by Zen Cho
“Why, what could he do but disapprove of an establishment that allows its girls such latitude?” said Mrs. Daubeney. “But he is not the only one whose opinion must be considered. Clarissa Midsomer has told her family of what passed. It seems her brother taught the wretched girl to pass messages by zephyr, which is the worst possible thing he could have done. Why the family sent her to us if they were only going to spoil our work by teaching her spells, I’m sure I don’t know! The result is that Mr. and Mrs. Midsomer have said that I must send you away, or they will ruin me. And they are perfectly capable of it, Prunella! All they need do is tell their friends what happened today, and everyone is bound to take their daughters out of the school, for who would educate their girls at an institution where they were permitted to brawl like prizefighters?”
“Good gracious!” said Prunella in dismay. “What a shabby thing to have done!”
Even then it did not occur to her to be alarmed. She could not conceive that Mrs. Daubeney would really send her away for such a trifle as a spat between the girls. But Mrs. Daubeney said, in a voice trembling with passion:
“That is to understate the matter altogether! You have no notion of how very little stands between us and disaster. How could you, indeed? You have never known what it is to be at the mercy of a mortgage!” Mrs. Daubeney shuddered at the hideous word.
“I have laboured for years to establish this school, and if the Midsomers choose to set everyone against us, it will all be for nothing,” she said. “Just when I have contrived to pay off poor Daubeney’s debts, and am nearly able to put us out of the reach of want forever! If our credit with the world is not to be destroyed—if I am to preserve all I have worked for—I must be seen to take every possible step to prevent a recurrence of this morning’s incident.”
The bottom seemed to drop out of Prunella’s insides, letting in a draught that chilled her to the heart. Mrs. Daubeney had never before spoken to her in this manner, with this combination of trepidation and self-righteous resentment.
“What will you do?” said Prunella. She was so determined she should not sound frightened that her voice was toneless, lending her words an insolence she did not intend.
Mrs. Daubeney bridled. Prunella was never ingratiating at the best of times, but it seemed outrageous to Mrs. Daubeney that she should be so unconciliating just now.
“Less than you deserve!” snapped Mrs. Daubeney. “I ought to send you away, but I could not bring myself to do it when I thought of your poor father. In truth, if you have ideas above your station, I must take some of the blame, for it was I who indulged you, and gave you a greater sense of consequence than your position can support. But that will certainly change, and I do not think Mr. and Mrs. Midsomer can object to my penalty. You ought to be grateful, Prunella. It is not such a great alteration, after all. You have done such work all along.”
“What do you mean?” said Prunella. Her hands, folded in her lap, tightened their grasp until the knuckles were white, but her voice was steady.
Despite Mrs. Daubeney’s anger, she was not so composed, and she fidgeted with her bracelets as she spoke:
“Henceforth I must ask you to conduct yourself in accordance with your station. You may not teach any more classes, not even the infants, and you must not take your dinner with the girls, or address them by their Christian names. It does not do to be so familiar with girls whose station in life is so far above yours. I have told the servants, and they will expect you in the kitchen this evening. I think it best to begin today as we mean to go on.”
Prunella was stunned. It was one thing to clean out an attic or two, or to help with the dinners, to oblige Mrs. Daubeney. Mrs. Daubeney had been known herself to scrub a floor or make a bed, especially in the earlier days of the school.
But it was another thing altogether to be told she must have her meals in the kitchen, and call the girls “miss.” Prunella was on cordial terms with the servants, but she had no wish to be counted among them.
Her silence discomfited Mrs. Daubeney. She was genuinely fond of Prunella, and felt she had been forbearing. Any other woman in her position would have conceded to the Midsomers’ demands, rather than offering them a compromise with which they were only half-satisfied. No doubt Prunella was put out, but she was really very fortunate, and must be taught to take the correct view of the affair.
