Chalice of Roses

by Jo Beverley

  A magnificent sword lay within the cotton-wool that had surrounded it. I came closer to look at it; it was long-handled, and the blade had curious marks along it—crosses, I thought, or perhaps a row of fleurs-de-lis. A glow began to come from it, and I looked at Will, whose eyes had widened, and then at Jeanne.

  “It is the sword Fierbois,” she said. “The sword carried by the blessed Jeanne d’Arc—Joan of Arc—into battle.” Her voice lowered. “It must be kept safe. I thought, since you are the Knight and the Guardian . . .” We had told her all, since she was family on both sides. She looked at both of us pleadingly. “The council could help—”

  Will and I looked at the sword, now faintly pulsing with light, then looked at each other.

  “Dear heaven,” he and I said at once.

  And then Will smiled at me, and I took up the sword.

  Eternal Rose

  BY BARBARA SAMUEL

  Chapter 1

  “It’s haunted, you know.”

  Alice Magill peered into the pearl gray fog that swirled around the garden of her freshly rented flat in an English village. Over the ancient wall bounding the property was an old woman, stout and bespectacled. She wore a dark blue sweater and a rain hat.

  “The house?” Alice asked.

  “Well, yes, that, too, but the garden is what I meant. All manner of things come and go through there. I reckon you’ll want to be careful at dusk, miss.”

  “Ah.” Alice carefully tucked her skepticism beneath a polite smile. “What kind of things?”

  “Cats, for one thing.” The woman caught sight of something behind Alice. With a wave of her hand, she said, “Shoo!”

  Alice turned to see a big black-and-white cat, very well tended, sitting on a stone bench, his long, fluffy tail curling and uncurling in typical cat boredom. He did not seem to mind the old woman’s dislike. As if he were raising a brow in silent complicity with Alice, his left whiskers twitched ever so slightly.

  “He looks harmless enough.”

  “You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” She tossed a twig toward the cat, and he dashed into the bushes. “They’re not harmless, miss, and I’d watch them if I were you.”

  Wrinkling her brow quizzically, Alice said, “Thanks.”

  “American, then, are you?” The woman leaned in more curiously. “What brings you here? Are you studying at the foundation? That’s who usually rents those flats, students and teachers.”

  “Guilty.” Alice tugged off her thin gloves and walked over to the wall. The old woman was probably lonely, looking for a little conversation. Nothing wrong with that. “My name is Alice Magill. I’m here to do some graduate work in literature.”

  “Oh, all of that nonsense is over my head, but welcome anyway.”

  “Thank you . . . er . . . ?”

  The woman gave a lighthearted, almost girlish laugh. “Silly me. I’m Mrs. Leigh.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs. Leigh?”

  “Oh, no, my dear. I have to get my garden to bed before the freeze.”

  “All right. Thanks for the warning. About ghosts and cats. And things.” Alice turned back toward the old manor house where she had rented a flat only two days before. The fourteenth-century building came complete with mullioned windows, a pelt of thick green ivy and climbing roses, and a moat. A moat with actual water in it, which alone would have cinched her selection.

  Under the current light conditions, the possibility of a haunting seemed not only possible, but likely. Fog drifted in clouds of myste riousness, showing a clump of white asters near a stone bench, then parting to illuminate a single yellow rose on the vine climbing around her bedroom window. So beautiful!

  Gratitude rushed into her chest. As long as she could remember, Alice had dreamed of traveling to England. Born to a sprawling Irish-American family in Chicago with more love than money, she had put herself through college, then graduate school, and now had saved enough to come to this little village and its Foundation for the Study of English and Scottish Ballads. From the moment she’d spied the rolling green land beneath the plane, her heart had been singing. England! She was here, she was here, she was here. Even better, now she was wandering around the garden of an ancient manor house with a moat. A moat!

