The Bell at Sealey Head

by Patricia McKillip

  Suppose the disasters did not end there.

  Suppose the Inn at Sealey Head, exposed on its bluff facing the tumultuous waves, had begun, over the winter, to melt away. Its walls, battered by briny spindrift and rain, grew swollen and soft; its stones cracked under the lash of water and salt. Rooms leaked; travelers left in high dudgeon, complaining of water dripping into their beds as they slept. The stable roof fell in; all the feed moldered in the wet. To make matters much, much worse, a portion of the coast road just south of Sealey Head had been buried under boulders when the towering cliff it passed under collapsed in all the rain. The boulders had torn a portion of the road away, so there was nothing but a long, dangerous ravine from the top of the cliff to the great rocks in the sea below. Those traveling along the coast were advised to make a wide circle around Sealey Head. The town suffered from the lack of business, as did, very keenly, the innkeeper, Anscom Cauley, and his family. He was forced to let his stableman go, then his housekeeper, then, unfortunate man, his cook; Mrs. Cauley had to do all the work herself.

  But that is not all.

  Two more prominent and influential men in Sealey Head were also suffering from the harsh turn of Fortune. The shipping merchant, Mr. Blair, had lost three out of four of his ships in the terrible seas, and the fourth had been driven so far out of its charted path that no one knew where it had gone. Rumor sighted it far to the north, trapped in a perpetually frozen sea among the icebergs. Or in dry dock on an island in the tropics, whose people spoke no familiar language, so could not tell the sailors where they were in the world. Mr. Blair expended the last of his fortune to send a fifth ship out to search for the missing.

  And all was equally unwell at Aislinn House. Lord Aislinn’s profligate ways had so depleted the family fortune that his daughter, Eloise, became his only hope. But a slender one at that: with no fortune, and a face like a vole, all small dull eyes and teeth, she had no prospects whatsoever. Not even the ambitious young Master Tibald Sproule, who had his eye on Aislinn House, would make an offer for her.

  In such hideously difficult times, it seemed only a fortuitous stroke of luck would save the town. As luck would have it, it came, though not in any shape anyone could have expected.

  Gwyneth stopped. The twins stared at her expectantly. Even their father had shifted a palm frond aside to gaze at her in wonder.

  “Go on,” Crispin grunted.

  “That’s all I have.”

  “But the bell!” He bounced a little, impatiently, on the sofa. “You said it was about the bell.”

  “I haven’t figured that part out yet. Not in this story. Nothing seems right.”

  “I like all the catastrophes,” Pandora commented. “I hope there are more of them before you put everything aright.”

  “I believe there will be. I haven’t yet made up my mind about which of its faces Luck will be wearing.” She laughed at their twin expressions, both of them astonished and annoyed at once. “I’m sorry. I was hoping you might have some suggestions for me.”

  “I cannot imagine how you will rescue your poor characters,” Toland Blair told his daughter over the palm frond. “You’ve certainly made them wretched enough. I hope you’ll at least show mercy to your beleaguered merchant. But why the bell? Why do you keep going back to it?”

  He was a big, weathered man with gray streaks in his hair and broad mustache. After his wife had died, he took to sea on his own merchant ships for long, wearying periods, returning briefly now and then to comment on his children’s heights and give them carved ivory animals, or wooden-soled sandals, or stranger things that Aunt Phoebe locked into a cupboard as soon as he had gone again. He was beginning to linger longer now on land; his seafaring eyes, wide and distant, were noticing again the wonders growing under his roof.

  “It’s a mystery,” Gwyneth said simply.

  He shook his papers straight on his desk and came out from behind the palms to poke at the fire.

  “It’s nothing more than the ghostly echo of the bell on a ship that foundered off the headlands long ago. It tolled its last as it was dragged under the waves, just as the sun vanished into the sea. That’s what everyone says.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  He looked surprised. “I never thought about it.”

  “I have.”

  “I know you have.” He chuckled. “I’ve listened to your stories. The sea bell that the mermaid rings in vain every sunset to summon her long-dead lover. The bell tied around the neck of a gigantic hound let out only at sundown.”

  Gwyneth flushed. “You heard that one?”

  “That was my favorite,” Crispin said enthusiastically. “When it ate all the evil highwaymen.”

  “I liked the bell on the path into fairyland,” Pandora said, “that signals the gate between worlds to open only at sunset.”

  “Well,” Gwyneth sighed. “Nothing ever seems right to me.”

  “Perhaps because the truth of the matter is that simple,” her father suggested. “That sad.”

  She looked at him doubtfully. Aunt Phoebe opened the library door then, sent the twins up to bed. She came to stand next to her brother in a rare, contemplative moment. Both heads bent, her white hair in a bun, his gray and brown tied at his neck; they gazed silently together into the fire. Gwyneth swallowed a sudden, flaring ember of memory.

  Then Phoebe raised her head, said briskly to him, “Gwyneth has been invited to go riding tomorrow with Raven Sproule and his sister to visit Lady Eglantyne.”

  “Really.” Her father glanced at Gwyneth. His mustache twitched at the expression on her face.

  “He seems quite interested in our Gwyneth.”