“I know it is not what you expected,” said Mrs. Daubeney, more gently. “But there is nothing else to be done, Prunella. I had thought, before, that you might teach the girls when you were older, but it would not have answered. The parents expect our mistresses to be of a certain quality, you know, and poor Gentleman! Who knows what indiscretions he might have committed in his youth? No one knows anything of your mother. She might be anyone.”
She did not add that it was clear, at least, what Prunella’s mother could not have been—an Englishwoman. Prunella was as conscious of this as anyone could be, and though she flushed, she said nothing.
“What is more,” said Mrs. Daubeney, “and indeed what is worse, you are too magical, which is what of all things an instructress of gentlewitches must not be. For you work spells before the girls, Prunella—you know you do.”
At this Prunella’s shame receded, anger taking its place. Mrs. Daubeney did not reproach her for working magic when the results suited Mrs. Daubeney. Why scold Prunella when her magic made polishing the silver or scrubbing the stairs or hustling the little ones through their breakfasts easier and quicker? There was a great deal Prunella did for the school with the judicious application of magic, and both of them knew it.
“I should not have done it if I had known you disliked it,” she said, in a cold fury.
“I am sure there is a great deal we would both change, if we could,” said Mrs. Daubeney, dabbing at her eyes. “If your father were alive . . . ! He is not, however, and we must do the best we can. You will not mind it so much, Prunella, once you have grown accustomed to the change.”
• • •
PRUNELLA was not weeping as she flung herself into her room. She never indulged in tears, and she would have disdained to give way to them for such a trifle.
She dropped to her knees, drawing out the valise from underneath the narrow white bed. Her valise, containing her treasures. Mrs. Daubeney could lay no claim to them now. She had lost all right to them when she forfeited Prunella’s confidence and affection.
Prunella laid out the seven blue stones, and opened her father’s journal. She read again the hastily scribbled fragment of text that had transfixed her before.
Endure: it is only a brief suffering. With what great reward! I have won a king’s ransom, and once I have learnt to unlock it, my fortune, my name and my place in history are assured. What will not the Society do for even the mere travelling magician, Hilary Gentleman, now that he possesses riches beyond its conception—now that he calls himself master of seven familiars’ eggs?
Prunella had been surrounded by the daughters of thaumaturges all her life, and she knew how highly even one egg was likely to be valued by the Society. Seven eggs were a king’s ransom.
She had had no thought of hoarding such wealth to herself. She had hoped Mrs. Daubeney would speak to the Sorcerer Royal, and obtain his advice as to how they might best profit from her discovery. But nothing could be hoped from Mrs. Daubeney now, or ever again.
So much for her foolish belief that she might be named Mrs. Daubeney’s heiress! Mrs. Daubeney would scarcely consider doing so much for a half-caste female whom she believed better placed in the servants’ hall. Prunella would be fortunate to receive a servant’s legacy if she stayed—and that only if she were patient; if she did what was required of her without complaint; if she suppressed all heart-burnings and swallowed her resentment and never showed a sign if it sat like a live coal within her.
It could not be borne. It would not be borne. Prunella had in her father’s treasure the
key to free herself. What would not society do for Prunella Gentleman, when she was able to supply such a reason for generosity?
She must leave the school, it was clear. As for where she would go, where better to learn about familiars’ eggs than the seat of English thaumaturgy—the greatest city in the world—London?
Even amid her revulsion from Mrs. Daubeney and all she stood for, Prunella did not think of attempting to hatch the eggs and employing their power for her own ends. It was a matter of orthodoxy that a woman’s weak frame could not support an excess of magic. Prunella would have supposed, if she had considered it, that the power supplied by a familiar would certainly exceed any female’s limits.
Besides, she had witnessed how little magic counted for in a female. Her life at the school had been a thorough education in the snubs magical women received, and the mortifying shifts to which they were put to suppress their abilities. Prunella was aware of what little worth society ascribed a Miss Liddiard, and she had no intention that Miss Gentleman should share her fate. There was no place for a magical woman in the world, unless she learnt to conceal her magic. After all, what had Prunella’s own magic done for her, save to persuade Mrs. Daubeney that she ought to be a servant?
