“Ah,” said Gray. “Yes, that is a point, indeed.”
He went back to his dinner, staring vaguely at a spot of sauce upon the table-cloth.
“I should be delighted to come with you,” said Joanna to Sophie—who smiled at her, but rather absently—“if Lord Kergabet has no objection. Gwen, shall you—”
There was a commotion below—rapid hoofbeats on the cobbles, and a hammering at the front door—and Joanna was out of her seat, in the act of darting to the window to peer down into the square, when the door of the dining-room opened to admit Treveur and a breathless courier in the royal livery, bearing a letter for Kergabet. Joanna quietly resumed her seat, and anxious glances passed up and down the table; such arrivals were not uncommon in the household of His Majesty’s chief counsellor, and could not be assumed always to signal a crisis, but given present circumstances in the royal household . . .
Kergabet broke the seal at once and began to read; as he read, the colour drained from his face, and Joanna felt chill tendrils of fear creeping over her skin.
“My love,” said Jenny (by which Joanna knew her to be badly rattled), “what news? It is not—there is not some worse news of Prince Roland?”
Kergabet laid the letter carefully down beside his plate; when he looked up, his gaze fixed upon Joanna. “Your father and his cronies, Miss Callender,” he said, “have escaped from the Tower, and are now at large.”
“Oh,” said Sophie faintly. From Gwendolen’s place at the table came a sound like a stifled yelp; from Mr. Fowler’s and Gray’s, almost simultaneously, low exclamations assuredly not suited to a lady’s dinner-table. Joanna slowly unclenched her fingers from her fork and knife, slowly laid these instruments down upon her plate.
“I do not see how they could have done,” she said, distantly surprised that her voice did not tremble, much. “They were held under lock and key, and within strong wards—were they not?”
“They were,” said Kergabet grimly. He pushed back his chair and rose to his feet, the letter still in his hand. “Your pardon, my dear,” he said, addressing Jenny, “but I must go and see His Majesty at once”—then, turning, “Fowler, with me.”
Mr. Fowler scrambled out of his own seat, leaving his dinner half-eaten.
“The rest of you—” Sieur Germain broke off sharply, perhaps recognising that he was, after all, standing in a Grosvenor Square dining-room and not in the barracks-yard of the Palace Guard, and resumed in a more moderate tone, “Jenny, my dear, I trust it goes without saying that your mama need not as yet be burdened with this news.”
“Sir,” said Joanna, making to rise also.
Kergabet turned in the doorway and looked at her; she seemed to feel the weight of his regard, pressing her back into her seat, though that was surely fancy—perhaps, she thought, the shocking news had turned her brain.
“I am sorry, Joanna,” he said. Sincerity rang in his words—and regret and apprehension with them—and Joanna sat up straight in surprise at his form of address. “Your involvement in their capture is likely to make you a target of revenge, if it is revenge they seek, and I should be criminally careless to expose you more than necessary.”
Joanna drew breath to protest that she did not at all regard any such danger, and had survived worse dangers in the past, but Kergabet forestalled her: “Were circumstances otherwise,” he said, “I should of course wish your assistance; but as things stand, you cannot be seen to be involved in this affair. You are too canny a judge of politics to suppose otherwise.”
A dozen arguments sprang to Joanna’s mind—the foremost of which, unhelpfully, was, I shall go mad if you leave me in the dark!—but sober reason told her that Kergabet was right; any hint of her knowing more than she ought about her father’s affairs must be damaging to more than herself. Deflated, she sank back into her chair, leaning her elbows heedlessly upon the table, and watched Kergabet and Mr. Fowler out of the dining-room.
A long speechless moment ensued, in which Joanna could feel everyone else at the table watching her and pondering what to say.
What are you afraid of? she asked herself, furious to discover that her hands were trembling and tears stinging her nose. The answer came to her in a heart-stuttering flash: Whoever or whatever is more powerful than the guards, the locks, and the wards on the Tower of London.
“I beg you will excuse me, Jenny,” she managed to say, carefully aligning her knife and fork. “I have rather lost my appetite.”
