Lucia’s eyes narrowed in something like amusement, and it occurred to Sophie belatedly that perhaps she ought to set more hedges round her promises to foreign heiresses, allies or not.
“I know you have been appointed my keeper and nursemaid,” said Lucia, “and if I must have some such person, I am grateful that it should be you. But, as you are my friend, Sophie, will you promise to tell me the truth, always? Even when it may be unpalatable or inconvenient?”
“Of course,” Sophie repeated. So little for Lucia to ask of her, after all. “Yes, of course.” She held out her right hand, Alban-fashion, and Lucia clasped it; and after a long moment’s thought she said, “I swear upon the blood we have mingled and the magick we have shared, to give you the truth as I understand it, so long as I shall live and remember.”
There was nothing particularly arcane about such an oath; but nonetheless Sophie felt something shiver through her, like a distant echo of that long-ago sharing of magick. By Lucia’s pensive, grave expression, she had felt it too.
“Thank you,” she said solemnly, and waited a long moment before releasing Sophie’s hand.
* * *
Sophie had no particular wish to speak to Roland at once; her head was spinning with new facts and with evidence dramatically realigned, and she wanted nothing so much as a quiet hour to put her thoughts in order. But Queen Edwina had made it very clear that a conversation with Roland was expected of her; and as between Roland and his mother, the choice was evident. Sophie, accordingly, went looking for her brother.
She found him wandering about in the shrubbery and persuaded him to sit with her upon a bench in the rose-garden. Taking a leaf from Joanna’s book, she did not attempt subtlety but asked him outright: “What think you of Lucia MacNeill, now that you have seen her for yourself?”
Roland looked down at his feet—rotated his left ankle, broken last summer in a fall from the saddle—rose from the bench, tugged a wilted rose off its stem, and began pulling it to pieces.
“I do not understand her,” he said at last, his tone skirting the line between forlorn and merely petulant. “We have been corresponding for the best part of two years, and now we have met at last, and still I know next to nothing of her heart. She is always wanting to talk of some book or other—of politics, or magick, or of tactics and strategy—what sort of young lady prefers talk of politics to talk of love?”
“The sort, I imagine,” said Sophie dryly, “who has been brought up to rule a kingdom.”
She rose to her feet, approached her brother (a little warily, for he was now grown taller than herself), and, gently removing the abused rose-leaves from his fingers, drew him back to sit with her once more upon the stone bench.
“Ned was brought up to rule a kingdom,” he said mulishly, “and it has not prevented him from making sheep’s eyes at Delphine whenever they are in the same room together, or from sitting in the garden with her, reading minstrel-tales aloud.”
Sophie refrained from pointing out that this speech had a strong flavour of Joanna Callender about it.
“I am sorry that Lucia should not have made a better first impression,” she said.
“That is not what I said,” Roland protested. The petulant tone was quite gone, and he looked genuinely astonished and not a little dismayed. “Not at all. Only . . . Sophie, I had not the least notion what to say to her! It was bad enough when we were a kingdom apart, and writing letters to one another—I had time then to read the difficult passages over, and study how I might reply—”
“You mean, I suppose,” said Sophie, “that you do not feel sufficiently clever to carry on an ordinary conversation with an educated woman, and that you fear being accounted her inferior—no—you fear that you will not be accounted her superior?”
Roland stared at her a long moment, before at last one corner of his mouth quirked—their father to the life—and he said, “I take your point, Magistra.”
Sophie kissed his cheek and patted him on the shoulder, in her best elder-sisterly manner—which Ned, Roland, and Harry seemed able to take seriously, though Joanna (who knew her much better) never had.
“I am sure you will manage it,” she said.
CHAPTER IV
In Which Sophie Attempts a Reconciliation
“Horns of Herne!” said Joanna, at breakfast some days later, looking up from a letter which had been waiting by her plate when she and Miss Pryce came in from their morning ride.
“Language, Jo!” said Miss Pryce. It was no very loverlike speech, to be sure; but Sophie, who had been watching Joanna and her friend closely since her conversation with Lucia, recognised the same half-exasperated, half-affectionate tone in which she herself occasionally spoke to Gray. How in Hades did I never see it before?
