A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  Sophie’s stomach churned with a sickly stew of guilt and grief and half-forgotten anger, and she could not think how to apologise.

  * * *

  They met again the next morning across the breakfast-table, and Sophie put down her knife and fork and took her courage in both hands.

  “Amelia,” she said.

  Amelia looked up.

  “I am sorry,” said Sophie. “For what I said to you last night.” She tamped down her reflexive annoyance at Amelia’s expression of surprise. “It is not your fault that the Professor so detested the cuckoo in his nest and encouraged you to detest me likewise. And when you paid me a compliment, I ought not to have thrown it back in your face.”

  Amelia blinked, and for what seemed a very long time said nothing.

  At last she looked down at her plate, then up again at Sophie, and said, “I was always so very jealous of you.”

  “Of me?” said Sophie, incredulous. “Because I was not permitted to go to school, or to read the books I wished to read, or to—”

  “Because Mama loved you so.” Amelia’s words cut across hers like ice cracking. “You, and no one else in the world—certainly not her other daughters.” She laughed; her laughter sounded as though it hurt her. “Of course I see now why she could not love me. I ought to have known, even then.”

  Tears stung Sophie’s eyes. What has become of the world, that I should have cause to weep for Amelia?

  “It was not because you were not hers,” she said, and swallowed against the lump in her throat. “It was nothing to do with you, at all—with either of you.”

  “Do you think I did not know it?” Amelia demanded, in a sort of harsh half whisper. “Papa and she were entirely unsuited to one another, and ought never to have married; and she could not love either of us, because we were his children.”

  Unsuited. Sophie hesitated in an agony of doubt: to tell Amelia, or not to tell her, that her beloved papa had repeatedly forced himself on Sophie’s mother? Mother Goddess, did he do the same to Amelia’s mother? No, surely not. But the thought niggled, and Sophie could not bring herself to inflict it upon Amelia.

  “Mama may not have loved you or Jo as she loved me,” she said at last, “but she loved you well enough to take thought for your safety, and seek to spare you pain.”

  “I do not see how,” said Amelia, frowning; too late, Sophie recalled that Amelia did not know the truth of her stepmother’s death—had never read, in Queen Laora’s last letter to her beloved cousin, the words, I weep to think of my girls left in his power.

  It was not an explanation which could be given in a quarter-hour’s time, over breakfast; and, indeed, Sophie had not the least idea where to begin, nor whether she had any right to tell her mother’s secrets.

  “You may ask Cousin Maëlle, if you doubt me,” she said instead. “She knew Mama far longer and better than I.”

  Amelia was tearing a bread-roll into tiny pieces, and resolutely not raising her eyes from her busily working hands. Sophie watched this process to its natural conclusion—the sight was oddly hypnotic—as she collected her thoughts.

  “We were none of us very well served by our childhood, I think,” she said at last. “But it does not follow that we must carry our hurts like stored-up treasures all our lives. We were good friends, once, Amelia, as well as sisters; might we not try to be friends again?”

  Or, at the least, to lay down our arms and cease to be sworn enemies?

  “We might have gone on being friends, if you had not turned Joanna against me,” said Amelia—not accusingly, but as though stating a settled fact; and before Sophie could draw breath to object, “And driven off every suitor I ever had, for now I do not suppose I am likely to have any more; and if you had not the power to turn me out of my own home—”

  “Catharine Amelia Callender.”

  Amelia’s litany of accusations cut off abruptly, giving way to a silent, furious glare.

  Sophie swallowed hard. If that is how she sees things, I wonder that she should have been willing to come within a hundred miles of me.

  “You may believe whatever you wish about Joanna,” she said, “and I freely confess that I once kept watch whilst she put half a dozen frogs in Walter Mandeville’s bed, because by that time we both of us knew better than to attempt to tell you of his improper advances to the housemaids.”

