“That is not so very strange, is it?” she said, after a thoughtful moment. “This coin is a long way from home, certainly; but if it was Amelia’s, then it came here by way of Breizh, and coin from the Duchies crosses into Breizh and Maine and Normandie often enough in the course of trade, when relations are good.”
She studied Jenny’s troubled expression, relieved to see that at any rate her face was no longer the colour of a tallow-candle.
“There is something else, I collect,” she said. “What is it?”
Jenny swallowed another spoonful of beef tea, then set the half-empty vessel aside and folded her hands upon her knee. “The coin was Amelia’s, in fact,” she said, “but only very lately; she did not acquire it in the course of some ordinary transaction, but received it—received an entire purse of coin from the same source, not only copper but silver and gold—by the hand of a stranger, with instructions for its conveyance to some third person.”
“But who?” Joanna demanded.
“Had I been able to identify either of these mysterious persons,” said Jenny mildly, “I should already have told you so. I was not.”
“And who made the coin?” said Joanna, in a more moderate tone—there was certainly nothing to be gained from antagonising Jenny. “Or ordered it made? And where?”
Jenny shook her head. “It was not made in Britain,” she said, “but that much we knew already. The reverse is a fleur-de-lys; one or other of the Duchies seems indicated, as you have remarked yourself. More than that, at present, I cannot say.”
From below came the bright peal of the dinner-bell.
“Do you feel well enough to come down with us, Jenny?” said Sophie, laying a hand over Jenny’s, still clasped upon her knee. “You are still a little pale, I think—Jo, do you not think so?”
“I am perfectly well,” said Jenny firmly, before Joanna could make any reply; rising from her seat, she put off her shawl and went to the mirror to scrutinise her hair. This done, she turned back to them, hands on hips, and added, “Come along!”
Joanna and Sophie followed her obediently out of the room. If Joanna chanced to remark that Jenny’s gait was a trifle more measured than ordinarily, or that she kept a firmer hold of the bannister when descending the stair, she was not so foolish as to mention it aloud.
CHAPTER XVI
In Which Gray Receives a Commission
There were guests for dinner, whom it had been too late to put off: Sir Herbert and Lady Beaumont, their eldest son, and their daughter, upon whom Mrs. Marshall had matrimonial designs on behalf of her son Alan; for after the first, shocked reaction to Kergabet’s news of the escaped prisoners, Mrs. Marshall had quickly returned her attention to her chief aim in coming to London. Miss Beaumont was a perfectly inoffensive young lady—indeed, thought Sophie, she was very pretty, with her tawny-gold hair, finely sculpted features, and warm smile—and perfectly friendly to Mrs. Marshall; the enthusiasm which the latter (and possibly also Lady Beaumont) supposed that young lady to possess for the absent Alan, however, appeared entirely her own invention.
Nevertheless Jenny had, at her mother’s request, invited Miss Beaumont and her parents not only to eat dinner but also to spend the evening in Grosvenor Square. The evening party was to include more than a dozen further guests, among them—and here Sophie anticipated considerable chagrin on her mother-in-law’s part—three unmarried young men, all of them personable, reasonably intelligent, and of larger fortune than Alan Marshall, as well as Madame de Courcy and her two eldest daughters.
Jenny had also intervened—or, rather, had outmanoeuvred her mother’s intervention—in the seating arrangements, so that Miss Beaumont was seated to Sieur Germain’s left, with Gray on her other side, and as far as possible from Mrs. Marshall.
No one mentioned Amelia. Lady Maëlle, Sophie discovered, had invented an invitation from a cousin to an extended house-party at the fictional cousin’s husband’s estate in Kent, received by Amelia in the course of the previous se’nnight and taken up yesterday afternoon. Being who and what she was, she had succeeded in persuading Mrs. Marshall to swallow this unlikely tale as though it were entirely plausible, first, that Amelia should have been in possession of a cousin with an estate in Kent and said nothing of it to anyone, and, second, that she should have abandoned London for the country when the London season was yet in full swing. And now, though Sophie knew her to be furious with Amelia, furious with herself, and half-sick with fear that something far worse than an ill-considered elopement might have befallen her, she was calmly eating quail en croûte and discussing the relative merits of two different breeds of sheep with Sir Herbert Beaumont.
