The Midnight Queen (23 page)

“Magister,” Gray said softly, reaching across to touch the older man's arm. “Magister, where are we? What's the hour?”

Master Alcuin started, turned, and smiled at him. “Of the hour,” he said, “I have no notion, but we have done nearly a third of our journey, I should guess. You have been sleeping for some time.”

Gray began to apologise but quickly saw that there was no need.

“I wish my father had been more like you, Magister,” he murmured sleepily.

As his eyelids dropped again, he thought he heard Master Alcuin say, “I have often wished the same myself, dear boy.”

*   *   *

They set down at an inn at High Wycombe to change horses and attend to various other requirements, and while there, Master Alcuin judged it high time to begin his pupils' tuition in earnest. Yawning, trailed by an uncharacteristically silent Joanna, they trooped out to a clearing in the little coppiced wood behind the inn and embarked on the oddest series of lessons Sophie had ever been set.

“The first and most important thing any user of battle magicks must learn,” Master Alcuin was saying now, “is how to shield himself. Or, ah, herself,” he added. “All the offensive spells in the world are of no use if one is felled by the first attack. You were very fortunate, but Dame Fortune is not always so kind. A shield must be strong, true, but as you discovered, Marshall, what is only strong is also vulnerable, in the end. Your truly effective shield, therefore, must also be
flexible
. Now, attend . . .”

Sophie was not at her best. She had slept nearly the whole journey thus far, and her mind felt much the better for it, but her body was stiff and bruised, and, try as she might, she could not shake off her fear of pursuit. This perhaps explained why she was so long in recognising that she had ceased to comprehend what she heard.

The first idea that suggested itself was that she was suffering from hallucinations. Only when Gray said, sounding puzzled, “Magister, what tongue is that?” did it dawn on her at last that Master Alcuin had drifted into a language not known to her.

Master Alcuin's incomprehensible lecture abruptly ceased; he regarded his students with an expression of such honest bafflement that Sophie could not suppress a grin.

Then he frowned, and Sophie remembered herself. Fighting the instinct to hide behind Gray, or perhaps a tree-trunk, from the inevitable explosion, she lowered her gaze respectfully, peering sidewise at her teacher from the corner of one eye.

“Magister,” said Gray, “you have not
forgot
it?”

His tone—not apprehensive, but warmly amused, a little disbelieving—made Sophie look up again in surprise.

“Certainly not,” said Master Alcuin; but he did not, in fact, tell them what language he had been speaking. Instead, he blinked primly, and tugged on the end of his beard, and said, “Now, Miss Sophie! Tell me, where was I?”

Sophie gaped at him. Gray said, “But . . .” and went no further.

Was Master Alcuin, Sophie wondered, perhaps very slightly mad?

At last, casting her mind back to the last thing she was perfectly certain of having understood, she said hesitantly, “You were explaining, sir, what difficulties ensue when a shield is not sufficiently flexible.”

Master Alcuin's eyebrows flew up. “By Jove!” he said. “As far back as that? I had no idea.”

Then Gray began to laugh—a deep, musical chuckle that Sophie had never heard before, but which instantly felt familiar.

Master Alcuin's expression was, in fact, very comical, and when, on finding himself an object of his student's open mirth, he did not draw himself up and grow purple in the face with affronted dignity, but tilted his white head very slightly and gave a sheepish little smile, the taut line of Sophie's shoulders, the tension and strain of their near-capture in Oxford, flowed out of her in a peal of laughter.

“Speaking of languages,” Master Alcuin said, some time later, “I hope you have studied your Cymric, Miss Sophie?”

Sophie shook her head.

“Well, you and I shall address that question at another time, for a lack of Cymric is a grave disadvantage to any serious scholar. Now, however,” he continued, “
retournons à nos moutons
, that we may live to fight another day. Marshall, demonstrate that last shielding-spell again, if you please . . .”

Gray did so, to some effect, and Sophie followed suit; they practised diligently until Mrs. Wallis appeared to summon them back to their conveyance. And all the time Master Alcuin's words echoed in Sophie's mind:
to any serious scholar . . .