She rose from the table in her turn, and stalked out of the room, her gaze fixed in the middle distance so as not to risk seeing anxiety, concern, mistrust—worst of all, pity—in their faces.
* * *
By the time Gwendolen’s hesitant knock (their private signal, six knocks divided into groups of two) sounded at what was presently their shared bedroom door, nearly an hour later, Joanna had had her brief, furious cry, composed herself, stonily ignored the anxious inquiries of Lady Maëlle and Sophie, written out a passionate defence of her right to participate in the manhunt for her father, read it over, torn it into tiny pieces, burnt it to ash in the basin on the washstand, and sat down at Gwendolen’s desk to devise a new stratagem—an enterprise in which, thus far, she was signally failing.
“Come in,” she said, squaring her shoulders and turning to face the door.
The door opened slowly, and Gwendolen’s narrow face peered round the edge of it, brow furrowed, as though she were uncertain of her welcome in her own bedroom.
“Come in,” Joanna repeated. “And shut the door behind you.” After a moment she added, belatedly, “Please.”
Gwendolen did so, but having closed the door, leant her back against it rather than crossing to the desk. Joanna had drawn the curtains, shutting out what daylight remained, and that side of the room was dark, out of range of the small lamp which cast its pool of candlelight upon the desk; Gwendolen held out one hand, her lips moved briefly, and a pale globe of magelight drifted upwards from her palm to hover near the ceiling. She stood still a moment more, muttering something under her breath, audible now but incomprehensible: a warding-spell, presumably, against eavesdroppers. Useful skills, both, which Joanna rather envied, though Gwendolen was apt to deprecate her own talent as small and insignificant.
“Are you . . . are you well, Jo?” she said at last.
Joanna scowled. “I am perfectly well,” she snapped, hating Gwendolen’s diffident tone, hating her father and his misguided ambitions, hating her own weakness in the face of this crisis. As though my feelings were of greater importance than the danger to the kingdom!
“You don’t look it,” said Gwendolen, stepping away from the door.
The unaccustomed diffidence had entirely vanished from her voice, and Joanna exhaled relief. She turned back to the desk, folded her arms upon its polished surface, and buried her face in the crook of her left elbow.
Footsteps approached; Gwendolen’s hands settled on her shoulders. “I know how little you like to be left out of things, Jo,” she said. “I should not much like it, either, but . . . but I cannot quarrel with Lord Kergabet’s reasoning.”
Joanna groaned. “Nor can I quarrel with it,” she said miserably. “If I could, I should have done so at once. I do not doubt he has arrived at the logical and rational conclusion, but that does not make me like it any better.”
“Well.” Gwen’s thumbs skimmed across Joanna’s shoulder-blades. “You shall soon have thought of a scheme, I expect; you always do. And then we shall—”
We?
Joanna raised her head and half turned to look up at her friend. “This is not a matter for larking about, Gwen,” she said earnestly, “like Sophie’s Oxford project. I should not care for the risk, if it were only to myself, but these men have killed before—not in battle, nor in their own defence, but by poisoning in cold blood—and if it were not for Sophie and the rest, they should have been regicides as w
ell as murderers. I cannot allow you—”
She stopped, abashed by the scowl gathering on Gwendolen’s face.
“And what was Cormac MacAlpine, then, if not a murderer and would-be regicide?” Gwendolen demanded, taking a step backwards and folding her arms. “If that was not too much risk, why is this? For you ran towards that danger willingly enough, and made no objection to my running with you.”
“That was different,” Joanna began, indignant, but she could take her protest no further, unable to articulate in what, exactly, the difference consisted.
