“But will you try?” Lucia persisted. “I fear I shall run mad if I am mewed up here much longer.”
Roland sighed. “I have scarcely seen my father since Ned’s regiment left England,” he said. “Talking of mewed up—he is always closeted with Lord Kergabet and the rest, and it seems I am not welcome in their counsels; certainly I am not welcome to interrupt them to talk of . . . of other matters.”
Another grimace. Lucia was reminded that Roland and Harry and Delphine and their mother, too, were confined to the Palace until further notice—though Delphine and Queen Edwina had at least their ladies-in-waiting to bear them company, while Roland seemed to have no one at all. Not even—she looked about her curiously—his valet or any of his usual guardsmen.
“Have you sent all your minions away?” she inquired.
Roland’s flush deepened, and he thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his dressing-gown. “Yes,” he said, hanging his head. “I had rather they did not see me sulking like a little boy.”
In spite of everything, Lucia laughed. “If you will not negotiate my release from captivity, Your Royal Highness,” she said, “perhaps you will at least give me a game of chess?”
Roland returned her a sheepish, lopsided smile. “Certainly, m’lady,” he said.
* * *
The crucial document, when at last they discovered it, was an unprepossessing assemblage of foxed and tattered pages, scattered more or less at random throughout the strata of unsorted and uncatalogued detritus in a crate labelled Miscellaneous manuscript. For two days Sophie, Joanna, and Gwendolen, with occasional assistance from Jenny and once, briefly and after much cajoling, from Lady Maëlle, painstakingly sorted through the lot, with a relatively innocuous section from the Princesses’ Regent account of their brother’s illness pinned to the edge of the reading-stand for reference, and perhaps for inspiration. Their first find—not obviously relevant or useful, but undeniably written in the same hand, and therefore at any rate worth remarking upon—came in the afternoon of the first day; it was not until the following morning, however, that Joanna ran across a second, in which appeared the tantalising words pierres de Carnac, and by the time the sixth and, so far as they could deduce, final page surfaced—in fact, it was the beginning of the sequence, for they had located what appeared to be its end some time before—Treveur had rung the bell warning the household to begin dressing for dinner, a foot-high stack of miscellaneous papers plausibly attributable to one or other of the Princesses Regent had been assembled in the centre of the table, and the crate was nearly empty. Jenny had long quit the field, for the paper-dust made her sneeze, and Lady Maëlle, pleading fatigue (in Sophie’s opinion, it was less fatigue than melancholy), had retired for a rest before dinner.
Sophie was all for ignoring the bell, and dinner itself, in favour of sitting down at once to the reconstruction of the document which mentioned the Karnag stones; how could she, how could anyone, think of food or conversation at such a time? Joanna and Gwendolen, however, flat refused to have anything to do with the enterprise until dinner had been served and eaten. When Sophie attempted to argue the point, they took her by the elbows and marched her up the stairs to her bedroom, then watched her dress for dinner, herded her into Gwendolen’s room, and required her to sit on the edge of the bed whilst they did the same.
For a wonder, there were to be no guests for dinner, and Kergabet and Mr. Fowler were not expected to return until late in the evening from their latest council of war. They sat down therefore only five at table for what passed in Grosvenor Square for a simple family dinner, and the conversation, except when Treveur and Harry the footman were actually bringing in the dishes, consisted almost entirely in speculation as to the progress of events across the Manche, on the one hand, and the possible contents of Princess Edith’s and Princess Julia’s papers, on the other.
“I wish we might be assured that should we find some manner of help therein, the Privy Council may be amenable to accepting it,” said Joanna. “But experience suggests—”
“There is no sense in planning to lose your battles before you have fought them, Jo,” said Gwendolen bracingly.
Jenny raised an eyebrow at this military turn of phrase but made no comment aloud.
And besides, Sophie thought, if the Privy Council will not do what is needful, why should not we do it ourselves?
