A Scholar of Magics

by Caroline Stevermer

  “But you must know—” An awkward pause threatened to descend as Lambert searched for words and came up dry. “You can’t—”

  Jane looked puzzled. After a moment, she prompted Lambert. “I can’t what?”

  “It isn‘t—They don’t—For women—” Lambert gave it up.

  Jane frowned slightly, apparently perplexed by his lapse into silence.

  “Jane knows perfectly well,” said Amy.

  Jane relented. “I do know Glasscastle is off-limits for any but those properly escorted by members of the university and they man the gates with Fellows of Glasscastle to keep it that way. Very proper and sedate, this place. What about you? Are you able to range at will, or do you have a chaperon?”

  Lambert found Jane’s flippancy engaging. “Oh, I range at will—within reason. Though there are quite a few places they don’t let me ramble on my own.”

  “That must have the charm of novelty for you,” said Jane.

  “Needing a chaperon? There are plenty of places where outsiders aren’t allowed in Glasscastle. Just because they let us inside the gates doesn’t mean we’re welcome there. An escort provides a simple way to prevent me from delivering unintentional offense while I’m a visitor.” Lambert broke off, conscious of how stuffy he must sound. He must have been spending too much time listening to the Fellows’ dinner conversation in hall. Pomposity must be contagious. Lambert felt himself poker up.

  Jane’s solemnity was back, and the challenging look that went with it. “Intentional offenses only, I take it?”

  Lambert didn’t let Jane’s solemn look fool him. He did let the gleam of challenge in her eyes tempt him to maintain his air of gravity as long as possible. “Maybe I should have said inadvertent,” he added, with diffidence.

  His meekness seemed to take Jane aback. “I hope I haven’t—inadvertently—offended you. I prefer the intentional offenses myself.”

  “Oh, I agree. There’s nothing more satisfying than delivering a sound, well-regulated insult. Only to those who deserve it, of course,” Lambert added with deliberate piety.

  “But whoever does deserve to be insulted?” Amy asked. “When one’s intentions are properly taken into account, there is seldom cause to give or even receive an affront. It’s all a matter of understanding one another’s intentions.”

  “Some intentions,” Jane replied, “are not well intended.”

  Amy countered, “How do you know that? You can’t read people’s minds.”

  “Of course not. But I can pay attention to what they say and what they do. Easier to read behavior than the shape of people’s heads,” said Jane.

  The edge in her voice made Lambert wonder if Jane might have some experience of Amy’s fortune-telling. Eager to keep a safe distance from that particular topic, Lambert changed the subject. “What do you aim to do while you’re here in Glasscastle? Are there any special places you’d like to see?”

  “Oh, yes. The Winterset Archive, for one. Some consider it holds the finest collection of magic texts in the world. I’m told there’s a larger one in Peking, but not surprisingly, most of that library is in Chinese. For another landmark, the chapel of St. Mary’s. I have quite a list, but much depends upon my brother. I’ll need him to squire me. If he’s too busy, I’ll need to change my plans.” Jane sounded distinctly wistful.

  “Oh, really,” murmured Amy. “Too heavy-handed of you, Jane.”

  “I could escort you,” said Lambert. “I’d be glad to. I’ve been shown around myself. It would make a nice change to be the one to do the showing. St. Mary’s is the place everyone starts with. I’m free to come and go as I please in most of the buildings around Midsummer Green, including the Winterset Archive.”

  “Excellent.” Jane’s delight was plain. “What else?”

  “Do you know much about stained glass? The glass in St. Joseph’s chapel is supposed to be old and fine, if you know about such things. I don’t. The labyrinth in the botanical garden is famous, of course, but we’d need a Fellow of Glasscastle to escort us there. Everything in England seems old to me, but when they dug a reflecting pool in the garden at Wearyall, they found some Roman potsherds, so maybe Glasscastle will seem old to you too.”

  “I’d love to see everything,” said Jane. “Tomorrow, perhaps?”

  “Well, sure. Unless Jack Meredith needs me for a marksmanship trial. There are no tests scheduled tomorrow—that I know of.” Lambert didn’t let the pleasure Jane’s enthusiasm provoked overrule his honesty. “I can’t show you everything, but what I can, it’d be a pleasure.”