  As if that were not enough, she was studying and teaching her favorite legends, all rooted right in these green lands. Life, she thought with a happy sigh, didn’t get any better than this. Some—her extremely superstitious Irish grandmother among them—might say she ought to be watching for the other shoe to fall out of the sky and give her a black eye, but Alice subscribed to a cheerier superstition: If you listened to your heart, it would lead you where you were meant to go.

  Some said that made her naive. But they were stuck back in the sharp winds of the Midwest, while here she was collecting flowers from a centuries-old garden for her kitchen table. With a pair of heavy-handled scissors she’d found in the kitchen drawer, Alice clipped a fistful of blue asters and pale chrysanthemums, and then headed toward the back door. Up the back of the house climbed the rosebush, glossy dark green against the soft gray day. The roses were nearly spent, but a few still bloomed bright yellow. She reached for one, a little bit over her head—

  Movement at the edge of her peripheral vision caught her attention. Alice turned in time to see . . . something . . . distinctly skitter through the trees. She caught a flash of scarlet, the impression of long black hair, and then the fog closed around her so completely that she felt as if it were a blanket, smothering and too close.

  She might as well have been blind. Panic clutched her throat as she spun around in a circle, seeking a marker of any kind with which to orient herself. Nothing. She made a stab at heading toward the back door.

  Or at least, she thought it was the back door. Instead, she stumbled over a round clump of aromatic lavender and fell, face-first, in the wet grass. Flowers went flying from her basket, her teeth clicked together painfully and she jarred her right elbow. The wind was knocked out of her, adding to her panic, and she felt as though she might pass out, right there in the garden.

  Maybe, she thought, struggling to take a breath, her grandmother was right.

  “Breathe!” said a voice.

  Alice struggled to obey, but it felt as if two fists were squeezing her lungs tight. The edges of her vision began to blacken, which sent her spiraling into absolute terror, even though some distant part of her brain knew that passing out would be the end of the whole drama, because she’d relax. Her body would take over and do what was required.

  “Breathe!” said a man’s voice, and a blow struck her between the shoulder blades, startling enough that Alice sucked in a giant breath. Air filled her lungs, then flowed out, and she coughed.

  She sat up, turning to thank her rescuer, but the fog was so thick she still could see nothing. “Thank you,” she said.

  No one answered. The cloud shifted ever so slightly, and she thought she saw a foot in a soft leather shoe, but then it was swallowed again.

  Uneasy, Alice went to all fours and gathered the flowers that had scattered when she fell. The basket could wait, since she couldn’t see it anyway, and the scissors would likely rust, but she wasn’t going to risk another tumble. Getting to her feet, she stepped carefully. Eventually she would come to the wall, the moat or the back of the house. All sound was muffled, but she could distantly hear the water in the moat chuckling along its way. It was at least a point of orientation.

  Moving cautiously, she peered into the dense air, and finally spied a single gleam of yellow, like a torch in the gloom. It was the rose against her kitchen window, dewy and bright. It led her the last few steps to the door safely.

  Only then, with her palm flat against clammy bricks, did she look back into the fog-shrouded garden. Who had helped her?

  Maybe the garden was haunted. A cold shiver crossed her shoulders, rushed down her spine.

  After her class tomorrow, she would poke around the library for some research on the hous
e. Who knew what dramas and lost loves she might uncover?

  Her flat had been modernized with a gas fire in the sitting room and a kitchen the size of a teacup. The bathtub was a bonus, vividly pink, long and deep, but the bedroom, along with the moat, had been a major deciding factor in settling on this flat over another that had been available.

  She had to climb a circular staircase to reach it, a hand on the stone wall. As she climbed, it was easy to imagine knights with swords swinging in scabbards at their sides, and ladies in flowing gowns, and the whisper of conversations held for centuries in the walls. At the top of the stairs, an arched wooden door opened into a purely medieval room, with heavy timbers overhead and a vast hearth—where of course she could not afford to light a fire—and a deep window seat with mullioned windows on three sides. Piles of pillows in purple and red and gold littered the bench. A small table stood nearby, ready to hold a cup of hot chocolate or buttered toast. Alice had brought an afghan from home, woven with her grandmother’s trademark rose stitch.