Hoping for some reply from the Oxford friends to whom she had dispatched requests to investigate their personal or College libraries and map-rooms for materials relating to the history of Lady Morgan College, Sophie herself had again been disappointed—which only increased her interest in everyone else’s correspondence. She craned her neck to see the direction on Joanna’s letter, and her eyebrows flew up as she recognised the hand. “From Amelia?” she said, astonished; a letter to either herself or Joanna from their elder sister, still resident in the house in Breizh where all of them had grown up, was a rarity indeed. “Truly this is a day of wonders and portents! What does she say?”
“That she and Lady Maëlle are coming to London,” said Joanna, still in the same tone of astonished dismay; and—continuing over Sophie’s involuntary What!—“at once. And it is worse even than that, because the letter was mis-sent to Carrington-street, and is nearly a fortnight old.”
Jenny sat up straighter, winced, and laid one hand on her belly, just now beginning to round out. “We ought to have expected it, I dare say,” she said. “Half the kingdom is coming to London at present, the better to catch a glimpse of Lucia MacNeill.”
“This must have been a very hasty decision, however,” said Sophie, frowning, “unless, I suppose, other letters have also gone astray.”
And that was odd, too; in fact, the more she considered this odd turn of events, the odder it grew. Amelia was not, it was true, the most faithful of correspondents, but it was not like her to forget Joanna’s direction altogether.
“Does she give an address in London?” Jenny inquired, in a tone which tried very hard to be neutral, and nearly succeeded.
Joanna returned her attention to Amelia’s letter, and presently said, “Yes.”
Jenny’s covert expression of relief was erased almost at once by Joanna’s reading out the address in question, which proved to be that of an hotel almost equally unsuited to Lady Maëlle’s elevated station and to her limited means.
“I shall have to invite them to stay, of course,” she said. “Apart from anything else, I should never live down the stain on my reputation otherwise. But, Vesta preserve us! where am I to put them? The South Room and the Lilac Room are not likely to be finished for another month, and the plasterers have left the Rose Room in such a state . . . !”
Joanna, Miss Pryce, and Sophie—the only other occupants of the breakfast-room at present—exchanged a look.
“If Gwen and I were to share her room, Jenny,” said Joanna after a moment, “you might give mine to Lady Maëlle, as it is the largest, and the Little North Room to Amelia.”
“That is generous of you,” said Jenny—looking, however, not at Joanna but at Miss Pryce. “What say you, my dear?”
Miss Pryce met Jenny’s gaze steadily. “Certainly,” she said. “I have not the least objection. Indeed, I should be happy to offer my room in place of Joanna’s, but, as she says, hers is the larger.”
“That will appeal to Lady Maëlle’s sense of her own consequence,” Sophie agreed. Jenny does not know, of course, she thought, bemused by the entire exchange. Or . . . does she?
“
I think, however,” said Jenny, acknowledging Sophie’s remark with a brief, mischievous glint of her hazel eyes, “I shall pander a little to your sister’s consequence, also, by shifting Mr. Fowler into the Little North Room, and giving her the Kingfisher.”
She nodded decisively, then rose from her chair and sailed out of the room, presumably to send an invitation to Lady Maëlle de Morbihan and Miss Amelia Callender in care of Bracquart’s Hotel.
* * *
Not for three days after the belated arrival of Miss Callender’s letter, and the swift dispatch of Jenny’s invitation, was any further word of the travellers from Breizh received in Grosvenor Square. It came in the form of a note—written, in Lady Maëlle’s small, austere hand, on ivory-coloured writing-paper engraved with the elegant B of Bracquart’s Hotel—which, upon being opened and read, caused Jenny to press her lips together and close her eyes.
Gray could not help rather wishing that Sophie’s imperious cousin might persist in maintaining her independence, for the sake of poor Jenny’s nerves. On the other hand, Joanna had regaled him and Sophie (over tea in the nursery, on the nursery-maid’s half day) with the tale of Lady Maëlle’s last encounter with his mother, and he could not entirely suppress a competing wish to see what might happen this time.
