Lady of Magick (15 page)

Mór MacRury hovered at the edge of the little crowd about the pianoforte, her narrowed eyes darting from Gray to Sophie and back again. She could see magick, Gray knew; what had she seen just now, and what had it told her?

He was prepared to consider Mór MacRury a problem for another day, however, until she broke away from the group and stalked purposefully towards Sophie's place of refuge. Then he made polite excuses—though scarcely knowing what he said—to the Chancellor and his lady, and followed her, coming within earshot just in time to hear Mór MacRury say, “You forget that I see what most cannot.”

“Do tell us, Mór MacRury,” he said, and was gratified by her start of surprise and a little disgusted with himself for it. “What is it that you see?”

Sophie was pale but resolute, her eyes overbright and her slim hands clenched tightly in the folds of her skirts. Stepping warily
around Mór MacRury, Gray stood at Sophie's left hand, and drawing her close against his side with one arm, he held fast until she straightened away, squaring her shoulders.

Mór MacRury had all this time stood silently watching them, or rather watching some indeterminate point in their vicinity. Now she spoke at last, her voice low and hesitant: “I see . . . I see magick running
between
you, ebbing and flowing like the tide. I see your magick, and
your
magick, separate from one another, but also . . . twining, joining. Almost . . .
growing
.” Her hands sketched these puzzling phenomena in the air before her face, and she spoke faster and faster. “This is entirely beyond a joint working—it is almost a
shared
magick—shared in both directions, which ought to be impossible. And what is stranger still is that your magicks appear to replenish one another: not as a vessel is filled from a stream, but as two streams commingle to form a river.”

Gray looked down at Sophie. From this angle he could see her face only obliquely; it was pale and set, but when he took her hand, he found it steady.

“Will you,” said Mór MacRury, “will you tell me how you do it?”

Gray gave Sophie's fingers a gentle squeeze; she raised her face to his and nodded minutely.

“We can tell you only what we know ourselves,” said Gray, “which is very little: only that since we were married, our magicks have worked together in a way they did not before.”

“It is not a thing we
do
,” Sophie added, “but a thing that
is
.”

Gray nodded. He could still see in his mind's eye—as he had seen them on the morning after their wedding—the faded flowers from Sophie's hair, discarded upon the dressing-table, transformed into living blooms rooted in the wood.

Though such effects had fortunately not proved permanent, the bone-deep thrum of
rightness
which he felt whenever so much as their hands touched, of magick finding magick and returning strength for strength, had never faded. However poorly understood, it was a chapter of their shared tale—as much a part of his present self as the small sufferings and joys of his childhood in Kernow, as his long journey
from cowed, stammering boy to Master Marshall of Merlin. As much a part of both of them, in fact, as they now were of one another.

“And . . . has this effect any limits, to your knowledge?” said Mór MacRury.

Gray and Sophie looked at one another, and Sophie shrugged.

Mór MacRury's eyes widened. “Men dream of such power,” she said, a little unsteadily.

“I do not doubt it,” said Gray.

Mór MacRury cast a brief glance over her shoulder, past the harp-frame at her back, and said, “We cannot stand much longer whispering in corners before someone comes to fetch us out. I should advise you to keep your own counsel on this matter; the world is more full of unscrupulous persons than you may imagine.”

It was on the tip of Gray's tongue to say that Sophie and he possessed extensive experience with unscrupulous persons, and needed no such warning. “Of course,” he said instead.

The three of them returned to the rest of the party arm in arm, discussing the works of Robert Burns, poet of the Border Country, and amiably debating whether his poetry were more Alban or more English in character. Gray fancied that the Chancellor's brother-in-law—he who had been conversing so animatedly (one might almost have said forcefully) with Sophie throughout the second remove—cast a suspicious glance or two in their direction; but neither he nor anybody else made any remark which could not be construed as entirely innocent, and the company parted for the evening without further incident.

Roland's behaviour towards
Joanna had undergone an abrupt revolution, from dogging her every step with love-poetry and even less subtle declarations to avoiding her presence insofar as he was able and addressing her with chill formality when he could not. Joanna's initial relief at the withdrawal of his importunate attentions—though undiminished in itself—retreated into the background as it became clear to her that no return to their former uncomplicated friendship was to be forthcoming.