  After her fall in the garden, she carried a cup of chocolate and an apple upstairs and sat on the wide window seat with the afghan around her shoulders. The fog was so thick that the only thing she could see was the branches of the climbing rose, winding around a drainpipe just outside the mullioned windows. One yellow bud, a perfect flame, was framed in a wavy square of ancient glass.

  To ground herself, Alice settled in to read the materials she hoped to shape into some sort of cogent narrative. The history of the Grail was long and deep in this area. A handful of scholars thought it might be buried nearby, deep in the bowels of a church crypt, perhaps, or tucked behind a false wall in a castle ruin. Alice theorized that the lyric poem “Roman de la Rose” held clues to that location, and she’d written a thesis about it. While doing her research on that, she’d stumbled on a little-known ballad from the Cavalier period that seemed to connect the dots. It had been written here, in Hartford.

  Lulled by the quiet and the dark day, Alice dozed off over her books and fell into a dream. In it, she was still in her bedroom, but everything was different. Instead of the fluffy floral duvet, the big bed was covered with velvets and hung all around with heavy curtains. A fire blazed in the hearth. Arranged around the leaping, friendly flames were two chairs and a love seat, the fabric embroidered with hunt scenes and stags all in shades of green.

  Before her, the window opened, and a man came in. The moon rose over his shoulder and shone over his pale long hair. He smiled as he knelt by Alice, and touched her cheek with the tips of his graceful fingers. “Wake up, my fair Alice,” he said in a deep, melodious voice.“I’ve brought mead and bread and a little cheese.”

  Cradled by the enchantment of the dream, Alice was not in the least afraid. Instead, her heart caught as she looked up into the young man’s face. He was as beautiful as a prince, with aristocratic cheekbones and red lips. His eyes were a deep, velvety blue. His form, too, was beautiful—lean and elegant, with wide shoulders beneath a poet’s shirt with flowing sleeves and cuffs, left open at the neck so that she could glimpse his throat and a scattering of hair on his chest. Her blood quickened.

  “Come,” he said. “Let’s sup by the fire.”

  “Who are you?” she asked, taking the hand he offered, allowing herself to be led to the hearth. She noticed that her clothing was no different. She still wore a simple plaid skirt and blouse, with the afghan around her shoulders as a shawl.

  “I am William of Knotfield,” he said. “We met in the garden.”

  “That was you?”

  He gave her a chivalrous nod. “It was, my lady.”

  “Thank you. I don’t know what happened. I was very disoriented.” She frowned. Confessed the whole truth. “Scared out of my wits.”

  “It is not . . . the simplest place to navigate.” Settling his things on a low table, he said, “I am here to help you learn the rules of this place.” They sat on a thick fur rug on the floor before the hearth, where it was warm enough that Alice set the afghan on the floor beside her. He settled a pottery jug next to a loaf of bread on a wooden board with a slab of white cheese. From his belt, he took a dagger and sliced the cheese and handed it to her.

  “So what are the rules?”

  “There are a few. Do not wander in the garden at dawn or sunset, and when you are walking toward the village, stay well away from the tree at the center of Farmer Potts’s field.”

  Ruddy light from the fire limned his straight, elegant nose, caressed the angle of his jaw. Along his chin and upper lip, tiny glints of gold showed that it had been a long day since he had shaved. She wanted to brush her hands over the hair—would it be prickly or soft? Aware suddenly of her thoughts, she turned her attention to the bread and cheese in a most un-Alice-like acceptance of the odd situation.

  And yet . . . “Might I ask why?” she said, and took a bite.

  “I am not at liberty to grant you that information.”

  Alice smiled, thinking how cleverly her dream was supplying details. His speech was so mannerly, his gestures as courtly as anything in a Shakespearean play. “All right.”

  He caught her smile and inclined his head. “Do you find me amusing?”

  “No,” she said. “Not at all.”

