Unexpected Magic

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “And if,” she said, “a wise man hereabouts sees aught of this on a clear night, he will shut his eyes and turn away, making the sign of the cross for safety … ”

  Alex put his thin greasy hand under his pointed chin and leaned forward with an eager sigh. Cecilia had tucked her feet up under her green tartan skirt, with one hand holding down the bulging crinoline. With the other hand she was absentmindedly twirling and pulling a bright gold ringlet. The draft sighed in the chimney and a sheep coughed outside. Cecilia sighed too, because the best part of the tale was coming.

  “These things seen of a night are bad enough,” said Miss Gatly, “but let the wise man beware of things seen by day. Once in a hundred years, they say, a horseman gallops through the bay. He is the Wild Rider, the Rider of Doom, and let those who see him take heed. For within the year, as sure as fate, some poor soul will perish in the bay. He may be caught in the tide, and they say that happens to some, but, more like, the poor soul founders in the quicksands and vanishes without a trace.”

  The sheep coughed again. Alex, with a delicious shiver, looked over his shoulder at the window. It was dark, streaming wet with the warmth from the range, but there was someone outside. For a second, with his hair prickling, Alex was sure that he saw a face. Then there was nothing and no sound either.

  “It was the fog,” he thought. “It plays the strangest tricks. We all know that.”

  Miss Gatly put up her knitting, lit her candle, and creaked away to bed. In winter she went to bed at seven. Alex, still wrought up and shivering, pushed aside the tea and muffins and spread out Latin and History books for his weekend homework. Cecilia, whose duty it was to wash up the tea, was lazy with excitement after the story. She still sat with her feet curled up, sometimes twirling her ringlet, sometimes idly sewing the bodice of her best dress. There was to be a Courcy party just after Christmas and the dress had to be ready for then. Cecilia had hoped her father would forbid her to go after the governess-incident, but it was the last thing Josiah would have forbidden. Cecilia sighed. Outside, in the farmyard, the sheepdog barked, a snarling uncertain bark, and was quiet.

  “Tyke doesn’t like the fog,” Alex remarked. “Cecil, explain Caesar’s campaign against Gaul to me. I know you know.”

  Cecilia smiled, because she liked being called Cecil. She had always wished she had been born a boy. And she was proud of knowing Latin. She had learned it from Alex’s books while she was helping him to learn it. Sewing away busily, she explained, and Alex listened, chewing his pen. Outside Tyke growled, and was quiet again.

  “Then,” said Cecilia, “Caesar was quite shocking to the poor Helvetii. I cannot at the moment remember why they came into it—”

  “But I have to know,” said Alex. “Try to remember.”

  Cecilia thought, scratching at the scrubbed table with her needle. The grandfather clock ticked in a clattering, unhurried way, and the lamp on the table whispered and flared sideways in a cold draft from somewhere.

  Cecilia said at last: “Well, they were wandering about in southeastern Gaul when they should have been in Switzerland, but I—”

  “They were in search of a new home, poor souls,” said someone else.

  Alex jumped up. His chair fell over behind him. Cecilia, with a gasp that was nearly a scream, jerked around and slapped one hand down on her crinoline, horrified at all the frothy petticoats she had been showing. The stranger latched the back door without a sound and came down the room toward them with the faintest of swishing and chinking.

  “I beg your pardon for intruding on you,” he said.

  They stared at him. The hands of the grandfather clock had moved on nearly three minutes before they could believe they were really seeing him. He was exactly like the pictures in Alex’s open History book—except that he had taken off his complicated feathered hat as he shut the door. His hair was long and dark brown and wavy with dampness. He wore a great orange cloak, stained at the hem with water and mud, and tight wet boots with long jagged spurs to them. Under the cloak they could just see clothes that took their breath away: dagged, embroidered, hanging sleeves, clasps studded with jewels, a shining swordbelt hanging across his chest, and the smooth, used-looking hilt of the sword itself.

