Unexpected Magic

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “But they have not been, dear.”

  “Then why was I not told? My studs, Smith! Oh, there they are at last! Josiah is in London, you know, and I am responsible for those children. We must send to the farm and enquire.”

  So, to Susannah’s relief, a footman was sent to the farm. He went very reluctantly, since, being a footman, he was twenty times more of a snob than the family who paid him, but he went nevertheless. Susannah saw him anxiously to the door before she went off to greet the first of her guests.

  Harry, meanwhile, knew nothing of this. Shortly after the footman left, he squared his shoulders, straightened his collar, and went to confess to Sir Edmund. His father stopped him impatiently after the first few sentences.

  “What is the matter with you all? I sent James to enquire ten minutes ago. Why on earth should it be your fault? A man listening to you would think the whole family had conspired to keep these children at home.”

  “Well, we did not exactly conspire, sir, but I am afraid that is what it may have seemed like to them.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” said Sir Edmund. “Fudge!”

  The party was in full swing by the time the footman returned. He had the presence of mind to call Sir Edmund away from the guests before he told him the alarming news that Alex and Cecilia had set out early and should have been at Arnforth two hours before luncheon.

  “Miss Gatly was quite beside herself, sir, because it came on to snow soon after they left. She fears they are lost, sir.”

  “With some justice, I imagine,” Sir Edmund answered, and hurried to his study to smoke a cigar and think. As soon as the cigar was lit, he remembered what Harry had said and rang for James again. “Fetch all my children here at once. I want Charlotte too, but not Charles Phelps. They are all to come whatever they are doing.” And as James went away again, Sir Edmund imagined himself telling Josiah the news and nearly bit his cigar through.

  Fathers seldom mentioned business affairs in those days, so that none of the Courcys knew how grateful they should have been to Josiah. Sir Edmund, being as lazy as Martin, had let his money get into something rather worse than a mess. Josiah had discovered this by accident some time back and had been trying to straighten Sir Edmund out ever since. But the case was next to hopeless and things had reached the stage where it would be entirely due to Josiah’s work in London that the Courcys had any money at all by the end of the week. Indeed, the most Sir Edmund hoped for was sufficient money to have Charlotte safely married at the end of January. After that, he was thinking of emigrating. And now, when he needed Josiah’s help so badly, it looked as if his family had somehow lost Josiah’s children.

  They all came into the study, all except Charlotte, looking frightened and dutiful. Charlotte was sulking at being snatched away from Charles when she was really looking her best, but even she forgot her bad temper when Sir Edmund told them what had happened.

  “I shall faint,” she announced, but no one took any notice.

  The whole story came out and Sir Edmund was relieved to find it was no worse. Susannah and Harry told their part. Lavinia, Emily, and Charlotte admitted to calling Alex an oaf, and Martin agreed that he had been high-handed to reprove Alex on top of all the rest. Egbert, who despaired of seeing Cecilia again, surprised them all by saying:

  “Rotten bad show, all of us. Better send out search parties. Never come to Arnforth again after this, what?”

  But Sir Edmund had not finished with them. He took another ten minutes to say what he thought, and most of what he said was to Harry. Harry was hard put to it not to cry, and Susannah wept heartily. It made it all the more impressive that Sir Edmund was not, like Josiah, a lecturing, raging father.

  Then search parties were sent and the Christmas party fizzled out. Harry and Susannah were very thankful that it did. They were able to creep away with a candle to the back of the linen room and talk it all over.

  Susannah said: “I think we should try to find them. We ought, Harry.”

  “But we do not know where they have got to. It could be anywhere. Wait and see what the search parties find.”

  They went on talking, however, until Susannah remembered how Cecilia had run away across the bay two years before. Harry looked at her with long rippling shudders running from his hair to his heels.

  “We had better go and look at the quicksands, Susannah. Let us go before it is light, then we will get there before anyone else thinks of it. It is the least we can do.”