  “Two o’clock?” Jane suggested eagerly.

  Amy rolled her eyes but said nothing.

  Lambert asked, “Shall I call for you here?”

  “That would be perfect. It will give me the whole morning to torment Robin. You’re very kind, Mr. Lambert.” Jane’s smile was wonderful.

  “It’s nothing.” Lambert thought it over. “It might be better to get someone with full authority to go with us. Then neither of us will miss any points of interest.”

  “It’s all new to me. Amy, would you care to come with us? Robin must have shared the best bits with you, surely?”

  “Oh, I have seen quite enough stained glass for now. You two will enjoy yourselves.”

  Lambert held Amy’s mildly satirical gaze. “You should come with us. I ought to have thought of it myself.”

  “Perhaps another time,” said Amy. “I’ve been shown the glass in the chapel of St. Mary’s so many times I think I may scream if I must admire it again so soon. When Robert decides to show you the labyrinth in the botanical gardens, I’ll come along. Except for that, I’d rather stay here and put my feet up.”

  The parlormaid joined them again, this time bearing an envelope on her tray. Amy added, “Here’s your wire at last, Jane. You put the wrong house number, I see.”

  “I did not.”

  “Your penmanship, I suppose. No wonder it was delayed.” Amy opened the envelope and read. In a moment, she looked up. “I understand the part about inviting yourself for a visit of indefinite duration. I understand the part about hoping to be here in time for tea. But what on earth do you mean by Luke 15:23?”

  “‘Bring hither the fatted calf.’” Lambert smiled crookedly at the stares this earned him from Amy and Jane. “I liked Sunday school, that’s all.”

  “I’m glad someone knows the reference,” Jane said. “I looked it up specifically for Robin’s benefit.”

  Amy shook her head. “You’re a strange girl, Jane.”

  Jane’s good cheer was unimpaired. “Odd, that’s what Robin always says.”

  Lambert left the Brailsford house to walk back to his rooms at Glasscastle. It was a bright, warm day. Only a brisk southwest wind kept it from being unpleasantly hot. The wind forced him to adjust his Panama hat to a less jaunty angle to keep it on. It was insistent, shoving him along, as if it thought he should be off doing something useful. Yet he had nothing to do, useful or otherwise, until dinner.

  Whatever the residents of Glasscastle town were doing, they seemed to be doing it out of sight. Even the busiest streets were nearly empty. Here and there weeds grew in the center of the streets, the usual wear and tear of cart traffic in abeyance for the summer holiday.

  To Lambert, the buildings of the town of Glasscastle circled the foot of Glasscastle Hill like a ring of stone. Set like a jewel in the bezel of that ring was the walled and gated university of Glasscastle, where magic lived and worked in the harsh light of modern day.

  Holythorn was the senior college of Glasscastle, and every scholar of Holythorn was a Fellow, a full scholar of magic. St. Joseph’s was a less exalted institution, for it and its sister Wearyall admitted beginners, young men who were just setting out in the study of magic. All three colleges were vital to the whole that was Glasscastle. No religious mystery of three in one was required. It was an arrangement as practical as a three-legged stool.

  In its way, Glasscastle was its own religion. Those who taug
ht and studied there were devotees of the study of magic, magic for its own sake, the purest of disciplines. Behind its gates, Glasscastle enfolded itself in halls and towers, greens and gardens.

  Lambert found it a pure delight to walk the mile and a half from the Brailsford house to the great gate of Glasscastle. The sun would have been hot, but the morning’s high clouds had refused to burn off. The overcast thinned the summer sunlight and gave it a silvery cast. There was just a suggestion of potential bad weather to come in that slight overcast. With a persistent stiff breeze, the sky should have been utterly clear, yet the high cloud lingered. Lambert savored the warmth of the sun on his back as he walked the cobbled streets. He savored the cool of the shade when the street he walked was overarched with trees.

