Travellers in Magic (5 page)

“Robert?” she said, tentatively. I didn't look back.

When I got home I took the photographs out and spread them across my desk. I was surprised to see how worn they were, how frayed at the edges. How many hours had I spent looking at them, planning a future that never existed? I lit a match and held it up to one photograph, then threw them in the fireplace. Five seconds later they had all burned.

Now, in the evenings, mostly I sit and think. I feel lost, as though I've survived a great tragedy. I neglect my work, and my answering service has one or two messages every day from irate clients. I think about my wasted ten years, about Cassie and her crazy family, and their strange ability to charm. I think that sooner or later it will be time to call Cassie back, to start a life that was stopped—that I stopped—ten years ago. I'm pretty sure Cassie will turn me down. But for the first time in a long time,
I don't know for sure
. And that excites me.

A
FTERWORD

Sometimes two separate story ideas combine to make one story. The idea of photographs that show the future had come to me about three or four years before I'd started this story; I'd tried writing it then but it hadn't worked out. And I knew a few reptile smugglers and thought that they might be interesting to write about. It was only when I tried putting these two things together, when I came up with the character of Aurora the reptile fanatic, that the story started to work.

E
VER
A
FTER

The wedding ceremony had been very tiring. Of course they'd rehearsed it—rehearsed it over and over until she thought she'd fall asleep during the actual ceremony—but they had never gone through it while she was wearing the wedding gown. The gown had been made in a hurry, and made wrong: the bodice pinched so tightly she thought she wouldn't be able to breathe.

The gown. The princess felt a wave of embarrassment thinking about it, glad that the inside of the coach was so dark that he couldn't see her blush. Of course she couldn't afford a wedding gown, she had known that, and she had expected that something had been arranged. But when she'd found out that it hadn't been, she'd had to go to the prince and haltingly, stuttering on almost every word, explain her problem. And the prince had had to go to his father, the king, and the king (who was very kind, everyone had said so) had laughed and said, Well of course, buy her a gown. Only make it green, to match her eyes.

It had been a joke, she knew that. Only when the king made a joke everybody took it as an order, because they were never sure when it wasn't going to be a joke. And her eyes were blue, not green, but the king, being very near-sighted, hadn't known that. So she had to stand through the ceremony horribly self-conscious, knowing that all around her people must be whispering, “The fairest in the land? She certainly doesn't look it.”

And the reception afterwards had been, if anything, even worse. “You're very fortunate,” people told her, over and over again. “Very fortunate.” The princess had smiled and nodded, thinking, But what about him? Don't they know how fortunate he is to have me? Because I do love him, more than any of these people ever would. And once she had said, “Yes, very fortunate,” and the woman she had been talking to laughed, and she had blushed a deep red, wondering if she had said the wrong thing.

“It's your accent, dear,” the woman said. “We can barely understand you.”

I can understand you just fine, the princess had wanted to say, but of course she had been hearing aristocratic speech, and following aristocratic orders, ever since she was a small child. “It's very quaint,” another woman had said, clearly anxious to make her feel better, and then had said, “Oh, look, she's blushing.”

In the darkness of the coach she tugged at the bodice, trying to straighten it. She had only worn one other fancy gown in her life, and that one had fit so perfectly she had thought they all would be like that. “Is something wrong, dear?” the prince said, reaching over to squeeze her hand. “We'll be there soon.”

“Oh no, nothing,” she said. How could she act this way, so ungrateful? As if she hadn't just been given the most exciting day of her life? She smiled at him. “I'm just tired, that's all.”

An hour later the coach stopped. She had thought, when the prince had told her they were going to his country estate, that it would be a small house hidden among trees. Through the windows of the coach she could see an enormous building, to her eyes almost the size of the castle in the city. All the lights were blazing.

The servants were ready to take the coach, to feed them if they wanted food, to undress them and take them up to bed. She lay in the large, canopied bed, waiting for him, feeling bereft. When he finally came to her she recognized the sensation: she wanted to cry.

The prince took her very gently, stopping often to whisper reassurances. At times she almost wanted to laugh. Did he really think she knew nothing about what went on between a man and a woman? There had been nights, at home, when her stepsisters would talk of nothing else. Still, she couldn't help feeling a tenderness towards him. He did love her, after all.

He was gone when she woke the next morning. She remembered he had said something about fox-hunting the night before. She sat up, wondering what happened next. After a while she stood up, padding about the stone floor in her bare feet. One door she opened led to a closet filled with men's clothing. The next door should be—Yes, it was. She took out a simple white dress, very much like the one she had worn to the ball, and put it on.

One of the servants, a woman, looked in the door for a minute. The servant began to laugh. The princess could hear her running down the hall, laughing. After a few minutes another servant—much younger, about her age—came in the room.

“Good morning, my lady,” the servant said.

“Hello,” the princess said nervously.

“Please come with me, my lady,” the servant said. She led her to an adjoining room. “Here. I'll help you undress.”

What's that? the princess wanted to say, but she recognized a bath just in time. She had never seen one so large and so white. Did these people bathe every day then? She stepped out of the dress and the servant hung it up for her.

When she got out of the bath the servant had another dress ready. Was the other one dirty? Or wasn't it appropriate for today, for whatever she was going to do today? Without questioning, she put the dress on.

The prince was already at the table when she came down for breakfast. “Lessons,” he said, popping a muffin into his mouth. “You're going to have lessons, starting today. You can't do everything the way you've always done it.” He looked at her fondly.

“Yes, my lord,” she said, bowing her head to cover her blushes. He had heard, then. Someone had told him about what had happened this morning. Still, he thought she was capable of learning. And if he thought so then she was capable. She would live up to his trust in her. She was eager to learn. “What sort of lessons?”