*   *   *

“Number eleven, Half-moon-street,” Master Alcuin mused, staring up at the tall, narrow house before which they all stood, surrounded by their possessions and gradually dampening in the chill London drizzle. “It is the same house, certainly; I remember the odd shape of the dormer-windows very distinctly . . .”

Mrs. Wallis harrumphed, and Joanna wandered about, skirting the leavings of carriage-horses, to peer down into the areas of adjacent dwellings and up at their frost-nipped flower-boxes. Sophie sat on Gray's battered trunk, shivering and awash in homesickness.

The coach had brought them along the broad, noisy thoroughfare of Piccadilly, turned into Half-moon-street, and set them down in front of number eleven, at their request. They had waited below on the pavement while Master Alcuin made use of the ornate door-knocker, and at length the door had been opened by an elderly and excruciatingly correct manservant.

“I am sorry to tell you, sir,” he said to Master Alcuin, “that you have come to the wrong house.”

“But indeed it is not the wrong house! I have visited my sister here often and often—that is—perhaps the house has recently changed hands?” Master Alcuin suggested hopefully.

“Certainly not, sir!” the servant replied. “Not these ten years.”

“Perhaps we may speak to the present occupants . . . ?”

“I regret, sir”—he did not sound in the least regretful—“Sir George and Lady Faraday are not at home.”

Mrs. Wallis had at this point reassumed the persona of put-upon upper servant, while the others kept Master Alcuin below on the pavement, and exerted herself to be confidential and charming. Sophie could not hear all that was said, but at any rate the Faradays' man unbent so far as to bid Mrs. Wallis a very civil farewell, and wish that she might succeed in finding the old gentleman's sister, before closing the door politely but firmly on them all.

The house, Mrs. Wallis then informed them, had been the property of the lady's late husband; she had married again, and gone away, and thus had the house come into the possession of its current owners. What the lady's name might now be, and where they might find her, Mrs. Wallis's new acquaintance could not or would not tell.

“And a pretty mess we are in now, sir!” she said to Master Alcuin. “Ten years, indeed! This is quite the most harebrained scheme ever embarked upon since—”

Then she shut her mouth abruptly, and turned away.

Gray approached Master Alcuin and laid a hand upon his shoulder. “Magister,” he said, “it was a good plan, but we must hatch another. Mrs. Wallis will perhaps have some acquaintance who can help us, and in any case we cannot stand about forever in the street. Ought I not to walk out to Piccadilly, and find a hackney-carriage?”

“Oh, yes, do,” said Joanna, appearing suddenly at Sophie's elbow. “I shall come with you.”

*   *   *

An hour later a hackney-carriage deposited their damp and increasingly irritable party before an hotel of intimidating appearance, which Sophie feared they could very ill afford. A liveried man and a boy of Joanna's age descended the front steps and took their baggage in charge, and while Gray paid the driver, Mrs. Wallis led the way up the steps.

The apartments in which they were soon installed were small but elegantly appointed, with Roman plumbing and every other comfort imaginable—save the woods and fields of Breizh, or the groves of Oxford. Sophie, forgoing the promised dinner, spent a pleasant half-hour in a hot bath, after which she fell into bed, waking only briefly when, some hours later, Joanna tumbled in beside her and began to snore.

After breakfast the next morning Mrs. Wallis took out paper and ink and sat for some time composing a mounting stack of letters.

“Who are you writing to, Aunt Ida?” asked Joanna.

“To the shades of former friends, it may be,” Mrs. Wallis said, without looking up. “It is many years since your mother and I were last in London, and, as you may recall, we departed in awkward circumstances. But if only one of these letters bears the fruit I hope, it will be enough.”

Joanna hovered at her elbow—attempting to read over her shoulder, as Sophie would have liked to do herself—until Mrs. Wallis put down her pen and said, “As you have nothing to do,
Harriet
, I am sure you will be glad to be of use. Go and fetch me a page-boy to take these to the post.”

Joanna fairly scampered away.

*   *   *

When the letters had been dispatched, and their luncheon brought, eaten, and cleared away, Master Alcuin warded the room against listeners and Mrs. Wallis settled down again with her work-basket. Master Alcuin and Gray had spent the morning hunched identically over stacks of codices, and Sophie in determined study of the primer in Old Cymric, which the former had produced for her from an overstuffed valise; she eyed it now with some disfavour. She could no longer say whether she were more daunted by the noise and bustle of the London street visible from the window of their sitting-room, or eager to escape out of doors.

