by Mary Gentle
The older woman wiped her hands on a kitchen cloth. "As if you hadn’t been fretting to travel since the day you came back to Roseveare!"
"Me? No. I don’t carry sword-and-pack now . . . Am I a disappointment to you all?"
Abiathar shrugged plump shoulders. "Ask Hazelrigg or Kitterage when they come in. Tell me the truth. How long before you leave us again?"
"Roseveare ought to have a different heir. Jared would— no, he wouldn’t," the White Crow concluded. "He’d live here in town, and be a merchant on the ’Change. At least I’m as confused by that boy as Roseveare ever was by me."
"And now we sit here with half a king’s fortune in the coach-house—"
"Oh, what?" The White Crow sat up. She banged the pewter mug down on the scrubbed kitchen table. "That’s from my having Kitterage drive the coach, I suppose? If he can’t keep his mouth shut outside the house we’ll all have more trouble than we know what to do with . . ."
"Speaking of trouble." Abiathar grunted. She reached up to the shelf over the range. "There’s a message left for you."
The White Crow unfolded the scrap of paper.
Madam i hope this findes you in good health. I desire you will examine me as you promis’d you should, for dis-ease or else for whether i am carrying an unlawfull child. Yr servant in the Lord. Guillaime
"Yes . . . I did promise her that."
"Dirty soldier’s whore!"
"Roseveare owes her!"
The White Crow stood, stretched, and walked out of the kitchen, rapidly climbing narrow stairs; three flights and then four, slowing as she reached the living rooms at the top of the house.
Deep voices resonated down the stairwell.
A sudden recognisable burst of laughter made her stop, frown, and walk on up more slowly. The door banged open as she reached for the handle.
"Dress, little one! Prepare! Tonight is the night of—asshuu!"
The Lord-Architect Casaubon searched in two pockets, and unearthed from his buttoned-back cuff an immense brown handkerchief. He wiped his nose.
"Of the Astrologers’ Feast, yes." The White Crow stood on her toes, attempting to see past the fat man and into the room. "I have every intention of being there, given an hour to rest beforehand—Casaubon!"
The Lord-Architect stepped out. She walked in. Just too early for lamps; light flickered from the hearth-fire and reflected up from the torches below in Roseveare Court. Lady Arbella Lacey, Gadsbury, Bevil Calmady, and the Margrave Linebaugh glanced up from their card-playing by the bright hearth.
"Ah."
Dimness muted his scarlet brocade coat. The trailing white lace cravat stood out, that and his pale face under the darkness of the periwig’s curls. The gentleman-mercenary captain Pollexfen Calmady sprawled in a winged armchair. His eyes flicked up to meet hers, with a brilliance either manic humour or ironic despair.
"Polly was arrested." The Lord-Architect waved an airy hand. "Who else could he come to for bail? I must shift my shirt before we go out—"
"Bail?"
The door clicked shut behind the Lord-Architect’s large and rapidly departing back. The White Crow bit down on what she might have wished to shout after him. She crossed to the window and stared out.
Pollexfen Calmady’s voice came ironically from the chair. "Madam, I’m your lawful guest, it appears. Indeed, the courts say I may not now avoid your hospitality without being unlawful—at least until they try me."
The White Crow breathed on the window-glass and rubbed a clearness, looking down at quiet fallen snow, trodden into a mire outside the bookshops, and the booksellers’ doors thrown open and spilling yellow light.
Soundless, Pollexfen Calmady appeared by her side. His coat smelled faintly of scent and ordure. One of the wig’s harsh curls scratched her cheek.
"Selling broadsheets," he said thoughtfully, "every hour of night and day, new ones."
"Don’t fear. You’ll have your turn in the Newgate broadsheets."
He turned, facing her in the dim room, drawing the skirts of his coat slightly back. Sword-hanger and blade both gone. He smiled crookedly. At the hearth, the card game continued.
"I appreciate that I am not a welcome guest. Nor, things standing as they do between myself and your husband, a guest that you can refuse."
He shrugged.