  Cecilia came to her senses first. He must, she thought, be an actor who had lost his way. She saw that he was not very much older than herself and that he was soaking wet, very tired, and full of worry and weariness.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You gave me a terrible shock for a moment. Have you lost your way in the fog? May we offer you a cup of tea?”

  The stranger shook his head. “I do not think I have lost my way. This is the farmhouse at the end of the causeway, is it not?”

  Cecilia nodded. “That’s right. Then what—?”

  “What is tea?” asked the stranger.

  Cecilia dragged at her tight new corset, afraid that she might faint with astonishment. “I—I’ll brew you a pot,” she said weakly.

  Alex still stood staring, with his Latin book in his hands, and Miss Gatly’s stories whirling around in his head. “Who are you?” he said, very high and squeaking, and too frightened to care. “Just tell us who you are.”

  The stranger smiled at him. “You should not attend to that old lady’s stories,” he said. “I am a real man, and until yesterday I was Count of Gairne. My name is Robert—and it seems I am still allowed the title of Lord Howeforce.”

  “Then it was you I saw at the window,” Alex said, fixing on the only part of the answer that he could understand.

  The strange man nodded, and Cecilia saw that he shivered too.

  “You are soaked to the skin,” she said. “Whoever you are, you must come by the fire and dry yourself. Come, sit down, and I’ll make some tea.” Ever afterward, she was amazed at how brave she was. She hurried up to the stranger and pulled at his damp arm. He was certainly real, but very cold, and the stones in the clasp of his cloak were precious ones, she was sure—not actor’s bits of glass. He came with her to the range and sat down thankfully in the warmth.

  Cecilia put the kettle to boil. Alex moved around to where he could see the stranger better but still keep a chair between them.

  “Are you from—from the island?” he asked nervously. The man cast a shadow, he could see, so he could not be dead—Miss Gatly had told them many times that dead men have no shadows. But he looked as strange and outlandish to Alex in his Eton jacket and skimpy ankle-length trousers as he would have looked to anyone in the twentieth century.

  The man shook his head at him kindly as if he saw how frightened Alex was. “My lands lie—lay—over the water from the island,” he said, “but I think you would think of me as from the island.”

  “Then,” said Alex, too amazed and nervous to be polite, “whatever are you doing here?”

  “Alex!” said Cecilia. “Leave the poor gentleman alone. If you were wet through and worn out, how would you like someone staring at you and asking rude questions?” And to the stranger, she said: “You are not to answer him, Mr.—er—your lordship, until you have drunk a cup of tea.”

  “But,” said Alex, somewhat nastily, because Cecilia had hurt his feelings treating him like a little boy in front of this strange person, “but suppose Father comes in here before he’s told us anything.”

  That frightened Cecilia and gave her a change of heart about the stranger. She knew Josiah would be angry to find them entertaining him. He would think the man was a lunatic—and now she thought of that, Cecilia was not at all sure that he might not, indeed, be a lunatic. Perhaps a rich lunatic, that would be it. She turned her back and poked the fire, wondering what they might do if he was.

  “Never fear,” said the man. “The gentleman your father is engaged on a pile of manuscripts and seems not likely to stir. I took the liberty of looking in upon him, through the window. And, as for your question, sir, I am here somewhat in the position of the unfortunate Helvetii. I have had to leave my lands.”

  “Oh!”
said Alex. He was fascinated. Here seemed to be a story such as even Miss Gatly would find hard to equal. He itched to have the man say more. He spoke in such a formal lofty way that ordinary English sounded splendid as he used it.

  The man was looking at Cecilia. “My lady there,” he said to Alex, “is your sister, is she not?”

  “Yes. She’s Cecilia. I’m Alex.”

  Cecilia blushed and was even more nervous. What could he mean by calling her “my lady”? He knew they lived on a farm. He had said so. If Josiah had been a nicer father, she would have run and fetched him. As it was, all she could do was to make the tea and pretend to be very busy. There was a nasty silence, with Alex jigging impatiently and the stranger staring sadly at the fire, until Cecilia poured the tea into a cup and passed it to him with her hands shaking. “Sugar?” she asked coldly.