For obvious reasons, she said none of this where Jenny or Lady Maëlle might hear.
* * *
Assembling the fragments of their find into the correct order took more than half an hour, for two of the pages had been torn in half, one crossed in two different hands, and several covered on both sides; on the verso side of one of the latter Gwendolen found what appeared to be notes for an essay on the theory of spells of concealment, in yet a third hand quite different from the other two, which muddied the waters for a few moments. At last, however, they were satisfied with their reconstruction, and Sophie carefully shuffled the pages into a stack and began to read aloud.
Since the days of Ahez ar Breizh, the queens of England have held the secrets of the magick of blood and stone, have taught those secrets to their daughters-in-law so that the kingdom might be shielded from the assaults of its enemies. In the reign of our father, the eighth Henry, this chain was broken; for though Queen Elinor did her duty by the Princess Catherine when she married our father’s elder brother, Prince Arthur—then heir to the throne—Arthur did not outlive his father, and all know what became of poor Catherine thereafter.
But if Queen Catherine, as she for some years was, was fated never to have a daughter-in-law to whom she might bequeath her knowledge, she did have a daughter; and it was to the Princess Julia—not to her successor, Queen Adwen, or any of King Henry’s subsequent wives—that she taught Queen Elinor’s secrets. The Princess Julia, whose love of her kingdom exceeded her resentment of her father, had every intention of guarding the knowledge for the sake of her brother’s wife, when he should be of an age to marry; young Edward took the throne at the tender age of nine, however, and but a few years later, Mathilda Julia of Britain was called upon to use the magick of blood and stone in a manner which no prior keeper of its secrets could have foreseen.
“Why do they write of themselves as if they were strangers?” said Joanna. “What a very irritating affectation.”
“Hush,” said Gwendolen; very quietly in Joanna’s ear, she added, “You are quite right, love, but if we are forever interrupting, we shall never come to the point.”
Joanna subsided; she leant her shoulder against Gwendolen’s arm, and let her head tilt down to rest on Gwendolen’s shoulder, as Sophie read on:
Thus did Edith Augusta of Britain also become a sharer in the magick of blood and stone, and thus was the chain broken in truth, for Edward rewarded his sisters’ love and loyalty by exiling them from his Court and—
Sophie stopped. “We have had this part of the tale already,” she said, running her eyes down the page; “I think we need not hear it again. Ah! Here we are.”
As we cannot fulfil our duty by bequeathing our knowledge to our brother’s queen, we set it down here, in defiance of long custom and in the hope that it may one day come to the hand of her successors, and thus be ready at need in defence of Britain’s eastern frontiers.
Joanna and Gwendolen exchanged a look.
She who would wield the magick of blood and stone need not be Queen, but she must be a loyal subject of the Kingdom of Britain, and a mage of some talent and skill. She must possess the map of the keystones, and the spell that wakes their power to rouse the kingdom to its own defence.
“And here is the spell,” said Sophie, holding up the page, the remainder of which appeared to be written in verse. “The map of the keystones, I suppose, is the one we have already—at any rate, I hope it may be so.”
But it falls to the kings of Britain to ensure that the magick of the stones is replenishe
d, at the turning of the year, by that of the kingdom which it protects from harm.
“Mother Goddess!” Joanna exclaimed. “What in Hades does that mean?”
Sophie looked up from the manuscript, frowning. “I have not the least idea,” she said. “And I suspect that my father has not either.”
“By which you mean that no one has replenished the magick of the stones since the time of Henry the Great,” said Joanna, her heart sinking, “and there is no use in our having found the map, or in your learning the spell, because no power remains to be called upon.”
“Wait,” said Sophie. She held up a hand, frowning now at the page before her, rather than over it.
