The Midnight Queen (24 page)

When they had all packed themselves into the carriage like herring in a barrel, Lady Kergabet turned to Sophie. “I must warn you, Miss Callender,” she said, low and grave, “that you may be no safer from your father in my house. He has already been at Kergabet seeking you, before we came away, and I am not at all persuaded that he believed me when I said you had not been there.”

L
ondon

In Which Sophie Is Thoroughly Astonished

“This is quite
the most preposterous tale I have heard in all my life,” Sieur Germain de Kergabet declared, not two hours later. “You ask me to believe that you”—he jerked his head at Gray—“stand accused of a murder which you did not commit,
and
that you bested two master mages in some sort of magickal . . .
duel
, with the help of”—he glanced at his wife, and swallowed—“of this young lady, and that . . .”

He spread his hands in a gesture of appeal. “You cannot deny that it is all most implausible. Murders, poisons, and now plots against the Crown . . .”

“We have told you only truth,” Gray said, his voice tight. “We did not come here to seek your help, but if you should be in a position to give it, I assure you that your efforts will not be misplaced.”

“I will vouch for the truth of what he says,” Master Alcuin offered.

“And I,” said Sophie.

“And so will I,” said Lady Kergabet, speaking for the first time since Gray and Sophie had begun their tale. All of them turned to look at her. “Two months ago in Breizh,” she told her husband, who looked taken aback, “when I scried Joanna's and Sophie's father, I saw that he meant harm to Gray; he was the importunate caller whom I told you of last month, seeking to retrieve Sophie, and I am quite willing to scry Gray or any of his friends, to prove to you that they are speaking truth.”

As she spoke Sophie remembered that they had something better even than this. “Gray,” she murmured, “the keys we took; have you them still?”

Gray looked briefly puzzled, and then delighted. He felt about in the pockets of his Ned Dunstan coat, from which Mrs. Wallis had brushed the worst of the soot and grime; at last he extracted the jangling object and presented it to his sister.

“These,” he said, “we thought to use to discover the conspirators' next step; we were forced to flee before we could search the Professor's rooms, but perhaps with your help, Jenny, we may yet learn what they plan . . .”

“Those keys are stolen property, I conclude?” said Sieur Germain mildly.

“They are, sir,” said Sophie. “I stole them myself, and I assure you no man ever deserved it more.”

Sieur Germain raised his eyebrows at her, but said nothing.

Lady Kergabet took the keys, and Sophie watched, fascinated as ever, while she shut her eyes and murmured the still-unintelligible words of her scrying-spell. This time, when she raised her head, she was wide-eyed and pale. What manner of things had she seen or heard?

“I wish I had something of some use to tell you,” she said to Gray. “He has killed a man who ought to have feared him, but did not; it is not he who wishes the death of King Henry, but they have given him what he asked, and he will keep up his end of the bargain. He has still every intention of seeking your death.” She turned to Sieur Germain and said, “You shall do as you like in your own house, of course; but for myself, I shall help my brother, and our King.”

It was a brave speech—a brave stance, for a wife to defy her husband so openly; even a Breizhek husband, and even on such a point. Sophie hoped that Lady Kergabet—Jenny, as she had insisted they call her—would not regret it.

Sieur Germain appeared nonplussed, as well he might. Lord and lady faced one another in mutual defiance; Sophie held her breath.

Jenny's husband might have ordered her from the room and thrown the rest of them out into the street; he might have humiliated her before her friends by dismissing her words, or—as any stranger would certainly have done—accused Gray and Sophie of tampering with the keys to mislead her.

Instead he nodded sharply, raised her hand to his lips, and said, “Of course, my dear; of course we must both help Graham and his friends.” He looked round at all of them. “There will be time later to discuss what it is best to do. For the present—you must all be hungry and weary, after your journey, and we have as yet made you no proper welcome.” At his summons, a servant appeared as if from nowhere with decanter and glasses.

“We shall have refreshments set out in the morning-room,” Sieur Germain went on, when all had drunk in the rite of welcome, “and, Jenny, perhaps you may like to show our guests their rooms? Miss Callender, Miss Joanna, I understand that you are countrywomen of mine . . . ?”