  The man looked very puzzled by the cup and saucer, but he took it politely and said: “Thank you, my lady.”

  Cecilia lost her temper, as much from fright as from anger. “I’m not your lady,” she told him loudly. “I am not a lady at all. You know perfectly well I am simply a farmer’s daughter.”

  Alex blushed—he hated Cecilia’s rages—and to Cecilia’s consternation, the stranger blushed too. He stared at her as if she had said the most embarrassing thing he had ever heard. He stared so that tears came into Cecilia’s eyes and she put her hands over her mouth. Then he looked down at the tea, which he was holding extraordinarily clumsily.

  “I—I apologize,” he said. “As you see, I am woefully unfamiliar with manners Outside. What do I do with this—this tea?”

  Cecilia giggled. “You drink it. Try some sugar if you have not had tea before.”

  Alex sighed. It looked as if the embarrassment was over. The man tried the tea. Alex was sure that he did not like it but was too polite to say anything. “I wonder what it is he usually drinks,” he thought. Cecilia, meanwhile, made up her mind to believe that he really was the extraordinary thing he seemed until she had found out more.

  “Won’t you take off your cloak?” she asked politely. “You must have come a long way for it to have got so wet.”

  The stranger put down the cup and unclasped his cloak. Cecilia took it from him and spread it over a chair to dry, while Alex marveled at the richness of the strange clothes underneath. “I have not come so very far,” the stranger said, “but I was pursued. My horse was killed and I was forced to hide in various wet places.” His boots were steaming in the heat, and the fur lining of his sleeves was soaked and draggled.

  Alex could easily believe what he said was true. “Tell me,” he begged.

  The stranger pushed back his hair with both hands and stared into the fire. “What shall I say?” he said wearily. It suddenly struck Alex that the man was really not very old at all, scarcely a man, hardly older than Martin Courcy or the great boys at school. But he was handsomer and more grown-up-looking than anyone Alex knew of the same age.

  “Say why you were pursued,” Alex said and was thrilled at the answer.

  “I am an outlaw. I am accused of killing a man I did not kill.” The stranger looked earnestly from Alex to Cecilia, plainly very anxious that they should believe him. “I swear to you I did not kill him. This man was my liege lord, and to kill him would be as evil as if I had killed my own father. Someone killed him—who it was I cannot say—and I was accused. It seems I had enemies where I thought to have had friends. And it gave color to their case that I did indeed kill a man—my uncle—when I was scarcely turned fourteen.”

  Cecilia gasped. Alex was frightened again. Outlaws were all very well, but a self-confessed murderer sitting beside one’s kitchen range was a totally different matter. “What made you do that?” he said.

  “My uncle,” the stranger answered, “had killed my father. I saw him, and so did several others, push my father from the battlements of Gairne Castle. There was no other course open to me—but I assure you that it was in fair fight that I killed him. He had always been a poor swordsman.”

  “Well,” said Cecilia, “I suppose that was all right. But could you not have brought the law on him?”

  The stranger was a little puzzled. “It was according to the law, what I did—er—madam.”

  “Call me Cecilia, for goodness’ sake,” she answered. “And was there any reason why you might have killed this other man?”

  “I assure you, none.”

  Alex asked: “And you would like us to hide you here, would you? Until you can prove your innocence.”

  The stranger laughed, not greatly amused. “That may be for as long as I live. There is no evidence that I can see to establish a proof. No—if I might beg hospitality here for one night, it will be much more than I deserve for my rude intrusion.”

  Alex looked at Cecilia. “What do you say to the guest room? It’s a long way from Father and Miss Gatly.”

  “Yes,” said Cecilia. “I’ll get a warming-pan. And you will need something to eat, I imagine.”

  “I would be grateful for some food,” the outlaw said. “It was early this morning when last I ate.”

  “You must be famished!” cried Cecilia. She hurried away the remains of the muffins and brought out what food there was in the pantry. Alex kept watch for their father while she worked.

