The Midnight Queen (31 page)

In Which Master Alcuin Draws an Interesting Conclusion

They stood for
a long moment staring at one another, hearing no sound but the tattoo of raindrops on the window-glass and their own ragged breathing.

“We had better ward the room, I suppose,” said Sophie at last, blushing, and Gray, with some relief, nodded.

“It will be enough?” she said. “You are quite sure?”

He was less completely confident than he had led Sophie to believe, but the theory was sound enough. “Two days since,” he said, “when Master Alcuin warded the dining room—did you feel the wards at all, when you walked through them?”

Sophie's eyes widened. “I thought,” she began, “I thought I had brushed away a cobweb. I felt the merest touch—like gossamer—and—I wanted so
very
much to be out of that room, and away from everyone . . .”

“Exactly,” said Gray. “No one else in this house could have passed those wards.
My
wards alone would not likely suffice to contain your magick, but a joint effort, using a particularly effective spell—”

Sophie drew a deep breath and nodded.

It took some little time, in the circumstances, to achieve the proper state of concentration on the spell that Gray had carefully transcribed and they had both committed to memory; by Sophie's silence he deduced that she was in the same difficulty. “
Tego, sæpio, custodio
,” he began at last, and heard her voice echoing his own:
“Sæpio, cingo, amplector . . .”

At the final phrase—
Ego obsecroque impero
—a double whisper of magick passed through him; the hairs on his neck and arms rose shiveringly for just a moment, and he opened his eyes to see Sophie scratching her nose, her dark, intent gaze focused on his face. He attempted a smile and made to take her hand, but she turned away, moving towards the dressing-table where, somehow, her
toiletteries
had appeared, tidily disposed beside his own. “My head aches dreadfully,” she said, sitting down before the mirror. “Every hairpin in this house is in my hair, I think.”

She bent her head and began pulling out the pins. “Let me help you,” Gray ventured, and crossed the room to stand behind her chair.

Her hair, freed gradually from its constraints, was as wonderfully soft as ever he had imagined it, but there seemed no end to the flowers and ribbons and pins. As he worked them free—gently, cautiously, for this was territory as unexplored as any that might come after—he could not resist occasionally stroking his fingers through the silky strands. He looked up, startled, when a soft chestnut-coloured tendril wound itself momentarily about his hand, but Sophie's head was still bent just enough to render her expression unreadable.

From time to time their fingers met, and he thrilled to every momentary touch. It was of all things the most absurd that such a slight contact should so affect him
now
, but so it was; by the time the last pin chimed softly on the polished surface of the dressing-table he was breathing rather fast.

Sophie raised her head; his eyes met hers in the looking-glass, and he saw that her face was as flushed, her eyes as nervously bright as his own. She stood abruptly, turning away from her reflection. “It ought not to be so very difficult to begin,” she said.

*   *   *

“You could sing to me, you know,” Gray murmured, “and I should be utterly in your power.” He stood perhaps four paces' distance from her, one hand white-knuckled on the nearest carven bedpost.

“But that,” replied Sophie (who had read one or two books far more unsuitable than her stepfather had any idea of), “would be most unfair.”

She took another step towards him.

“Indeed—and”—a moment's pause; then, striding forward and pulling her into his arms—“and quite unnecessary, besides.”

She was never afterwards sure exactly what happened next; only that, somehow, Gray's coat and waistcoat, collar and neck-cloth, were quite elsewhere, and the bodice of her gown sliding off her shoulders, at the moment when their fingers collided around her elaborately knotted sash.

They laughed uncertainly; Sophie let go the knot, and Gray's long fingers fumbled with it. “Let me,” she said after a moment, but Jenny had tied it so thoroughly, and pulled each separate twist so tight, that they could neither of them make any headway.

“When fair means fail,” Gray said at last, “we cheat.” And, closing his hand about the recalcitrant knot, he whispered three words.

Then he looked down at his hand, and blinked. “Oh,” he said.

