When the shades of Gwen’s father and stepmother, and of that tyrant Mrs. Griffith-Rowlands, are judged in the realm of Hades, I hope they may all be condemned to the fires of Tartarus, for having made my Gwen believe no one but her dead mama could love her.
When at last she turned away from the washstand, still drying her hands on the inn’s crisp linen towel, she found Gwendolen standing before her, near enough to touch. Without her conscious volition, her hands came up to clasp her friend’s slim shoulders, and Gwendolen stepped forward into her arms.
“You must never doubt it,” Joanna whispered fiercely. “Not for a moment.”
“Nor you,” said Gwendolen, muffled into Joanna’s hair.
Joanna pulled away just far enough to look up into Gwendolen’s deep brown eyes. “And you must never think you have any cause to be ashamed,” she said. “I ought not to have spoken as I did, without your leave, but a useful skill is always worth possessing, and I spoke from pride in your skill, not . . . not from any other motive.”
Gwendolen swallowed hard, pressing her lips together briefly; then she smiled—a small swift thing, but warm and full of affection—and said, “I thought, perhaps, your motive was to open that rusted old gate. But perhaps I may be mistaken?”
Joanna laughed aloud, and kissed her.
All the same, she thought, not for the first time, I should very much like to know what your motive was for learning to pick locks.
CHAPTER XXII
In Which Gray Receives a Message and Makes a Decision
Gray woke to watery late-afternoon sunshine slanting through an open tent-flap, and prudently took stock before attempting to sit up. This was not his too-small camp bed in the night-scouts’ tent, but one of many identical ones set in tidy rows in a much larger tent—really a sort of pavilion, a canvas roof and walls which could be rolled up to admit fresh air and sunlight, supported by sturdy wooden posts. The regimental infirmary, then; and to judge from its lack of occupants, whatever offensive action might be contemplated by the force across the river had not yet begun.
Someone had dressed him, not in his own clothes but in a worn linen nightshirt, too small but scrupulously clean. His left arm, bent at the elbow, was bound flat against his ribs with a square of linen folded into a sling, which also held in place the folded bandages padding his shoulder; the shoulder yet ached a little, but the throbbing agony he remembered was nowhere in evidence. His head, on the other hand, felt as though he had spent an evening attempting to outdrink his brother George, and the whole of the succeeding night regretting it.
An arrow through the wing. Lécuyer’s words echoed in Gray’s mind. There were healers here—very skilled ones, clearly—and Lécuyer had lost no time in delivering Gray into their care; but even so, such a wound could not be recovered from in a single night. I shall not be flying for some days, I suspect.
Pinned to the blankets at the foot of the bed with a clothes-peg was a flat object, more or less white and more or less rectangular: a letter? Gray struggled to sit up, to lean down after it. An indrawn breath snagged in his throat, and he coughed. By all the gods, when had he last had anything to drink?
Help arrived in the form of a young man, clad in an odd hodgepodge of uniform breeches and boots and healer’s robes, bearing a cantine of water. He then insisted on taking Gray’s pulse, changing the dressing on his shoulder wound, and testing the motion of his arm, by the end of which operations, his patient was in a very fever of impatience.
“Is that a letter for me?” Gray inquired, low, when the healer had finished and was preparing to take himself off again. “May I read it?”
He held out his right hand to the healer, who gave him a dubious frown but unpinned the letter and handed it over. Awkwardly one-handed, Gray broke the seal. His brows rose; not Kergabet’s hand but Joanna’s had enciphered the contents. What could this portend?
Upon deciphering, the message proved brief—a mere few lines, padded out with nonsense. In Oxford, it read. Have consulted GEH; A is gone to Calais, not to Honfleur, and not with T. Means to join Papa, whereabouts unknown, and person styled Imperator Gallia. Not a rumour? Go carefully. S.