  She overrode Amelia’s squeak of outrage, for she had one last thing to say: “But I have never had any intention of turning you out of that house, Amelia, and never shall have; you may think what you like of me, but you must never think that. You shall always have a home there, if you wish it.”

  Then, not waiting to see or hear Amelia’s reaction to this, Sophie pushed back her chair from the table, stood, and left the room, abandoning her unfinished breakfast; the sight of it made her stomach churn.

  She strode blindly along this corridor, down that staircase, and when at length she came back to full awareness of her surroundings, she found herself in the small park at the centre of the square, standing before a stone bench not unlike the one on which she had sat with Gray and Jenny, long ago, when her life was just beginning to unravel. The sun was shining, and the scents of chamomile and clover, box and elm and chestnut, rose up around her like a blessing—as though Hegemone, goddess of plants and growing things, had led her here to soothe away her irritation of spirits.

  Sophie shook her head and chuckled wanly. What a notion! Yet the warm sun and the scents of green things growing were already beginning to loosen the knot of old guilt and new hurt that had gathered beneath her ribs, so that she felt able to breathe again, and even perhaps to think.

  * * *

  Lady Maëlle found her there, nearly an hour later, still wrestling with her conscience.

  “Your mama loved gardens,” she said, settling herself beside Sophie on the sun-warmed bench, “even your stepfather’s gardens, for all that she grew to loathe the man himself. A garden is its own creature, you know; we may say to ourselves, This belongs to me, but in truth a garden belongs only to itself, and to the gods.”

  “I always loved the Professor’s gardens, also,” Sophie admitted. “They seemed quite a different world from the house itself. And they were always full of beautiful things—even in winter—and of hiding-places.”

  “Indeed,” said Lady Maëlle, with a small, enigmatic smile. “And what makes you hide amongst the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy-tree today, ma petite?”

  For the oak, and the ash, and the bonny ivy-tree / They flourish at home in my own country, Sophie’s mind supplied, catching at the quotation and fleshing out the melody of the Border-country song. She waved it away impatiently.

  “Amelia,” she said, looking down at her feet. “All of my attempts to make friends with her seem to run aground in the same way. Now she has accused me of turning Joanna against her—she believes I mean to turn her out to starve—”

  Lady Maëlle startled her anew by curling one arm about her and drawing Sophie’s head down to rest against her shoulder. “You must give her time,” she said, shifting into Brezhoneg, “and a little space to think.”

  “Time?” Sophie demanded. She sat up straight. “Space? She has scarce set eyes on me these past five years!”

  “Perhaps,” Lady Maëlle said gently, “you might consider the matter from Amelia’s point of view. Suppose that rather than having been hurt yet again by a stepfather who had long and openly resented your existence, by the use he attempted to make of you, you had been betrayed by the father whom you loved wholehearted, believing yourself beloved in return.”

  “Oh,” said Sophie, in a very small voice. Of course she had believed herself to be considering Amelia’s feelings—why else offer her the use of the house which she so loved?—but evidently to much less purpose than she had supposed.

  “And suppose further,” Lady Maëlle went on, “that ra
ther than emerging from your trials possessed of a powerful magickal talent, a doting husband and devoted friends, a royal title, and an unlooked-for opportunity to attain the education you have long dreamt of, you had found yourself branded the child of a traitor, almost friendless and without prospects, through no fault of your own—”

  “If I could give the house and the gardens and all of it to Amelia and Joanna, I should have done it long ago, and gladly!” Sophie interrupted, unable to keep silence any longer. “I did not ask to be given it—Gray did not ask—but he consented to it, only because we should then be able to offer them a home there! . . . and you, of course, ma’am,” she added.

  Lady Maëlle inclined her head with a wry smile. “And I thank you both for that kindness,” she said. “But I am well accustomed to depending upon the hospitality of others; and you must consider, too, that I left Callender Hall a servant, and returned to it as myself. Your sister Amelia was its mistress once; to expect gratitude for your generosity in making her a perpetual guest in the house which she expected that she—or at any rate her husband—should one day inherit, was perhaps unreasonable.”