  Glasscastle Hill loomed over town and university alike, the long grass on the hillside shimmering green and gold as the wind made waves through it. At first, Lambert had wondered at the starkness of the hill. Why build all around the base and never upon the hill itself? His friend Nicholas Fell, in Lambert’s opinion the fount of all knowledge, arcane and historical, had explained the phenomenon to him.

  Long ago, the hill had been crowned with a prehistoric fort. Traces of the flat walkway that had circled to the top were still faintly visible, as if the hill had been terraced once. It was no longer possible to tell which had come first, the remains of ancient dwellings at the foot of the hill or the tradition that the hill itself was a place of power and not to be built upon.

  “There are legends that the hill is hollow,” Fell had said, when Lambert asked him about it. “Only legends, alas. About one hundred years ago, the Vice Chancellor of the day authorized an archaeological survey. He believed the ancient Phoenicians once had an outpost here and that the local legends were folk memories of a tin mine somewhere in the hill.”

  “What did they find?” How many thousands of years had men walked here? How many stories had been told of hollow hills and places of power? Lambert’s imagination was afire with the possibilities.

  “Potsherds, mostly. Nothing lasts like a potsherd because nothing much can happen to it. Even if it breaks, from then on you have two potsherds,” Fell said. “There was some excitement about a find at the crest of the hill, right where the old fort once was. It turned out to be a stoneware bottle, probably for beer, quite recent.”

  “No tin mine, then?”

  “No, nor any gateway to the hollow hill. No champions asleep until England’s hour of need. Nothing but a few broken pots. Not exactly the stuff of legends.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Tsk, Lambert. You seem disappointed. It’s only to be expected. Modern methods elicit modern answers. If you want a legend, that’s easily arranged. Climb the hill by moonlight and weave your own. Profit by past example and take some beer with you.”

  Lambert paused at the head of Hautboy Road to savor the view of Glasscastle at the foot of the green and golden hill. Behind the crenellated walls, the spires and towers of the place were peaceful. As they always did in his mind’s eye, the stones of Glasscastle seemed more than simply gray to Lambert. They were a gray stained subtly with other colors: lavender, silver, and violet, as iridescent as a pigeon’s feathers.

  From what Lambert could see at a distance, there was no more activity within the gates of Glasscastle than there was without. It was a sleepy afternoon, but for that constant southwest wind.

  Even as he neared the great gate, Lambert weighed the merits of going out again. He’d had enough of sitting still. Yet his stiff collar bothered him. The boots he’d put on for a formal call were too good to hike in. Despite his light flannels and the crisp breeze, he was sweating. Whatever he did for the rest of the afternoon, a change of clothing was the first order of business.

  In the cool shade of the gatehouse arch, Lambert greeted the Fellow of the university on duty as gatekeeper, signed the visitors book, and crunched out into the sunlight along the pea-gravel path that crossed the green to Holythorn.

  From inside its gates, Lambert could not help but think of Glasscastle as a labyrinth or a maze, walls within walls. Three paths that met at the great gate soon branched into many, as the broad stretch of Midsummer Green yielded to the shadowed passages of the colleges that flanked it. A man could get lost in those passages, Lambert knew. More than once, he’d been lost himself.

  Lambert made his way to Holythorn College. Once indoors, he climbed stairs two at a time, eager to reach what he considered home, the rooms Nicholas Fell had invited him to share six months before.

  Fell, as a Senior Fellow of the college, had three rooms overlooking a garden. The middle room, spacious and comfortable, served as a sitting room. It boasted a deep window seat overlooking the garden, a sound, well-designed fireplace with a Venetian mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and a handsome old clock ticking industriously on the wall. On either side of the sitting room was a bedroom, Fell’s twice the size of the one he’d given Lambert.

  Even though Fell had a study filled with books and other reference materials at the Winterset Archive, his rooms at Holythorn were still lined floor to ceiling with his books. Lambert had never seen so many books in one place in his life as he had the first time he laid eyes on Fell’s sitting room. Later, when he saw the Winterset Archive, his ideas about what constituted a lot of books had been revised upward radically. Nevertheless, he still found Fell’s books a source of abiding wonder and pleasure.

