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“Your Majesty.” Sieur Germain inclined his head respectfully. “I hope all is well?”

  His Majesty looked at him in perplexity, as though it were slightly absurd of him to have supposed that an urgent summons to the Royal Palace might suggest some cause for alarm. Screened by Sieur Germain, Joanna and Mr. Fowler, their differences temporarily forgotten, exchanged a long-suffering look; they both knew King Henry to be, in most ways, a prudent and competent ruler, and deplored the habit he was presently indulging of affecting light-mindedness or outright foolishness in the presence of visitors from foreign courts.

  “You have all the documents, have you not?”

  Mr. Fowler hastened to provide Lord Kergabet’s dispatch-box, from which the latter extracted several rolls of parchment and a stack of ordinary writing-paper, closely covered in Fowler’s clear, elegant script.

  “I believe we have everything in order, sir, yes,” said Sieur Germain. “I have three copies of each. Which did—”

  “Excellent, excellent. Then we shall proceed.” His Majesty beckoned the major-domo, and on his approaching said, “Go and fetch Prince Roland.”

  “Your Majesty.” The major-domo bowed and strode away.

  It could not have been more than a quarter-hour before the major-domo reappeared, visibly restraining himself from hauling Roland along by the ear, but it was perhaps the longest quarter-hour which Joanna had hitherto endured. Within moments of their arriving, however, she was wishing heartily that they had not.

  “Is this Your Majesty’s idea of a jest?” Roland demanded, pink with outrage, when the news had been broken to him. “I am to be—to be queen of a kingdom of—”

  Joanna coughed quietly; when Roland’s wild gaze swung half towards her, she tilted her head very slightly in the direction of Oscar MacConnachie, and Roland swallowed whatever slight had been meant to follow.

  “Your pardon, sir,” he said. “I spoke out of turn.”

  There was a long, tense silence.

  “Prince-consort,” said Sieur Germain at last, quietly.

  “Sir?” Roland had evidently remembered his manners with a vengeance; Joanna winced inwardly at the chill in his tone.

  “The husband of a reigning queen, Your Highness,” Sieur Germain said, “is styled Prince-consort. A position of more influence, respect, and responsibility, in fact, than that afforded by any other marriage alliance previously entertained for you.”

  Roland visibly considered this.

  “And how is it,” he said at last, “that this Lucia MacNeill inherits from her father? She has no brother, I suppose?”

  “She has a younger brother, in fact, Your Highness,” said Oscar MacConnachie, “but he is not the heir.”

  “We call Donald MacNeill king, because king is an idea we understand,” Sieur Germain explained, “but he is not a king as your father is; he is a chieftain of chieftains. There is no law in Alba, as there is in Britain, that the eldest son must inherit, or even the eldest child. As Oscar MacConnachie explained it to me, Donald MacNeill might have chosen any young man—or young woman—of his clan as his heir, subject to the will of the clan chieftains; he chose his daughter, Lucia, for the trust he reposes in her heart and in her wits, and his choice was confirmed by the clan chieftains in council.”

  Roland’s chin lost none of its stubborn set, but his eyes betrayed a glimmer of interest.

  “And Lucia MacNeill,” Sieur Germain said, “has considered the alternatives her father set before her, and has chosen you.”

  Joanna prayed to the Lady Venus that Roland would accept the implied compliment and allow the conversation to progress towards the subject of Lucia MacNeill’s many virtues, perhaps to the portrait that reposed in the box at Joanna’s feet.

  For a moment it seemed as though he might indeed fulfil her hopes; instead, however—after a long, speculative silence—he tilted his head to one side, frowning, and said, “Why?”

  Jenny, thought Joanna irritably, would have known what to say to steer Roland—writer of love-sonnets to unsuitable young women, would-be adventurer, protector of sisters embarking on long journeys—in the correct direction. But Jenny was in Carrington-street, receiving morning callers whose husbands wished to curry favour with Kergabet or the King, and Joanna was here only because the King chose to indulge Sieur Germain’s eccentric taste in assistants; and Sieur Germain himself—

  “Because, Your Highness,” said that gentleman, “she and her father share His Majesty’s desire for a strong and stable alliance between their kingdom and ours.”