  “Really,” he said again, still gazing at his daughter. She widened her eyes abruptly, crossed them. He looked away, clearing his throat noisily.

  “Well,” he said only, “there is another tale in the making. Let’s see what she does with this one.”

  Three

  Emma found Ysabo in the closet under the grand staircase, where she kept the cloths and the brass polish for the carpet rods on the stairs.

  From long experience, she kept one foot stuck out to hold the door open, and a good grip on the polish, while the vast hall shimmered into shape far beneath her. Ysabo was standing on a narrow stone landing, from which steps zigzagged forever, it seemed, down the wall. She smiled quickly, while Emma, her head reeling, stared down at knights in their black leather and armor and bright surcoats, so far below that the words in their deep voices echoed and bounced across the walls, became distorted, incoherent, voices in a dream. They had grown up together, the princess and the housemaid; they had known each other nearly all their lives.

  “Sorry,” Emma whispered, an ear cocked for footsteps on the worn floorboards on her side. “I was just putting things away.”

  “It’s all right. I’m always happy to see you.”

  “Yes.” She allowed herself a rare smile, wondering that she remembered how in those sad, quiet days. “It’s good to see you, too. You look beautiful. Is it some special day?”

  The princess was dressed in sage green, old lace, pearls as yellow as the foam that piled up on the shore sometimes in winter. The mass of her red, tightly curling hair had been pulled back into a cone of lace and gold wire. Amber the strange, speckled green-gold of her eyes hung from her earlobes and her neck. She made a little wry face at Emma’s words, a twist to too-thin lips, an arch of carroty brow in her colorless skin.

  “My mother says I’m a goblin-child,” she had told Emma long ago, when they were both very small. She had added something that even now Emma wasn’t sure she understood. “Well, she would know.”

  That day Ysabo answered, “It’s my birthday. Aveline says something wonderful will happen at supper tonight. All the knights will be celebrating with me.” The noise was increasing, crashing upward in waves against the stone walls. “I must go. The bell will ring soon, and, for one night in my life, instead of doing my usual supper rituals, I must go down in the
company of Maeve and Aveline. I hope next time we will be able to talk.”

  “Oh, so do I. It’s been too long.”

  Ysabo smiled again, her face so bright that surely, Emma thought, in some other world it would be considered rare and hauntingly beautiful. She closed the door carefully. When she opened it again a moment later, she put the polish and the cloths on the shelf, hardly starting at all when the unexpected steps creaked across the floor toward her.

  It was Mrs. Blakeley, the ancient housekeeper. “Oh, there you are, Emma. The doctor is upstairs with Lady Eglantyne. There is a tea tray ready for him in the kitchen. He’ll have it with some brandy in the library when he comes down.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Blakeley.”

  The old lady gave a gusty sigh. Her hair and her skin had faded all one color over the years; her face looked like an ivory cameo. Or a cracked and yellowing map, Emma thought, to some wonderful realm that everybody had long forgotten existed. “Sad times, Emma,” she murmured. “Sad times . . . And a new mistress at my age.”

  “Maybe it won’t come to that, Mrs. Blakeley,” Emma said quickly, stricken by the sorrow in the pale, sunken eyes. “Dr. Grantham will coax her better.”

  But Mrs. Blakeley only shook her head silently, turned away. Emma closed the closet door and went down to get the tea tray.

  In the kitchen, the cook, Mrs. Haw, was weeping silently as she boiled a pot of seafood shells for stock. Crab, shrimp, scallops, and mussels stood in neat little piles, waiting their turn; the kitchen smelled of root vegetables and brine. The cook, a massive mangel-wurzel of a woman, stirred with one hand and dabbed her tears into her apron with the other. She had a long braid of gray-brown hair and expressive hazelnut eyes, which, at the moment, were red and welling over and salting the brine.

  “I’m not so much afraid of having nowhere to go,” she explained to Emma between sniffs. “Amaryllis Sproule has been trying to steal me away from Lady E for years. But I grew up in this house. It’s all I know.”

  “Maybe—” Emma began helplessly.

  “I was scullery maid when my mother was cook, barely old enough to hold a chopping knife, I was. Oh, the size of strawberries, then! Oh, the radishes! And the late suppers among the gold candlesticks and crystal decanters. Now it’s enough if a half cup of bisque comes back on her tray with a lowered tide line in the bowl.”

  Emma murmured something, picked up the doctor’s tray, and escaped. The house, as far as she remembered, had been growing quiet and empty for years. Her mother, before she took to the woods, had charge of the stillroom in Aislinn House. Everyone consulted her, from Lady Eglantyne to the townspeople, who came knocking after twilight at the boot room door. Hesper taught her daughter her letters, her numbers, and how to copy the odd scribbles of stillroom doings, the concoctions, the requests, the various success and failures into the records book. When she was four, Emma had opened the pantry to lay a bundle of herbs to dry, and found the wild-haired little princess instead, with her homely face and enchanting smile. Such richness Emma had glimpsed, such space, such bustling, before she had slammed the door so hard the jars rattled on the stillroom walls.