  Then, very late, when the search parties had come back empty-handed, they went to bed and Susannah at least had horrifying dreams of Wild Riders—hundreds of them. Harry never said what he dreamed, but when they met again in the early morning he was as white as a sheet in the light of Susannah’s candle. His first act was to go to the gun room and borrow one of Sir Edmund’s heavy ornate pistols. He made sure it was loaded too. Then he saddled his horse and helped Susannah with her pony and they set off, eating bread and cheese as they went.

  They reached the bay as the sun came up behind the Hornbys’ hill. The tide was just going out and wind swept bitterly in from the mouth of the estuary. Harry was relieved to see the black sands and salty gray snow appearing as they looked. Both he and Susannah had clean forgotten the sea.

  “We can get to the quicksands now if we go carefully,” he said. Susannah followed him down the slippery rocks, realizing how foolish they were to expect to find anything. If the sea had been up all night, then anything outside the quicksands would have been swept out to sea with the tide. Harry set a diagonal course across the bay on the island side of the river channel, so that they would always have the water between them and danger.

  It was only by the most extraordinary lucky accident that they found anything. They were, without knowing it, almost beside the hidden road from the island and Harry was trying to bring himself to cross the river channel, when he saw something moving, almost hidden against the gray gleaming sand.

  “Susannah! There are two horses in the quicksands.”

  Susannah’s hands at once went almost over her eyes in horror, but she could not bear not to look. She was sure whose horses they must be. They were one behind the other, moving slowly and steadily through the quicksands. The horse in front was a beautiful ghostly gray. As the sun caught his bridle, it glinted gold. The horse behind was brown, and if ever a horse looked bewildered and tired it was that horse.

  “That one behind,” said Harry. “That is Alex’s Trim Jim. I’d know him anywhere. I do not know the other, though, do you?” He watched them, expecting them to sink and struggle any minute, but they did not.

  “It is the Wild Rider’s horse!” Susannah whispered.

  “Nonsense! That one was a blue roan. As if anyone could forget that.”

  By now, the animals were nearly at the river channel. Everard’s horse—for that was what he was—was going slowly across. Trim Jim was close behind him, going faster now, because at last the landscape was familiar and he began to believe he would see his own stable again after all. Harry rode quickly across to them. The gray shied aside when he came up, but Harry managed to catch hold of its bridle. He was amazed at the antique look of the harness and at the gold leopards stamped upon it.

  Susannah came up behind, calling to Trim Jim and pulling sugar out of her pocket. “What can have happened?” she said to Harry. “Why is this strange horse—? And what of Cecilia’s Nancy?” Cecilia’s little mare was still in Falleyfell, of course, being excellently cared for by the Prince’s grooms.

  Harry and she as they held out the sugar both happened to glance along the way the horses had come. Both of them gasped: “There’s a road there!” They forgot the horses. The beasts nuzzled the sugar from their hands and then, seeing they were not noticed any longer, continued calmly along the hardway toward the island.

  “Falleyfell,” said Susannah.

  “Oh!” said Harry. “It’s impossible! It cannot be! But the Wild Rider went this way, I am sure of that. I think Alex and Cecilia mu
st have tried to follow him. We had better take this road and—and ask anyone we meet.”

  “They—they will not have shadows,” said Susannah, terrified.

  “The strange horse has,” Harry answered. They looked after the animals, who were again almost camouflaged in the glinting sands. Indeed, all they could clearly see of them were their long black shadows. “Come on, Susannah,” said Harry. He made sure to cock his pistol, and then set off down the hardway, the way the horses had come. And Susannah bravely followed.

  Chapter 2

  Tracks

  When they reached the other side of the bay, Harry and Susannah found the fresh tracks of the two horses in the frozen snow of the steep bank. Farther on, there was a trampled patch among the bushes where the two beasts had waited most of the night for the tide to go out. Then the tracks led inland from the trampled patch to the road. They were almost the only prints upon it. Since it had been freezing hard all night, the marks were still deep and clear.

