The Bell at Sealey Head

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Known locally as a wood witch. She’s an herbalist; people come to her with random problems. Even Dr. Grantham consults her sometimes. She lives in a sort of tree house near Aislinn House. For some reason, she collects any kind of family history, memoir, journal, even old letters that have to do with Sealey Head. She takes them in trade, or buys them outright, if she has to. I’ve been putting such works aside for her for years.”

  “Interesting,” Ridley murmured. His eyes had grown very dark behind his lenses. “Does she say why?”

  “Why such an obsession with a rather commonplace coastal town?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. I pressed her about it once; she only looked vague and talked about ancient herbal remedies passed down through generations.” Mr. Trent shrugged. “Maybe that’s her interest. But I think there’s something else . . .” He gestured toward the window, where a line of wooded hills rose above warehouses, shops, dwellings, and the back lanes of Sealey Head. “She lives up there. She might talk to you about Sealey Head. If you can’t find the tree house, ask the young maid at Aislinn House; that’s her daughter, Emma.”

  “Do you know this wood witch?” Ridley asked Judd, after he had paid for the books and they had returned again to the street.

  “Of course,” Judd said, amused. “I know everyone.”

  “What’s she like? Would she talk to me?”

  “She’s very kind . . . I went to her about my father’s failing eyes. She tried everything she knew and wouldn’t take any form of payment when nothing worked.”

  “Why did she take to living in a tree?”

  “No one knows. She was the stillroom maid at Aislinn House for many years.”

  “Was she,” Ridley breathed. “Was she now.”

  Judd looked at him, hearing mysteries in his voice, secrets. He knew something about that sad, ancient house that Judd didn’t. Something about the bell?

  “It was on a ship,” he heard himself protest incoherently, he thought, but somehow Ridley knew exactly what he meant.

  “Was it?” he only said, and the town that Judd had known all his life changed in his head, transformed by the words of a stranger. Who had also, in that moment, transformed himself under Judd’s nose.

  A word sprang alive in his head; recognizing it, he began to understand what it meant.

  Magic.

  Five

  Ysabo was on top of the tower, feeding crows again. It was only bread from last night’s supper, and a few scraps of meat; the knights had eaten everything else. As always, gulls circled and wove among the crows, crying in their piercing, tormented voices as though they had eaten every fish in the sea, every plump morsel in its shell on the shore, and were on their last breaths with hunger. But they were wary of the crows and rarely snatched a mouthful. Ysabo had seen why the first time she had fed them, when she was a little girl. The gull that had caught a crust out of her bowl had been transformed instantly into a raging tumble of black feathers and beaks. The midair brawl had quickly flown itself over the sea, where, as the black knot had untangled itself into birds again, something ragged, limp, and bloody had dropped into the waves. The crows flew back to the tower, landed peacefully at Ysabo’s small, slippered feet. She had stared at them; they had looked back at her, beaks clacking, something knowing, mocking, in their black eyes. She had dumped the rest of the scraps over their heads and fled.

  But Maeve had made her go back. “It’s your duty,” her grandmother said, “from this day. We all have our duties. They must never, ever, ever be neglected. Not one. Don’t be afraid of the crows. They are wise and powerful, like the knights. Like the knights, they kill their enemies. But they would die to protect us. All they need is that we never fail our solemn responsibilities.”

  “Why?” the very small Ysabo asked. “What would happen?”

  “We are sworn,” Aveline had said in her rich, husky voice, shaking her bright head, her great gray eyes seeming to see, in that moment, all the sorrows of the world in the sunny morning. “That is enough for you to know. Never ask again.”

  Ysabo had looked to Maeve, who had long hair like cobweb and pale green eyes. Her voice was wavery and frail, no contest for Aveline when she was in a mood, but the right word from her, fragile though it might be, was usually the last word in any argument between them. Then, Ysabo had no concept of age. Maeve looked the way she did because she was Maeve. As years passed, she finally saw Maeve in Aveline’s face, and Aveline’s in Maeve: the regal bones, certain expressions. But though she searched every mirror in the castle, Ysabo couldn’t find her mother’s face in hers.

