The Midnight Queen (6 page)

In Which Professor Callender Welcomes a Visitor

Gray began the
next morning by searching the house for his tutor, intending to carry out his resolve of the night before. This quest proving fruitless, he sighed in resignation and fetched his gardening hat.

Before the day was ended, he had undergone a change of heart.

Still wanting an early glimpse of the Professor's “distinguished guest,” he contrived to find work that placed him within sight of the front of the house. This was bound to irritate Pellan, who did not like anyone else—even the Professor, who paid his wages—to decide things about
his
gardens, but a dressing-down from Pellan would by now be nothing unusual, and the events of the summer had given Gray a strong distaste for surprises.

The visitor was due to appear in the course of the morning, but when Joanna came out to summon Gray to luncheon, there had still been no sign of any new arrival.

“Do you know who this mysterious visitor is to be?” he asked her as they trailed towards the kitchen garden. Although Joanna lacked Sophie's gift for blending in unseen, she was, through continual gossiping in Breton with the house servants, often in possession of useful information.

This time, however, she only shrugged. “I have not the least idea,” she said, plucking a leaf from a stand of bee-balm in passing. “But he must be terribly rich or terribly important, for Father to make such a to-do.”

The same thought had occurred to Gray.

“And if Father admires him so,” Joanna continued, “he will be dreadfully dull and probably very stupid, and we shall all be expected to flatter him and agree with everything he says. I have been considering,” she said, her round, freckled face screwed up in thought, “whether I ought to fall down the stairs and sprain my ankle, or simply take to my bed with a chill.”

Despite himself, Gray had to stifle a snort of laughter. “Never the stairs,” he said. “You should not like your injuries to be
too
real. And a chill is difficult. A headache is what you want: very easily feigned—no outward signs—and should a healer be sent for, you can say it has gone away.”

Joanna looked reluctantly impressed. “Sophie was right,” she said; “you
are
rather clever.” Then, her face resuming its more customary expression of pugnacious suspicion, she demanded, “How did you come to be studying with
Father
? Had you done something to make the College angry with you?”

*   *   *

Gray had largely overcome his resentment at being expected to work outdoors in all weather, amidst clay and compost and thorns, yet still look the gentleman at meals. But today, as he hurried into the dining-room to join the others at table—his hair hastily slicked down and, under his coat and waistcoat, a clean shirt sticking to still-damp skin—the Professor's disapproving glare forced him to swallow back a hot, unreasonable rage.

“M-m-my apologies, sir,” he stammered, trying to slip gracefully into the empty place opposite Sophie and Joanna. He might have spared himself the effort; the chair he drew out from the table scraped horribly along the floor, his legs tangled with the cloth, and, attempting to keep his balance, he put his elbow down in a clatter of silver.

Amelia and the Professor glared; Joanna for once had the grace to muffle her giggles. Sophie looked across at him with sympathy in her dark eyes.

“Now that Mr. Marshall has had the goodness to join us,” said Professor Callender, with one last disparaging look at Gray, “let us begin our meal.” He offered the ritual words of thanks to Jove and Juno, to the All-Father and the Mother Goddess; Gray had never once heard his host invoke any local deity. Gray—raised on Kernowek servants' tales—was of a different habit; under his breath he murmured his own thanks to Cerridwen, Rosmerta, and Dahut before lifting his knife and fork.

*   *   *

They were still at table when young Katell, smoothing her skirts with trembling fingers, opened the door of the dining-room.

“Begging your pardon, m'sieu',” she said in hesitant Français, “the coach 'as brought your guest. Shall I show 'im in, m'sieu'? I told 'im I'd show 'im to 'is rooms if 'e wanted, but—”

“That will do, Katell,” said the Professor, in the same language; “that will do. Show him in.”

Katell curtseyed again and fled; the Professor and Amelia looked after her, shaking their heads.

Then the door opened again and Gray heard Katell's voice once more: “M'sieu' le Vicomte Carteret,” it said, as a dark-haired, slightly stooped man of perhaps forty or fifty sidled into the room.

