Lady of Magick (13 page)

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.

It was soon clear, however, that she could not provide sufficiently exact information to hold her companion's interest.

“I was telling you, my dear,” he said, gently interrupting her stumbling description of the enormous blue dragonflies that frequented the banks of the Thames where it flowed through Oxford, “what an intriguing tale I had from the keeper of the Serpent and Master. It seems there is a local tradition that the Lady Laora ar Breizh, she who was afterward the wife of your King Henry, came to the shrine at Kerandraon—though not that one only—with promises and offerings, to beseech the Lady Dahut to spare her from the illustrious marriage to which her father had promised her.”

“D-do they say so?” Sophie managed, belatedly remarking that Conall MacLachlan was waiting for her to speak. “That tale is one I never heard at home.” This was, in the strictest sense, quite true; she
had in fact heard it much afterwards, from Gray, who had had it from her stepfather's coachman on the occasion of that disastrous pilgrimage.

Conall MacLachlan eyed her shrewdly. “They do say so, in fact,” he said. “They say it still, I am told; and I have heard, too, that though the Lady Dahut denied her petition, it was to Kerandraon that Queen Laora returned when she fled her gilded prison in London, and in Kerandraon, or its environs, that she died, leaving her daughter to the care of a neglectful stepfather.”

Sophie schooled her features—without magick—into an expression of polite interest; beneath the tablecloth, she clenched her fingers in the folds of her gown.

“Of course, being so lately in London, you must have heard the newest rumours from Henry Tudor's court?”

Sophie lifted a forkful of venison to her lips and chewed it, thinking hard. Was the use of her father's name in place of his title Alban custom or calculated disrespect? And what rumours could he mean? Not her own tale, at any rate; even so far away as Alba, events two years in the past could not possibly be considered
new
—and clearly Conall MacLachlan knew exactly who she was, or thought he did. What, then? If there had been any interesting rumours flying about London at Midsummer, they had flown quite over Sophie's head.

“I fear that I have nothing of that nature to relate,” she said, when she had finished chewing.

“Indeed?” Conall MacLachlan raised his eyebrows in honest surprise, or a very good counterfeit thereof. “There is no talk, for instance, of a betrothal for one of the King's sons?”

“Oh!” said Sophie. “Yes, as to that, the Crown Prince is to marry Lady Delphine d'Evreux—next autumn, I believe. But that is not rumour; it is settled fact.”

“But Edward Tudor has two brothers, has he not?”

“His Majesty has two younger sons, yes.” Sophie laid a subtle stress on the Latin title, from a perverse desire to defend the very dignities which she so much disdained on her own behalf. “I have heard nothing of the kind with respect to either of them, however.”

Conall MacLachlan's expression suggested that he did not altogether believe her but could not think how to accuse her of dissembling without provoking a scene. As Sophie had been perfectly truthful, however, she had no difficulty in meeting his gaze, and after a moment he turned back to his venison and winter squash.

Her curiosity getting the better of her, Sophie said, “May I ask, sir, what prompted your question?”

“I think you know, Domina Marshall.” The slight emphasis on her name and title—her own tactic turned upon her—might be her imagination; the knowing half smile that accompanied it was not.

“You must have heard many such curious tales in your travels,” said Sophie, for after all she was not eager to give offence to her hostess. “I have travelled very little myself as yet, but I confess I have a great fondness for it. I suppose you must have seen a vast number of strange and interesting places?”

Conall MacLachlan looked sidewise at her.

To Sophie's relief, however, he took up the offered change of subject with no further comment, recounting with some spirit—though with more than occasional pauses to redact elements which, he said, were not for a lady's ears—his adventures in various parts of the Iberian Empire, until the table turned again with the final remove.

She suspected him of choosing the locale for the purpose of provoking some reaction from her, and unwilling to concede him this victory, she smiled and laughed at his outrageous tales, and sipped at her wineglass—which seemed perpetually full—and turned over in her mind the question which she had asked and Conall MacLachlan had declined to answer.

*   *   *

It was not the custom here as it was at home, for the ladies to rise and withdraw at the end of the meal whilst the gentlemen remained in possession of the dining-room. Instead, a signal from their hostess produced a general shift from table to music-room, where inevitably, in Din Edin as in London, smaller groups began to coalesce as the guests, no longer constrained by their placement at the dinner-table,
sought out those others of the party with whom they genuinely wished to converse.

The music room was large and well furnished with a gleaming pianoforte, large and small harps, a little group of music-stands, and sensible racks for sheet-music discreetly concealed behind a tall folding screen painted with twining roses. Sophie did not recognise that she was drifting towards the pianoforte until she found herself standing before the closed keyboard with the fingers of her right hand resting upon the hinged lid; she was just snatching her hand away, hoping that no one had remarked it, when from behind her a hearty voice said, in heavily accented Latin, “Oh! Domina Marshall, are you a musician as well as a scholar?”