  That was one thing she understood now, after more than a decade and a half of growing up Ysabo. She had lost her fear of the crows; they truly needed her, she understood. And she knew why she didn’t resemble Aveline. She took after her father, instead. And if she had questions about the rigorous and exacting ritual of their lives, she had learned to keep them to herself.

  Three rules were simple, and made very clear to her, very early.

  Never leave the house.

  She had no idea how. It was enormous, so many halls and stairs and doors, she could get lost for hours just turning a corner. The idea of a door that actually opened to trees, earth, the lairs and paths of animals seemed wildly improbable. Anyway, Maeve explained, everything they needed or might want could be found within the walls.

  Never neglect your duties.

  If you have to write them down with your own blood to remember them, do it, Aveline had told her passionately. Never forget them. At first, there were only candles to be lit, doors to be locked or unlocked, certain goblets to set at certain places for the nightly feast. Gradually her duties multiplied, became more complex, their exact timing governed by the ringing of the bell. These things must be done, in this order, before it rings; these after. Nothing must be forgotten; the proper order must be rigorously maintained. She did write them down eventually, in ink rather than in blood. She carried the paper with her for years until she realized nothing had been added for a very long time. She had come to the end of learning the ritual, and it was written in her heart.

  Don’t ask why.

  That was the hardest rule. But when she forgot and broke it, punishment was swift: a heart-freezing stare from Aveline, some tedious, endless task from Maeve. Sometimes a blow. So she stopped asking, early, except in her head.

  Except two nights ago, on her birthday.

  “But why?” she had asked the knight. “Why must I marry anyone? Why must I marry you?”

  The bruise his fingers left burned on her cheek like a brand.

  Little had been said about it during the feast. Afterwards, in their chambers, Aveline had wept, of course, but not over the knight’s behavior.

  “How could you?” she stormed at Ysabo. “After all you have been taught?”

  “But, Mother—”

  “The knights have their rituals, as we do; they dare not deviate. It is immensely dangerous.”

  “He didn’t have to hit me.”

  “You questioned him. He had no proper recourse but that. No other words.”

  But why? Ysabo wanted to shout, to weep, to kindle her own storm, set it raging against Aveline. But why but why but why why why?

  Maeve, sitting beside the fire, listening, raised her white head as though she felt the silent storm. Or sensed something of it in Ysabo’s wide, glittering eyes, her tense face, livid but for the burning shadow of the knight’s hand.

  “Come here,” she said.

  For a breath Ysabo stood motionless, staring at her grandmother, fearing another blow. Then she forced herself to move, her mouth tightening so that her thin lips all but disappeared, left a snake’s mouth, a toad’s mouth in her face.

  Maeve only tugged at her wrist gently, until Ysabo sank to her knees on the soft skins under Maeve’s chair. Maeve patted her shoulder; Ysabo’s brow came to rest finally against her grandmother. Behind them, Aveline opened a casement, let in the wind. Ysabo heard the
distant thunder of the sea, a gull’s lonely piping in the dark.

  “Our world will not come to an end because you asked a question,” Maeve said. “But it will, without the ritual. Think of the ritual as something powerful enough to call up the sun, to set the waves in motion, bring down the moon. If you forget, or willfully abandon any part of it, imagine that the sun will not rise out of the sea; the sea itself will stop, lie silent and idle as a puddle in the perpetual black. Imagine that your blood will stop flowing, lie as stagnant in your veins.”

  “But he does not love me,” Ysabo whispered. She heard a sharp sound, very like a snort, from Aveline. But Maeve only stroked her hair a moment, quietly.

  “Then look to us for love. Look to the knight for your child. What you do not expect, you won’t miss.”

  Ysabo felt a sudden flash of cold throughout her body, as though she had drunk moonlight or swallowed the icy prick of light that was a star. “My child.”

  “If it is male, he will become a knight. If female, you will teach her the ritual, as Aveline has taught you.”

  Ysabo closed her eyes. She felt hot tears well behind her lids, the first she had cried all evening. Poor poppet, she thought numbly. Poor unborn thing.