As Roland was drawn more closely into the ongoing negotiation of the arrangement, moreover, the two of them were increasingly thrown together, and Roland's drastically altered manners drew the notice of more than herself.

“Miss Callender,” said Mr. Fowler one afternoon in early November, raising his eyes from the document he was copying to regard her diffidently across their paired desks. “I wonder—it is none of my affair, I am sure—”

Joanna bit back a sharp retort.

“I have remarked,” he went on, perhaps encouraged by her lack of
sarcasm, “that you are always the most successful at reasoning with Prince Roland. Were it not—that is—”

She watched, unamused, as he struggled to evolve an inoffensive circumlocution for the words
if you were not a girl
.

“I might almost have said,” Mr. Fowler at last said, “that you and His Royal Highness were . . . friends.”

Joanna returned his gaze steadily, expressionlessly, and said nothing; she knew where he was going, or was seeking to go, and refused to help him on his way.

Mr. Fowler looked down at the pen he was twisting in his fingers, then up at Joanna again; finally, fixing his gaze on a point above her right shoulder, he said, “It seems to me, Miss Callender, that if this was so once, it is so no longer. You understand, I am sure, the importance of this arrangement with Alba, and the absolute necessity of its going forward unhindered; if the disagreement between yourself and the Prince, or any other . . . aspect . . . of your private life should in any way impede—”

Almost without conscious volition, Joanna found herself on her feet, both hands flat on the polished surface of her desk, glaring down at Fowler. Some part of her mind, fierce and deeply buried, snarled in malicious triumph to see him rear back wide-eyed in alarm.

“I have Lord Kergabet's trust,” she said coldly, snapping off each word as though she might thus make of it a keen-edged weapon aimed at Fowler's heart. “And I have sworn the same oath of fealty to His Majesty as you have yourself. I hope you do not suppose that it means less to me, because I am not a man?”

Mr. Fowler blinked at her in stunned silence.

“I have stood Prince Roland's friend longer than you have been at all acquainted with him,” Joanna continued—though it was not so very long for all that—“and shall continue to do so, whether or not he chooses to acknowledge it.” She leant forward a little, to press her advantage of height—which Fowler (being nearly a foot taller than herself) might have obviated at any moment by rising from his chair, and yet had not.

“If you cannot persuade yourself to trust in my loyalty to my kingdom, my patron, or my friend,” she said, “you might at the very least consider what a mutton-headed fool I should be to throw away the work of a year and more for the sake of a petty quarrel.”

Joanna gathered her fair copies into a tidy stack, squared the corners with aggressive precision, slotted them into a folder, and tied up the red tapes. “Good afternoon, Mr. Fowler,” she said icily, and marched away with her head high and her files clasped firmly to her breast to quell the angry roiling in her belly.

*   *   *

Some days later Joanna returned from a damp and chilly morning ride about the park—escorted by Gaël, for Gwendolen had slept badly and declined to accompany her—to find the household in uproar, and a pair of strangers in Jenny's morning-room.

She paused in the doorway, her soggy gloves in her hand, to stare at them in surprise. On the sofa facing the door sat a dark, narrow-faced, whipcord-lean man of middle age, wearing sober country dress and a deeply unhappy expression. A plump fair-haired young woman perched beside him, clinging limpet-like to his elbow; though her attire was that of a matronly gentlewoman, she looked no older than Jenny—young enough, indeed, to be the man's daughter, but it was not with a daughter's eyes that she gazed up at him.

There was something familiar about the man's face. Joanna could not place it, however, until her eye fell upon Jenny, poised and calm but with the glint of battle in her hazel eyes, and beside her on the opposite sofa, Gwendolen. Glancing from one narrow, dark-eyed face to the other, Joanna concluded at once that she was at last about to be introduced to Mr. and the infamous Mrs. Pryce.

“Had you a pleasant ride, my dear?” Jenny inquired.

“I am sorry, Jenny,” said Joanna, thrusting the dripping riding-gloves out of sight behind her skirts. “I did not mean to interrupt—”

“Oh, do please come in, Jo—Miss Callender!” said Gwendolen, too quickly; and at once she rose, crossed the room, and clasped Joanna's free hand to tow her back towards the sofas.