Jenny’s next invitation seemingly produced a change of heart, and on the following afternoon Lord Kergabet’s carriage was dispatched to retrieve the two ladies from their temporary lodgings and bring them to Grosvenor Square.
The household, or most of it (Mrs. Marshall having sniffed about country manners and resolutely kept her seat in the morning-room), assembled on the front steps to greet the newcomers. Standing close beside Gray, her hand gripping his behind the curtain of her skirts and his coat-tails, Sophie fairly hummed with anxious anticipation—and, as Gaël Roche opened the door of the carriage and unfolded the steps, with the thrum of sympathetic magick through the bond that connected her to Gray.
Lady Maëlle, he saw, was still as stout and straight-backed as ever, if rather more grey; the young servant who descended from the barouche box, where she had been conducting an animated conversation in Brezhoneg with Gaël, he recognised as the erstwhile Callender Hall housemaid Katell, now presumably acting in the capacity of lady’s maid. Miss Callender, on the other hand, Gray should scarcely have known out of context, for the plump rose-and-golden prettiness he remembered, the tendency to look down her nose at all the world, had bloomed into a true and quiet beauty.
“Amelia!” Sophie exclaimed. “How well you look!”
Miss Callender’s composure cracked very slightly, Gray fancied, at the unfeigned enthusiasm in her stepsister’s voice; but it was for a moment only. “Your Royal Highness,” she said, making a graceful curtsey.
Sophie, hands outstretched in glad greeting, faltered and went very still. “Amelia,” she repeated, in a doubtful tone, “what—”
Miss Callender was spared from any immediate necessity of explaining herself, however, by Lady Maëlle’s holding out her arms to Sophie, and by Sophie’s flinging herself joyfully into them.
Gray said, “How do you do, Miss Callender?”
Her lovely damask-rose face flushed a little, and she looked down, smoothing her skirts with hands grown suddenly restive. “I am well, I thank you, Mr. Marshall,” she said. “And . . . and yourself?”
“Gray, what are you about?” said Sophie, laughing. “Come and make your bow to Cousin Maëlle.”
He turned to them, meaning to do so, but Lady Maëlle forestalled him by approaching with both hands outstretched to clasp his own. “How do you do, my dear?” she said, smiling so warmly and maternally at him that he blinked in surprise and almost stammered his answering “Very well indeed; and yourself?”
“I am glad to hear it,” said Lady Maëlle, smiling. “I fear your wife is a most frustrating correspondent; her letters tell me all about the books she is reading, and the price of butter and eggs in Din Edin, and nothing whatever about herself. And Joanna is grown shockingly neglectful, since she became such fast friends with this Miss Pryce of hers—Miss Pryce will be that tall, dark girl, I suppose—?”
“Yes,” said Gray. This sunny, confiding iteration of Lady Maëlle had begun to unnerve him rather, and he was not sorry when a summons from Jenny recalled them both to the duties of welcomes and introductions.
For the most part, the moves of the dance were not difficult to predict: Miss Callender and Miss Pryce, all complaisant smiles to one another’s faces, could be seen eyeing each other sidelong whilst each was conversing with somebody else; Joanna and her eldest sister executed a cautious embrace, each looking as though she were remembering every cutting remark she had ever made to the other. Katell was quickly swept up by the laughing Breizhek grooms, and as quickly rescued from their attentions by Mrs. Treveur, who sent Gaël and Loïc away to their work with fond exasperation.
Sophie, having been so thoroughly rebuffed, made no further attempt at conversation with her stepsister, and instead tucked her arm through her cousin’s and bent her head to speak rapidly and unceasingly in her ear, pausing only to permit the occasional small gust of laughter.
As they passed into the house—and now at last Gray understood his mother’s refusal to leave the morning-room, for of course she should have had to cede precedence not only to Jenny but also to Lady Maëlle—Miss Callender lingered a little, looking up at the grand façade of Jenny’s house with an expression curiously both wistful and disapproving.