"And the girl is your patient, Master-Physician; yes, all this I see clearly. But see you, I did no more harm to her than any sleeping husband who wakes to find himself in congress with his wife. If she have a child, I’ll pay for it— if ever I have money. And if she needs a name I’ll wed her, although truth to tell, there are those yet living who have had that privilege before her."
The White Crow looked down at her hands. The faint luminosity of magia touched her skin, no brighter in this dim room than in full sunlight; pregnant with the possibilities of healing and destruction.
"Excuse me."
She inclined her head curtly to Bevil and the rest, walking out. A few yards down the corridor she kicked a bedroom door open, walked in, shut it, and leaned back against the wood.
The Lord-Architect Casaubon stood with his shirt-sleeved arms over his head, fingers almost touching the plaster ceiling, his head muffled in the shirt’s vast folds. Unbuttoned green silk breeches wrinkled massively across his buttocks and thighs. His elbows worked: muffled muttering succeeded by a ruffled crop of copper-gold hair emerging.
"Little one."
Abrupt, he reached one fat finger to stroke her cheek. The White Crow absently pulled the drawstrings at his sleeve and tied the laces in a loose bow.
"The man is a rapist," she said dangerously.
"He is one of my oldest friends."
"Whom you haven’t seen for—how long?"
The Lord-Architect shrugged magnificently. "He came to me for help; could I refuse him?"
"You? Well, no, you . . ." The White Crow shook her head. "But staying in this house?"
"Terms of bail," Casaubon explained. "And in any case, little one, he had a claim on my hospitality. Blackmail."
"What?"
"If I hadn’t conceded, he swore he’d tell you how I wrote to him last summer, and persuaded him to put my name to the Protectorate for the repair of the eye of the sun."
"You wrote—"
The White Crow opened and shut her mouth several times. In the lamplight's yellow softness, she watched the Lord-Architect tucking in his shirt and buttoning his breeches up the sides, one hand reaching over his immense shoulder to grab the trailing ends of his braces.
"Yes. I can see that you wouldn't have wanted him to tell me that."
"You'd be angry," Casaubon explained, "given that you don’t know about it."
The cinnamon-haired woman choked, and rubbed moisture out of the comer of her eye with her knuckle. She seized his wrist, that her two hands together could not reach around.
"I might have guessed. I might have known—"
He looked down at her over the swell of chins, chest, and shoulder. "I believe I didn't quite catch that?"
"I said," the White Crow observed, "it's a good thing that he didn't tell me, and that I don’t know!"
Chapter Seven
The astrologer William Lilly plodded on from Eleanor’s Cross in the dusk. White snow gleamed on the gables of the overhanging houses. He trudged through slush trodden black, and over the yellow stains of chamber-pots emptied from upstairs windows.
A wolf howled.
He dug his chin into his collar, head down, hurrying for the arched entrance to St. Martin’s disused wine cellars. Torchlight and voices came up the steps: infallible signs of the Astrologers’ Feast. He hacked snow from his boots on the worn brick steps.
A rough-coated body pushed past his legs.
"God’s teeth, man!"
The wolf barged down the stairway, paws splaying, head low. Mange marked its grey-black pelt. William Lilly abandoned the entrance-way, slush and a searing cold wind blowing in, and followed. The wolf’s muzzle swung to giv
e him one glance with eyes as pale as ice. Scars and ribs could equally be seen under the thinning fur.
"Cannot you take a little more care?"
He came down off the last step. The arched brick vault danced with torchlight, shadows, and smoke. Immense barrels lined each side. At the far end, beyond an iron grating, the noise of the Feast’s preparation echoed. Here nitre clung to the walls, and brickwork smelled of graves. The wolf whined, pawing at a heap of clothes.
Pale skin spread through its pelt.
Its bent limbs lengthened, straightened, grew. A faint cracking of bone echoed.
A shadow leaped upright on the wall.
The young man, his naked back to Lilly, and every knob of vertebrae standing sharply in relief, reached down and swung the bundle of clothes up. He thrust head and arms awkwardly through a black robe’s neck and sleeves.
