A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Read online

  “No, Mama,” said Jenny patiently; “I am quite well; I was down to breakfast an hour ago and have eaten all I can hold, I assure you.”

  After a further quarter-hour of limping conversation, consisting mostly in ingratiating questions from Mrs. Marshall, and in less and less patient answers on the part of everybody else, Joanna and Miss Pryce (who had increasingly been exchanging covert looks of amusement and exasperation) excused themselves from the breakfast-table and went away. Mrs Marshall frowned after them; Sophie, on the contrary, rather wondered at their not having fled sooner.

  * * *

  As always during visits to London, and irrespective of her role as shepherd or chaperone to Lucia MacNeill, one of Sophie’s tasks was to mend fences with her father.

  She therefore found herself occupying an idle hour in the library of the Royal Palace, in the interval before the family dinner, so called, to which she (but not Gray) had been summoned; and it was here that she found it—tucked almost invisibly between two quarto volumes, its leather binding faded and its endpapers badly foxed. A Dove amongst the Peacocks, the title-page read; Being the Tale of the Founding of Lady Morgan College, Oxon.

  She had forgot until this moment the astonishment, the fascination, with which she had pored over this volume, when first she discovered it amongst her mother’s books; the wondering, bubbling joy, to learn that such a place—a college for the education of women, founded by a clever Cymric heiress hundreds of years ago—existed, and to imagine that she might one day aspire to a place there; the falling of her heart when Mama told her, her eyes soft with regret, that in fact it had closed its doors two centuries before.

  This copy of the book bore a variety of scuff-marks and several illegible annotations in ink, but no cataloguer’s mark or number; very possibly, no one but Sophie knew of its existence here.

  “Gray,” she said, “see what I have found—”

  Then she recalled that Gray was not here, was at this moment no doubt eating his dinner in Grosvenor Square, and scowled ferociously at the bookcase before her.

  She laughed at herself, if a little crossly—I am justly served, for thinking Gray impossibly absent-minded!—and sat down to examine her find.

  The volume was more or less as she remembered it, insofar as she remembered it at all—which was odd, considered rationally; in general she had an excellent memory for books, yet the contents of this one seemed to have slipped sidewise from her mind whilst her attention was elsewhere. The frontispiece, an engraved view of the College buildings with the central dome of Minerva’s shrine, caught her gaze, familiar-strange—like and not like the buildings themselves, glimpsed behind the ivy-covered outer wall on the far bank of the Cherwell in Sophie’s Oxford days, always at the periphery of her attention, never reaching its centre.

  She had first seen that derelict dome, those overgrown walls, from the window of a hired carriage on a rainy autumn day. The sight had gripped her with a sorrow so profound as to steal her breath—the memory of it, lost till now, returned in force, and she let the book fall on the table, struggling to draw breath around the sudden tightness in her chest.

  And she had had another thought—had wished, had yearned to restore that dead place to vivid life—and Joanna had said—

  “Mother Goddess,” Sophie breathed, as the vice-grip on her lungs began to ebb.

  —Joanna had said, Perhaps you may do so, when you are a princess again.

  “How could I have forgot such a thing?” she spoke aloud now, only for the reassurance of hearing her own voice—which, to her immense relief, sounded absolutely as usual. “How could I live two years in Oxford, and never once—”

  She stopped, arrested openmouthed by another vivid recollection: an evening stroll over the Cherwell bridge, the fragrant Midsummer-tide twilight, her hand tucked through Gray’s elbow, faint splashing and young men’s voices singing and calling to one another from below, and the dome of Minerva catching the light of the setting sun, and Gray’s voice, thoughtful: “What a place it must have been, in its day!”

  And again the press of sorrow and loss, the yearning to see the gate flung open and the halls and quads filled with scholars once more.

  There is a pattern here, Sophie thought. There is, there must be—but, by the gods, I cannot see its shape.

  Now that the idea had caught hold of her once more, however, it was easy to succumb to its persuasion. There had been a college for women in Oxford once; why should there not be again? Sophie’s namesake and distant quasi forebear, the Princess Edith Augusta, had been one of its patrons, as well as a student there; why should Sophie not fill the same role?