  “Best it be a knight, then,” she whispered. Maeve’s fingers found her chin, drew up her face to see her eyes.

  Before her grandmother could speak, Aveline whirled away from the window, demanded, “Has your life here been so terrible? You have wealth and status; everything is given to you, done for you. All that is asked of you is the ritual, and most of its movements are no more onerous than steps in a dance. You can do this one thing without complaining.”

  Maeve turned her head, said sharply, “Be merciful to her. You at least were loved.”

  “Yes.” The brittle word made Ysabo turn, too, to look at her. Aveline stared out at the dark again, her jeweled fingers working, tightening and loosening, on the stone ledge. She moved abruptly, went to Ysabo, and leaned over her, drew her so close that Ysabo felt her mother’s tears on her cheek. “But,” she whispered, “I did not love. I don’t know which is harder. Then I had you, and I loved as I had never learned before.” Ysabo lifted her arms, groped blindly for Aveline, who dropped a kiss on her brow that burned on her flushed face like the knight’s fingers. “Best it be a princess who will never leave your heart.”

  Ysabo lay awake for a long time that night, watching the moon in its changeless ritual and trying to remember the knight’s face. Just before she fell asleep, she realized ruefully: I don’t even know his name.

  Emma found her the next morning, when Ysabo was returning from the crow tower with the empty bowl. The maid opened a door somewhere in her world and saw the princess in one of the long, empty stone passageways, just about to turn the heavy, iron ring of the latch on her side. Emma said nothing, just gazed at her over the tray in her hands, her eyes as dark and searching as the crows’.

  Ysabo gave her a crooked smile, and said, “Can we talk?”

  For once, and for a wonder, time and privacy stood with them on both sides of the door. Emma put the heavy silver tray with its ornate handles on the floorboards and sat down beside it. Ysabo hunkered down to the cold stones on her side.

  “I’m just bringing Lady Eglantyne’s breakfast down. The doctor has already been and gone; nobody else will come up here this morning.”

  Ysabo studied the remains: a triangle of buttered toast with a crescent moon of a bite missing from two corners, most of an egg congealing in its fine flower-strewn cup, a dab of porridge in a bowl that had not been disturbed, an untouched half of a pear in syrup. A strange, dour thought flashed through her head: the crows would have that eaten in a breath.

  “I’m bringing the scrap bowl down,” she said. “No one needs me until noon, now. She’s still eating, your lady.”

  “Very little,” Emma sighed. “Mostly she just wants to dream.” Her soft, chestnut brows were knit in her pretty face, with its bright, full lips and warm, burnished skin that the princess had never thought to envy before. Perhaps, if she had that face instead, the knight might have loved her?

  “What happened on your birthday?” Emma asked baldly; she had never been taught to be afraid of questions.

  Ysabo’s thin mouth twisted wryly. “I got betrothed.”

  Emma sucked a horrified breath. “Why?” she kept asking, as Ysabo described the supper and its aftermath. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Ysabo kept answering. “I must not ask. It’s the ritual.”

  “You don’t even know his name?”

  “Well, there are so many of them, and they come and go. The faces seem to change so often. Anyway, I never paid much attention to them since they hardly see me when they look at me. I am only there as part of the ritual. I pour wine into some of the cups but not others. I am chosen to escort one, but never the same one twice. They talk among themselves, but not to me. As though I don’t really exist.”

  “It’s fantastic,” Emma exclaimed, and then, after thought, “It’s monstrous.”

  “Is it?” Ysabo asked, suddenly, intensely curious.

  “It would be in my world.”

  “It doesn’t happen there?”

  “No. Well, yes. Anything happens here. But even I can choose who I want to marry, and I’m only a housemaid.” She paused, her brows peaking again. “I mean, in the best of circumstances. As I said, anything happens here. People marry those they don’t know, they’re forced into it for money or status, they lie to each other about being in love, they make all kinds of mistakes. Even being obliged to marry someone who hits you before you know his name—I’m sure it does happen here. But why should it happen to you?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the way things are, here.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Emma’s lips tightened; she glanced up and down the wainscoted hallway as though the painted faces along the walls might be listening. “Run away,” she said abruptly. “Just walk through this door. Come into my world. I’ll find you a place here.”

