The Bell at Sealey Head

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “But he came back. He always did.”

  “Until then.”

  “No—he came back again to take us to supper with Queen Hydria in her great court. You must remember, Maeve! The knights’ banners hung from the ceiling, all the rich threads of red and blue and gold glittering in the torchlight. Blagdon himself was there beside the queen, an old man as hale as a tree, bearded with moss, tussocks for eyebrows and ears like dried leaves. I was older then.” Aveline’s voice grew dreamy, rich as cream. “I wore pale green and dark blue, with gossamer over my hair. I remember the queen’s eyes, how beautiful they were. The colors of my gown, blue and green together. Do you remember?”

  “Yes. Now I do.” Ysabo heard Maeve’s needle pierce the taut fabric in its frame. It was another mystery, the queen whose name Ysabo had heard every day of her life but who remained invisible except in her mother’s and grandmother’s stories. “I do remember that wonderful feast. Twelve stuffed swans floating on platters of polished silver and twelve fat salmon on platters of gold . . . I don’t remember eating any of it, though. Did we? Do you remember?”

  “No. I remember music, though, but not the musicians; it was as though the music came out of fire and air.”

  Their voices trailed silent; their threads spoke, pushed and pulled, in and out. Ysabo felt again their little, fretting bird glances. So she turned to the musicians playing old ballads softly on harp and flute near the hearth.

  “That was lovely,” she told them, though she had scarcely heard what they had just finished. “Play it again.”

  Their music wove its own thread into the morning. Maeve and Aveline’s voices added texture, soft at first, then gaining depth as they misjudged the reasons for Ysabo’s abstraction.

  “I remember having trouble with that, too,” Aveline murmured. “I couldn’t wait for supper to begin, so I could see for certain which it was.”

  “And did you?”

  “Not at first. You know how they are. Not one face told me anything. They were lost in their own ritual. Do you remember?”

  Ysabo felt Maeve’s gray eyes, cold as cloud, drift over her face, away. “Very little. The ones you do remember—”

  “Yes,” Aveline said instantly. “Yes. The ones you remember are the ones you never meet during the ritual. Those you meet outside of time, in a stray hour, before beginnings, after endings ...”

  “Who? Tell,” Maeve commanded, her hands dropping onto her work, between stitches.

  Aveline’s voice went very soft. “The one who taught the young knights how to fight. He had the most amazing eyes.”

  Maeve’s hand rose, covered her mouth. “You didn’t.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “You went down there? To the training hall?”

  “That’s where the young men were when I was young. He talked to me, he wrote me poetry. Best of all, he saw me when he looked at me.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing. For all I know, he’s still down there. But I got married.”

  Maeve’s voice leaped out of her like a frog. “You weren’t—” “A virgin? No.” Aveline’s voice had resumed its normal volume, in case, Ysabo guessed, her daughter needed to hear this. “It didn’t seem to matter at all.” She added, a bit defensively, “You never told me it might.”

  “Well, how was I to know—” She rocked forward, laughing suddenly, her hand back over her mouth. “I remember this much: neither was I.”

  “Tell,” Aveline demanded then, and Maeve picked up her needle, her voice going soft again. Ysabo heard Aveline suck breath sharply.

  “Nemos himself?”

  “Sh,” Maeve breathed, softer than smoke from a dying candle. “Sh . . .”

  Ysabo stitched the name into her memory.

  At noon the knights rode out. The household gathered in the great hall to watch and pay honor, as two long lines of knights in their silvery mail and white cloaks threaded with red knelt together on the flagstones. They held their unsheathed swords point down on the stones, both hands folded on the hilt. Their heads were bare, bowed. Sun from the high narrow windows crossed them in blades of light.

  Ysabo stood between Maeve and Aveline at the head of the lines. The three of them held gold goblets ringed with jewels along the rim. Ysabo’s cup held water; Aveline’s red wine, and Maeve’s a murky, bitter potion that smelled of herbs and dead insects. One by one the knights rose, came forward, chose their cup, drank. They could drink what they liked; if all the knights chose the same cup, it never emptied. Courtiers, old knights, ladies and their ladies, all of whom Ysabo rarely saw except at supper, surrounded the lines, each holding a long, thick, burning candle. Trumpets sounded at each sip. The enormous doors opened wide to the courtyard, where the horses in their caparisons waited restively. The knights mounted as they left the hall. The doors were closed after the last knight had crossed the threshold.

