  Joanna stood up again and went round the table to stand behind Gwendolen’s chair. “It suits you,” she said. “I should not have thought it, but it suits you very well.”

  “Oh,” said Gwendolen, and Joanna discovered that her right hand had risen, without volition or indeed conscious thoug
ht on her part, to ruffle the soft dark curls.

  Gwendolen tilted her head back, dislodging Joanna’s fingers, and resumed her boyish grin, but Joanna fancied that it was not quite so insouciant as formerly. Then she pushed back her chair (narrowly missing Joanna’s toes) and jumped up to attend to the kettle.

  * * *

  “You see the advantages, of course,” said Gwendolen, when the tea was made and they were seated on either side of the kitchen table, drinking it. “In Alba, women may travel together unescorted as a matter of course, but in Britain almost never; your tale of Elinor and Harriet will be the more plausible for having their cousin George in the party, in place of Louisa. And George will be able to speak to people whom Elinor and Harriet never could.”

  “Not George,” said Joanna firmly.

  Gwendolen frowned. “Why not? I have just been explaining—”

  “Oh! No, I did not mean that we ought to have Louisa instead,” Joanna said. “But George is Gray and Jenny’s dreadful elder brother, you see. Perhaps you might be . . . Arthur, instead? Or Denis, or Gaëtan?”

  “Or Gaël,” Gwendolen suggested, her mouth tilting up at one corner, “as I am wearing his best suit of clothes.”

  Joanna was surprised into laughing aloud. She studied Gwendolen’s neat trousers, shirt, and coat—the polished riding-boots, she saw now that she was looking carefully, were Gwendolen’s own. They were not a gentleman’s clothes, exactly, but the lines seemed to be drawn rather differently in Alba; and where they were going, distinctions of this sort were highly unlikely to matter.

  “I hope you did not steal them, Gwen?” she said.

  “Of course not!” Gwendolen looked scandalised. “I asked very politely, and I gave him enough coin to replace them. And I did not steal that, either,” she added, with a reproachful look at Joanna; “Lady Kergabet is astonishingly generous, and makes me a much larger allowance than I can possibly spend.”

  Joanna acknowledged this to be entirely in character.

  “He was quite pleased with the transaction, in point of fact,” Gwendolen continued, “for he has never liked this shade of blue.” She tugged gently at the collar of Gaël’s best coat. “Though I am not sure how he means to explain the alteration to Lady Kergabet.”

  This time, the smile she directed across the table at Joanna was no more than a crinkling-up of her dark eyes; but it made Joanna grin recklessly in return.

  “Morgan,” said Gwendolen after a moment. “That is the name I used when last I ran away dressed as a boy—but nobody in Alba knows it. Morgan Prichard. What say you, Jo?”

  “Harriet, you mean,” said Joanna.

  “My apologies, dear cousin.” Gwendolen’s voice went slightly deeper and very slightly rougher about the edges. “Should you care to dance, Harriet?”

  Joanna goggled at her. “By Thalia’s masque, you ought to be on the stage!”

  After all, however, if she were to be Harriet Dunstan again, she ought to do the thing properly. When Gwendolen held out her hand, therefore, in the best gentlemanly manner, Joanna took it.

  At once she was swept into a sort of manic reel, danced to and fro across Sophie’s kitchen, which left them both breathless and laughing. When finally they spun to a halt and dropped hands, and Joanna (in character as Harriet) curtseyed whilst Gwendolen (equally in character as Morgan) made her elegant leg, and they looked respectively up and down at one another, Joanna felt quite capable of facing down any number of inimical MacAlpines.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  In Which Sophie Makes Herself Useful

  Loath though Joanna was to admit it, it was true that the addition to their party of Sophie—of a Sophie, that is, perhaps not altogether herself, but certainly restored to something like it—was both encouraging and enormously useful. In the service of this cause, and with Lucia MacNeill’s borrowed magick almost visibly thrumming in her veins, she was taut and focused, entirely free of both irksome doubts and tedious melancholy. It was she who had procured them seats in a mail-coach bound for Glaschu, under the names of Elinor Graham, Harriet Dunstan, and Morgan Prichard; she who had done the hard magickal labour of creating a seeming of herself, which should sit at the pianoforte for some hours as she ordinarily did, to be seen by anyone who looked in at the window; and it was thanks to her concealing magick that they were rattling along in a coach full of strangers more impecunious than themselves—not one of whom paid them any mind at all—before the day’s guardsmen, Menez and Tredinnick (and thus Lord de Courcy), had any notion that they had so much as left the house.

  The broad outlines of this part of the plan had been Joanna’s, but she could certainly not have carried it off so well without Sophie—Sophie who sat composedly beside her, knitting (knitting!) something on large needles with a soft, heavy wool, and looking nothing at all like herself.