  As Lambert had few possessions of his own, his small bedroom was ample in size. All he really needed was a bed and a wash stand, and there was a wardrobe besides. The sitting room held everything else he considered vital to support life: Fell’s books, a comfortable chair, and a good reading light. Given free run of such things, the living arrangements at Holythorn suited him tolerably well. He liked Fell and he was grateful to him for his generous hospitality. Compared with life on tour or in a rooming house, life at Glasscastle was a revelation. Never before had Lambert known such comfort, privacy, or peace.

  At the moment, however, Lambert found the cosiness of Holythorn, usually so pleasant, stuffy and hot. He needed to be outdoors. He would change his clothes, get back out into that wind, and let good fresh air clear his head and calm him down.

  As Lambert had half expected it would be, the sitting room he shared with Nicholas Fell was empty, as was Fell’s bedroom. The only sign of recent human habitation in the sitting room was one of Fell’s stale cheroots left half smoked and teetering on a scallop shell that did service as an ashtray. That cheroot had been there two days now. Lambert had last seen Fell at breakfast the day before. Fell had said nothing at that time about any deviation from his usual routine, nor had he left any message for Lambert.

  Lambert didn’t permit himself to waste any time speculating about Fell’s whereabouts. The man didn’t need a nanny, after all, nor did he owe Lambert any explanation of his actions. Fell’s scholarship—or to be exact, Fell’s idiosyncratic notion of scholarship—drove him. That was explanation enough.

  Lambert changed from flannels into a linen suit several degrees less impressive than the one he’d put on for tea with Amy. It was that much more comfortable and Lambert moved with ease as he took a circuitous path away from Holythorn. His route led Lambert behind the Holythorn kitchens, between the kitchen garden and the walled garden of St. Joseph’s deanery, toward Pembroke gate, to the east side of Glasscastle, to the far side of the university from the Brailsford house.

  There, in the shadow of Wearyall’s cloister garden walls, Lambert sat on a stone bench and listened. The sound of chanting voices was clear and pure. There were more voices during the regular school year than there were now, so the volume was not as loud as it had been the first time Lambert came there. But the power in those voices had nothing to do with the volume. Many voices sang as one, intoning the pure tones of the chants. That was the source of the beauty, to Lambert. That such disparate young men could each bend his will to serve Glasscastle, that the individual could surren
der himself for the good of the whole, that many could become one.

  Lambert yielded to impulse and stretched out full length on the stone bench. He balanced his hat on his stomach and gazed up into the shimmer of leaves overhead. The wind in the trees blended with the chanting. Lambert stared upward. Beyond the leaves, the sky was raked with small scudding clouds. Yes, there was bad weather brewing out there somewhere, with more rain to come. Rainiest summer for years, folks said.

  It had been raining when he first visited this spot. Lambert had arrived at Glasscastle in February. The grass had been just as green then, but the trees were bare and most of the flowers yellow, forsythia and daffodils within Glasscastle, gorse on the hillsides. The damp cold had sliced through Lambert’s clothes courtesy of a wind that seemed never to ease or shift direction more than a degree or two from true north. It had been chilblain weather.

  Lambert’s arrival at Glasscastle had been in full cowboy regalia. He’d assumed that the men from Glasscastle, stern in their shiny top hats, meant to hire a cowboy sharpshooter, so he’d prepared accordingly. He’d worn his show costume, and he’d brought along the Colt Peacemaker, his most reliable weapon. The effect was all he’d planned. Heads had turned every step of the way, some with a nearly audible snap. It wasn’t until he was inside the precincts of Glasscastle that he understood how he’d miscalculated. The Fellows of Glasscastle didn’t want a cowboy, they just wanted a sharpshooter.

  Lambert considered himself an entertainer, thanks to his time with Kiowa Bob. He had never meant to give anyone as much entertainment as he did that day at Glasscastle. It could have been worse. His shooting was up to standard. But the intense amusement his costume inspired was more than Lambert had bargained for. On top of that, Lambert had to strain to keep his embarrassment from showing. That had never been a problem before, even back in his earliest days with the Wild West Show. Lambert told himself to perk up. It didn’t help much.