  “I have never asked for Amelia’s gratitude, either,” said Sophie tightly, “or anyone else’s. She is perfectly free to consider herself mistress of, of that house, if she likes—”

  “But she is not mistress of it, truly, nor ever shall be,” said Lady Maëlle, gently, “though she loves every room of it, whilst you cannot bear even to speak its name. And Amelia knows it, if you do not.”

  “What is it you wish me to do, Cousin Maëlle?” Sophie’s demand sounded, to her own ears, mortifyingly like an infant’s pleading.

  “Think on it, child,” said Lady Maëlle.

  Then she kissed Sophie’s unresisting cheek and took herself away.

  CHAPTER V

  In Which Amelia Is Inscrutable, and Lucia Hears a Tale

  “Jenny,” said Sophie hesitantly—this conversation had seemed much more advisable in the abstract, turned over and over in the back of her mind whilst the most of her attention was occupied with Amelia, than it did now, in the flesh—“has either Joanna or Miss Pryce any thought of marrying, do you suppose?”

  Jenny, blessedly calm, looked up from the letter she was composing, put down her pen, and gave Sophie a measuring look.

  “I should not think so,” she said at last; and after another long moment, “Why do you ask?”

  “Joanna is my sister,” said Sophie—not unreasonably, she felt.

  “But Miss Pryce is not,” said Jenny. “For that matter, Joanna’s being your sister is a perfectly sound reason for asking her what plans she may have for the future, but it is no reason at all to ask me.”

  There followed a long and increasingly uncomfortable silence, which Jenny made no move to assist Sophie in breaking; and at length Sophie said, “I only—they are both of them handsome and clever, and if they have not much fortune between them, they have at least the great advantage of your patronage; I expected them both to be besieged with suitors, and yet it is no such thing. And,” she added, “as Jo is a ward of the Crown until she marries, I should have expected her to be looking about her in search of some independence, if for no other reason.”

  “Sophie,” said Jenny firmly, “if I believed Joanna’s life to be in jeopardy, I should not hesitate to divulge any confidence of hers which might assist in saving it. As things stand, however, I can only repeat that whatever questions you may have about your sister’s plans, you must ask her yourself.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Sophie, in a chastened tone, and bent her head to her sewing.

  All the same, she reflected, I have my answer: Jenny knows something about Jo and Miss Pryce, which she considers none of my affair.

  She was not altogether pleased to have so provoked Jenny, for whom she felt enormous affection and esteem; but short of asking Joanna outright, Does Jenny know?, this had seemed the best means of mapping out the territory.

  In any case, Joanna and Miss Pryce—allowing for the dampening presence of Mrs. Edmond Marshall—seemed well contented; Amelia, on the other hand, did not.

  * * *

  “Amelia is hiding something,” Sophie announced, almost before the door had closed behind her.

  They had been in London only a fortnight, and already Gray was growing weary of the daily tensions of living in Jenny’s house not only with Sophie, Joanna, and Miss Callender, but with his mother and all the various persons whom she had also contrived to antagonise, and beginning to think longingly of Din Edin—of Oxford—even, almost, of Glascoombe in Kernow, which at least offered one set the less of familial grudges to navigate.

  Had Sophie not been bound to her shepherding of Lucia MacNeill more or less by royal command, he should have been urging an end to the visit several days since; he had even, for the first time, begun to consider begging the hospitality of the Royal Palace—though, knowing Sophie’s opinion upon that subject, he had not yet dared mention it to her.

  “Oh?” he said now, turning. “Why do you say so?”

  Sophie seated herself at the dressing-table and began pulling the pins from her hair. “She had a letter this morning at breakfast,” she said, “which must have given her some sort of shock, for she turned very pale; do you not recall Cousin Maëlle’s asking her whether she was quite well?”