Where Lady Maëlle had been since leaving Sophie and Joanna alone with Katell, Sophie had not the least idea. There had been no opportunity before dinner to convey to her what Katell had confessed, or what Jenny’s scrying had discovered, and Sophie itched with the desire to do so—to, if she were honest with herself, lay the whole of it before her erstwhile guardian like a child bringing her small woes to her mama.
Instead, however, she gathered her wandering wits, turned to the young man at her side, and in as ordinary a tone as she could manage said, “Have you been long in London, Mr. Trenoweth?”
Mr. Trenoweth smiled winningly. “A twelvemonth only,” he said.
“And how do you find it?”
“I find it very well supplied with beauty,” said Mr. Trenoweth. “And with dancing, and spritely conversation. I am very fond of dancing,” he added.
As Sophie was also very fond of dancing, this topic served them well for some time.
“I hope Miss Callender may be enjoying herself in Kent,” said Mr. Trenoweth at length.
This remark rather startled Sophie, both by its unexpected consonance with her own thoughts and because she had not known Amelia and Mr. Trenoweth to be at all acquainted with one another. When she did not at once reply, Mr. Trenoweth frowned at her and said in quite a different tone, “Mrs. Marshall, are you quite well? You are very pale.”
Sophie drew her mother’s magick about her, imagining it as a veil—so finely woven as to be nearly invisible, yet obscuring the truth of her feelings from her face—and said, “Perfectly well, I thank you. I hope the same. I am not acquainted with these cousins, but my sister seems to have been pleased by the invitation.”
She had learnt from Joanna, though not without many a painful moment of revelation, the trick of telling plausible lies: Only the word cousins was genuinely untrue.
“You are acquainted with the Mesdemoiselles de Courcy, however, are you not?” said Mr. Trenoweth. His tone was light, almost offhand, but his expression betrayed his interest.
“A little, yes,” she said. “The eldest is a great friend of my sister Joanna and of Miss Pryce.”
“They are known in London society to be clever and bookish,” said Mr. Trenoweth. “One does not altogether know what to make of such remarks.”
“Indeed?” Sophie raised her eyebrows. “Speaking for myself, I think I should begin by considering their source.”
A sudden, startling grin flashed over his face, there and gone in a moment. “That is the interesting thing, you see,” he said, sinking his voice to a confidential murmur. “I have heard my sister call them so, and Miss Callender—Miss Joanna, that is—do so also; yet they do not appear to mean at all the same thing by the words.”
“I see,” said Sophie, who thought she did. “If I may contribute my pinch of salt to the soup-pot”—this was an expression adopted from Donella MacHutcheon—“I am not so well acquainted with the ladies in question as either Jenny or Joanna, but what I do know of them, I like very much. Mademoiselle de Courcy, I believe, is a great student of politics and of history, and I have heard my sister say that Mademoiselle Héloïse—she is talented, you know, which her sisters are not—takes a considerable interest in alchymy.”
“Does she, indeed,�
�� said Mr. Trenoweth, thoughtfully. “And, if I may ask—I fear it is a great impertinence!—what think you of Miss Beaumont?”
Startled, Sophie glanced down the table at her, and found her smiling up at Sieur Germain. Too far away to distinguish their words, Sophie nonetheless thought she recognised her brother-in-law’s expression as akin to the look of kindly but slightly weary patience he so often wore when conversing with Mrs. Edmond Marshall.
“I think,” she said after a moment, choosing her words carefully, “that Miss Beaumont is a kind, sweet, biddable young lady, who has not had much encouragement to think for herself.”
Mr. Trenoweth followed her gaze, his thoughtful frown deepening. “Hmm,” he said.