  The Princess Edith, it was true, in her capacity as co-Regent for her brother Edward, had had access to powers and resources which Sophie had not; true, too, that to assume the mantle of patronage in respect of a living, thriving institution was one thing, and to rebuild it from what might well be literal rubble, entirely another. But if it could be done . . . If I might be the one to do it . . .

  The steward’s knock upon the library door startled her out of her thoughts, and half out of her seat; but by the time it was followed by the man himself, she had regained some of her composure.

  “If you would be so good as to join Her Majesty in the small reception room, ma’am,” he said, with a nicely judged bow.

  “Of course,” said Sophie.

  She tucked the book into her reticule—no one would miss it, she reasoned, and she should return it upon a subsequent visit, of which there were bound to be many—and followed him out of the room, making notes in her mind as to the possible means of proceeding.

  Point the first: Search the remainder of the Palace library for further published works.

  Point the second: Gain entry to the Archives, and find whether any unpublished documents exist which might shed light upon the problem.

  Point the third—

  Point the third: How did I come to forget something so very much worth remembering . . . ?

  But now, at this moment, there were her father and her brother Ned to be reassured as to her well-being, and Delphine’s shy raptures over the child she was expecting; young Harry to be regaled with tales of life in Alba, and Roland to be talked out of his nerves; and Queen Edwina—with her seemingly unbreakable habit of addressing Sophie as “Edith”—to be borne with cheerfully.

  But when next I have leisure for my own pursuits . . .

  CHAPTER III

  In Which Lucia Meets Her Match

  On the morning of her third day in London, Lucia MacNeill, daughter of Donald MacNeill, holder of a graduate degree in practical magick and heiress to the chieftain’s seat of Alba, stood in her borrowed bedchamber—truly alone for almost the first time since leaving Din Edin—and gazed disconsolately at her reflection in a tall cheval-glass.

  She could not fault her appearance; her unruly curls were smoothed and tamed into a knot low on her neck, and her simply but exquisitely cut sea-green gown made the most of her slim figure and of the colour of her eyes. She looked, in short, as much like a suitable successor to her father as she was ever like to do. She adopted a grave expression, suitable for affairs of state—then turned away abruptly, hands clenched and lips pressed tight together, when it threatened to dissolve into either giggles or tears.

  The last leg of Lucia’s journey to London had been made in the sole company of her cousin Sìleas Barra MacNeill and Sìleas’s husband, Oscar MacConnachie, to whom—thanks to the latter’s status as Donald MacNeill’s envoy to the British Court—had fallen the duty of introducing Lucia therein. Sìleas was a kindly and motherly companion, for whose presence Lucia (who had lost her own mother at the age of ten) was duly grateful; she was also, alas, a rather tedious one, for her mind ran solidly in a very few tracks and could not be jolted out of them. And she was at present waiting just outside the door, and very likely fretting over Lucia’s odd behavio
ur.

  “You are the heiress to the chieftain’s seat of Alba,” Lucia said aloud, sternly, as she turned back to the glass. She stood straighter. “Confirmed by the clan chieftains in full council, with the blessings of Brìghde and of the Cailleach. If the prospect of ruling a kingdom does not alarm you, why should you so dread meeting your mother-in-law?”

  Dread it she did, but there was nothing to be gained by delaying the inevitable. Lucia smoothed her hands down her skirts one last time and went out to meet her fate.

  * * *

  Queen Edwina, it transpired, could scarcely have appeared less frightening: a small, plump, smiling woman, blue-eyed and golden-haired, who rose to welcome Lucia with every appearance of genuine pleasure at her arrival. She addressed Sìleas Barra MacNeill as Lady MacConnachie, which Lucia recognised after a heartbeat’s frozen confusion as the appropriate British form of address for Oscar MacConnachie’s wife.