“May we go out walking, Mrs. Wallis?” Sophie asked.

“Oh, yes, please!” Joanna turned from the window. “Gareth—the boy who took your letters, you know—says that there are public manor-parks to walk in, very near.”

“Perhaps tomorrow,” said Mrs. Wallis.

“You need not come with us,” said Joanna, “if you had rather not . . .”

“And if you lost your way? Or fell under the wheels of a hackney-carriage? I should be a poor chaperon indeed, to set the two of you loose in London before we have been here a day.”

“Perhaps Gray might go with us,” said Sophie diffidently.

Across the room, Gray looked up from his book.

“You know London well, do you, Mr. Marshall?” Mrs. Wallis inquired.

Gray admitted that he did not. “But one who knows a good finding-spell or two can never lose his way altogether,” he said.

“And,” said Sophie, inspired, “I should like to leave an offering to Mercury in thanks for our safe arrival; would that not be wise?”

Mrs. Wallis appeared to consider all of this. “Very well,” she said at last, and, with a meaning look at Sophie, “mind you do not draw attention to yourselves.”

*   *   *

The streets of Mayfair were far busier even than those of Oxford, and Sophie found the number of strangers overwhelming, but at length perceiving that they paid her small party little heed, she ceased to fear that everyone they passed might be a spy for the Professor. The crowds and the noise, however, soon enough made her long to turn back. Having left her small offering at the Temple of Mercury and Epona, whose roof-peak she had earlier glimpsed from the hotel window, she had no desire to further prolong the excursion, and she was grateful to see again at last the very rooms she had been so eager to quit not two hours since.

This first outing having passed so uneventfully, however, they had little difficulty in persuading Mrs. Wallis to consent to its being repeated, and on the following afternoon they ventured farther afield.

On the third day of their sojourn in London, their now-daily walk took them into a vast park, on whose paths ladies strolled arm in arm and the occasional mounted gentleman walked or trotted by. Gray and Sophie kept a leisurely pace, letting Joanna dart ahead or linger behind as she chose, though never quite out of their sight or hearing.

The sun was well down towards the western horizon when they turned from the footpath into the Serpentine Road, returning in the direction of their hotel. Here was wheeled as well as foot and mounted traffic, and they kept a tighter rein on Joanna, mindful of Mrs. Wallis's dire predictions about carriage-wheels.

Thus they both perforce paused with her, at the turning out of the park, to admire the elegant grey mares that were drawing towards them a little open carriage.

The driver slowed as he turned into the park, and thus gave Sophie a clear view of the carriage's occupant as it passed her. The cloaked and bonneted woman looked strangely familiar, but Sophie could not recall when or where she might have seen her before—until, unexpectedly, the woman turned in her seat and spoke, and Sophie saw her face.

“Gray?”
The voice was incredulous, even frightened. “Gray, is that you?”

Gray's face paled, flushed, and then split into a delighted, unbelieving grin. He sprinted towards the woman, who was already fumbling awkwardly with the carriage door.

“Jenny!” he cried, lifting her down and whirling her about. “Jenny, whatever do you here?”

Lady Kergabet extricated herself from her brother's arms and stood on the pavement, staring.

“I have heard no word from you for so long.” She looked to Sophie as though she had seen a shade, or some other unearthly being. “I thought—I feared that—”

“We are all quite well, Lady Kergabet, truly,” Sophie said.

“We are just now come from Oxford,” said Gray, “and, Jenny, it has all gone terribly wrong . . .”

“Not here,” Sophie whispered, with a covert tug at his coat-sleeve, and to her relief he subsided.

“Where are you walking to?” Lady Kergabet inquired.

While Gray explained the direction of their hotel, Sophie studied Lady Kergabet. She seemed to have grown more plump since their last view of her, but it was not until she turned to speak to her driver, presenting her profile to Sophie, that the reason for this became apparent. Sophie was pondering what she ought to say—whether this was a suitable venue for congratulations—when Lady Kergabet began to speak again: “Get in, all of you,” she said—though there seemed hardly room for two, let alone four—“and I shall take you there, and then you may tell me all.”