Then the table turned with the next course, and Sophie left Mr. Trenoweth to the care of Jenny and talked determinedly of nature-poetry, Latin and Gaelic and English, to Mr. Fowler, until the end of the meal.
* * *
“A word, if you please, Marshall,” said Sieur Germain quietly, drawing Gray aside with a hand on his shoulder.
“Sir?” Gray followed obediently, and not so quickly as to draw attention; when they had reached the secluded corner behind Miss Pryce’s harp, he asked, “Have you had news of the prisoners?”
“Yes,” said Sieur Germain, “and no. There have been reports, of course, almost since the moment their escape became public knowledge—sightings of them in every hole and corner of the kingdom, and it is a task for Hercules himself to discover which of them may be true ones, if any. But our business together is something else entirely.”
Gray turned so as to continue looking at him whilst also keeping the rest of the party in his line of sight.
“As you know,” Sieur Germain continued, “I have—or, rather, His Majesty has—agents in cities and towns across the Duchies, all of whom send in ciphered dispatches as best they may; their reports do not always arrive regularly, or in the intended sequence, and at times rumour is reported as fact, and only later corrected. When first one of our men in Touraine reported that local men were being recruited to serve a man calling himself Imperator Gallia, as you may perhaps remember, we all thought it as likely to be a practical joke as not—”
Gray nodded; he did remember, and could not deny that the notion still struck him as unlikely to the point of absurdity.
“Yet this same man—or, rather, the same title, whether or not the same man is meant—has been mentioned in no fewer than half a dozen other agents’ dispatches since, which of course is not proof but does suggest that there exists something worth investigating.
“Moreover, dispatches from our border garrisons in Breizh, in Maine, and in Normandie have lately reported that some large force is massing beyond the Loire, and another in the Comté de Blois and northward, on the borders of Maine and Normandie. The arms of Blois have been sighted, and of Anjou, Poitou, Touraine, and Acquitaine, among others—”
“Together?” said Gray, astonished.
Though no great follower of politics, and still less of military campaigns, he was at any rate aware that the Comte de Blois and the Comte de Poitou had been making attempts these seventy years and more to wrest the territory of Anjou—which, with the Comté de Touraine and the British province of Maine, lay between their own—from the Duc d’Acquitaine, each claiming a right, on behalf of their respective liege-lords, to defend it from the depredations of the other, and from the no longer particularly credible threat of British reconquest. Even had one of them prevailed at last, what could have induced the others suddenly to make common cause?
“Indeed,” his brother-in-law said dryly. “You will thus perhaps understand the Privy Council’s . . . curiosity.”
“Certainly,” said Gray, “but—”
“Now, all of this is very curious, of course; but more lately my colleagues and I have ceased to be intrigued, and begun to be alarmed, for the reports we have been accustomed to receive have grown more infrequent, and for the last fortnight have ceased altogether. And that, Marshall, is where you come in.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Gray, equally baffled and alarmed, “but I do not see . . .”
“Do you not?” Sieur Germain chuckled, but quite without humour. “Miss Joanna warned me to expect as much, I admit.” Whilst Gray was digesting this rather extraordinary remark, he continued, “I wish to send you as my eyes and ears to Ivry, on the river Eure, where we have a cavalry regiment garrisoned and, as it seems, a large mixed force from several of the Duchies encamped opposite, lest we be tempted to cross the river, one supposes. And, from Ivry, where the trail leads you—without stirring up further hostilities, that is, for we have enough to be going on with at present without making, or provoking, an outright declaration of war.
“What has become of our agents in the Duchies? Can all of them have been captured? Killed? Suborned? How, and by whom? Who is it that calls himself Emperor of Gaul—if such a person exists indeed—and what is he about? And,” he added, “it will not have escaped your notice that according to your sister’s scrying, the absent Miss Callender was bound in the same general direction when she departed this house—or, at any rate, believed herself to be so.”