  No one saw by what gate they left the yard; there were none when Ysabo looked out. No one saw them ride beyond the walls of Aislinn House; no one saw them return. In the time between those two pieces of ritual, Ysabo had to work her way through a labyrinth of small, strange, and bewilderingly meaningless tasks.

  Open this window; light this candle there, though, on such a day, light itself rendered the flame nearly invisible.

  Lock the door at the top of the east tower.

  Unlock the door on the bottom floor in the west corner of the house that leads to the underground chamber.

  Light this candle; place it into the holder. Light this lantern from the taper; carry both into the dark of the subterranean chamber, which was chilly, dusty, and as far as Ysabo could see in the frail, ragged light, entirely empty. The black water that ebbed and flowed silently with the tide in its stone channel caused her some excitement when she first saw it. She finally gathered enough courage to follow it. The water led her not beyond the walls and into the wood around Aislinn House, but to another locked gate. An ornate iron grate was bolted to the sides of the channel; it ran up to the ceiling and down into the water as far as Ysabo could feel. She had been late finishing her tasks that day, and Aveline was furious.

  Leave the lantern on the prow of the boat chained to the stake in the stone shore at the water’s edge. Return the way you came, and lock the door behind you.

  Don’t ask who takes the lantern back to its hook beside the door, puts it out, and hangs it up again.

  Just do it.

  Go to the armory near the practice yard. No one will be there at that time of the day. Take the sword with the single red jewel in the bronze hilt out of its scabbard, and leave it lying across the arms of the wooden chair with the cracked leather seat, the worn back where the figures stamped into the leather and painted have become pallid ghosts of themselves. Rest the scabbard against the wall beside the chair.

  Leave the room. Quickly.

  Climb up the stairs of the east tower, and unlock the door you locked earlier. Go into the room at the top of the tower. Turn one page of the book on its stand in the middle of the room. That page will be no different from the one you turned the day before, and the day before, and the day before that. A blank book of days. Lock the door when you leave.

  Don’t ask who unlocks it after you have gone, who reads the blank page.

  Cross the parapet walk to the west tower, where, this morning, you fed the crows. Put on the apron someone has left there. Take the bucket of water and the brush. Scrub the leavings of the crows off the stones, their discarded scraps, stray feathers, acrid droppings. Ignore the crows when they line the walls and watch you. They approve. They like a clean house. And with them there, you won’t be tempted to lean over the battlements and watch the wood for a flash of armor, a flow of color through the trees, whose lengthening shadows portend the waning of the day, the return of the knights, the bell.

  Go to your chambers, take off your soiled clothes, bathe, and dress for supper.

  Wait for it, the ringing of the bell.

  When
you hear it, open your door to the sounds of the knights’ voices welling and booming up from the great hall, the sound of stray pieces of armor clanging on stones, dogs barking welcome, musicians beginning to play.

  Hurry down to place their chairs, fill this cup but not that, to see which pair of eyes might linger on yours.

  Hurry down to meet your fate.

  The feast that night began like every other in her life. Four long tables were set end to end down the hall, across the stones where the knights had knelt earlier that day. Cloths of gold and red and blue were spread over the tables. The chairs were lined against the wall, beautiful things with arms and spindles carved of ash and oak and bone, the seats and backs fashioned of brilliant tapestry whose threads never seemed to fade. Goblets as bright and varied as the chairs stood at each place, beside plates round and white as the moon. Sharp, gleaming knives with handles of horn lay across the moons, on napkins red as the blood that would run from the great haunches of meat whose smells of drippings and herbs pervaded the hall. The knights gathered at the two huge hearths, one at either side of the hall. They stood on the hides of deer and soft white sheepskins, telling tales and jesting with one another. Dogs milled around their legs, stirred by the heat and the deep voices as the knights waited for the servants to place their chairs. Ysabo moved among the servants, watching for those they left untouched. The chair with the griffin tapestry she pushed to the place at the table with the goblet whose stem was a griffin rampant, its wings opened to enfold the cup. The chair with the mermaid tapestry matched the mermaid whose uplifted arms carried the cup. The lion tapestry, the unicorn tapestry, the tapestry man with his enigmatic eyes and rack of horns, these she shifted to their proper places. Chairs done, she filled the cups: griffin, lion, mermaid, horned man, with red, spiced wine.