  Ysabo felt herself smiling for the first time in days. “You know I can’t,” she said softly. “I can’t abandon the ritual.” She lifted her hand, held it in the air above the exact center of the threshold. Emma raised her own hand, frowning and smiling ruefully at the same time. Between doorways, their palms and fingers touched. “This is as close as I can come.”

  “I know that. But—”

  “I may not question. But no one has told me not to think, or look for answers on my own, as long as I break no rules. Maybe there is a way to find out why.” She paused, then shrugged lightly. “Maybe, if I can change nothing anyway, it’s better not to know why.”

  Emma started to speak. Ysabo heard a voice, a door opening, somewhere in the dim, quiet house; the maid turned her head toward the sounds.

  “I’d best go,” she said, getting to her feet. “I have my own rituals to attend to. Our lives won’t end if I don’t dust, but that’s what I’m paid for.” She picked up the tray, hesitated, gazing fretfully at Ysabo.

  The princess smiled, hiding her own apprehensions. “Maybe next time I can tell you his name.”

  “I hope so,” Emma breathed, and pushed the door shut on her side with one elbow.

  Ysabo opened it again, a breath later, and the tidal wave of noises in the great house welled up, echoing against the walls of the hall below with laughter, calls, dogs barking, the clatter of armor against stone, clink of crockery and goblets, distant music. She paused before she gave the bowl to the kitchen maid waiting for it. She could hear, even amid the tumult, the desolate silence on the other side of the door, as though that Aislinn House had already begun to die.

  Questions filled her head, crowded like strangers into a room not big enough for them, kept coming, until fear itself, pushed far back against the wall, became scarcely recognizable in the crush.

  Six

  Luck, Gwyneth wrote in her impetuous, untidy hand, was a
ship.

  It sailed into Sealey Head harbor on a fine spring day when another roof beam had fallen into the middle of Anscom Cauley’s best guest room, when Lord Aislinn received half a dozen stiff and threatening letters from the lawyers of two wine merchants and a boot maker in Landringham, from a certain Mr. Grimm to whom he owed a substantial gambling debt, and a very private, perfumed letter from a woman with whom we need not acquaint ourselves. On a day when Mr. Blair, receiving no word either of his missing ship or the ship sent out to find her, sank deeper into gloom, and in Magnus Sproule’s fields, crows were busy ravening every seed that might possibly have been missed by previous flocks of hungry birds.

  The ship, which caused the despondent merchant to sit upright in his chair, was extraordinarily beautiful. It was long and lean, its three tall masts raked back to suggest its speed and power. It was superbly painted in the glossiest of cream, finely trimmed with gold and airy blue. It took the difficult channel into the harbor with a nonchalant roll. A bell sounded as in greeting: a single toll. Mr. Blair was quite relieved to see, as it sailed into the harbor, that it was not armed. Turning his telescope upon it, he was among the first to notice that its crew was most unusual.

  Steps pounded up the little stairway: Crispin, she recognized, and glanced out the window. The sun had set already, she saw incredulously; she hadn’t heard the bell except in her story.

  A palm thumped against the door. “Gwyneth! Come down. You have the most extraordinary visitors.”

  She must, indeed, if Crispin had bothered to come to tea; the twins usually hid at the sight of Raven and Daria. She called back in answer; the footsteps receded. She put her writing away and hurried after them.

  Ridley Dow, in a dove gray vest and a plain black coat whose exquisite cut needed no other adornment, had completely captivated Aunt Phoebe and the twins. Gwyneth, watching him chat eagerly and articulately about nothing—the weather, his dogs in Landringham—blinked suddenly at the gleaming black hair and dark, dark eyes, the warm, vivid smile. She touched her own hair vaguely, wondered if she had ink on her face. Then she caught sight of Judd in the shadows, with a cup and a saucer in one hand and a cake in the other, and not sure what to do with either.