Sophie, following his gaze, saw at once the source of his consternation: Rather than simply untying the knot, his spell had unravelled the sash itself into a mass of silken threads. “What was it you said to me, a few days since?” she said, restraining her laughter as best she could. “‘I should not love you half so well,
cariad
, if you were like other people . . .'”

Gray stared at her for a long moment, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, then looked again at the ruined fabric in his fist. At last he spread his fingers and let the gossamer threads fall to the floor. “Come to bed,” he said—half command, half entreaty—and opened his arms once more.

And, smiling, Sophie went.

*   *   *

She woke with the twittering of sparrows at false dawn, half under the tangled bedclothes, half firmly wrapped in the arms of her husband, who slumbered deeply, his warm breath tickling the back of her neck. She had been dreaming, she remembered: a pleasant dream of wandering in a forest in spring. She shivered, then frowned; the room was far colder than it ought to be, surely. Had the fire gone out altogether?

With some difficulty she wriggled out of Gray's embrace and, eventually, out of bed. By now thoroughly chilled, she retrieved and shrugged on the first garment to catch her eye: Gray's discarded shirt, whose hem fell past her knees. Wrapping the rumpled fabric twice round her body, she approached the hearth and found that, indeed, last night's cheery blaze was now a heap of cold ashes; they had not thought to bank the fire. More puzzlingly, the hearthstones bore signs that the flames had blazed up spectacularly before burning themselves out.

Only yesterday Sophie had dreaded what she might behold on waking, her mind's eye conjuring splintered wood, shattered glass, cracked hearthstones—things fractured, charred, fragmented, crushed by the power she had never sought and now could not control. Though as yet she had seen nothing so very dreadful here, she could not be sanguine; the odd half light of this hour just before dawn might hide a multitude of horrors.

Trembling a little—and not only from the cold—she raised a hand and called a timid, fragile globe of light.

She was very near the window, and so it was the window-curtains that she noticed first of all: Had not the heavy damask borne a quite different pattern yesternight? But she had been thinking of quite other things; perhaps she might be mistaken. Determined to know the worst, she strengthened her light a little and, moving to the centre of the room, revolved slowly on her heels, examining every visible object intently. From time to time, as she moved, an unfamiliar twinge recalled to her mind fragments of the night just past. They had neither of them truly known what to expect, but—Sophie smiled a small, secret smile—such things, it seemed, had a way of working themselves out. There had been a great deal of laughter.

She had been able to forget, for a time, how much she was afraid, but now she could not help remembering.

They had not destroyed anything, in the strict sense of the term; this gave her some comfort. But that the wards on this room had been necessary, she could no longer doubt. She had only to hope that they had also been sufficient.

The beautifully carved rosewood bed had sprouted little leafy shoots, all along the headboard and up and down the tall posts; the small rosewood bookcase seemed similarly afflicted. Not only the window-curtains but the costly hearthrug, the damask coverlet twisted about Gray's long legs, the drawn-back bed-curtains—all had somehow been reworked into new and phantastickal motifs. The little flowers carelessly discarded upon the dressing-table had apparently taken root there and nodded their unseasonable heads before the looking-glass like tiny ladies of fashion.

The looking-glass itself, paradoxically, remained quite unmarred, and cast Sophie's reflection back at her just as though she—as though
everything
—were not profoundly, irrevocably changed.

*   *   *

Gray stirred in his sleep and mumbled something, and Sophie—who had crept into bed again and, shutting her eyes against the bizarre phenomena around her, allowed his slow, even breathing to lull her back into sleep—sat up abruptly to see full daylight, a cold, bright, wintry sun, throwing bright shutter-stripes on the walls and floor.
At least,
she thought absently,
it has stopped raining at last.

“Gray,” she said softly, laying a hand on his bare shoulder. “Gray, wake up.”

His face showed a momentary confusion; then he opened his eyes, and blinked at Sophie, and smiled a wide, delighted smile.