Cormac MacAlpine had kidnapped Gray—last in a string of captives whose ill fortune it was to be foreigners in Alba, and possessed of powerful magick—with the twin aims of using Gray’s power and of ensnaring Sophie for the same purpose; which was, as Gwendolen rightly noted, to sweep Clan MacNeill from the throne of Alba and install himself in Donald MacNeill’s stead. He had also, it later transpired, been wooing Sophie’s friend Catriona MacCrimmon, whose family harboured some ancient connexion to Clan MacAlpine on the distaff side, with a view to establishing a new MacAlpine dynasty; though, to Catriona MacCrimmon’s credit, she had not known the half of the means to MacAlpine’s ends, and had behaved with great courage in defying him, once she began to learn the truth. MacAlpine’s ultimate threat had been to the throne of Alba—indeed, as it proved, to the kingdom itself—but Joanna, in determining upon her course of action, had been motivated purely by the threat he represented to Gray and, through Gray, to Sophie.
What, then, was different here? Deprived of their head, the traitor Lord Carteret—beheaded upon Tower Hill in the wake of the conspiracy’s revelation, as they should all have been, had not King Henry indulged his fit of clemency (And look what that coin has bought us now, Your Majesty!)—what threat did her father and his co-conspirators presently represent, and to whom? Of Appius Callender himself she knew enough—or thought she did—to draw some conclusions: He had long been prone to petty score-settling, seldom averse to cheating as necessary to win his small contests of power, always ready to take offence and to put the worst possible complexion upon any word or action of anybody else. Imprisonment had undoubtedly changed him, for how could it not? But still Joanna had no doubt that if left to itself, his mind would turn at once to revenge—and Joanna’s own part in bringing about his downfall paled into insignificance beside those of Sophie and Gray, and of Lady Maëlle, and of Kergabet and even Jenny (who twice had him thrown out of her house).
But as for Gwendolen Pryce . . .
“You are safe enough from my father’s attempts at retribution, I believe,” she said at last, “so long as he does not know what you are to me.”
Gwendolen’s arms remained folded, however, and her fine dark brows drew closer together. “And what am I, then?” she inquired, in what Joanna recognised as a dangerously level tone. “Am I your pretty, innocent little bride, to be protected from the great perilous world at all costs? A swooning damsel for you to rescue and carry off on your prancing steed?”
The idea was so preposterous—aside from the obvious, Gwen was two years older than herself, and nearly a head taller—that Joanna nearly laughed aloud; but it was clear to her even in her present disconcerted state that this would be an enormous tactical error.
“No,” she said instead. “No, of course not. Gwen, I—”
“We have made one another no vows, Jo,” Gwendolen continued, cutting across her, “but surely you understand that were it in my power, I should pledge myself to you before the whole of Britain, by any vow you chose.”
“Yes,” said Joanna, weakly. “Of course I know that.” She swallowed past the lump in her throat, and went on: “And you understand, I hope, that I feel just the same.”
Gwendolen’s expression softened a little. “I have sometimes suspected it,” she said gravely.
“Then you understand why—”
“Jo.” Gwen dropped to her knees at Joanna’s feet, clasped Joanna’s hands in hers, and looked earnestly up into her face. “Suppose that I were the one in danger—should you wish me to spare you the knowledge of it? To refrain from doing all I could to combat that danger, from a desire to shield you alone?”
Put in those terms, the notion seemed not only foolish but repugnant.
Gwendolen had not done, however: “And you have not forgot, I hope, that if any one of us had set off alone on that mad sortie to the Ross of Mull, all of those poor fellows locked up in Castle MacAlpine should now be dead, or worse, and very likely all of us with them.
“In any case,” she concluded, “did you not hear what Sieur Germain said to you?”
Joanna cast her mind back—ran over his words—and after a long moment said, “Gwen! Oh, Gwen, how clever you are!”
Gwendolen grinned, and Joanna tugged at her hands until she knelt up far enough to be soundly kissed.
For Kergabet had not said you must not be involved in this affair, but you cannot be seen to be involved.
* * *
It was not until the small hours of the morning that Joanna’s busy brain cast up to her, like fortuitous flotsam upon the shingle of her conscious mind, the question of Amelia.
Amelia, whose behaviour Sophie had called peculiar—who had received at least two mysterious letters—whose motives for coming to London (as related by Katell) had seemed so suspect.