The Professor was on his feet, ushering in the newcomer while his flustered housemaid brought another chair to place beside Gray's. “I beg you will allow me to present my eldest daughter, Amelia,” he said; the stranger bowed. “My daughter Sophia; my daughter Joanna.”

Gray fancied that the stranger studied Sophie's face just a trifle longer than was polite.

“And this,” said the Professor, turning to indicate Gray, “is a student of mine, Mr. Marshall.”

Viscount Carteret—
where have I heard that name before?
wondered Gray—also turned, and nodded to Gray. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Marshall,” he said.

Gray bowed silently in return. His mind was racing, and he was grateful that the obligatory gesture of respect hid his face, however briefly. For, if he could not recall where he had heard this man's name, he had not forgotten that insinuating nasal voice.

“Will you not take some refreshment with us, my lord?” said Amelia.

Lord Carteret turned to her with a smile. “I beg you will excuse me, Miss Callender,” he said; “I fear I should be at best indifferent company.”

I did not mistake the voice,
thought Gray;
it is he, indeed.

“My journey has been long,” their guest continued, “and I am presently more in need of repose than of refreshment.”

So saying, he allowed Katell to lead him away to Callender Hall's best-appointed guest room.

Gray's relief at this departure was considerable. Though not unpractised in the art of concealing his state of mind from others, he feared that this shock, combined with the previous evening's disastrous experiment, might be too much for him. He needed time to think, and certainly, if the Professor's co-conspirators had begun to pay him private visits, Gray could no longer consider simply running away home.

He sat silent, thinking furiously, while the Professor lectured his daughters on the honour bestowed by Viscount Carteret in deigning to visit them. The oration was a long one, suiting Joanna's prediction that the honoured visitor would be “desperately dull.” It was also a masterful exercise in saying much while revealing little.

“Father,” Joanna interrupted, drawing an ominous beetling of the paternal brows, “I wish you will tell us who this Lord Carteret
is
.”

After a pause, during which even she seemed to recognise that perhaps she had gone too far, she added, “If you please.”

Professor Callender drew himself up in his chair. “I had forgotten,” he said icily, “the boundless ignorance of the world in which my offspring choose to bury themselves.” He looked down his large pink nose at Joanna.

This seemed hardly fair. Across the table, Joanna was bristling again, and Gray sent her a silent plea to keep her temper. Perhaps Sophie was at the same time exercising some more concrete form of restraint, for, though visibly fuming, the younger girl held her tongue.

The Professor was still speaking, but his student could hardly credit what he said: “. . . Lord President of the Privy Council, King Henry's closest advisor.”

The Chief Privy Counsellor?
Here
, in this house?
Gray fought to keep his jaw from dropping open. His next coherent thought—harking back to that dreadful night in Oxford—was,
Why should such a man interest himself in the affairs of Merlin College?
But that voice . . .

If I have not mistaken his identity, then his loyalties are suspect—more than that!—and this is surely no mere social visit. I must discover what he has come here for.

*   *   *

In the salver on the hall table was a thick letter directed to Gray in Jenny's hand. He picked it up and made to take it with him, up to his bedroom to resume his working clothes. Before he had reached the staircase, however, he found himself cornered by his tutor, who wore his bluff and hearty air.

“Well, Marshall,” the Professor huffed, “and what think you of our distinguished guest?”

“I—I hardly know, sir,” said Gray. “I have not yet had leisure to form any opinion of His Lordship.”

“Ah! You have never before been in company with him, then.”

Had Gray had any respect for his tutor's intellect, it would have sunk under the weight of this clumsy attempt to trap him.

“No, indeed, sir,” he said, with perfect truth. “I have never seen His Lordship before in the whole of my life. My family, you know, is in Town very little.”

Please, All-Father and Great Mother, let him not ask whether I've
heard
him.