“The sun is long up,” she said. “I am sure we ought to be downstairs; everyone will be thinking—”

But Gray was laughing at her—the low, musical sound she heard so seldom, and loved so much—and pulling her down into his arms, among the rumpled pillows. “That we are new-married and lying late abed,” he said. “What else should they be thinking, pray?”

“Gray.” Was it possible that he did not see what she had seen? “Gray, look about you.”

Raising his eyebrows, he sat up and surveyed the oddly new-furnished room. One long arm reached up to pluck a leaf from the nearest bedpost. “Is this . . . ?” he inquired, peering at it.

Sophie nodded.

“Well,” said Gray. He looked at her, and back down at the tiny yellow-green leaf. “This is not quite what we had expected.”

*   *   *

When at length—long after the morning meal had ended—the new-made
conubii
made their appearance downstairs, they were greeted by what Gray supposed to be the usual sort of friendly raillery, but though there was quite enough of this to make both of them blush, he could see very well that no one's heart was in it.

“Something has happened,” he said, looking from Jenny to her husband to Master Alcuin. “Or something new has come to light—what is it?”

It was Joanna who spoke, while the others seemed to be considering how to begin. “He has come back again,” she said. “My father. With another man—Master Alcuin observed them from the window as they departed, and believes it was one of Father's students—and two constables of the Watch.”

“During
breakfast
!” added Jenny. “I suppose he meant to catch us in a lie by arriving at an hour when no civilised person would think of calling.”

“They were at length prevailed upon to depart,” said Sieur Germain, with a grimace, “but although the good men of the Watch appeared persuaded of our innocence in the matter of Professor Callender's missing daughter, I fear the Professor himself was not.”

Sophie's grip on Gray's hand had tightened painfully, and his hand clasped hers with scarcely less ferocity. Joanna said, “I shall go and fetch you a fresh pot of tea.”

“It is very fortunate that you warded your room so completely,” said Master Alcuin. “I am not certain which of our visitors worked the rather potent finding I observed—perhaps it too was a joint effort, by Callender and his young friend—but certainly it must otherwise have located you, Marshall, worked at such close range.”

“Located
me
?” said Gray, startled. “Are you quite sure?”

“Oh, certainly,” Master Alcuin replied.

“I left the others here in the breakfast-parlour to intercept Callender and his party below, in the hall,” Sieur Germain explained. “It was necessary, of course, that Master Alcuin not be questioned by the men of the Watch. I can assure you that when not impugning your honour and that of your sister and myself, and threatening retribution for my intransigence, Callender spoke particularly of a finding-spell directed at you.”

“But why . . .” Gray had wondered that the Professor, on his previous visit, should have wasted time seeking Sophie under sofas and behind occasional tables, when he might have found her so much more quickly and easily by magickal means. Now a thought struck him. “Perhaps,” he said to Sophie, “he cannot picture you accurately enough to work a finding.”

Sophie, Jenny, and Sieur Germain protested the absurdity of this idea, but Mrs. Wallis and Master Alcuin looked thoughtful.

“Indeed, Miss Sophie,” said the latter, “it seems entirely possible that your magick could have such an effect.”

“Or perhaps his companion worked the spell,” Gray continued, “and had no means of knowing what you look like. In any event, however, we are none of us safe so long as he still suspects our presence here. A finding may be less reliable at greater distance, but—”

“Perhaps . . . if we set a ward on the whole house?” said Sophie. “Or a shielding-spell? Might such a spell be constructed particularly to evade findings?”

Master Alcuin's thoughtful frown deepened, and he began toying with the end of his beard. “Such a construction ought certainly to be possible—”

“He is still there,” said Joanna, erupting suddenly into the breakfast-parlour.

Sieur Germain rose from his chair, glowering, and strode out of the room, calling for Treveur.

“I thought him gone away,” Joanna continued, “before Gray and Sophie came down, but he is still there, or he is come back. He is alone now, at least.”

“And will see us the moment we pass by any window facing the street, I suppose,” said Sophie, “or venture a single step out of doors.”