  A horn sounded. Ladies entered, Maeve and Aveline among them. The knights moved to greet the ladies, led them to their places, where they would mostly be ignored for the rest of the meal. Ysabo, finished with her ritual chores, looked for her own chair.

  Someone took her arm. She started. A knight looked down at her briefly, his eyes as dark and secret as the eyes of the horned man. He was very tall; she could feel the strength in the hard fingers at her elbow. His pale hair was tied back from his young, proud, clean-lined face. His brows were black. She had no idea, she realized with amazement, if he was the knight who had proposed to her, and then left the brand of his fingers on her cheek. She didn’t remember him at all.

  But he must have been: he led her to her chair, the one with the tapestry turtledoves surrounded by a ring of flowers. The stem of her goblet was a thick silver rose stem with blunted thorns, upon which the gold flower opened to accept the wine. He sat in the fiery salamander chair beside her. She had poured his wine; she remembered that much. She had placed his chair. Someone else had placed hers beside him, where he seemed to think she belonged.

  He said nothing to her then. She glanced bewilderedly down the table at Maeve, who was watching her. Maeve’s ringed forefinger rose, touched her lips. Don’t ask. The trumpets cried again; the knights rose to their feet, cups splashing wine in the ritual salute of the woman who never showed her face.

  “Queen Hydria!”

  A second, unexpected blast of the trumpet made Ysabo jump.

  The knight at the head of the table rose again, holding his cup. The chair he sat in changed every evening, Ysabo knew, because she placed it herself. The last chair left along the wall went to the head of the table. That night it was the tapestry wolf, leaping to catch the moon in its jaws; a silver wolf held the ivory wine cup balanced between its teeth.

  The knight’s voice was very loud in the silence; it echoed as he spoke, bouncing back and forth along the walls. Ysabo understood a word here, two words there. Her own name. Y-sa-bo-bo-bo. She blinked, rigid with surprise. The knights lifted their goblets again, shouted something.

  Then they gave attention to their plates, which the servants were filling with meat, bread, roots, and greens. They ate as busily and intently as the crows, but far more noisily. The ladies, separated from one another by the men and by the broad tables, never spoke.

  At the end of the meal, the knight whose name Ysabo still did not know, turned his eyes again to look at her.

  “At the full moon, then,” he said. “Princess Ysabo. Attend to it.”

  He rose amid the clatter of chairs, the music that began to flow more freely, more wildly, the hum of women’s voices as they drew together once again and began to leave the hall. Ysabo opened her mouth impulsively, bewilderedly to ask: Attend to what? Aveline, beside her suddenly, pulled her into the drift of women.

  “I didn’t understand,” Ysabo murmured finally, carefully. Aveline knew exactly what she meant.

  “Your wedding.”

  Ysabo received that news numbly. Why? turned somehow into Why not? in that incomprehensible world.

  She said, feeling suddenly insignificant, lost, and very plain, “I still don’t know his name.”

  But Aveline had turned away to greet someone. Ysabo moved with the gentle, inexorable tide of women across the threshold.

  Eight

  On her rare half-days off of work, Emma went looking for her mother.

  That morning, she brought Lady Eglantyne and Sophie their breakfasts. Then she cleaned the grates, laid new fires, and tidied their rooms. Lady Eglantyne, her pink, sunken eyes filmy with sleep as she sat up in bed, murmured a few words now and then to her teacup or to her toast, which she politely refrained from eating. Sophie coaxed a few spoonfuls of porridge into her and a couple of strawberries. Dr. Grantham was shown up, in time to keep her from nodding off into her poached egg.