*   *   *

The recently purchased Carrington-street residence of the Kergabets was a typically tall, narrow Mayfair house whose second-floor bedrooms seemed to the country-bred Sophie to reach Olympian heights; it was elegantly but comfortably furnished, with much bright woodwork and many soft and yielding cushions. The chamber to which Jenny at length conducted her—having duly deposited Mrs. Wallis and Joanna in their rooms and sent Gray on alone to the third floor—was bright and cosy, with wardrobe and dressing-table of some cheerful blond wood, and a coverlet of bright kingfisher blue upon the bed. The shutters were open, and on the outer sill perched several small brown birds, their feathers fluffed out against October's chill.

“I hope you will rest comfortably,” Jenny said, smiling so kindly that Sophie had not the heart to tell her how unlikely this was. “I am very happy to see you again, you know, though I should wish that the circumstances were different—I wish I were more certain that you will be safe here.”

Sophie—to whom Jenny presently seemed, despite all, a beacon of homely comforts—could think of nothing to say that might adequately convey her feelings.

What little remained of the day was spent mostly in eating (though Sophie, for her part, was too exhausted to feel very hungry) and talking over all that had occurred on either side, since Jenny's visit to Callender Hall. The Professor had been to Kergabet to seek them, but, it appeared, had first gone to Kemper, following their rumoured trail to the Sisters of Sirona. This unlooked-for piece of good fortune explained why, though travelling alone and openly, able to take a more direct route, he had not reached Oxford before them.

After dinner the ladies repaired to the drawing-room, and there, gleaming hospitably from the centre of the floor, was the most beautiful object Sophie had ever beheld.

Her weariness vanished; she only half heard Joanna's laughter at her eager approach to the pianoforte, the first she had seen since leaving Callender Hall. She had never before been so long without practising, and at first her fingers were stiff and uncooperative. She persevered, however, and soon long habit reasserted itself, and the instrument responded to her touch.

She found her way into a gloomy ballad which she had loved as a child, and had lost on the day when she made Mrs. Wallis and the housemaids weep, and her parents had confronted her—Mama regretful, Father disapproving—and informed her that well-bred young ladies did not sing common ballads. She had understood from their decree only that, for no evident reason, they wished to take from her one of the few things she loved. But she had known better, by then, than to challenge the Professor, who, though kind enough to Sophie and her sisters when he was pleased with them, grew cross so very easily. Instead she had taken to disappearing from the house for hours at a time, roaming the gardens and, eventually, the park and tenant farms, in search of places where she would not be overheard. Even so, she had never dared to sing that particular ballad aloud, but she sang it now, for herself and for Joanna, feeling dimly that it symbolised an end of her stepfather's power over the children they had been.

And I'll watch all o'er his child while he's growing,
she sang, ending the burden of the ballad's final verse, and looked up into an unnerving silence. Without her noticing, the men had come in to join the ladies; tea had been poured, fruit and cakes brought in and eaten; and now Mrs. Wallis and Master Alcuin sat on one sofa, and Sieur Germain—with one arm quite openly curled about Jenny's shoulders—on another, and Gray in an armchair with Joanna curled catlike at his feet, all of them watching her. For a long moment no one spoke, and then Jenny seemed to rouse herself and said softly, “I see that Gray was right, Sophie; yours is a rare talent indeed.”

Sophie's cheeks warmed, and she wished their rapt attention away. “I am sorry,” she whispered to no one in particular. “I—I am very tired . . . if I might retire, now . . .”

“Of course.” Jenny nodded. The three men stood, and there was a chorus of good-nights, and Sophie slipped out of the drawing-room and escaped up the stairs.

*   *   *

At first Gray thought he was hearing things—hearing again, perhaps, whatever odd manifestation had afflicted him in the temple at Kerandraon. Almost at once, however, he recognised that this sound was a physical voice, and a voice he knew.

As before, he was helpless to resist it.

The song—not so much a song as a low, mournful keening—drew him out of his bed, out of the room, down the stairs, until he stood before Sophie's closed door. While his conscious mind shrieked at him to escape this compromising position with all possible speed, his left hand seemed to raise itself unbidden and gently rapped its knuckles against the polished wood.

