Joanna hid a most unladylike snort of derisive laughter behind her hand; Sophie glared at her, and she left her seat and began to pace about the room.
“In any case,” said Sophie, returning her attention to Katell, “Mr. Taylor is not an Oxford man, handsome or otherwise; he is a convicted traitor. A man who took part in a plot to poison the King.”
This, it seemed, Amelia had not confided to her accomplice; Katell’s brown eyes widened in alarm, and she swallowed hard before saying, “I am sure that can’t be right, Miss Sophie. Or”—her voice grew more confident as she evolved an alternative theory—“if it is, I’m sure Miss Amelia can’t have known of it.”
“She did know of it, Katell,” said Sophie gently; “I know she did, for we spoke of the matter very lately. But I believe she thinks better of Mr. Taylor and his friends—and of the Professor, too—than they deserve.”
Behind Katell, Joanna rolled her eyes; this time Sophie could not glare at her without Katell’s seeing it, and so she confined herself to a brief crimping of her lips. “But whatever Miss Amelia may believe of them, Katell, they are not good men, and I do not believe she is safe in their company.”
Katell bit her lip and twisted her apron in her hands as though it had been a floor-cloth which wanted wringing out.
“I am sure Miss Amelia would never go away with a young man unless she intended marriage,” said Sophie, pressing her advantage, “but what Miss Amelia intended and what Mr. Taylor means to do may not be the same, you see.” Despite herself, she heard her voice go pleading, felt Joanna’s gaze sharp on her face—wondering at her tone, or suspecting her of prevarication? “Amelia and I have not always been very kind to one another, but if she should come to harm, harm that I might have prevented—”
“She had letters from him,” Katell burst out. She sounded near to weeping—and no wonder, if she was betraying a promise of secrecy. Truly, thought Sophie, it was cruel of Amelia to have put her in such a position. “He promised to marry her, and to take her where her father is, and that he and the Professor have powerful friends, and will be great men there.”
“Where?” Joanna demanded.
Katell burst into tears, and flung herself at Sophie. “I don’t know,” she sobbed into Sophie’s shoulder. “She never told me that. I don’t know.”
Did she know herself? Had she any idea what she was about? Oh, Amelia . . .
And whilst all of us were brangling over whether she ought to be permitted to speak with him, in a public park and in Gray’s company, for a quarter-hour, she must already have been planning to elope with him!
But if that were so, then why—
Katell interrupted this promising train of thought by clutching at Sophie’s shoulder-blades and sobbing, “I gave her my word, and now look!”
“All right, Katell,” said Sophie, holding her tight. “All right. I am sorry that we should have made you break your word. You did right to tell us, I promise you.”
Over Katell’s heaving shoulders, Sophie caught Joanna’s gaze and held it. We shall have to ask Jenny to scry Amelia’s things in any case.
* * *
To Joanna’s surprise, Lady Maëlle was not lurking in the corridor listening at the door, and, indeed, was nowhere to be found. Having given Katell over to the care of Mrs. Treveur, the acerbic but kind-hearted Breizhek matron who ruled over Jenny’s kitchen, Joanna and Sophie went in search of Jenny. In the morning-room they found Mrs. Marshall at work on a vast and complex piece of petit-point, and in the library, Gray, surrounded by stacks of books and poring over an enormous codex—but no Jenny.
They ran her to earth at last in the nursery, nearly at the top of the house, where she was ensconced in a rocking-chair with Yvon curled in her lap and Agatha hanging perilously over the chair-back. All three were listening raptly to Gwendolen, who sat cross-legged on the nursery carpet with a book open in her lap. “Au bout d’une quinzaine d’ans,” she read, “le Roi et la Reine étant allés à une de leurs maisons de plaisance, il arriva que la jeune Princesse courait un jour partout dans le Château, et montant de chambre en chambre . . .”
Sophie coughed.
Gwendolen looked up sharply. “What is the matter?” she said.
“Aunty Jo!” said Yvon, pointing with a chubby finger. “Story!”