These questions had been superseded entirely, in Joanna’s mind and no doubt in Sophie’s, by the escapades of Roland and Lucia, and now by the potential disaster of the prisoners’ escape. Now, however—if it were not merely the effect of a wakeful night, the sort of notion which daylight reveals to be utterly crackbrained—it occurred to Joanna to ask herself whether the three mysteries might not be connected. And if that were so . . .
Beside her, just visible in the faint glow of the banked fire, Gwendolen slept quietly, curled on her side with one hand tucked beneath her pillow and the other just grazing the corner of Joanna’s; the bed they presently shared was not a large one. Joanna gripped Gwendolen’s shoulder and gently shook it, murmuring her name.
Gwendolen stirred—frowned—opened her eyes at last, her eyelids heavy, and in a voice blurred with sleep said, “Jo? Is all well?”
“No,” said Joanna. “I need—”
Gwendolen’s eyes opened wide; she sat up straight, as though stung into motion, and reached for Joanna, taking her by both shoulders and peering earnestly into her face. “What is it?” she demanded. “Are you ill? Is someone—”
“No one is ill,” said Joanna firmly. “But I have had an idea—about my father, and Roland’s trees, and Amelia.”
Gwendolen favoured her with a sort of exasperated half laugh, flopped back down onto her pillow, and briefly pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.
“An idea,” she said, through an enormous yawn.
“Yes,” said Joanna. She propped herself on one elbow. “Does it not seem an odd coincidence that Amelia should be so very eager to come to London, and should be receiving mysterious letters and behaving so much unlike herself, at just the same time when her father has inexplicably contrived to escape what ought to have been the securest captivity?”
Gwendolen, somewhat to Joanna’s disappointment, did not seem particularly astonished by this notion. “It does,” she said, “seem a very odd coincidence indeed.”
Then she stretched her long arms above her head, produced another enormous yawn, and said, “For the gods’ sake go back to sleep, Jo. This will all keep for the morning.”
She lay down again, curled up with her back to Joanna, and closed her eyes.
Joanna glared down at her, at the pale shape of her shoulder in the firelight, the dark stripe of her plaited hair. But no better soporific existed than the sound of Gwen’s deep, even breathing so near at hand, and at last, in spite of herself, Joanna tucked herself against the curve of her friend’s back, and drifted once more in
to sleep.
* * *
Sophie and Gray woke very early the next morning, and arrived in the breakfast-room almost before the breakfast itself—though not before Joanna and Miss Pryce, whom they found respectively demolishing a plate of brioches and yawning over a cup of tea.
“Amelia knows something,” said Joanna at once, and à propos of nothing whatever, the moment they crossed the threshold.
“Amelia presumably knows all manner of things,” said Sophie, bemused. Whatever choleric or melancholic humour had led Joanna to flee the dining-room and shut herself up in Miss Pryce’s room all yesterday evening, in the wake of Sieur Germain’s revelation, had now, it seemed, passed off. “What—”
“About Father,” said Joanna, lowering her voice and leaning across the table. “Those letters—her insistence upon coming to London now, for no good reason—the very odd way she has been going on, since arriving here—”
“Jo,” said Gray, regarding her gravely over the rim of his teacup, “you understand, do you not, that you are accusing your sister of high treason?”
Miss Pryce blanched.
“No, no,” Joanna said impatiently, “it is no such thing. I am only accusing her of doing whatever Father tells her; I do not suppose she had the least notion what any of it meant.”
“And what is it you suppose her to have done?” said Sophie. She had spent a miserably wakeful night, and dreamt of horrors when at last she slept; she did not feel capable at present of any degree of reason—but, after all, it was she who had first supposed that Amelia might be hiding something. Only, I did not imagine anything so dangerous. Or so very, very foolish.
Joanna made an impatient gesture. “I have not the least idea,” she said. “That is, not yet. Nothing particularly dreadful, I should imagine; passing along messages she did not understand to persons of whom she knows nothing, very likely, or arranging for the purchase of items whose purpose she could not divine. Truly, Sophie, you must not suppose that I am seeking revenge upon Amelia, or anything of the kind; I am only thinking of whether she may be able to tell us anything to the purpose.”
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 14