  Her mother, measuring some odd purple powder into a bowl, said only, “Don’t be afraid. But don’t talk about it, either, except to me. It will be our secret.”

  “But what is it?” Emma whispered.

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ll tell you when I know.”

  Emma had begun her training then, learning to care for the ancient house, and using every door it possessed in the process. Doors opened only one way, she realized soon enough, as she and Ysabo became friends. The princess rarely opened her own doors, for one thing. And even then, she never inadvertently found Emma carrying a mop down the hall or winding a clock. It was always Emma, with an armload of folded linens, or heading in to make a bed, who opened a door and found the princess.

  Neither ever crossed a threshold. Ysabo was not permitted to leave her house, though, from what Emma understood, it was all part of Aislinn House. And Emma was wary of the doors that only opened one way. They might let her through, but would they let her back? The noisy, brilliant world she glimpsed through randomly opened doors frightened her with its dizzying walls, the strange rituals she sometimes found Ysabo performing, the gruff voices of the knights, the lovely, passionate voices of the ladies, the echoes of quarrels, booming laughter, the magnificent, outlandish feasts where an entire stuffed deer with flaming tapers and crows among its horns might be paraded, accompanied by hunting horns, through the hall before everyone got down to the business of eating it.

  Her Aislinn House only got quieter as Emma grew older. The younger servants left or were let go as rooms were shut up; visitors came more and more rarely. Even Emma’s mother left, went to live in a tree in the wood. Someone had built a tiny cottage in a great hollow trunk; Hesper added a hovel here, a lean-to there, and trained some flowering vines from her garden up the walls to give it charm. There she continued her stillroom business, which gave her an income of sorts, mostly in the tender of a cheese or a fish or whatever was ripening in the fields. She encouraged old books, too, as payment, handwritten histories out of people’s attics, for choice.

  “I’m still puzzling,” she told her daughter, when Emma asked about them. “I’ll let you know.”

  By then, Emma had grown into a young woman in a sparse houseful of the aged. Occasionally, the more absentminded among them, like Fitch the butler, or Sophie, Lady Eglantyne’s antique maid, confused Emma with her mother. She wore her dark hair in the same tidy braid they remembered down her back; she had the same sloe berry eyes and calm voice. When they called her Hesper, she wanted to laugh, for her neat mother now had frosty hair as wild as Ysabo’s, and she only wore shoes when she walked into town. She ran barefoot as an animal in the wood and sometimes slept where she dropped under the stars.

  Emma kept an eye on her, leaving a coin on her table now and then, bringing her fresh bread from town and news from Aislinn House. But nothing her mother concocted seemed to help Lady Eglantyne, who spent most of her days in a waking dream.

  “She’s old,” Dr. Grantham said simply, when Emma brought the tea tray into the shadowy library, with its scents of polished oak and leather, and asked after her. “She’s not in pain; she only wants to sleep.” He poured brandy into his tea, gazed into it a moment before he sipped. He had been a young man when Emma had been born and Lord Aislinn had died; now she was grown, and he was middle-aged, and Lady Eglantyne was dying. “Someone must send for her heir. I’ve told just about everyone in the house, but nobody really wants the change. I’ve told her solicitors. Even they seem reluctant.” He raised the cup to his lips, eyed Emma speculatively, as though she might take pen to paper and summon the missing heir. “Mrs. Blakeley keeps promising to write, then doesn’t. Is there something ominous about this heir?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir,” Emma said gently. For lack of anyone else in the house to talk to whose wits weren’t intermittently woolgathering, Dr. Grantham tended to forget Emma wasn’t part of the family.

  “What is she? A granddaughter of Lord Aislinn’s brother, is that it? Lived in Landringham all her life?”

  “I think that’s right, sir.”

  “City girl.” He took another sip. “What about your mother? Has she got anything more up her sleeve?”

  “Nothing that works any better than what you’ve got.”

  “She’s old,” Dr. Grantham said again, sighing. “None of us has a cure for that. Unless there’s some magic your mother stumbles across.”

  “I know she’s still trying.”

  He set his cup in the saucer, still frowning at it. “Good.”

  The sundown bell rang. He didn’t hear it, Emma guessed. Nobody did, really; it was just another noise they lived among, like wind or tide. But he turned abruptly, reached for his bag, as though someone, somewhere, had called to him. She picked up the tray, listening to Fitch tugging the cranky front door to let him out, while all around
her, the vast secret house seemed to reverberate with the dying echoes of the bell.

  The next morning they had visitors.

  Emma was in the library dusting the windowsills, the preferred spot for bluebottles to die, it seemed. There was some kind of bulky, colorful flow across the glass; she looked up, saw horses moving past to stop at the broad fan of stone steps in front of the house. The riders waited. Emma, her cloth motionless, watched them. There had been no stable kept for years. No Andrew or Timothy to help them down, take their horses. And no Fitch, either, she realized, to open the door for them. He must be down in the pantry, polishing the corkscrew or some such. One of the ladies laughed at the persistent silence. Emma recognized her then, and the young man as well: nobody else in Sealey Head had quite the parrot profile of the Sproules.

  She scrambled out from behind the leather couch, tossed the dead flies into the fireplace, and hurried to the door.