Agatha dropped to her feet, ran forward, and caught Joanna and Sophie by the hands. “Come! Sit down!” she said. “Aunty Gwen, tell us what happens next to the beautiful Princess!”
Gwendolen glanced up at Joanna as if seeking permission to continue; Joanna nodded minutely, and silently shaped the word Later. Gwendolen returned the nod, bent her head to the book, and took up her interrupted tale.
Sophie meanwhile had allowed herself to be towed half across the nursery and deposited on the cushioned window-seat. Rather than joining her, however, Joanna paused by Jenny’s chair and, bending close to her ear, murmured, “It is as we suspected, and possibly worse.”
Jenny’s wide hazel eyes fell closed, and her arms about Yvon tightened briefly. “What had Katell to say?” she said, low.
“A farrago of lies, I strongly suspect,” said Joanna; “but not her own lies, and, unless I miss my guess, not even my sister’s.” In a rapid undertone, wary of Yvon’s listening ears, she sketched the purport of Katell’s confession. “But what she did not know—or, at any rate, would not admit to knowing, and by then I believe she had abandoned concealment—is where. I hope, therefore—”
“Yes,” said Jenny. “Bring me something of hers—come to my room, when you have dressed for dinner—and I shall do what I can.”
Joanna blinked, nonplussed. She and Sophie had marshalled their arguments, arming themselves to overcome Jenny’s scruples on the subject of scrying Amelia’s abandoned possessions without her consent—but here was the skirmish won for them, without a sword drawn.
“I thank you,” she said at last, and, after gently ruffling Yvon’s tow-coloured curls, turned away to settle beside Gwendolen on the carpet.
Under cover of their muddled skirts, Gwendolen’s free hand found Joanna’s and held tight.
* * *
“Dougal MacAngus would have my head,” muttered Sophie, sifting through the contents of Amelia’s dressing-table drawers, very little of which recognisably belonged to Amelia. Of course even Dougal MacAngus would make an exception in the case of a missing person—but was Amelia missing, in that sense, or had she merely made a choice with which her family and friends vehemently disagreed?
Joanna’s face appeared round the door of the wardrobe, into which her head and upper body had vanished some time before. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
“Never mind.” Sophie waved a hand vaguely about the scene of their various transgressions—of the laws of hospitality, of their sister’s privacy, of (though as yet only in prospect) the tenets of magickal ethics—and returned to her rummaging.
The results thus far were not encouraging; as well as making a nearly clean sweep of her fungible assets, Amelia appeared to have taken away with her—or otherwise disposed of—all of her jewellery, her brushes and hair-pins, her dancing-slippers—
“Aha!” Joanna emerged fully from the wardrobe, and thrust towards Sophie a battered reticule, embroidered with pink and red carnations and closed by a wide ribbon of dull green. Loose threads spilled from the edges of a rent in one side.
Sophie regarded it doubtfully. It was difficult to imagine Amelia as the owner of such a bedraggled object, but had it belonged to Miss Pryce, whose bedroom this ordinarily was, Joanna could not have mistaken it.
“The carnations,” said Joanna, impatient, waggling the limp satin. “I shall never forget you. Amelia’s friend Claudine Harcourt made this for her when she left school, and Amelia made her one very like it.”
“I shall take your word for it,” said Sophie. “Have you that copper coin from the back of the drawer . .
. ?”
Joanna extracted the coin (or, at any rate, a coin) from the folds of her sash and held it up.
They knocked diffidently upon the door of Jenny’s room; as Joanna pushed open the door, Jenny turned from her dressing-table, smoothing her skirts over her knees with anxious hands.
“What have you found?” she said.
Joanna produced the carnation reticule and handed it over.
Jenny’s eyebrows rose in doubt—exactly as Sophie’s had done, not a quarter-hour since—and Joanna, anxious and impatient, bit back a sharp reply. “It is Amelia’s own, I promise you,” she said instead; as a further thought occurred, she added, “Indeed, I rather wonder that she should have left it behind.”
“She must have packed up her things in a great hurry,” said Sophie.
Jenny flattened the worn and shredded silk across her lap and studied it thoughtfully. “A gift from a dear friend, perhaps?” she said.