  When they came to their destination, they should again be relying heavily on Sophie’s magick, first to slip unnoticed into Castle MacAlpine, and then to escape with—in the best case—five rescued prisoners, or—in the worst case—sufficiently damning information to spur Donald MacNeill to immediate action. Joanna eyed her sidelong, uneasy.

  At their first halt—some three hours into the journey, at a posting-inn of vaguely unsalubrious appearance—Gwendolen sprang down from the top of the coach, attempting without much success to conceal her delight in being out of doors in the spring sunshine, behind if not astride a team of fast horses. Joanna rather envied her this outside position, for which she had volunteered when the number of passengers proved greater than could be accommodated inside; the interior of the coach was hot and close, and smelt strongly of damp wool and of the roasted chestnuts which several of her fellow passengers had been sharing out between them for the first hour of the journey. Equally she envied Sophie her unruffled calm, despite knowing it to be entirely fictitious.

  “Should you like me to fetch you some wine, Harriet?” Gwendolen asked her, in English; and, turning to Sophie, “Elinor?”

  Joanna’s lips twitched; had Gwendolen been taking lessons from Lady MacConnachie’s superior manservant, then? “At the next halt, perhaps, cousin,” she said. “We shall walk apart a little; mind you do not let the coach depart without us!”

  She took Sophie’s arm and steered her away towards the least crowded corner of the inn-yard, swinging wide about a stack of crates each of which appeared to contain at least one deeply offended goose.

  “What is it?” Sophie demanded, sotto voce, the moment they were out of earshot of the rest.

  “Nothing,” said Joanna, surprised; “I only wanted to ask whether you felt quite well.”

  “Perfectly, I thank you,” said Sophie. She frowned. “Why?”

  “Because . . .” Because you look and speak and behave like a stranger, and you are so much better at it than you used to be, and it puts me quite off my stride. Joanna lowered her voice. “Because this masquerade must be costing you a great deal of magick, and we cannot know how much or how little you may have to spare.” Besides her own disguise, Sophie’s concealing magick was also, more subtly, protecting Joanna and Gwendolen, by rendering them unremarkable and deflecting from them any unfriendly attention.

  Sophie’s face—or, rather, the apple-cheeked, befreckled face she had assumed this morning, together with a very slightly more curvaceous version of her general shape, and a riot of auburn curls—grew briefly introspective. “I think . . . I think we have no cause to worry as yet.”

  Joanna nodded warily. Sophie’s expression, so often difficult to read, was now entirely inscrutable, cloaked as she was in the mysterious Elinor Graham.

  The name worried her a little, too: Elinor Graham. Sophie had briefly been Elinor during their flight from Callender Hall three years ago; and Graham of course was Gray, whose Borders-born mother had once been Agatha Graham. “Is that not something of a risk?” she had asked Sophie, cautiously, on its first bein
g proposed, but had desisted thereafter, in the face of Sophie’s frosty stare.

  * * *

  In Glaschu Sophie procured both rooms for the night at a respectable-looking inn and—by way of a voluble half-hour’s conversation in Gaelic with the innkeeper’s daughter, of which Joanna understood no more than half a dozen words—the names of several boats known to take passengers to Mull.

  “You mean ships,” Joanna corrected reflexively, when this welcome news was imparted to her, in a low voice, over supper in the inn’s common dining-room. It was an effort to avoid slipping into Brezhoneg, but a necessary one; to account for Sophie’s serviceable but imperfect Gaelic, Elinor Graham must be a child of the Borders, and the others, who spoke no Gaelic at all, her English cousins.

  Sophie’s—Elinor’s—mouth crimped. “No,” she said, “boats. I hope you have neither of you any objection to fish.”

  Joanna chuckled at the mental image of the Princess Royal perching amongst some oblivious fisherman’s catch; Sophie frowned at her with Elinor Graham’s heavy auburn brows.

  “I am sorry,” Joanna said. “Pray continue, Elinor dear.”

  The frown relaxed a little—although she could still read in Elinor’s hazel-green eyes Sophie’s dread of being mocked or laughed at—as Sophie explained that the same trading-boats ferried cargoes—including fish—and passengers from the larger seagoing vessels that put into deeper harbours on the coast along the River Clyde into Glaschu, and goods and passengers out to those same harbours, and Joanna committed the names and descriptions of promising boats and their proprietors to memory.

  “Morgan and I shall go and speak to them,” said Sophie, when Gwendolen had gone to fetch back a jug of wine—and perhaps a scrap or two of gossip—from the barmaid.

  “My going to haggle with fishermen will offend Morgan’s sense of propriety far less than your doing so,” Joanna protested.

  “But you have no Gaelic, Harriet,” said Sophie, “and they will have no English and no Français.”