In the reign of Edward Longshanks, whose obsession with conquering Alba led him to neglect the defence of his territories across the Manche, the magick of the stones was not replenished for some years. Following the final defeat of Edward Longshanks at the Roman Wall, it fell to his sole surviving son and heir to repair the damage wrought by his father’s neglect. Though a misfortunate monarch in most ways, Edward II did succeed in this one task, for which he is to be commended. Posterity may well record as a noble deed his enterprise in setting down in his private diary the method by which the task was accomplished, for it may be that at some future date another King of Britain shall find himself in need of it.
A copy of his account, dating from the tenth year of his reign, is appended—
“But it is not here,” Sophie concluded, sounding defeated, as she raised her eyes from the page. “Gods and priestesses! Of all the ill luck—”
Joanna and Gwendolen were already shuffling through the larger stack of royal papers, armed now with a greater certainty of their goal, when Sophie said, in an entirely different tone, “Oh! Listen—under this blot on the verso: made from the original in the Royal Archives. If we cannot find the copy, why should the original not still be where the Princesses found it?”
Joanna looked up. “Why indeed? But how are we to go to the Archives and look for it, when both Lord Kergabet and your father have decreed that we are none of us to leave this house?”
For what seemed the first time in months, or possibly years, Sophie’s face lit in a broad, genuine smile. “We cannot go looking for it, but Roland and Lucia can.”
* * *
Lucia was kicking her heels in Delphine’s sitting-room, amongst a gaggle of young ladies whose laudable attempts to divert Delphine from her melancholy thoughts about Prince Edward by talking very cheerfully of gowns and shoes and millinery had, after more than two hours, begun to set her teeth on edge, when a knock at the door heralded the arrival of a page bearing a message from Roland.
I am in the Archives, it read, on a commission for Sophie, and should be grateful for your assistance.
—R
Even had the words Archives and Sophie not set her heart beating faster, Lucia had been longing for escape this hour and more; she retained self-control enough to rise from her seat and beg Delphine’s pardon with grace and dignity, rather than leaping up and running out of the room without explanation, but only just.
“Lucia!” said Roland, his face lighting in pleased surprise, when at last she ran him to earth in a poorly lit back corner of the Palace Archives—not at all his natural habitat. He was halfway up a library-stair, using both hands to wrangle a box off a shelf at about the level of his shoulders; his hair was dusty and more than usually rumpled.
“I thank you for that timely rescue,” she said. “What are we seeking for Sophie in all this dust?”
Roland smiled sunnily down at her. “The private diaries of King Edward the Second,” he said.
Lucia perched on the edge of the long, narrow table that ran down the middle of the long, narrow aisle. “Whatever for?”
“That,” said Roland, puffing a little as the box finally came free, “Sophie was not willing to entrust to the eyes of the guardsman who brought her letter to me; she knows as well as I do that nearly all of her correspondence is opened and read at present, for my father still fears that she will run off after her husband, with or without his consent. And I daresay she should do,” he added, “if she knew where to find him.”
He was descending the ladder now, slowly and carefully, the box tucked under one arm.
“If my husband were missing in enemy territory in time of war,” said Lucia, “I hope I should not wait for anyone’s consent to see him found and rescued.”
Then she remembered to whom she was speaking, and flushed hotly with embarrassment.
“I am happy to hear you say so,” said Roland gravely—was he laughing at her, beneath that solemn expression? It irked Lucia that she could not tell—as he set the box on the table. “But of course your position and Sophie’s are quite different.”
And that—as she ought not to have needed Roland to remind her—was perfectly true: Whatever privilege and indulgence Sophie might enjoy by virtue of being her father’s daughter, Lucia had real power in her father’s kingdom, and would have more hereafter. But then, Sophie also possesses other sorts of power which I can only dream of.
“Have you found them, the diaries of . . . Edward the Second, did you say?” she inquired, nodding at the dusty box, in lieu of pursuing this line of thought. “He was the son of Edward Longshanks, the would-be conqueror of Alba, was he not?”