  Cecilia was a little embarrassed by the food they had. “It is plain and good,” she thought, “but it can be nothing like what he must be used to. I am sure, from the look of him, that he is used to the choicest of things.”

  While the outlaw ate, Alex wandered between the kitchen door and the table, watching the man eat and hoping for more talk. He was fascinated by the way he did not seem to use a fork. The stranger smiled at him.

  “I fear I interrupted my lady—er—your sister in her exposition of Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul. Might I take her place, while I eat, and continue the explanation?”

  “That is very kind of you,” Alex said.

  So the stranger took up the story where Cecilia had left off. He explained many more things than Cecilia, or even Alex’s schoolmaster, would have thought necessary, and he explained them so clearly and vividly that Alex never forgot them. He knew all about fighting. Alex had never heard a battle explained before as if one were actually giving the orders to the soldiers, but that was the way the stranger explained Caesar’s battles. Alex began to admire Caesar far more than he had ever done in his life, and he admired this outlaw even more than Caesar.

  Cecilia came in and out while the man talked. The man seemed very shy of her, particularly of calling her Cecilia. He went out of his way not to call her anything. And as for Cecilia, and Alex too, they were nearly reduced to calling him “Hey, you!”

  “What should we call him?” Cecilia kept asking herself, as she hurried up and down stairs. “It seems as if he has lost most of what names he had when he became an outlaw.”

  They became shyer and shyer, because the longer they left it, the more stupid it seemed not to have asked him what name they should use. It was not until they had taken him into the bleak whitewashed guest room and Cecilia was turning back the elaborate white crocheted overlay on the guest bed, that Alex was impolite enough to ask.

  “What would you like us to call you?” he blurted.

  The outlaw smiled. “My name is Robert,” he answered.

  “Very well, then,” Cecilia said, briskly, because she was so thankful. “Good night, Robert. I hope you sleep well.” Then she ran out of the guest room, with Alex behind her, both of them feeling very silly.

  They felt even sillier the next morning when they crept along to the guest room and found that he had gone. At first they thought he had vanished without a trace. The bed was stark, empty, and neatly covered. Its crisp valences looked as if they had never been disturbed. “And he did not look like the kind of man who could make a bed,” Cecilia thought.

  “We couldn’t have dreamed it, could we?” Alex whispered, staring around the chilly room. Then he saw the kitchen candlestick sitting on
one of the crocheted mats on the washstand. “One of us must have believed in him enough to bring this here at least,” he said, and looked in the pitcher. The water had been iced over, but the ice was broken. “He must have washed, Cecil. Look.”

  Cecilia, feeling glum and flat, came over and agreed. She picked up the candlestick with the guttered candle, thinking that Miss Gatly ought not to find it there, and they saw that there was a slip of paper underneath.

  Alex pounced on it. It had been torn from the front of the book of sermons on the bedside table. There was no writing on it—there had been no writing-things in the room—but there was an orange-wax seal, stamped with something which must by the size have been a seal ring. Alex held it to the light. The device might have been a bee or a wasp—some kind of insect, they were sure—and if they tilted it this way and that, they could just make out the letters around the edge: GAIRNE

  “He told us,” Alex said, “that he had been Count of Gairne. Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” said Cecilia. “He was real, then.”

  Chapter 2

  Wild Rider

  The next strange occurrence was the day before Christmas Eve. Alex came home for the holidays that morning and he and Cecilia went skating in the afternoon at the edge of the bay. In those days the shores of the great river estuary were not so well raised and drained as they later were. Below the Hornbys’ house, almost beside the long rocky causeway to the island, was a large meadow which was flooded every winter as the river swelled with rain and tides. The railway ran along one side, next to the road, and the other side was open to the sea. The fresh water froze in the meadow, and then was covered with seawater during the spring tides. Out in the bay the river channels which wound on either side of the dark island had partly frozen over too, and drifts of snow on their banks had hardened into shining gray cliffs of ice. The mud sand of the estuary was all black and gray and dangerous with frost, until the sea swept in and covered it up.