  “We must follow these,” said Harry. “This is the way to find Alex at least.”

  Susannah nodded and stared around the new countryside. In the snow, it was hard to see whether it was a strange land or simply the moors they knew were on the other side of the bay. They were not sure that they were indeed somewhere they did not know, until they came to where the road branched down to the stone village. There, the horses’ prints were concealed in a multitude of hoof-marks, where a herd of cows had been driven to the village.

  “There are not any villages here,” said Susannah.

  “Well, here is one now,” said Harry, and rode down toward it. He was not shy of making enquiries when it might be a matter of life and death. His only real worry was that they might not speak English in this country. From anything else, he hoped his father’s pistol might protect them.

  Susannah was very shy. She stayed outside the gate, while Harry went to knock at the door of the first cottage. The man who opened the door, to her relief, looked foreign, but not so very strange. He wore a smock-frock like men did on the home farm.

  “Excuse me,” said Harry politely. “I am looking for two friends of mine. Have you seen any strangers here?”

  “Outsiders, ye mean?” asked the man—in English, to Harry’s relief, but with a stronger, slower accent than that of the countrymen near Arnforth. Harry nodded, hopefully. The man stared him all over and then went on to Susannah, before he spoke again. “Aye, there be news of Outsiders,” he said, “but not hereabouts. We hear tell of an Outsider who laid claim to the coronet, so they lock him up for treason.”

  “Alex!” Harry said in amazement.

  “That be the name,” said the man. He was interested and conversational.

  Before Harry could find out more, he had to tell the man his own name and Susannah’s.

  “Courcy?” said the man. “That be a name known here. Ye be cousins of the Prince, to have that name.”

  “No—no,” said Harry, hastily, suddenly afraid that he would be locked up for treason too. “No relation at all, I assure you. What made them think Alex was? He’s only—” Then he stopped, because of what Sir Edmund had said last night.

  “A peasant’s son?” the man asked, not seeming worried about it. Harry blushed. “That were what the Prince call him, they say, when the Outsider say the island belong to him.”

  “But—” said Harry and stopped again. He realized that if he told the man that Alex was right, and the further fact that the island had belonged to the Courcys before that, he would almost certainly be locked up before he had a chance to rescue Alex. “Where is Alex? Where have they locked him up?”

  The man shrugged his shoulders. “Some say here, some say there. Some say the Prince run mad, poor boy, at finding an usurper come to crown his sorrow, and tried to kill the Outsider. Certain ’tis the Prince is mad and close confined for a space. Wicked times we live in.”

  Harry’s hair was standing on end by this time. “And Cecilia? Have you heard of Cecilia?”

  The man shook his head. “I reckon you should ask at Falleyfell for news, my lord.”

  “I’m not a lord. And isn’t this Falleyfell then?”

  The man looked shocked, and, Harry thought, a little suspicious. “No, indeed. This here be Arnforth.”

  At this, Harry was so astonished that all he could do was to make a strange squeak. He thought the man was looking at him more peculiarly than before. He noticed that he was beginning to shut his door. “Then where is Falleyfell?” he demanded.

  The man had got his front door half shut by now. He had decided that Harry was mad. Nothing else could explain his strange distraught manner. And it seemed to him that all Outsiders were probably mad. They got it young and it took them in one of two ways: either they were like this Alex people talked of and had delusions of grandeur; or else they were like this one, who was every inch a nobleman and yet so strongly denied it. He pointed out the way to Falleyfell and then slammed the door in Harry’s face.

  Harry, imagining he had probably gone to call his friends to arrest him as a traitor, got back to his horse and Susannah as fast as he could. “Hurry,” he said. “He did not trust me an inch. We must get to Falleyfell. He says it is along the main road.”

  Susannah was giggling. “He thought you were mad, Harry. I could see him thinking it. This place cannot be called Arnforth. It is too ridiculous!”