  Roland’s expression congealed. Joanna managed—just—to refrain from groaning aloud.

  Though Sieur Germain clearly recognised that he had taken the wrong tack, and seemed to be trying to come about, it was equally clear that he did not understand the nature of his mistake. Leaving the subject of alliances, he expended some effort in praise of Lucia MacNeill’s political acumen; when this failed to crack Roland’s air of grim endurance, he shifted rather abruptly into an admiring disquisition on her achievements as a scholar.

  Joanna bent to retrieve the box at her feet. Mr. Fowler saw what she was about—though it appeared that no one else did; she caught his eye and scowled meaningly at him until he stepped forward and touched Sieur Germain’s elbow. Sieur Germain paused at once, turning his head in Fowler’s direction with the intent, Joanna supposed, of glaring him into better-bred behaviour.

  Joanna gripped the sides of the box and stepped forward, neatly sidestepping the distracted Sieur Germain.

  “Your Royal Highness,” she said, holding Roland’s startled gaze. “Lucia MacNeill of Alba presents her respectful compliments, and asks that you accept this token of—” For a moment Joanna’s imagination failed her. Sieur Germain had ceased muttering to Mr. Fowler, and she could feel two sets of eyes focused on the back of her head. “Of her earnest wish to learn your heart as she hopes you will come to know hers.”

  She proffered the box and held her breath, watching Roland’s face.

  His eyes softened minutely, though his lips remained set in a tense line. After a painful moment’s consideration, however, he took the box from Joanna’s outstretched hands and said, “My respectful compliments to the Lady Lucia, and I must hope the same.”

  Joanna heaved a vast, silent, inward sigh of relief as the box left her hands.

  Roland resumed his seat, which the rest of the assembled company chose to regard as a concession of sorts, to judge by the perceptible lessening of tension in the room. Settling the box upon his knees, he carefully removed the lid and set it aside, then unfolded the layers of linen and lifted out the portrait.

  Joanna watched him closely as he examined it. She had herself studied the face of the heiress of Alba at some length, when the portrait had first come into Sieur Germain’s possession, and had concluded that if the portraitist did not greatly exaggerate, Lucia MacNeill was a very beautiful young woman. The artist had contrived to capture, too, a certain challenging light in his subject’s blue eyes, which led Joanna to suspect that Roland’s life might soon become rather interesting. Roland’s brows drew together in thought; one finger gently traced a curve along the canvas, and at last one corner of his mouth tugged reluctantly upward.

  “She looks . . . rather clever,” he said, as though he had not very lately heard copious evidence to this effect.

  “I believe she is accounted so,” Sieur Germain agreed, cautiously; it seemed he had decided to pretend likewise.

  “I am glad of that,” said Roland decidedly. “I could not bear to be married to a stupid woman.”

  This was very probably a dig at poor Lady Delphine, Prince Edward’s betrothed, of whose intellect Roland (not unjustly) held a very low opinion. Fortunately Oscar MacConnachie did not recognise this—or, at any rate, did not choose to acknowledge it—and accepted Roland’s compliment to Lucia MacNeill at its face value, with an accommodating bow
.

  Whilst the eyes of the company were on Oscar MacConnachie, Roland fixed Joanna with a speaking look. Joanna, after the first startled meeting of glances, gave her very fullest attention to the Alban ambassador.

  Roland restrained himself, in the ensuing discussion, from offering further comment on the laws and customs of Alba. Joanna thanked the goddess Minerva for this evidence of wisdom, small as it was, until the moment when, daring another glance at Roland, she found him studying her, his mouth set in a grim straight line, and recognised his motive: As his father, Lord Kergabet, and Oscar MacConnachie laid out their plans for Lucia MacNeill and himself, he was watching Joanna—so clearly in the secret where he himself was not—and remembering her assurances that she knew nothing of any such plans.