  A lovingly polished welcome-cup—bright gold on its inner surface, and finely etched without, prominently bearing the Tudor rose—stood ready to hand, half-filled with a deep red wine. The Queen took up the cup; drank deeply from it, holding Lucia’s gaze; and, passing it into Lucia’s hand, spoke the blessing in formal Latin: “My welcome to this house, Lucia MacNeill of Alba, and to this kingdom.”

  Lucia accepted the cup. “I thank you for this welcome,” she replied, in the same tongue. “May the gods smile on you, on this house and on this kingdom, and all who dwell here.”

  The wine was much too sweet for her taste, but she did not like to appear less than enthusiastic (or, worse, to seem suspicious), and so drank deeply nonetheless.

  The formal ritual thus accomplished, Queen Edwina rose a-tiptoe to kiss Lucia on both cheeks, and bestowed upon her a beaming smile that creased her bright eyes nearly shut.

  Lucia’s English and Français were not so fluent as she might have wished, her lessons with Sophie Marshall having dwindled in frequency as she grew increasingly occupied with her father’s affairs; but she rallied herself to return this unexpected gesture, making her best and most grateful curtsey to the Queen and saying hesitantly in English, “I am so very glad to make your acquaintance at last, Your Majesty.”

  Queen Edwina smiled even more widely and clapped her small white hands in childlike delight—reminding Lucia inescapably of Sophie, though otherwise the two could not have been more unlike. “How clever you are, my dear! However do you contrive to speak so naturally, when you must have learnt from books?”

  “Oh! I did not learn from books,” said Lucia; “Sophie taught me.”

  “Of course.” The Queen’s welcoming smile grew a little fixed, and her warm voice a little cooler. “Yes, I understood you to be already acquainted with the Princess Edith.”

  Rattled, Lucia cast a pleading glance at her cousin: I have put my foot in some rabbit-hole, but which? Sìleas, however, either did not or chose not to understand her difficulty.

  In any event their private audience was at an end, it seemed, for a liveried servant now opened a door opposite the one through which Lucia had entered the room, admitting a veritable parade of ladies. Lucia at first set about learning all their faces, but gave up the attempt when a familiar face and form leapt out at her from the mass of strangers, and Sophie’s voice cried, “Lucia MacNeill! Come here at once, and let me see you.”

  “Sophie!” said Lucia, delighted and relieved, as Sophie (contradicting her own instructions) ran forward to embrace her, as eagerly as though they had been parted for months instead of days. At once she regretted it—ought she not to have said Your Royal Highness?—and cast a glance over Sophie’s shoulder to see how this relatively intimate greeting might have been received.

  Queen Edwina, indeed, wore a slightly pinched expression; whatever had been Lucia’s earlier transgression, it appeared she had now compounded it.

  “Never mind,” said Sophie, speaking in Gaelic, and very low, into Lucia’s ear. “It is only that she does not like me, because I am my mother’s daughter; I did warn you, you know. I shall endeavour to prevent my unfortunate shadow from falling too heavily upon you.”

  Before Lucia could express either protest or acquiescence, Sophie was returning her to the care of Queen Edwina, with a graceful curtsey and a pretty, altogether un-Sophie-like apology for stealing her away.

  * * *

  The rest of the introductions went rather better. Sophie’s uncharacteristic deference to her stepmother continued, though Lucia strongly suspected her of storing up sharp remarks for some later, more private conversation. Lucia made the acquaintance of Prince Edward’s pretty, diffident young wife, and if the Princess Delphine was no longer quite so blushing and bashful as Sophie had once described her, she certainly did not accord with Lucia’s notion of a future Queen. On the other hand, she was very evidently doing her part to ensure the continuance of the royal line.

  Next came Lady Lisle, who seemed genuinely delighted to make Lucia’s acquaintance and genuinely to have nothing else to say for herself; Lady Kergabet, wife of King Henry’s chief advisor and, Lucia recalled just in time to avoid abject humiliation, already familiar to her as Sophie’s much-admired sister-in-law Jenny; Madame de Courcy, with whose husband—the British envoy to Alba—Lucia had already a long and sometimes very surprising acquaintance; the elderly Lady Craven, and the humblingly elegant Madame de Mayenne, and at least a dozen more. Lucia smiled at them all, and thanked them for their kind welcome, and tried not to feel as though all of them but Sophie were studying her like some exotic insect under glass.