  “Vaguely,” said Gray, from within the folds of the shirt which he was pulling off over his head. “I confess that your sister Amelia was occupying very little of my attention at the time, as Mr. Fowler was telling me—”

  There was a brisk knock upon the door; Gray hastily struggled back into his shirt as Sophie called, “Quo vadis?”

  The door-handle turned, the door opened a few inches, and Joanna’s face peered round its edge. “May I come in?” she inquired—rather belatedly, in Gray’s view.

  “Come in or go away, as you like,” said Sophie, “but in either case, do shut the door, Jo.”

  Joanna opened the door, stepped through it, and closed it again behind her; Sophie dropped the last hair-pin on the table-top and took up her hairbrush.

  “Let me,” said Gray. She half-turned towards him, holding out the brush; he took it from her, but, out of sight of Joanna, indulged himself by running his free hand through the silky mass of her hair before setting to work.

  Joanna folded herself into the armchair onto which Gray had recently flung his coat, tucking up her bare feet beneath the hem of her dressing-gown.

  “Sophie,” she said, “what ails Amelia, do you suppose?”

  “I have been asking myself the same question,” said Sophie. She repeated the tale of the letter for the benefit of Joanna, who had come in too late from her morning’s ride to see its arrival for herself, and concluded: “She would not say what was in the letter, nor who had sent it. And I cannot blame her—she is not a child, and her correspondence is her own business!—but there was something in her face, and her voice—I do not know Amelia so well now as I once did, but I should have sworn that she was truly frightened.”

  Gray’s hands stilled. “Frightened,” he repeated. “Now, what could frighten the indomitable Miss Callender?”

  “Gray,” said Sophie severely, meeting his gaze in the glass with her eyebrows drawn together. “I am entirely serious; I beg you will not make fun.”

  “I was not making fun,” he protested, startled. “Why should you think so?”

  Sophie twisted round to look at him straight on; from the armchair, Joanna regarded him with a deeply sceptical expression.

  “Truly,” he said. “Have I never told you how much your sister alarmed me, when first I came to Breizh? The proud and elegant Miss Callender, undisputed mistress of all she surveyed, very evidently finding fault with my very existence, and liable to report my least misdeed to the Professor at once! I was never so much relieved as when she determined me to be of no consequence, and cease
d to pay me any attention.”

  As he spoke, an expression of disbelief had spread over Sophie’s face; now she rose to her feet and hopped nimbly up to stand upon the seat of her chair, so as to lay her hands on Gray’s shoulders and smile down at him—a small, rueful smile. He wrapped one arm about her to steady her.

  “I was eaten up with jealousy,” Sophie said, after a moment—very softly, for his ears alone—“though I do not think I understood it at the time. All the young men I had ever met paid court to Amelia, you see, and I had never begrudged her their attentions; but for some reason I could not bear that you should be like them.”

  “‘For some reason,’ aye,” Gray agreed solemnly. “I see. Come down from there, my green-eyed goose.

  “Now,” he said, when Sophie had resumed her seat, and he his brushing, “my question stands: Who, or what, might she be frightened of? I do not suppose you chanced to catch a glimpse of the letter, or of its direction?”

  “I did not,” Sophie admitted. “We were placed across from each other, as you may recall”—Gray had no particular recollection of anyone’s placement at the breakfast-table, apart from his own, but did not like to say so—“but I did see the envelope for just a moment, and it bore no frank.”

  “An express?” said Gray, surprised. He had finished brushing out Sophie’s hair, and was braiding it into a long plait. How his brothers would jeer at him! And how comfortable to discover that he no longer cared what either of them thought. “Or delivered by hand?”

  “I have not the least idea,” said Sophie, “though we should have heard an express arrive, I think, as the breakfast-room overlooks the square.”

  Gray considered this. “It does not seem very likely that Amelia should take any of us into her confidence,” he said, tying off the plait, “but surely if something were very much amiss, she would confide in Lady Maëlle? Or,” he added more confidently, “Lady Maëlle would find it out.”