Unexpected Magic (39 page)

“Say why you were pursued,” Alex said and was thrilled at the answer.

“I am an outlaw. I am accused of killing a man I did not kill.” The stranger looked earnestly from Alex to Cecilia, plainly very anxious that they should believe him. “I swear to you I did not kill him. This man was my liege lord, and to kill him would be as evil as if I had killed my own father. Someone killed him—who it was I cannot say—and I was accused. It seems I had enemies where I thought to have had friends. And it gave color to their case that I did indeed kill a man—my uncle—when I was scarcely turned fourteen.”

Cecilia gasped. Alex was frightened again. Outlaws were all very well, but a self-confessed murderer sitting beside one's kitchen range was a totally different matter. “What made you do that?” he said.

“My uncle,” the stranger answered, “had killed my father. I saw him, and so did several others, push my father from the battlements of Gairne Castle. There was no other course open to me—but I assure you that it was in fair fight that I killed him. He had always been a poor swordsman.”

“Well,” said Cecilia, “I suppose that was all right. But could you not have brought the law on him?”

The stranger was a little puzzled. “It was according to the law, what I did—er—madam.”

“Call me Cecilia, for goodness' sake,” she answered. “And was there any reason why you might have killed this other man?”

“I assure you, none.”

Alex asked: “And you would like us to hide you here, would you? Until you can prove your innocence.”

The stranger laughed, not greatly amused. “That may be for as long as I live. There is no evidence that I can see to establish a proof. No—if I might beg hospitality here for one night, it will be much more than I deserve for my rude intrusion.”

Alex looked at Cecilia. “What do you say to the guest room? It's a long way from Father and Miss Gatly.”

“Yes,” said Cecilia. “I'll get a warming-pan. And you will need something to eat, I imagine.”

“I would be grateful for some food,” the outlaw said. “It was early this morning when last I ate.”

“You must be famished!” cried Cecilia. She hurried away the remains of the muffins and brought out what food there was in the pantry. Alex kept watch for their father while she worked.

Cecilia was a little embarrassed by the food they had. “It is plain and good,” she thought, “but it can be nothing like what he must be used to. I am sure, from the look of him, that he is used to the choicest of things.”

While the outlaw ate, Alex wandered between the kitchen door and the table, watching the man eat and hoping for more talk. He was fascinated by the way he did not seem to use a fork. The stranger smiled at him.

“I fear I interrupted my lady—er—your sister in her exposition of Caesar's campaigns in Gaul. Might I take her place, while I eat, and continue the explanation?”

“That is very kind of you,” Alex said.

So the stranger took up the story where Cecilia had left off. He explained many more things than Cecilia, or even Alex's schoolmaster, would have thought necessary, and he explained them so clearly and vividly that Alex never forgot them. He knew all about fighting. Alex had never heard a battle explained before as if one were actually giving the orders to the soldiers, but that was the way the stranger explained Caesar's battles. Alex began to admire Caesar far more than he had ever done in his life, and he admired this outlaw even more than Caesar.

Cecilia came in and out while the man talked. The man seemed very shy of her, particularly of calling her Cecilia. He went out of his way not to call her anything. And as for Cecilia, and Alex too, they were nearly reduced to calling him “Hey, you!”

“What
should
we call him?” Cecilia kept asking herself, as she hurried up and down stairs. “It seems as if he has lost most of what names he had when he became an outlaw.”

They became shyer and shyer, because the longer they left it, the more stupid it seemed not to have asked him what name they should use. It was not until they had taken him into the bleak whitewashed guest room and Cecilia was turning back the elaborate white crocheted overlay on the guest bed, that Alex was impolite enough to ask.

“What would you like us to call you?” he blurted.

The outlaw smiled. “My name is Robert,” he answered.

“Very well, then,” Cecilia said, briskly, because she was so thankful. “Good night, Robert. I hope you sleep well.” Then she ran out of the guest room, with Alex behind her, both of them feeling very silly.

They felt even sillier the next morning when they crept along to the guest room and found that he had gone. At first they thought he had vanished without a trace. The bed was stark, empty, and neatly covered. Its crisp valences looked as if they had never been disturbed. “And he did not look like the kind of man who could make a bed,” Cecilia thought.

“We couldn't have dreamed it, could we?” Alex whispered, staring around the chilly room. Then he saw the kitchen candlestick sitting on one of the crocheted mats on the washstand. “One of us must have believed in him enough to bring this here at least,” he said, and looked in the pitcher. The water had been iced over, but the ice was broken. “He must have washed, Cecil. Look.”

Cecilia, feeling glum and flat, came over and agreed. She picked up the candlestick with the guttered candle, thinking that Miss Gatly ought not to find it there, and they saw that there was a slip of paper underneath.

Alex pounced on it. It had been torn from the front of the book of sermons on the bedside table. There was no writing on it—there had been no writing-things in the room—but there was an orange-wax seal, stamped with something which must by the size have been a seal ring. Alex held it to the light. The device might have been a bee or a wasp—some kind of insect, they were sure—and if they tilted it this way and that, they could just make out the letters around the edge:
GAIRNE

“He told us,” Alex said, “that he had been Count of Gairne. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” said Cecilia. “He was real, then.”