  Harry laughed at that too. It was ridiculous that there should be two places of the same name only ten miles or so apart, but he saw there would scarcely be a chance of them getting mixed up. All the same, he was very worried. Susannah might have been right about what the man thought, but it made no difference to their position. One was locked up here for being mad—witness this Prince—just as much as for being a traitor, like Alex. And it alarmed him that there was no news of Cecilia. At least they knew Alex was alive. He wished he had sent Susannah home and come here by himself.

  “Oh!” said Susannah. “Those horses came down to the road here. Look!”

  They were some way beyond the turning to the village now. Harry looked to the left, as Susannah pointed, where a long slope rose from the roadside, and saw the tracks they had been following again. They led straight up the hill into the sun. He wondered if it was worth following them anymore after what he had been told. Susannah had no doubt that it was. She was already leaving the road and her fat pony was blowing out steam as he scrambled up the hill. Harry shrugged his shoulders and went after her.

  “One thing,” Susannah called over her shoulder, “that man in the village had a shadow. I feel better about it now.”

  Harry did not. To have met real people hidden away here seemed much more frightening to him. Real people did real things. But he kept on after his sister, up the hill, over its smooth shoulder, and down to another road, much less used than the one they had left. The horses had gone straight across, coming from further hills on the other side. Harry and Susannah were just crossing the road too, when a black mare came trotting round a bend. Its rider was a woman in a great hooded cloak and she reined in when she saw them.

  “Stop!” she called. “What have you done with Everard?”

  They stared at her beautiful sad face in astonishment. Susannah, in spite of her surprise, sighed with envy of the lady’s bright fair hair. Like many dark-haired little girls, Susannah craved to have golden hair and a pink-and-white face.

  The lady looked surprised too. “I am sorry. I thought you were the other Outsiders. Where are they?”

  “We do not know, madam,” said Susannah. “We are looking for them.”

  “Oh, find them—find the boy at least,” implored the lady. “My son is with him. That much I have been told.”

  “We are going to find Alex,” Susannah told her grandly, “or die in the attempt.”

  “Pray God you succeed,” said the lady. “This realm is in deadly danger while Towerwood has him. And you must find the young lady too. Towerwood is hell for leather after her and Robert, if my messe
nger is to be trusted.”

  “Who is Towerwood?” Harry asked.

  “Who is Robert?” Susannah asked.

  They did not believe the lady heard them. She talked on, leaning earnestly toward them, with tears running down her face. She talked frantically, as if no one had given her a chance to talk before. Harry and Susannah were awed and appalled, because they had never been beside so much grief before, and their awe was greater because they understood hardly any of what the lady said. She was, Susannah thought, the kind of person who always took it for granted you knew the people she was talking about, and now, in her distress, she mentioned names, places, and happenings all crowded together in a way which quite bewildered the two children.

  “And I was not at Endwait, or I might have seen his face and known the truth. Now, surely, it will die with him. Poor Everard is too young to understand, you see—but I know he is not mad. I do not believe he killed Arbard, though as for the other, I am not sure. It is all Towerwood’s doing. He has him somewhere, no doubt intending to make him mad indeed. And he knows I know, because Phillippa was standing by when I told Robert to proclaim himself Prince. Towerwood dropped many hints of this last night when he came to Falleyfell and my poor sister-in-law took poison rather than marry him. She is dead, God rest her soul, and I deserve to die too for my deceptions—for I told Towerwood I would marry him so that he could be the Prince, and then when he was gone I ran away rather than take poison too. If you find Everard, tell him I have gone to the nuns of Uldrim. I shall be safe there for a while.”

  The lady stopped speaking suddenly, with her blue eyes wide, wide open. They saw she was horrified that she had said so much to two complete strangers. “Tell no one of this!” she said wildly. “Tell only Everard where I am.”

  “We promise not to tell a soul, ma’am,” Harry said.

  “Not a word,” promised Susannah. They were both thinking that the lady could not have told anyone more likely to keep their promise, since they understood so little of what she said.