  Was it her imagination that beneath the warm, sometimes almost effusive welcomes there lurked a note of anxious apprehension?

  She was not to be introduced to Prince Roland himself until the following day, a proceeding which seemed less idiotic now than when Sìleas had explained it to her this morning. By tomorrow, one might hope—with this first ordeal behind her—she should have had a proper night’s sleep, and a long talk with Sophie, and should have got her feet under her once more.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, Sophie and Joanna stood side by side, a little apart from Jenny and Delphine, and watched Roland advance towards Lucia MacNeill. Lucia herself was accompanied only by her cousins, Sìleas Barra MacNeill and Oscar MacConnachie, and appeared to Sophie to be regretting the women-at-arms of her personal guard, whom she had left behind in her temporary quarters in the Queen’s wing of the Royal Palace. She was entirely calm and composed, her hands steady, her red-gold hair impeccably dressed, and smiling in welcome; but to Sophie the composure seemed just slightly too stiff, the smile just slightly too symmetrical.

  Roland, on the other hand, looked so straightforwardly nervous that Sophie felt quite sorry for him.

  “Lady Lucia,” said the Queen, “allow me to present His Royal Highness, Prince Roland Edric Augustus.”

  Roland made an elegant leg, spoiling his performance very slightly by glancing up at Sophie and Joanna as he raised his head, and by going rather pink in the face. It made him look rather younger than his seventeen years—which was a pity, as he already seemed so young beside his poised and elegant betrothed.

  “Roland: Lady Lucia MacNeill, heiress to the chieftain’s seat of Alba.”

  Lucia’s deep curtsey was flawless—to Sophie’s secret relief, for Lucia had practised it on her endlessly, first in the sitting-room of the house in Quarry Close, and more lately behind closed and guarded doors in her Palace quarters, persisting long after Sophie’s assurances that she had mastered it. (“It is not that I am afraid of doing it wrongly,” she had explained; “I am afraid of forgetting where I am, and putting out my hand instead, as I should do at home.” Sophie could not deny that this was a risk, having done the same thing herself half a dozen times at least.)

  Smiling benignantly upon her son and his betrothed, the Queen collected the rest of the party and withdrew, so that the Prince and his bride-to-be migh
t converse in relative privacy.

  * * *

  Everyone with whom Lucia was at all acquainted retreated to the far end of the Queen’s elegant sitting-room, leaving her alone with Prince Roland and a silent, impassive pair of Royal Guardsmen; and Lucia, accustomed to debating learned mages and giving orders to her father’s generals, could think of absolutely nothing to say. She forced herself to stop staring down at her folded hands, to raise her head and meet Roland’s gaze with a smile; and at once was glad that she had done so, for he seemed equally ill at ease.

  “Y-you are very like your portrait,” said Roland at last, producing a nervous half smile. His pleasant tenor voice was slightly husky, by nature or by circumstance it was impossible to say. Did he sing as beautifully as his sister?

  “Am I? You are not much like yours,” Lucia said, startled by this last thought into perhaps too much honesty. “I suppose you have grown up since then.”

  Roland’s pink cheeks grew pinker. “I have grown nearly four inches,” he conceded. His hands gripped the knees of his fine buckskin breeches. Like his mother, he spoke in Latin; had he yet made any efforts towards learning Gaelic, or must Lucia begin at the beginning? Ought she to try out her English or her Français? Or might that make the conversation more awkward, rather than less?

  It was maddening to know herself capable of mustering and leading an armed expedition to a distant corner of her own kingdom, of understanding Alban law and administering justice as her father’s deputy, and yet freeze in agonised indecision over such a trivial question.

  “Have you been out riding?” she inquired at last, still in Latin. “You are dressed for it, I think?”

  He looked down at the buckskins, at his tall polished boots, as though surprised to see them. “I-I-I meant to go out later in the day,” he said. “Before dinner. You are fond of riding, are you not, Lady Lucia?”