T
he next strange occurrence was the day before Christmas Eve. Alex came home for the holidays that morning and he and Cecilia went skating in the afternoon at the edge of the bay. In those days the shores of the great river estuary were not so well raised and drained as they later were. Below the Hornbys' house, almost beside the long rocky causeway to the island, was a large meadow which was flooded every winter as the river swelled with rain and tides. The railway ran along one side, next to the road, and the other side was open to the sea. The fresh water froze in the meadow, and then was covered with seawater during the spring tides. Out in the bay the river channels which wound on either side of the dark island had partly frozen over too, and drifts of snow on their banks had hardened into shining gray cliffs of ice. The mud sand of the estuary was all black and gray and dangerous with frost, until the sea swept in and covered it up.

The tide was out that afternoon. The sun was red and the sea wind cut like a saw. The ice in the flooded pasture was deeper and harder than it had been within living memory, and people came for miles to skate. Among them came the Courcys. Alex's heart sank when he saw the handsome carriages come dashing up and stop at the bottom of the hill. He and Cecilia had been enjoying themselves with Miss Gatly's nephews and nieces from the next farm, but at the sight of the carriages, the Gatlys all moved off to practice figure skating on their own. Alex drearily watched the whole Courcy family get out. There was Martin, the eldest, who always had his gentlemanly hands in his noble pockets; Harry, who was the same age as Alex and whom Alex liked even less than Martin; the in-between brother Egbert, who was a nondescript; and then all the girls, who were so much more elegant than Cecilia, but nothing like so pretty—Letitia, Lavinia, Charlotte (who was grown-up and engaged to be married), Emily, and little Susannah, whom Alex disliked more heartily than any of them. And there they all were holding out their feet for the coachman to screw their skates on as if none of them had hands of their own.

“Oh, Cecil!” Alex wailed.

“We have not seen them,” Cecilia answered. “And maybe they have not seen us.” She began on a complicated figure.

The Courcys, with their skates screwed on, came slithering down onto the ice. The other skaters made way for them. The two carriages went on up to the Hornbys' house. Alex had seen that Lady Courcy herself was in one of them. He knew that in the house there would be much rushing about with sweet wine, petits fours, preserves, footstools, shawls, and firescreens. He felt sorry for Miss Gatly. Cecilia did not look. She continued to skate, and she skated very well, better than Charlotte and the rest, who were tottering, giggling, and hanging onto their brothers.

After a while, the Courcys had skated over near to Cecilia. “My dear Cecilia,” cried Lavinia, “do demonstrate that figure again. This is quite an exhibition.”

Cecilia, very flushed, decided to stop, then thought better of it and did something different so as not to seem to do what they wanted. The Courcys all stood around, slithering a little, Alex among them, a bevy of beautiful muffs and elegant hogskin gloves. Alex, in his worn school cape and gloves knitted by Miss Gatly, felt shabby and out of place. The Courcys genuinely admired Cecilia's skating.

“You get a great deal of practice—what?” said Egbert.

“Think where she lives. Glorious, beautiful place!” Letitia exclaimed, waving her muff at the bay. She was the poetic one. People thought her pale and interesting.

Alex thought sadly: “They are not nasty. They simply despise us for our pretentions. How I wish we did not have to have pretentions.”

“I say, Alex.” Martin slid gently up with his hands in his pockets. “I say, be a dear fellow, will you, and fix Susannah's skate. Clamp's coming loose or something.”

Alex slid himself over to where Susannah's neat little cone-shape was waiting for him. Much as he disliked Susannah, he had no objection to mending her skate. He would have done it for anyone, and, anyway, he had a vague feeling that it was his station. What he objected to were the pert, hurtful remarks Susannah always made at him.

She said now, as Alex came up: “The cloaked figure of a highwayman! Do you really have to wear that cut-throat cape for school?”

“Yes,” Alex said curtly. “It's an old foundation. The uniform goes back to Queen Elizabeth.” And he thought that it was just like Susannah to hit on the shabbiest and most peculiar thing about him. It would have astonished him to know that Susannah admired him more than anyone she knew; and it would have staggered him if he had discovered she had broken her skate on purpose and sent Martin to fetch him specially. It never entered his head that she was rude to him in a desperate hope that he would think she was clever.

She put out her tiny foot to him as haughtily as she knew how. “The latchet of whose skate you are not worthy to unloose,” she said.

Alex, before he had half knelt down, stood up and glided away backward. “Then let someone do it who
is
worthy,” he said. “Besides, that's blasphemy, quoting the Bible like that.”

He was too hurt himself to see that Susannah was nearly in tears, but her brothers and sisters saw and were around him in a second. Susannah was everyone's pet.

“Poor little Susannah! Never mind the oaf,” came from at least three sisters.

Martin said: “I say, better mind your language, Alex.”

Egbert echoed him. “What?”

Alex, surrounded and angry, had to stick to his point. And as so often happened to him, both at school and among the Courcys, the more distressed he became, the more he spoke like the country boy he was. “I don't care. That were blasphemy she spoke.”

Harry Courcy was onto it at once. “Ah doan't cear. Thaat were blaasphemee,” he droned.

Maybe he had gone too far. Martin put out a skate and jabbed his brother hard in the leg. Nobody else said anything except Cecilia. She swung around in the middle of a figure—and around again before she could stop herself.