“After you, Miss Callender,” said Gray, for he could not leave her standing in the street alone (even so salubrious a street as the west side of Grosvenor Square). She started a little, turned her head so that her bonnet-brim hid her face, and preceded him obligingly enough up the steps and through the front door.
* * *
“I should not have known Amelia again,” Gray confessed, as Sophie and he were dressing for dinner, “had I seen her in some other place.”
Sophie looked at him with narrowed eyes, her head upon one side. “She is much prettier than she used to be,” she said. “But she has forgot how to smile.”
“Yes,” said Gray, “but that is not what I meant, exactly; she was never much given to smiling at me in any case. No; the difference is . . . well, perhaps it is only that she has grown older, while we were not by to see it.”
“Well! If that is so, we must hope she has grown wiser, also,” said Sophie darkly, “and will not fall prey to unscrupulous persons.”
“What sort of—” Gray began, but Sophie flapped one hand at him.
“It is an old tale,” she said, “and I shall not tell it you whilst we are under the same roof with Amelia; that, I think, she could not forgive me, Princess Royal or no, and I should not blame her.”
* * *
Amelia, it appeared, had taken up music again. When the ladies removed to the drawing-room after dinner, she eyed the pianoforte with eager interest—poorly concealed—and upon Jenny’s sitting down upon a sofa, drew near and asked in a low voice whether she might be permitted the use of it; and when, permission granted, she sat down to play, her performance was recognisably much better than Sophie’s remembrance of it.
Sophie too, insofar as the other demands upon her time permitted, had been renewing her acquaintance with Jenny’s pianoforte, so different from the scuffed and battered (though always meticulously tuned) thirdhand instrument that had graced the tiny front room of the house in Quarry Close. Might Amelia’s renewed interest in this once-shared pursuit open the way to some manner of reconciliation?
Certainly Sophie’s efforts in that direction thus far had not enjoyed much success. Inquiries after the health of tenant farmers and half-remembered neighbours in Breizh had been answered in a reproving tone which reminded Sophie, more pointedly than mere words could have done, that she might at any time have come to see them for herself, and had not. Offers of excursions to see the sights
of London were politely but firmly declined, and attempts by either party to interest the other in her pet topic—in Sophie’s case, her newfound (or renewed) fascination with Lady Morgan College and its history; in Amelia’s, the London season—tended to disintegrate with alarming rapidity into childish squabbling.
* * *
On one warm, close evening, astonishingly free of engagements and scented with the roses Mrs. Treveur had set in silver bowls all over the house, Sophie extracted from her music-case the collection of (mostly Alban) songs which she had learnt and painstakingly transcribed during her years in Din Edin, and, turning to Gray, said, “What song shall we have tonight, love?”
“‘Fear a’ Bhàta,’” said Gray at once.
“Are you sure?” Sophie cast a doubtful glance at Lady Maëlle, at Amelia. But Gray nodded, and, reasoning that, of all those present, only they two had enough Gaelic to appreciate the melancholy import of the lyrics, she shook out her fingers, arranged her music on the rack, and began to play—and, for the first time since coming back to London, to sing.
She scrupulously suppressed the magick that tried to weave itself into her song; nevertheless, by the final verse, Amelia had laid down her fancy-work and drifted close to the pianoforte, studying the hand-notated music over Sophie’s shoulder.
“You sing so beautifully,” she said, low, when Sophie lifted her fingers from the keys, and—astonishingly—settled herself on the bench beside Sophie, so close that their elbows touched. “I had forgot how you used to sing, when we were small. Until you stopped.”
With enormous effort, Sophie contrived not to gape at her. “I never stopped,” she said, after a long moment. “I sang to Joanna, always. But out in the park, and in the fields, because the Professor forbade it. Or had you forgot that, also?”
Amelia flinched—pressed her lips together—turned away. Then she stood abruptly, retreated to the sofa, and seated herself a careful distance from Joanna and Miss Pryce, who had their heads bent together over a book, and took no notice of her.
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 5