"Sir, I apologise." He bowed as he turned, adjusting his white falling-band and the belt of the robe. "I beg your pardon—unseemly—but my late arrival—"
William Lilly met the young priest’s gaze: colourless as ice. Underfoot, sawdust clogged with wetness; the pine-smell overlaying dankness and the perfume of oil-lamps. He bent and picked up a black-covered book that had fallen from the bundle of clothes. "Yours, sir, I think."
"I thank you, yes." A shy smile. "It is the first time I will have preached at the Astrologers’ Feast. I’m to give the later sermon. The text being Genesis 1:14, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven . . . and let them be for signs.’ "
"Then let me be first to bid you welcome. ‘Non cogunt: the stars do not compel.’ " Citing the Feast’s watchword, William Lilly took the arm of the young werewolf-priest and walked on into the crowded cellars beyond.
"Master Lilly."
The White Crow shrugged her shoulders, sitting back from the piles of open books on the table. Muscles loosened and lost tension. For a moment she stared into unfocussed middle distance, not seeing around her the powdered wigs, brocade coats and black robes, and the ruddy faces of the assembly.
"Mistress White Crow."
She smiled up at the thin man. "Will you thank your compatriots again for letting me use their library here?"
Voices burred. Above forty men and women stood talking in the cellars; some here in the fire- and damp-proof library, more through in further rooms lined with old casks and heated with iron braziers. She unbuttoned her doublet, hot for the first time in days.
"May I help?"
"I’d be glad of it." She pushed at the sprawl of papers on the long bench and shifted a pile of emphemerides-tables. "Geomancy isn’t my best line of work. And I’m not the architect in my family."
"I perceived Master Casaubon was unwell." The man smoothed his black gown as he seated himself on the opposite side of the table. His dark hair he wore long and natural. "I can calculate you a reading of any subject, event, or question within seven to ten minutes."
A large man in a curled grey wig and strawberry silk leaned over his shoulder. "What, Master Lilly? Still practising horary astrology?"
He raised his head, taking in the White Crow.
"Elias Ashmole, ma’am. Astrologer-Royal. This dunderhead still thinks he can predict an answer based upon the astrological moment of asking the question! Pure foolishness and delusion. If you have not the exact hour of a subject’s birth, how may you predict anything?"
The White Crow leaned back and put one foot up on the bench, clasping her hands round her knee. She grinned.
"I’m by no means certain, masters, that prediction is possible in this uncertain world. The Invisible College has always denied it. Else where’s free will? But it so happens that I need a reading of the Celestial Spheres, not for a person, but for a certain construction-site—"
Elias Ashmole held up a fleshy hand. "No names. Madam, I beg you, no names. Our rules at these Feasts are, no oaths to be sworn, no toasts drunk to any faction, and no discussion of sympathies in the present civil disorder. How else could we continue to meet in harmony?"
"Well, yes, Elias, and I am certain she knows all of that, being a magus." William Lilly chuckled. "Nor I will not say that I do not recognise what is this date of construction you have here. But to the meat of the matter: what should the analysis discover?"
"Why such a sacred site is plagued with demonic manifestations."
"Well now . . . I’ll see what I can do." His dark head bent over the papers. "Pay me in kind: a Thamys salmon, or a hare; a sack of coal; something of that. No one is rich as the world stands now. Let me see . . ."
Ashmole tutted.
The White Crow settled back. Her shoulder bumped solidity. She raised her head, apologising; and a small and wispy-haired man blinked through half-spectacles at her.
"Madam Roseveare." He smiled shyly. "Could you spare me a little time, I wonder, for some speech about antiquities?"
"I beg your pardon?"
Unperturbed, the man gathered his moth-eaten robes about him and bowed.
"Your childhood recollections of Roseveare and this noble town of ours before the civil war. Such things are of great interest to me. I am writing a—no, I cannot call it a history, it is too brief. A collection of the lives of those whose names history should not forget. I wonder, madam, if you might speak to me. Even a child’s memories may be useful."
The White Crow smiled wryly. "Yes, later, Master . . ."
"Aubrey. John Aubrey, madam." He blinked and removed his spectacles, disclosing a young face surprisingly sharp and tenacious. "Please remember that I spoke with you first. My friend Master Evelyn has a diary that he is completing, on much inferior lines, and I wish my own work to see the printer or ever his should."