“He was,” said Roland, “and wisely did not attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps—not in that respect, at any rate. These are some of the diaries, or so I hope; the archivist who labelled the boxes was apparently not a believer in writing a clear hand.”
He levered the box open with an alarming creak of the hinges, and they peered into its interior, which indeed was packed tight with ledgers bound in faded red calfskin.
“Sophie wishes us to find the entries from the tenth year of Edward’s reign,” said Roland. “There are a dozen boxes at least marked Edwardus II Rex; he reigned twenty years, so I have begun somewhere in the middle.”
It was a sensible approach, assuming that the long-dead archivist had been more skilled in organising his materials than in labelling them.
“You are not such a bad scholar as you believe yourself to be, you know,” said Lucia.
Roland shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I ought to be with Ned in the field,” he said at last, with the air of one airing a long-held grievance. “Or in the field in Ned’s place. He is the heir; he ought not to be risking himself so.”
“I am sure he will not be put into unnecessary danger,” Lucia ventured.
Roland’s expression made clear, however, that his objection was at least as much to being left behind himself, as to his brother’s being sent into battle. “Shall we begin with this box?” he said, producing a falsely bright smile that defied her to either commiserate or advise. “Or will I fetch down another now, to save time later?”
They fetched down the two boxes on either side of the first and went through them methodically from either end; the contents proved frustratingly disorganised, and eight boxes were open upon the table before at last records from the tenth year of Edward II’s reign began to turn up. Roland would have packed the unwanted volumes back into their original boxes, but Lucia insisted upon sorting them into chronological order, insofar as was possible, and fetched pen and ink and labels and paste-pot from the archivist on duty—to the latter’s great bafflement—in order to do the thing properly.
The real fruits of their labours—the box now labelled anno x Edw. II R., containing fourteen ledgers dated to that year, which they had found scattered amongst half a dozen boxes—they took away with them, which occasioned further baffled looks from the archivist on duty but, Roland being who he was, no outright protest.
At the door to Lucia’s rooms, they were relieved of their prize by a disapproving Conall Barra MacNeill, presently on duty there.
“Your cousin Sìleas is in a terrible fre
t over you, Lucia MacNeill,” he said.
“Why should she be?” said Lucia, startled. “What harm does Sìleas imagine could befall me, when I am not permitted even to walk in the outer gardens?”
Conall shrugged eloquently. “Not for me to say,” he said. “But when next you take it into your head to disappear, perhaps you may think to tell someone where you are going.”
Lucia sighed. “My apologies,” she said. “And I shall apologise to Sìleas also, never fear. I have a task for you, however.”
Roland and she had agreed, in the course of their journey from the Archives, that they could not in good conscience ask any of King Henry’s household guard to smuggle a box of purloined diaries from the Palace to Grosvenor Square.
“Brìghde’s tears, Lucia MacNeill!” said Conall, when she had explained the matter to him. “What tangle have you got yourself into now?”
Roland was looking from one of them to the other with eyebrows raised, but, Lucia was pleased to see, more amusement than offence in his expression at Conall’s less-than-subservient tone.
“No tangle at all,” she said bracingly. “Sophie Marshall requested Roland’s help and mine with a foray she is making into historical inquiry, as she is also presently under house arrest”—she could not resist giving Conall a hard stare, for his wholehearted connivance at her own imprisonment—“and therefore cannot come here to search the Archives herself.”
“An innocent bit of scholarship, is it?” said Conall. Lucia thought she had never seen a man look so disbelieving.
“What else should it be?” Lucia demanded.
“Considering the source,” said Conall Barra MacNeill, who had stood with Lucia and Ceana MacGregor in the shambles of Cormac MacAlpine’s yew-grove whilst Sophie worked epic and invisible magicks all about them, “I should not be surprised if it were any sort of mad enterprise, up to and including armed insurrection.”
“There is certainly no question of armed insurrection,” said Lucia firmly; shifting into English, she said, “Roland, open the box and find me something very dull to show him.”
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 41