The singing stopped abruptly, and with it vanished Gray's feeling of compulsion; and now, at last, wide awake and gobsmacked by his own stupidity, he understood.

He turned on his heel, prepared to flee, but before he could do so, the door opened, and he turned back to see Sophie's blotched and tearstained face blinking up at him. Her hair hung in a thick plait over one shoulder, dark against her white nightdress.

Even in the half moonlight he could see the dark smudges under her eyes.

“Gray?” she whispered. “Whatever are you doing here?”

“Your spell drew me,” he replied.

“What spell?”

“The one you sang.”

As Sophie only looked more bewildered, he went on: “I see now how the magick works, and I promise to explain everything in the morning—I shall ask Master Alcuin to help me confirm—but I cannot stay here, Sophie, you must see that—if anyone heard, or saw—”

“No!” The desperation in that syllable belied her almost inaudible tone. To Gray's astonishment, she took hold of his dressing-gown and pulled him through the doorway, nearly cracking his skull against the lintel; then she released him, closed the door, and leant her weight against it. The moonlight showed her face more clearly now—the evidence of weeping, the lines of exhaustion that she hid so effectively by day. She looked desperate and defeated.

“I cannot sleep,” she confessed, as Gray moved out of range of the window. “The nightmares have begun again, and worse than ever. I am frightened even to close my eyes. Mrs. Wallis offers to spell me asleep, but . . .”

“Why do you not let her?” he whispered fiercely. “You will do yourself harm, Sophie—”

“Will you do it? Please? I think . . . I think I should not mind it, if it were
your
spell.”

He stared at her in silence.

“Please,” she repeated, low. “I cannot trust her, Gray. You cannot ask it of me—not after all of her lies to me, all these years . . .”

“Yet you follow her,” Gray said stupidly. “All this way—”

“I follow
you
.”

The implications of this simple avowal made Gray dizzy with hope and despair.
But what does it matter what she thinks of me, if she drives herself mad with nightmares?
“Go back to bed,” he said. “I know a spell.”

He could almost feel Sophie's relief as she crept under the eiderdown, curling up like a child with her hand under her cheek. They had all grown used to her habit of nodding off at odd moments, and Sophie had always, after that first night on the road, refused to discuss the matter; but surely he—who loved her, and had sworn to serve her—ought to have seen how she suffered.

Crossing the room to kneel beside the bed, he laid one hand against her brow and, gathering up his magick, began to croon a spell for dreamless sleep. Slowly, Sophie's eyelids dropped; even after her deep, even breathing told him that the spell had done its work, he kept his station for some time, his gaze rapt upon her sleeping face.

At last, regretfully, he levered himself to his feet and looked about him, confronting the far greater problem of how to regain the safety of his own bed. For if any of Jenny's household were to find him here, barefoot and clad in nightshirt and borrowed dressing-gown, nightmares would be the least of Sophie's worries.

*   *   *

In the morning, Sophie was awakened by a knock at her door: one of the Kergabet housemaids, bearing morning tea. She felt disoriented and groggy, as though she had slept too long—though when the housemaid threw open the shutters, she saw that the sun had only just risen—and an odd impression nagged at her, of strange doings in the night. Still, she had slept more soundly here than in any bed since her own at Callender Hall, and, having been spared the usual nightmare procession of bloodied bodies and twisted limbs and dead, staring eyes, she felt it would be churlish to complain of how strange it was not to have dreamed at all.

Once washed and dressed, she leant her elbows briefly on the windowsill, looking out at the chill, bright October day. How peculiar to be surrounded by so many houses! But she felt oddly safe here, as though protected by the anonymity of this house, so like all the others.

She ran against Gray in the first-floor corridor that led to the breakfast room; he looked at her in a way she could not interpret and asked in a low voice whether she had slept well.

“Very well, I thank you,” she replied, puzzled, and was more puzzled at his smile.

The morning's post was brought in by a parlourmaid, who deposited a large stack of letters before Sieur Germain and handed on a salver a single thick epistle, sealed in violet wax, to his wife.

“This letter is from my mother in Kernow,” Jenny said, turning it over. She hesitated briefly, perhaps reluctant to exclude her guests by reading it at table, but in the end curiosity seemed to get the better of her; she broke the seal and read the letter through, while the conversation went on around her.