"Yes . . ." The White Crow inclined her head. "Excuse me, sir, please."
The group of astrologers closed in around table and charts. She grunted, stretching, and walked down to the further table and slumped into the chair beside the Lord-Architect Casaubon.
"Having such a body of knowledge here it’d be criminal not to use it, but—! All this tolerance is beginning to get on my nerves. If I see one more royalist and puritan propagandist—beg pardon, ‘astrological pamphleteer’—breaking bread together . . . Here’s Lilly drinking with Ashmole: you wouldn’t think they’d been calling each other the Commonwealth’s Exrement in a half-dozen broadsheets this month."
Casaubon, head bent over plans, compasses, square, and rule, grunted.
"Oh . . . they may well keep in with each other, I suppose. They’re going to need friends, whichever side wins. What have you got?"
Casaubon sniffed. "I am not a superstitious man. I refuse to believe hocus-pocus about the necessity for ‘royal’ blood! Patently obviously there is some fault in the proportions and patterns of the eye of the sun, that encourages disorder to manifest itself there. Patently obviously—"
He coughed cavernously. The White Crow looked at his flushed face above his unlaced shirt, noting beads of sweat that plastered his copper-red hair to his forehead.
"Except that I confess I cannot find it!"
She stood, pushing papers and books aside, and walked around him until she could lean on his shoulders, and put her arms about his neck. His fair skin burned. She rested her cheek against his, that sweat made warmly wet.
"I saw Carola touching for Kings’ Evil today. It worked. She healed people. I saw."
His vast chest rose and fell, the thickness of his breathing audible. The Lord-Architect frowned.
"Blood-royal? Eeeshou!"
She stepped back. The Lord-Architect Casaubon squinted and felt the back of his head, apparently in some surprise that it was still there. He wiped his sleeve across his face. Phelgm trailed down onto the waistcoat that barely contained his belly.
"I—shaaa!"
The White Crow hauled a kerchief out of her breeches pocket and thrust it at him. He took it gratefully, wiping his reddened, streaming nose. He looked up through watery eyes.
"Rot it, I almost know!"
"I’ll keep searching." She walked over to the further shelves, elbowing between two arguing astrologers and an alchemist. Her finger traced bookspines, stopping at familiar bindings, and she hooked out a three-volume set of the De Occulta Philosophica, a second edition of Ghâya, the Novum Organum, and a much-thumbed Picatrix, and dumped them on the nearest unoccupied table.
Three minutes after she seated herself, a shadow crossed the lamplight.
"Damned ruffians! They nearly had my carriage over in Oxford Street." A small man beat snow from his black coat. Breaking off in mid-movement, he leaned across the trestle-table and spoke quite naturally: "There is a theosophist work you should read, Madam Valentine, if you haven’t: Under the Shadow of Bright Wings—"
"—In the Heart of the Womb," Valentine White Crow completed. She lowered her voice slightly. "You’re the first of the College I’ve met here, Master . . ."
"Harvey, William Harvey. Ashmole told me you were come. Your reputation goes before you."
"And yours, sir. I know you for our foremost surgeon."
William Harvey seized a chair and turned it about, and sat with his arms resting along the back, and his chin on his arms. She judged him in his thirties; a short, neat man with hair powdered and drawn back, and brilliant dark eyes.
"Overturned carriage?" she queried, closing a book and keeping her thumb in the place. "Would that have to do with your medical research?"
He snorted with laughter without moving his chin from his arms, so that his shoulders jolted. "It would. Damn me if I didn’t take four sword-and-dagger men to Tyburn with me this time, thinking that’s enough—and we cut the man down fairly, after many had come up to take the benefit of a hanged criminal’s touch on head or breast—and had him shrouded and, as I thought, on the way to the Anatomy Hall. Halfway down Oxford Street I hear a cry. ‘Reverence the dead!’ So we whip up the horses, and race a mob of two hundred . . ."
He lifted his head and spat on the sawdust floor.
"You’ll be pleased to know I keep the Invisible College’s name somewhat distanced from this, or else you’d find a Tyburn riot at your door."