Those deities for once answered his prayer fully and promptly: The Professor nodded, apparently satisfied, and Gray made his escape up the front staircase, Jenny's letter in hand.

A quarter-hour later, he descended by way of the back stairs, having no longer any reason to haunt the front drive. Pellan was waiting for him, grim-faced as ever, with buckets of compost and two spades. That afternoon, under Pellan's direction, Gray and the undergardener shovelled compost onto the roots of every tree in the vast grounds—or so it seemed to Gray.

At last Pellan deemed their task complete, and Gray was left to his own devices for the hour before dinner. Idly fingering a long scratch left on his wrist by a rose-tree, he let himself in at the garden door, hung up his hat, and wearily climbed the back staircase.

As soon as he entered his bedroom, he saw that it had been searched. Though the physical signs were subtle—not the neatness imposed by a housemaid's labours, but a disorder just perceptibly different from that which he had himself created—the air was thick with upheaval.

At once he crouched down to retrieve, from beneath the overbearing wardrobe that filled one corner of the room, the spell-locked case, brought from his College rooms, in which he had been keeping the more revealing of Jenny's letters. Scratches about the keyhole showed that the lock had been tried, but the searcher had not forced it. Gray breathed a sigh of relief; nowhere else in this room was there anything to show that he was not a voluntary and perfectly contented guest in this house. And the latest letter, by purest happenstance, he had still in his trouser-pocket. He took it out and broke the seal.

Gray dear,
he read in Jenny's confident hand,
I hope you are well. I wish that you would write to my mother; she tells me often that she has heard nothing of you these many weeks, and is anxious for news of you. Of course I have assured her that you are safe and well, but she would be easier in her mind could she read the same in your own hand.

Gray snorted; how like Jenny to put such a complexion on things, to attempt some sort of reconciliation, when in fact she herself had for some time been the only member of their family to spare him a kind thought.

He folded the letter away with the others and tripped the lock with something like relief; though his rooms had been searched, surely there had been nothing much to learn from the exercise. But though the incident had shaken him, it had also given him an idea.
Two can play at that game, my Lord President.

*   *   *

For some days no opportunity offered itself for discreet investigation of Lord Carteret or the Professor; Gray was kept always at work, and under supervision, by Pellan or by the Professor himself. At last, however, having done his best to present an appearance of blithe innocence (not to say bovine stupidity), and having seen the Professor and his guest exit the house and pass by him in the general direction of the stables, he waited until Pellan's back was turned and his attention occupied by a molehill, then stole back into the house, via the kitchen, to put their absence to some use.

He crept as silently as he could down the dim, wood-panelled corridor that led past the Professor's study. Pausing outside the door, he pressed his ear against the polished oak just above the uppermost hinge, listening. He heard nothing but the thump of blood in his own ears, however, and so judged it safe to turn the door-handle.

Here Gray met his first check, for—not surprisingly—the door was locked and warded.

The lock first, he decided. He knew a number of spells for unlocking doors, as a result of his own unfortunate habit of losing keys; he had one hand on the door-handle and was preparing to spread the other over the lock when someone behind him said, “Mr. Marshall!”

Gray started guiltily and turned to look; one of the housemaids—Gwenaëlle, who had gone with them to Kerandraon—was coming up the corridor towards him, wearing a linen apron and an expression of surprise. Mrs. Wallis's bristling key-ring was in her hand, and Gray had a sudden idea.

“Gwenaëlle, perhaps you help me?” he said, speaking in halting Breton with what he hoped was a winning smile. “The Professor sends me to fetch something from his room, and says the door is open, but I find it locked. But if you have got another key . . .”

Gwenaëlle looked up at him, her fine dark brows drawn together. Gray prayed to Janus, god of gates and doors and decisions, that she might see nothing to decide her against him. At last she said, “No one but Professor Callender has the key to this room, Mr. Marshall.
Mantret on.
”
I am sorry.

Gray shrugged and let his smile twist sidewise, rueful. “No harm,” he said.
“Trugarez deoc'h.” Thank you.