“Yes, exactly,” said Joanna.
“Perhaps,” said Sophie, “we may find Amelia by seeking out Mademoiselle Harcourt?”
Joanna sighed. “Perhaps we might,” she said, “but that Claudine Harcourt—Madame Deschamps she was by then—died four years ago.” Sophie flinched. “Thrown from a horse, by Cousin Maëlle’s account—it was not Amelia who told me of it, of course.”
“Be quiet, please, both of you,” said Jenny, not unkindly.
Sophie reached for Joanna’s hand—to still the anxious fidgeting of her own, Joanna suspected—and they sat side by side, unspeaking, whilst Jenny prepared her scrying-spell.
There was not much to see, and they had in any case seen all of it before. Jenny cupped Amelia’s abandoned reticule in both hands, closed her eyes and steadied her breathing, and murmured the words of her spell—as obscure to Joanna now as they had been when first she heard them, all those years ago, applied to a ring of keys which Sophie had stolen from the pocket of the Professor’s coat.
On this occasion the process seemed to go on for a very long time. Joanna leant up close to Sophie and breathed in her ear, “What is happening? Is all well, do you suppose?”
As she drew back, Sophie turned to her with a small, unhappy frown creasing her brow. “Scrying is a closed book to me, Jo,” she said quietly. “I have not the least idea. I do know that a scry-mage must never be interrupted midspell.”
Meaning, in fact, Hush, Jo.
Joanna pressed her lips together and called on Lady Juno to grant her patience.
When at last Jenny raised her head and opened her eyes, her expression was surprisingly calm.
“Well?” said Sophie.
Jenny sighed. “I cannot decide whether this object was well or poorly chosen for the purpose,” she said. “It was in your sister’s possession for more than a decade, and strongly associated with her, but it is so thickly wrapped about with aetheric echoes that to find those we are seeking would, I think, be no easy feat for any scry-mage—even one far more skilled than I.”
“Jenny—”
Jenny held up a hand, and Sophie subsided, quivering.
“Fortunately, I am better acquainted with Miss Callender than a more skilled stranger could possibly be, and fortunately, too, the echoes we need are amongst the most recent, though not the strongest, which made my task easier than it might otherwise have been.” She looked down again at the lovingly worked carnations. Where, Joanna wondered, was this interminable lecture leading? “Less fortunately, your sister’s feelings of guilt at leaving behind this last relic of her girlhood friend have created such a strong echo as nearly to obscure those associated with her plans.”
“Jenny,” said Sophie, a pleading note creeping into her voice, “you know I should have no objection, in the ordinary way, to a lecture on the art of scrying, but in this case—”
“I am coming to the point, Sophie, I assure you,” said Jenny. “From what I have been able to see—and it is little enough, as I have tried to explain—Miss Callender’s thoughts, at the time when last she handled this reticule, were on the subject of Mr. Henry Taylor—”
“That, at least, is no surprise,” said Sophie, with a grim little nod. “There is no use in my going to the park as Amelia to meet him, then, I suppose.”
“It would surprise you very much, if you had seen him,” said Joanna. Try as she might, she could not make the pieces fit. “Truly, Sophie, I cannot imagine a man less likely to appeal to Amelia!”
“No doubt he will have found some way of making himself presentable,” said Sophie, waving an impatient hand. “He is an educated mage, after all—and, by Gray’s account, a dab hand at persuading people to do things they ought not. Jenny, what else has Amelia been thinking of?”
“Of Mr. Taylor, as I have said,” said Jenny patiently, “and of her father, and she seems to have been anticipating a journey across the Manche, to Trouville-sur-Mer or perhaps Honfleur. I must stress,” she added, reading their eagerness to start after this scent at once, “that I cannot say what she has done, or where she has gone—only what she thought of doing, or meant to do. And of course it is not unlikely that Trouville-sur-Mer and Honfleur are only two of a long list of possible destinations on the Normand coast, which she happened to remember.”