  She met his gaze squarely now, with no effort at apology. She had brought that expression of hard-eyed betrayal upon herself, and she should not be such a coward as to flinch from it.

  It was Roland, in the end, who looked away, though it might only be that he felt he had too long neglected the appearance of attending to his elders. When next he seemed about to turn in Joanna’s direction, he interrupted the motion and bent his gaze instead upon the portrait in his hands.

  What trials one brings upon oneself, thought Joanna, when one makes the mistake of growing romantical!

  CHAPTER X

  In Which Sophie Encounters a Collector of Butterflies

  Sophie carefully speared a morsel of trout on her fork and lifted it to her lips. It had been poached in wine and was meltingly tender; she wondered whether she might cadge the recipe from the Chancellor’s cook, to send to Jenny and Joanna.

  “So, Mrs. Marshall,” said Professor Maghrebin, who was seated to her left, “I understand that you come from Britain—from the province of Breizh, is that not so?”

  Sophie swallowed, smiled politely, and nodded. Who had furnished him that detail? Mór MacRury, very likely; she seemed to take a proprietary interest in all things foreign, and had also, in advance of this dinner party given by the Chancellor and his wife for the University’s visiting lecturers and professors, their spouses and their sponsors, provided Sophie and Gray with lively descriptions of many of their fellow guests.

  “I have never visited there, but I have been given to understand that it is very beautiful.” At the Chancellor’s table, as in his lectures, Professor Maghrebin spoke Latin with a musical cadence quite unlike the Albans’, the syntax archaic but perfectly clear.

  “That is certainly true,” said Sophie. The smile felt more genuine now. “And yourself, Professor? You are come from the great city of Alexandria, I am told; is it true that the library there is the largest in the world?”

  “I cannot pretend to have seen every library in the world,” Professor Maghrebin replied, his dark face creasing in a pleased smile, “but it is certainly the largest I know of, and the oldest. It contains many works of scholarship which, to my knowledge, exist nowhere else.”

  Libraries were a subject on which Sophie could converse both easily and with enthusiasm, and without straying into awkward territory. She listened, fascinated, as Professor Maghrebin described how a cataloguing system developed by an enterprising librarian during the rule of Ptolemy III had, nearly two centuries later, allowed the librarians to replace many of the scrolls and codices lost in a fire when Julius Caesar besieged the city. With some effort, she controlled her instinctive shudder; she had no wish to explain to a stranger how she had come by so vivid a sense-memory of burning pages fluttering through smoky air.

  The library had suffered such destruction more than once, it seemed, but, thanks to the work of selfless librarians and underlibrarians, it had succeeded always in preserving the greater portion of the works housed there, and in replacing those destroyed.

  “Though there have been books lost forever, I am sorry to say,” said Professor Maghrebin.

  “You speak of the library almost as though it were a person in its own right,” said Sophie, smiling.

  “That is so, I suppose,” the Professor replied. “Has not every library its own character? For example, the University Library here in Din Edin puts me in mind of a matriarch in the prime of life, beautiful and stately, of great girth and immense dignity . . .”

  Sophie nearly giggled, and at once pictured the library at Merlin College as a crabbed old man who glared menacingly at all comers as a matter of course, but could be relied upon to recognise seekers after wisdom and welcome them in. Her companion caught the small grin which she could not quite suppress, and returned it upon hearing her fanciful description.

  The first remove thus passed so pleasantly that Sophie was astonished to find it over, and the next bringing in.

  The gentleman to her right was the Chancellor’s brother-in-law, who (so Sophie understood from Rory MacCrimmon) was known throughout Din Edin for his collection of rare butterflies, and for the enormous house with which he shared it. Eithne MacLachlan, whose family belonged to a less illustrious branch of the same clan, had contributed the information that visitors were continually being invited to Conall MacLachlan’s town house but seldom returned a second time.

  “I have been there myself, with my mother and my elder brother,” she had told Sophie, with a little shiver, “and you cannot imagine how unpleasant! It is a very army of the poor creatures, ten or twenty or half a hundred to a case, and the cases on every wall; wherever you turn, you may be sure of seeing a poor dead butterfly pinned to a board. He intends his house to be a museum, when he is dead.”