Gray discovered that he was gaping, and shut his mouth with a snap. “I,” he began, and stopped. “Do not misunderstand me; I am eager to be of service, as I have said—and also to ensure Miss Callender’s safety; but I confess I do not altogether see why I should be more suited for this service than another. There must be . . . officers—agents—men trained to such work, and familiar with the territory—”
“Indeed,” said Sieur Germain once more, “but none whom I, and the redoubtable Lady Maëlle, can trust as we both trust you.”
Gray swallowed against an incipient stammer. “I thank you,” he managed, “very much indeed. Both of you. May I ask, however—”
“Certainly you may.”
“Do I reason correctly, from your talk of trust and the lack thereof, that you also have reason to suspect the existence of . . . sympathisers . . . within Britain’s own ranks?”
“It is not impossible,” said Kergabet gravely, “though at present I have no specific suspicions of the kind. You hesitate,” he added—Gray’s ears burned in embarrassment—“yet I know you do not lack for courage. You have reservations as to some aspect of the business; explain them to me.”
“I hesitate,” said Gray, “because I cannot imagine what qualifications—beyond my loyalty to my kingdom, and your trust in me—I might possibly possess for a reconnaissance mission on the borders of the Duchies, with daring rescue to follow.”
Kergabet’s eyebrows rose. “Can you not?” he inquired. “You have been trained in defensive magicks; you have seen battle, of a sort; you are an educated man, and a student of languages as well as a powerful mage; you have survived several months’ imprisonment and”—a delicate pause; then—“mistreatment at the hands of a most unscrupulous enemy, and even when rescue seemed most remote, did not agree to his demands. Can you truly imagine no reason for my choice?”
Gray blinked.
“By that account,” he said slowly, “I should seem the best man for the post.” He did not add that the said account did not sound to him at all like a description of himself.
“Indeed,” said Sieur Germain, with a small chuckle behind his hand.
A more urgent thought occurred to Gray: “You are aware, I am sure, of what befell Sophie, whilst I was imprisoned in Alba?”
Kergabet sobered abruptly. “Certainly I am,” he said.
“Then you will understand . . .” Gray hesitated. But Kergabet would understand, if any man could. “You will understand that I should prefer to have Sophie with me, as a partner in this undertaking.”
“Graham,” said Kergabet. Having made this startling beginning, he paused, folded his arms, and regarded Gray long and thoughtfully before speaking again. “I am well enough acquainted with
your character, I believe, to feel certain that you should never have made this suggestion, even to me, unless in your considered opinion the danger to her were less—or at least no greater—in accompanying you than in remaining here.”
“That is so, sir,” said Gray gratefully.
“That being said, however,” his brother-in-law continued, “it is not I who must be convinced, you understand, but the Princess’s father; and I tell you frankly that the odds of your succeeding in that endeavour are infinitesimally small.”
Gray nodded, disappointed but unsurprised. His Majesty—who knew Gray so little, and Sophie scarcely more—would not see, as Kergabet had done, the extent to which Gray’s request grew from a concern for Sophie’s . . . not safety, for to attempt to keep Sophie safe was akin to clipping the wings of an osprey and keeping it in a cage, but her happiness and well-being. He would understand it, rather, as reflecting selfishness on Gray’s part, or headstrong foolishness on Sophie’s.
Yet the thought of once more subjecting Sophie to the distresses of a separation—of doing so willingly and deliberately—and, almost worse, the prospect of breaking the news to her of his departure on an adventure in which she could take no part, and of which he could tell her almost nothing . . .
On the other hand, was it likely that he should be knocked on the head, taken captive, and held under interdiction, as he had been in Alba? The former, he conceded, was not out of the realm of possibility, though he hoped he should not be so caught off his guard a second time; but that an army on the move should have any means to hold a mage under interdiction—no, surely not.
So far, so reassuring; unfortunately, Gray could not help following out this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion: Far safer and easier to execute him on the spot.
He swallowed. “I doubt not you are right, sir.”
* * *
“Are you mad?”
“Cariad—”
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 22