A woman possessed of a key to magic, however—a woman who might at her pleasure grant or withhold men’s access to power—that was a different matter! Such a woman need never worry about poverty or obscurity. With such leverage Prunella did not doubt she would gain all she desired—position, influence, security—provided she were canny and careful.
She closed her hands over the stones, her decision made. She could not go to the Society with her treasures till she understood them better, but once she did, ah, then! She would know how to employ them to gain all she desired, and all she desired lay in that bustling metropolis, of which the girls had told such dazzling stories.
Everything might be accomplished in London. After all, if Emmy Villiers’s cousin was so foolish as to marry a grocer’s daughter, who was to say there were not more susceptible lords in London, rich enough to please themselves, and willing to be pleased by such a one as Prunella Gentleman?
7
SILENCE PREVAILED WITHIN the carriage as it trundled back to the Blue Boar, where Zacharias would pass the night before travelling to Fobdown Purlieu the next day. Sir Stephen broke this finally with an encouraging:
“It must be a weight off your mind to have that done with, eh? I did not envy your dinner. If that joint ever came of a goat, the creature must have been as old as I upon its expiry.”
“Is that so? I did not notice it,” said Zacharias.
Sir Stephen believed Zacharias was low-spirited, not without reason. The day had not been a success, and the dinner that had wound it up had been painful. Mrs. Daubeney’s eagerness to please could not conceal her private distress, and Zacharias’s mind was clearly elsewhere. Receiving no better response to her brave sallies than “Indeed, yes. No. I beg your pardon,” Mrs. Daubeney had finally retired from the field, and waited out the dinner in stony silence.
Sir Stephen cast about for a means of raising Zacharias’s spirits. Zacharias must feel he had done nothing right today, but then he had hardly been prepared by his previous life’s work for the occasion.
“I think you did very well, all things considered. It is a difficult thing to know how to deal with females when one has no experience of the creatures,” said Sir Stephen. “But practise would give your manners the polish they want. I tell you what it is, Zacharias, you do not mix enough in society. Maria wishes you to pay court to some young lady, does she not? You are perhaps young for marriage, but it might do you good to get up a harmless flirtation. Why should not you turn the Spring Ball to your advantage, and contrive to be introduced to a few agreeable females then?”
This suggestion jolted Zacharias out of his waking dream. He stared at Sir Stephen in astonishment.
“Get up a flirtation, at such a time as this?” he exclaimed. “It is not to be thought of. I shall be too busy to have any time for society. Such a wholesale reform will require a great deal of time and energy.”
Now it was Sir Stephen’s turn to stare. He said:
“Wholesale reform? What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”
“The reform of the magical education of women, of course!” cried Zacharias. “I wonder that you need ask. Surely there can be no question that reform is needed. Pobjoy’s taking! I have never heard the like! Of course, it targets the seven centres of magic within the body; I ought to have known it by the name they gave it. But I would never have conceived of its being put to such ends. They are fortunate they have killed none of their students yet!”
Zacharias did not often allow himself the indulgence of being out of temper, but he was a young man, as few other than Sir Stephen and Lady Wythe now remembered, and he was deeply affected by all he had seen at Mrs. Daubeney’s school. The longer he pondered the day’s events—and he had ample time for pondering over dinner, since he had not troubled to make conversation—the more convinced he was that he had been wrong on the subject of feminine magic. Everyone was wrong on the subject. But that would certainly change.
Zacharias had been engrossed in schemes of improvement all evening. In his fancy he had trampled over old articles of faith, won a reluctant Society to his cause, and built vast palaces of learning peopled with healthy, useful thaumaturgesses. This prepared him ill for Sir Stephen’s response.