  “No word yet,” Emma heard him tell Sophie before she took the tray back down.

  “Nothing yet,” she told Mrs. Haw in the kitchen, and “Not yet,” to Mrs. Blakeley and Fitch, who were in the butler’s pantry polishing silver that hadn’t been used in years. Ever since the doctor had sent his letter posthaste to Landringham, Mrs. Blakeley had been obsessively counting things. Bed linens, towels, plates, forks, wineglasses, chairs. She vacillated between tearing the dust covers off the furniture and airing the rooms, or leaving such matters until the heir had given them a definite date of arrival.

  “No use undoing what we’ll only have to do over again if she doesn’t come for months,” she kept saying. And, with panic in her eyes: “What will we do with their horses? The stables have been empty for years. To say nothing of the garden.”

  “Worry when it’s time to worry,” Mrs. Haw told her, sighing resignedly. “I can’t fret over cooking meals single-handedly for guests I can’t even count yet. Besides, we don’t even know if we’ll be kept on.” Mrs. Blakeley was rendered speechless at the thought. Mrs. Haw shrugged her massive shoulders, working her way around a potato skin with her knife. “Let’s wait to worry until we’re told why we need to.”

  In the midst of such uncertainty, nobody remembered that it was Emma’s half-day off. She didn’t remind them. Mrs. Blakeley was liable to find a dozen things for Emma to do, and a dozen reasons why she should give up her half-day and do them. At noon, Emma took her apron and cap off, put her walking shoes on, and slipped out the boot room door.

  She walked through the woods in the direction of the tree house first, though she had no real expectation of finding Hesper there. She could be anywhere on that sunny, genial day. The trees, maple, elm, birch, busy leafing out among the coastal pine after a weary winter, preened their leaves in the wind like birds flaunting their colors.

  Anything—wild ginger, mushrooms, hawthorn, violets, honeysuckle—might have caught her mother’s eye, or tantalized her nose, sent her clambering over hill and dale, filling the many pockets of her apron. As well, she might be napping under a bush. Or walking to town in her old clamming boots to buy a fish or a book. Sometimes Emma missed her completely, had to leave a gift and a message on her table in greeting.

  That afternoon, Hesper was easy to fin
d. Emma saw her from a distance among the trees, working the debris out of a new patch of garden near her house. Her arms and legs were bare, golden; the hoe wheeled and flashed around her in the light. Her hair, a mass of long, gray-brown curls, streamed in the wind like the tree boughs. She wore an old dress with the sleeves torn out, and the skirt raggedly shortened to her knees. As though she sensed someone’s eyes on her, she let the hoe drop abruptly, turned, shading her eyes with her hand. Emma heard her voice, deep and delighted, blown up the hill by the wind.

  “Emma!”

  “Dr. Grantham has sent for Lady Eglantyne’s heir,” Emma said breathlessly after they hugged, news tumbling randomly out of her, for she hadn’t seen Hesper for nearly a month. “Mrs. Haw thinks we might all be discharged.”

  “Good,” her mother said, washing her hands in a bucket beside the door. “Then you can come and live with me.”

  “Lady Eglantyne is still alive, though she hardly eats, and mostly sleeps. The doctor said if you have anything left for him to try, bring it up to the house.”

  “I will.” She dried her hands on an old apron, smiling at Emma. The lines were deep around her eyes and mouth in her lean, sun-browned face. But her smile seemed younger than ever. “How are you, girl? You look a little shadowy around the edges. Come in, and I’ll make you a tea for that.”

  She disappeared into the crazed house, the huge, hollowed tree trunk with a thatched roof, smaller huts and lean-tos built up around the openings hewn into its bole, the whole looking like a weird colony of mushrooms burgeoning off one another and held together by climbing roses and flowering vines. A chimney smoked improbably amid the thatch, attached to the thick stone hearth within the tree. One of the lean-tos, Emma knew, was entirely filled with books and papers.

  Emma followed. A thought shook her as she stepped across the threshold, and she froze. “The princess. What will happen to her if I leave? If someone else—some stranger wanting towels—finds her behind the linen closet door instead?”