  “I’m glad.” From someplace she did not quite comprehend, he produced a goblet. “We will have to share this. I am afraid there is only one.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  The cup was gold, carved with roses that seemed almost to move and grow as he held it within the cradle of his long-fingered hand. From the pottery jug, he poured a thick amber liquid and offered it to her.

  His eyes glittered, and for a moment, Alice was afraid. Was this some test? If she drank first, would she be enthralled by him? He was certainly beautiful enough to be a member of the fey. Perhaps she was already falling under his spell!

  Seeing her hesitation, William sobered. “I give you my word that I mean you no harm, my lady.”

  “You drink first.”

  “Very well.” His lips curled up on one side, giving his face an impish cast. He lifted the cup and took a deep draft, then grinned and gave it back to her. “It is mead from my own father’s bees.”

  Firelight moved on the goblet, making the vines seem to creep around the cup. It almost seemed as if the roses were gaining color. Intrigued, Alice curled her palms around the cup and, with a sudden ripple of excitement, wondered whether it could possibly be the Grail. It seemed alive, warm—

  Don’t be silly, she told herself. The metal was warm from his hands, but no more than that; no living vines crawled over her palms. She smiled at her fancifulness and drank.

  The mead warmed her tongue and throat, gliding like summer into her belly. “It’s wonderful!”

  “Aye,” said William. “There are two more things—”

  A sudden screech cut through the air. It was a terrible noise—half scream, half roar, a sound of mingled pain and fury.

  Alice was torn from her dream, finding herself curled up against the windows, shivering in the cold. Darkness had fallen beyond the window, and she straightened so abruptly that her book fell hard to the floor. Her heart was pounding.

  Thinking of the horrific screech, she stayed poised, listening, but the air was as still as a grave.

  After a moment, she relaxed, feeling the spirit of the dream return to her, that beautiful young man, the mead and the roaring fire, and that goblet they shared!

  “Rich,” she said, realizing how she’d woven all the elements of history and legend together. Very nice dream, at least until the end.

  But now she was ready for a little supper. All that bread and cheese in her dream had made her hungry for the real thing.

  Chapter 2

  Morning dawned in gauzy gold, the fog lingering only in the lowest spots. Alice dressed for class in a skirt and boots, donned a light coat and headed for the old castle on the hill that housed the foundation. Her elbow was a little bruised from her fall in the garden
, but otherwise all was well. After she tugged her door closed firmly, she spied the yellow rose. Thinking to tuck it into her hair, she stood on a nearby wall and tried to reach it. Instead, as if in protection, a thorn scratched her inner wrist and another pierced her index finger.

  “Ow!” she said to no one, and sucked at the bead of bright red blood that appeared on her finger. “All right, all right,” she said to the rose. “I get the message. You don’t want to be plucked.”

  Smiling at her own silliness, she crossed over a little stone bridge that took her over the moat to the back gate. One of the best things about the manor house was the fact that it sat a little apart from the village and the walled campus of the foundation. Alice could either drive three minutes on heart-stoppingly narrow lanes bound by hedgerows and blind corners, or she could take the footpath that ran through a meadow, beneath a tunnel of rhododendrons and walnut trees and around the edge of a wide, green pasture. Through the hedges, she could glimpse modern houses built of brick with sturdy glass conservatories attached to the back, but if she looked the other way, across the open pasture to a single tree, she saw only ancient rooftops and the spire of the church. It made her feel she had been transported to another time. As she walked, her feet getting wet from dew-heavy grass, she imagined the centuries of people who had walked this path before her—poets in wigs and flowing sleeves, peasants carrying their goods to the village, maybe even Romans! It thrilled her.

  Only the tree was slightly bothersome. It stood there in the center of everything, boughs reaching elegantly in all directions. Perhaps it was for shelter. But wouldn’t it be annoying to plow around it?

  Suddenly she remembered that her dream had warned her away from the tree. Obviously it had bothered her even more than she realized. She’d have to look up references to such trees.