“Mmm,” the prince said. “Etiquette. Manners. What else? What do ladies have to know? Embroidery. Oh, and we'll have to correct your pretty little accent. We'll start here, on our honeymoon. That way when we get back to the palace you won't feel so out of place.”

She looked at him, puzzled. He did love her, didn't he? Then why was he so anxious to keep her out of his way during the day? “And you, my lord?” she said. “What will you be doing?”

“Oh, the usual thing,” he said. “Fox hunting, falconry. I have my lessons too. I'll have to learn to be a king someday. But you don't have to worry about that.”

She smiled at him. Of course not. Of course he would have more important things to do.

And so it started. Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the morning was etiquette. She learned how to address people, and she learned how they should address her. She learned where to seat them at dinner. She learned what to wear to which occasions and what the latest fashions were. In the afternoons she learned how to speak like an aristocrat. Her Tuesdays and Thursdays were free, which meant that in the morning she had to embroider with the ladies-in-waiting and in the afternoon she had to deal with the day to day problems of running an estate. Your neighbor Lord So-and-so has just had a son, what should we get the baby? The coachman wants the day off to see his mother. The downstairs maid is sick. On weekends she got to see the prince, but on Saturdays there was usually a dinner or a dance to go to, and on Sundays there was church.

And she had insomnia. Of course that was to be expected after nearly a lifetime of sleeping on hard stones, but she hadn't thought that it would happen, and it worried her. She tossed and turned in the large bed, trying to get comfortable, trying not to wake the prince. The prince must never know, never suspect that she was ungrateful. The prince would rise early to go hunting, and she would fall asleep at dawn and be awakened, hours later, by the young servant, her personal maid. “Come, my lady, it's time to go to breakfast.”

She never got enough sleep. She was tired doing her lessons, tired doing her embroidery, tired talking to the cooks and cleaning women. “You look very pale,” they would tell her, and shake their heads. She once overheard two of the kitchen maids wonder if she was pregnant.

Of all her lessons she liked embroidery the best. She was good at it, having had to sew and mend for her stepmother and stepsisters all her life. She liked working with the silk threads and good linen and bright, sharp needles. But the conversation of the ladies-in-waiting, even of the ones who made an effort to be kind to her, flowed over her. She didn't know the people they talked about, didn't know why it was important that Lord So-and-so's cousin had married Lady Such-and-such or that Lord So-and-so's son had come down with a mysterious disease. She had asked the woman who taught her court etiquette, but the woman, an old distant relative of the king's, hadn't been to the palace for years, and all her gossip was thirty years out of date. And once or twice it seemed that the ladies-in-waiting laughed and talked about her. But there was nothing she could do about that.

Every day the princess improved, everyone told her so. She made fewer and fewer mistakes. The servants hadn't laughed at her since that first day. Her accent still wasn't perfect, but she never said anything at the major functions, and nobody seemed to notice. (She noticed that the women hardly talked until after dinner anyway, and then only among themselves.) Still, when the prince told her that they had to be back at the palace in a few days she felt apprehensive.

The palace was far more confusing than the country house. There were hundreds of people, each one with a different name and a different function, and she was supposed to remember them all. Some of the more important servants looked like nobility, and some of the least important of the nobility looked like servants, so that she could barely keep them straight. And the king was here, the king who seemed jolly enough but who always made her nervous. How did he really feel about his son marrying a commoner?

Here people were always whispering to her, warning her about other people. “Do you see that woman there, leaning against the pillar?” a minor prince said to her one night at a dance. She nodded. “That's the Lady Flora. She was the prince's sweetheart, before he met you. You'd better watch out for her.” She nodded again, puzzled. What could either one of them do? The princess was married, the Lady Flora was not: what did the man mean by “watch out for her”?

One night after a concert in the small dining room (the one that sat twenty-four people) the young woman who played the harp came up to her and slipped a note into her hand when no one was looking. The princess looked up, startled, but the harpist had already crossed the room. She took the note to bed with her and got up to read it after the prince was asleep. She had had some schooling before her father died so she knew how to read. She laughed to think that she might have had to ask someone to help her read a note that was so obviously intended to be private.

“We are in desperate need of your help,” the note said. “If you love liberty and justice—and we know that you do, being of the people yourself—please respond to us through the harpist. Your friends.”

She crumpled the note and burned it with the candle she had used to read by. What did it mean? Who were these people who called themselves her friends? They were working against the king, that much was clear. Did they expect her to betray her king, her husband the prince?

She could not sleep at all that night. In the morning, instead of going to her lessons, she sent for the young harpist.

“Yes, my lady?” the harpist said, coming into her room.

“I want to talk to you,” the princess said. She stopped, immediately at a loss. What did she want to talk about? “About your note.”

“Yes, my lady?” The harpist was clearly nervous.

“You can't—surely you can't expect me—” The princess stopped for a moment, silent.

“I had nothing to do with it, my lady!” the harpist said, alarmed. “They just asked me to deliver the note, because they knew I'd be safe. I'm not a revolutionary—I just play the harp. Truly, my lady.”

“I believe you,” the princess said. “I—What's your name?”

“Alison, my lady.”

“Well, Alison,” the princess said. “I—I just wanted to know who it was who gave you the note. No, no, I don't ask you to betray anyone!” she said hastily, seeing the girl become alarmed again. “I'm curious, that's all. Who are they?”

“They?” Alison said. For a moment the princess thought the girl might be half-witted. “I know—I only know one of them, the—the leader, I guess. He asked me to deliver the note.”

“And what's he like?”

“Oh, he's very handsome, my lady,” Alison said. “He's I don't know—very persuasive. A personality like sparks flying. You should meet him, my lady.”