“Perhaps it is a little foolhardy of those women to employ Pobjoy, but it does not seem to have done the girls any harm. It is a clever thing they have done, to funnel the magic back into the ether. If we could persuade more of our women to practise the exercise we would be all the better for it. I declare I do not see what you are so alarmed about.”
“No, indeed. Why should I be alarmed that we require women to suppress their powers and disregard their instincts?” said Zacharias. “Why should it distress me that we punish any deviation so cruelly?”
Sir Stephen was surprised, though he was intimately familiar with the zeal for reform that lurked, unsuspected, within Zacharias. He had done his best to curb these instincts, and when the young Zacharias had protested, “Why, sir, you are a reformer yourself!” he had replied placidly, “But you have not my advantages, you know. Besides, I know my limits, my dear fellow—I know my limits!”
But that was the trouble with children, Sir Stephen reflected. They were confoundedly liable to pattern themselves upon one’s conduct, when one would rather they simply did what they were told. Of course Zacharias was no longer a child, but the years had not dampened his fervour. Zacharias had ever placed what he believed to be right above what was politic.
“You had always a soft heart, and I suppose you were distressed by that girl,” said Sir Stephen. “But consider the privations a thaumaturge must suffer, Zacharias. You know better than anyone the cost of sorcery.” His voice dropped. “Think of how you are placed yourself—think of Leofric, and all you have suffered on his account, and mine. Would you subject women to that?”
Zacharias hesitated for the first time.
“I do not propose that women seek to pass for sorcerers,” he said slowly. “Indeed, I could wish the nation had no need of sorcerers at all. I have no anxiety regarding the effect of ordinary magic on women, however. You have met many a house- and hedgewitch yourself—they invariably live to a great old age.”
“Oh, that sort of thing is all very well for charwomen and chambermaids,” said Sir Stephen impatiently. “But their use of magic to lighten their burdens is no argument for imposing such evils upon females of the better classes.”
“What needs to be stifled by daily recitations of a curse can hardly be described as an imposition,” retorted Zacharias. “I am not sure I credit these tales of the peculiar dangers of magic for women. After all, did not the Society say much the same of me? That my body could not support, nor
my mind comprehend, the subtleties of the craft? You championed my abilities in the teeth of their opposition. Can you truly say, sir, that I should not seek to do for women what you did for me?”
Zacharias had not always been grateful for the form Sir Stephen’s defence of his abilities had taken in the past. Though he had never doubted his guardian’s attachment, being Sir Stephen’s protégé had at times felt like being a touring attraction—a dancing bear on its lead. But Zacharias knew he could say nothing so well calculated to silence Sir Stephen.
Sir Stephen looked as though he did not know whether to be pleased or dismayed. He assumed a cantankerous expression, and said, huffing and puffing:
“There were no pamphlets calling for me to be strung up for invented failures! But I suppose you will pursue these crotchets whatever I say. You are of age, and if you will not consider your own security, there is nothing I can do to prevent your risking yourself. But I wash my hands of the matter—I throw you off entirely, mind! When it all ends in disaster, remember I told you I would have nothing to do with it!”
• • •
YOU should certainly include a chapter on goety,” said Sir Stephen.
Since Zacharias could only start for Fobdown Purlieu in the morning, he had begun sketching out his plan to reform women’s magical education, by way of putting his evening to good use. He lay down his pen, stealing a look at the clock.
It was a quarter past eleven, and he was the only living person in the coffee-room, the inn having given over the apartment to him. He longed to massage his forehead, but he had no wish to remind Sir Stephen of his malady—Sir Stephen was bound to insist that he go to bed.
Zacharias knew he would suffer an attack of his complaint that evening—it was presaged, as always, by light-headedness, and hallucinations of strange shapes, lights and noises. But it would only strike at midnight, and he was loath to stop his labours before then. If he left off now it was a matter of real doubt when he would return to them again.