Gray stared at it for some time, questions boiling up in his mind: Why should Sophie go to Oxford—or rather, why should her father consent to her going? Calais, not Honfleur; meaning that Amelia sailed from Dover? Not with Taylor? Then with whom? Not all alone, surely? And where was she (were they?) going, in the end?
At any rate—all relevant observations having by now been reported up the chain of command, and there being no evidence whatever amongst the garrison of conversation with the enemy—Gray had already concluded that he could do no more good in Normandie.
He folded Sophie’s letter away and, for lack of a pocket of his own to stow it in, folded his fingers around it. Then—moving slowly at first, until he was certain that he should not fall over—he extricated himself from the camp-bed, climbed to his feet, and went in search of his boots and a pair of trousers, without which he did not quite dare accost Colonel Dubois.
* * *
Gray departed the camp at Ivry with even less ceremony than had attended his arrival a se’nnight since—shortly before dusk, on horseback, with a few necessities distributed into a pair of saddle-bags (together with a small purse of coin from Anjou, Orléanais, Picardie, Poitou, and Champagne, helpfully provided by Colonel Dubois); the rest of his possessions he had left behind in the care of Mage-Captain Tremblay. As soon as he could safely do so, he meant to wander into enemy territory in the dark; if, somewhere in one of the Duchies, someone were indeed calling himself Emperor of Gaul, then Gray had only to keep his ears open and his origins and identity concealed, and soon enough he should discover where to seek his quarry.
Or so I hope.
Around him, the camp hummed with preparations—improvements to the regiment’s defensive position, chiefly, though Gray and the rangy grey gelding Colonel Dubois had lent him were also passed by troops of grim-faced grooms shepherding strings of horses in from their picket-lines outside the camp proper. From time to time he received a respectful nod or even, once or twice, a salute; word had spread of the civilian night-scout who had matched the feat of the acclaimed Mage-Lieutenant Tanguy. My father would be pleased, at any rate, thought Gray, suppressing an ironical twist of his lips as he gravely returned a passing cavalry-officer’s greeting. Not that, should this sortie of his succeed, his father was ever likely to hear anything of it.
Gray had written, enciphered, and dispatched a report to Kergabet—parallel to the official version and, he suspected, rather shorter—giving a detailed account of his observations of the camp on the far bank of the river Eure, in which was enclosed a brief message of thanks to Sophie, together with a précis of his plans. Perhaps more usefully, Tremblay had unlocked his dispatch-case once more and made Gray a temporary gift of one of the talismans stored therein—the one marked XXI, which he had worn on his first sortie with the night-scouts; this small piece of insurance presently reposed in an inner pocket of his coat, and Tremblay had proposed a regular rotation of finding-spells by means of which he and Colonel Dubois should be apprised of Gray’s approximate location at least once every day, unless and until he reached the limits of the available mages’ range.
There, Sophie-of-mine: I am leaving you a trail to follow, as best I may, should . . . anything befall me.
He wished more than ever, now, that she had been here with him; how much more might he hope to accomplish, with two pairs of eyes to observe, two sets of ears to listen, and Sophie’s magick to wrap them in unremarkable obscurity? But he had made her a promise to return to her safe and whole, though plainly (he flexed his injured shoulder irritably, and thanked Aesculapius for talented healers) it was too late to return actually unscathed; and Gray hoped he was not a man to break a promise to his wife.
The grey gelding rejoiced in the name of Tonnerre, which in Gray�
��s experience thus far could not have been less à propos to its placid, accommodating temperament. Having passed the outer pickets, they ambled through the gathering dusk in a more or less southerly direction, roughly parallel to but out of sight of the river Eure and, it was to be hoped, any sentries or scouts posted by the force massed on its opposite bank.
The size of that force had more than tripled, the number of siege-engines doubled, and the heavy saltpetre-cannon added to the array of weaponry visible along the far bank, and new banners to the collection flew from the peaks of tents and pavilions and from the watchtowers facing the British camp. But no sortie had been made, either to attack or to parley. What might they be waiting for?