  Sophie turned to Conall MacLachlan, therefore, with some trepidation but considerable curiosity. What might a man be like to converse with, who chose to share his house with thousands of decorative dead insects?

  He was quite ordinary in appearance, a man of about her own height—at any rate whilst seated—who wore his sandy hair long, tied at his nape with a length of black silk, and a close-trimmed beard.

  “Sophie Marshall, you hail from Breizh, I believe?” he said, smiling brightly at her. He spoke in Gaelic, but a little slowly, in consideration of her stranger’s ear, and she could follow him well enough.

  Sophie acknowledged the fact. Had he had it from Mór MacRury also? Or from some other source? Gossip evidently travelled as quickly in great Din Edin as in little Oxford.

  “I travelled there once; not so long ago, not more than ten years past,” said Conall MacLachlan, “though I suppose that will seem long indeed to a child such as yourself, my dear!”

  This statement was accompanied by a cheerful guffaw, in response to which Sophie managed a tight little smile. It would not do to offend the Chancellor’s brother-in-law, and though she resented being thought a child, she was certainly much younger than Conall MacLachlan.

  “I have a particularly fine Cupido osiris in my collection,” he continued, “which I acquired on that expedition . . .”

  He told her how he had acquired it, in the tone of one recounting a thrilling adventure tale—how he had been seeking quite a different specimen, had been misdirected by a local man and found himself quite lost, had emerged from a coppice-wood into a meadow where dairy cattle were pastured, and come face-to-face with a stand of wildflowers populated by brilliantly blue butterflies.

  Sophie listened with half an ear, eating steadily—the Chancellor’s haunch of venison was excellent, and she was rather sorry that Joanna should not have been present to enjoy it—until Conall MacLachlan caught her full attention by saying, all unexpectedly, “I do not suppose you might be familiar with the temple of the Lady Dahut at Kerandraon?”

  For a moment Sophie said nothing at all, frozen in shock and dire remembrance: Her stepfather had meant Gray to die in that temple, and Joanna certainly should have done, if not for Gray’s quick work with a finding-spell and a strong arm to pull her back from the brink.

  At last she said, “I was there once, indeed; though I might mistake, for the
temple I visited was dedicated to Neptune, with a shrine of more recent date to Lady Dahut.”

  Conall MacLachlan waved a dismissive hand. “It is a matter of perspective only,” he said. Then, with a little frown: “You do not give preference to the gods of your country’s conquerors, I hope?”

  Sophie regretted her unconsidered words; she had remarked before this that the gods of Rome had almost no following here, and that, indeed—particularly outside the University—many seemed to consider them a topic unfit for polite conversation.

  “I hope I give all the gods their due,” she said carefully.

  “One can ask no more, I suppose,” Conall MacLachlan conceded, though with an expression of mild distaste. After a moment he continued, “I acquired another very interesting specimen in the neighbourhood of that shrine—a swallowtail, Papilio machaon, with most unusual colouring—and with it an intriguing legend.”

  “Indeed?” Sophie managed, concealing her apprehension in a perhaps inadvisably large swallow of the Chancellor’s claret.

  “I suppose, being from that country yourself, you must be familiar with some of the tales told of the Breton queen?”

  Sophie admitted that she was, in order to be spared hearing any of them.

  “I stopped for several days at an inn in Kerandraon—well, I say an inn; it was the inn, in truth, for the town was too small to have more than one.”

  “The Serpent and Master,” Sophie said, without thinking.

  “Ah, you know it!”

  “As you say, it is the town’s only inn.”

  “Indeed. I stopped there, as I mentioned, for several days, for the proprietor had a most promising garden—for the Lepidoptera, you know; and his wife was a surprisingly good cook.” He paused for a bite of roast fowl, and Sophie, fortifying herself with another swallow of wine, took the opportunity of inquiring about the garden, and describing, in such detail as she was capable of recalling, the butterflies she could remember seeing in the gardens at Merlin College.