“But,” said Sophie, “but, Jenny, when you scried my stepfather’s key-ring—over and over, you remember!—you learnt things from it which—what I mean is, why cannot you see anything of what Amelia is doing, or thinking, or feeling now?”
“I shall try again, naturally,” said Jenny. “I shall try every day, if there seems any possibility of its being a useful undertaking. But, as we are speaking of that former example, do you not recall my saying that it was difficult to discover anything of use, because your stepfather was so angry with you that I could see almost nothing else?”
Sophie nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I see.”
Joanna let go Sophie’s hand, felt about in the folds of her own sash, and after a moment succeeded in retrieving the forgotten copper coin. “There is this,” she said, holding it out to Jenny. “We thought the other must be the better source, because it had been hers so long, but . . .”
Jenny folded her long fingers—slender even now, though that would change in the months to come—around the not-quite-circle of dull copper; first one hand, then the other. “Hmm,” she said, apparently to herself. Then once again she closed her eyes and sank into her scrying, lips moving silently through the words of her spell.
Her face grew pale, first by slow degrees, then all at once.
Joanna and Sophie exchanged anxious glances. Belatedly Joanna asked herself whether Jenny ought to have undertaken this task twice in such close succession (could not this second attempt, at least, have waited till after dinner?)—whether the first attempt had not been too draining in itself, without a second’s being added to it—whether they were asking too much of her, and whether the consequence might be magick shock, or . . . something worse.
“But we must not interrupt,” said Sophie. Her face crimped unhappily; she shifted in her seat, and Joanna saw that she was actually sitting on her hands.
Jenny opened her eyes with a small, startled gasp; the copper coin fell from her hand, slid down the slope of her skirts, and rolled across the carpet until it ran against the toe of Sophie’s shoe.
“Well,” said Jenny faintly, as Sophie bent to retrieve it. “Well, certainly I did not expect that.”
Sophie laid the coin gingerly atop a nearby occasional table. “Jo,” she said, “will you go to the kitchen, please, and fetch back, er, some of Mrs. Treveur’s beef tea?”
As this irritatingly transparent attempt to get her out of the way—for what purpose, she could only speculate—was also more efficient than ringing for one of the servants to convey a message to Mrs. Treveur, Joanna picked up her skirts and dashed down the servants’ stair to the kitchen, though no
t before glaring briefly at Sophie.
Persuading Mrs. Treveur that there was no need to send for a healer (or for Lady Maëlle) took as much time as fetching out and warming the beef tea; when at last Joanna regained Jenny’s room, she found a fire dancing in the grate and Jenny and Sophie perched side by side on the chaise longue, heads bent together as though studying something. A fluffy woollen shawl was incongruously wrapped about Jenny’s elegant gown of mulberry-coloured silk. Moving closer with her heavy tray, Joanna discovered the object of their study: Amelia’s forgotten copper coin, dull and beginning to go green, lay in Sophie’s open palm, and beside it another, bright-new, of more or less the same size and shape.
“What has that coin to tell us, that the other had not?” she inquired.
She set down the covered tray upon the hearth, then handed the cup and spoon up to Jenny, who grimaced at the smell but, at Joanna’s severe look, meekly set to.
“There is something very odd about this coin, Jenny says,” said Sophie, holding up the two for Joanna’s inspection, “so we thought to compare it to an ordinary one, and look!”
Joanna looked.
The new coin was indeed perfectly ordinary: on the obverse, a head in profile, recognisable as that of His Majesty the King, and the legend HENRICUS XII REX; on the reverse, a stylised sandal of Mercury within a laurel-wreath, and the previous year’s date.
The other had been frequently clipped and was half grown over with verdigris, but closer examination revealed that it was not, as first Gwendolen and then Joanna and Sophie had supposed, otherwise an ordinary product of His Majesty’s mint. The profile on the obverse was not King Henry’s, nor his father’s or grandfather’s; the lettering round the rim was half clipped away, but Joanna could just make out ANS along the right-hand edge, and FRA along the left. On the reverse, what at first appeared to be a bundle of sticks resolved itself, when held at a particular angle to the light, into a fleur-de-lys.
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 21