The lights of Colonel Dubois’s camp behind him, Gray dug in his heels, urging Tonnerre into an easy canter.
* * *
The night was well advanced, and a gibbous moon lighting Gray’s path in black and silver, before it seemed likely that he should be able to cross the Eure without being seen or heard from the enemy camp. Fording the river left him drenched to the hips, chilled, shivering, and at odds with the world at large and Tonnerre in particular—no one had mentioned to him, for reasons best known to themselves, the gelding’s particular dislike of running water. But here he was, and a warming-spell repaired the worst of the damage, or at any rate rendered man and horse willing to tolerate one another once more.
By noon they were ambling into a village—middling prosperous, to all appearances, and in most respects indistinguishable from any farming village in Maine or Normandie—and looking about them in search of their breakfasts. The village proved, surprisingly for its size, to possess two inns, at opposite ends of its principal street; their signboards proclaimed them to be, respectively, the Lion d’Or and the Cheval Blanc. Gray, after some thought, chose the former.
Gray’s meal was a very long time in coming, and when at last it appeared, was garnished with preemptive apologies for its quality—the muster of the Seigneur de Déols had marched through the village three days since, and the inn’s cook, indeed half its staff, monsieur, had marched off with them, without so much as giving notice!—which, sadly, proved entirely justified.
The beds at the Lion d’Or, on the other hand, were clean and dry and free of vermin—though Gray, after his night’s journey, would gladly have slept on a horse-blanket in the stables.
The following morning, having inadvertently slept all afternoon and most of the night and feeling much the better for it, Gray loaded his saddle-bags, mounted up, and set off again, attempting to look as though he had some notion of going somewhere in particular. He could not, of course, turn back in the direction he claimed to have come from, nor was there any purpose in retracing his actual route—in addition to which, what wandering scholar would ride towards an army when he might so easily ride away from it? But if Amelia, with or without Taylor, had landed at Calais, then his best chance of intercepting her, surely, lay in travelling northeast, to Picardie and Artois. He therefore set his face more or less east once more, towards—eventually—the great river Seine.
The next several villages, with their several inns, offered generally better provisioning but not, in the main, much more useful conversation, and the endlessly repeated finding-spells continued to turn up nothing whatever. Gray began to curse himself—very quietly, rolled up in Ollivier’s borrowed travelling-rug in shared bedchambers at night—for believing that this wild-goose chase of his might have any other result than his eventually coming to the end of his coin and either starving to death or being hanged as a thief.
On an unseasonably wet and chilly day he arrived at dusk in a village which had no inn as such, but did possess a public-house—denominated Le Bouclier d’Argent—in whose hayloft, for a small price, travellers might spend the night. Here the cook and her minions remained, but the matériel for her art was lacking, having been eaten or simply requisitioned by a passing cavalry troop.
Conversation amongst the half-dozen persons poking dispiritedly at their unappetising dinners, however, showed more promise. Being asked his name and business, Gray declared himself once more to be Guy Marais of Poitiers, in Poitou (which he had judged sufficiently distant that most persons he encountered were unlikely to know it any better than he did himself, from reading histories and travellers’ accounts), and to be a scholar travelling the Duchies seeking employment, or, failing that, to visit as many libraries as possible. Having thus persuaded his new acquaintance that he was odd, eccentric, and almost certainly harmless, he assumed an affable and perhaps slightly foolish expression, and for some time let their talk flow over and around him.
Three were merchants from Arras en route to Tours, old acquaintance travelling together for safety and economy. A father and son had been stranded by the recent storm and were now making their way home to their farm near Anet. The sixth man was, so he said, a priest of Ceres, and had been travelling on the business of his temple in Orléans. Like Gray himself, he said little, but unlike Gray he did not try to hide that he was listening attentively to all that the others said. They all spoke in Français, in deference to the farmer, who had no Latin, and his son, who had very little; Gray’s Français was as different from the priest’s, the Artésien merchants’, and the farmers’ as they were from one another, but no one, it appeared, remarked it as Normand rather than Angevin.
In the Duchies as in Britain, it seemed, relative strangers taking one another’s measure are apt to talk about the weather. In the present case, however, thought Gray, the weather bore talking of—such a storm, the grizzled farmer and his son agreed, had not been seen here for many years, and the cold, wet weather since was out of the ordinary, also.
“Has there been much damage to the crops hereabouts?” Gray inquired, more or less generally, after nearly half an hour’s such desultory talk. “Or is there like to be?”
“With the goddess’s goodwill, there will not,” the priest of Ceres replied.
“And without it?” said the farmer’s son, with a sardonic half smile. His father frowned at him, and he subsided.
“You are come from Orléans, I believe you said?” one of the merchants said, addressing the priest. “Have you found things very . . . unsettled along the way?”
Observing the priest covertly, in profile, Gray saw him frown briefly before smoothing his face into blandness. “Here and there,” he said.
The merchants, severally and together, related at some length their misadventures on the road from Arras with their goods and gear. They had been forced several times to alter their planned route, either to avoid armies on the march or because, the said armies having passed before them and eaten the local populace out of house and home, they could no longer expect themselves, their servants, or their beasts to be lodged or fed; they had heard such rumours of happenings in and around Orléans that they had decided to swing wide around it on their outward journey, and return that way from Tours instead.
“Could you,” Gray ventured, hesitantly—if military strategy was not his strong suit, trade was perhaps still less so—“might there not be a market for your goods amongst the soldiers themselves? So that you need not travel all the way to Tours after all?”
The eldest of the merchants gave him a pitying look which Gray had seen before. “When one has woven webs of exchange over many years, monsieur,” he said, in a sententious tone, “when one’s word is trusted by one’s associates even at a great distance, because one has never broken it, one does not simply leap at the first opportunity of turning a profit, at the risk of tearing all those webs to shreds.”
“And besides, Médard,” said one of the others, a lean man perhaps in the middle forties, “there is no great demand for fine tapestries or carpets in a soldiers’ camp.”
He grinned. The rest of the table laughed aloud; the butt of all this mirth glared at his friend, but not without a small, rueful chuckle at his own expense.
“I had th
ought of visiting Orléans,” Gray said, seizing his opening before the conversation could turn again; improvising hastily on a strong ground of truth, he continued, “on my return journey. I have heard much of the libraries at the temples of Minerva and Apollo Grannus there. Ought I to avoid it, do you think? And what of Paris?”
“From what we have heard along the road,” said the third merchant, “Paris is no better.” He was the youngest-looking of the three—not, by Gray’s estimation, very much older than himself—but did not seem to lack for self-confidence. “They are building ships to go up the Seine to Rouen, and out to the Manche.”
There had been, in less unsettled times, some considerable degree of trade between Paris and Rouen by way of the river Seine; by the man’s tone, however, this was not the sort of ship he spoke of.
“Oh?” said Gray. “Er . . . what sort of ships? And who is ‘they’?”
“Ships with saltpetre-cannon mounted aboard,” the young merchant elaborated. He seemed rather to be enjoying himself. “As for who—”
The priest, Gray saw too late, was giving him a rather more interested and penetrating look than before.
“You are a scholar, monsieur, I think you said?” he inquired. “In search of some employment?”
“I am,” said Gray—immensely glad, not for the first time, that he had not tried his powers of invention further.
“A scholar of what, if I may ask?”
The truth is safest. “Of magick, monsieur,” he said.
The priest of Ceres smiled. “How fortuitous,” he said. “Monsieur . . . Marais, is it? I believe we may be of use to one another.”
That tone of voice, too, Gray had heard before. It was the tone in which, one very strange day years ago, Appius Callender had invited him to spend the summer in Breizh: the tone of a man disguising a command as a friendly invitation.
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 30