“Papa, Stepmama,” she said, “may I present my friend Miss Callender? Miss Callender, my father and stepmother.”

No sooner was everyone seated again than Mrs. Pryce, with the air of one continuing an interrupted dispute, burst out, “But it is too bad of you, Gwendolen, to give your papa and me such a deal of worry!”

Gwendolen drew herself up, her hands clenched in her lap, and said frostily, “If indeed you have been worried for my sake, ma'am, I am sorry for it.”

Jenny's lips twitched minutely. “I regret very much that you should have been alarmed about your stepdaughter's welfare, Mrs. Pryce,” she said. “Had I known that her letters were not reaching you—”

“Let us have no pretence, Lady Kergabet,” said Mr. Pryce. “We are grateful for the kind hospitality you have extended towards Gwendolen. I must object very strongly, however, to your abetting her in abandoning the situation which my wife was at such pains to arrange for her, and to your harbouring her for such a period, without until lately informing me of her whereabouts.” He drew breath, clearly working up a fine head of steam, and turned to Gwendolen. “Did you never consider what agonies of apprehension we should be subjected to, upon the Griffith-Rowlands' returning to Clwyd without you?”

Gwendolen lifted her chin. “If Mrs. Griffith-Rowland did not choose to tell you where I had gone,” she said, “or why I left her employ, that is no fault of mine.”

Her voice shook a little; her hands were clenched together in her lap.

Jenny laid one slim, pale hand over Gwendolen's darker ones. “I should of course have written to you myself at once to reassure you,” she told Mr. Pryce, “had it for a moment occurred to me that Gwendolen's letters to you might
all
have gone astray.”

Mr. Pryce did not look as though he believed in those letters any more than Joanna did, in which disbelief Joanna saw the first sign that he at all understood his daughter's character. It irked her a little that Gwendolen did not at once confess to not having written any;
what was she about, to be letting Jenny take the blame for her own irresponsible behaviour?

“In any event,” said Jenny, her tone still silky-calm, “here you are, Mr. Pryce, and here is Gwendolen, safe and sound, and, I am persuaded, none the worse for her sojourn in my house; and it now remains to discuss how we ought to proceed from here.”

“What can there be to
discuss
?” said Mrs. Pryce. “We have come more than two hundred miles from Clwyd, on the roughest and dirtiest roads imaginable, to fetch Gwendolen home with us; we have all that distance to travel again, and we must be on our way tomorrow morning.” Belatedly she added, “Is that not so, my dear?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Pryce, with a decisive nod.

“No,”
said Gwendolen.

There was a long, shocked silence. Gwendolen trembled, but stood her ground.

“So, you see,” said Jenny, “we have indeed a great deal to discuss.”

*   *   *

The Pryces, cowed by Jenny's calm unwavering smile, allowed themselves to be formally welcomed to her house and spoke the words of acceptance almost, it appeared, in a sort of daze. Treveur and Daisy appeared with refreshments, which everyone but Joanna ignored; whilst she sampled Mrs. Treveur's tea-cakes and
petits fours
, and tried to induce Gwendolen to do the same, Jenny said, “It seems to me, Mr. Pryce, that we have both the same end in view.”

Mr. Pryce frowned at her. “And what is that?”

“You, I presume,” said Jenny, “wish Gwendolen happily settled?”

He nodded warily.

“And I am sure you had rather that she did not disrupt your household, and your new family?”

“Lady Kergabet, I must object—”

“The difficulty being, of course,” Jenny continued, “that Gwendolen is still very young, with little experience of the world, and your wife, Mr. Pryce, not much less so. I can think of no other explanation for her appalling lack of good judgement in placing a girl of
Gwendolen's youth and inexperience at the mercy of Juliana Griffith-Rowland.”

“How can you say such a thing?” Mrs. Pryce demanded; then, evidently remembering to whom she spoke, she said, “I beg your pardon, Lady Kergabet! It is only that—to be accused of poor judgement, and of making one's own child unhappy—”

“I am
not
your child!” Gwendolen cried, leaping furiously to her feet. “You are not my mother! How dare you speak to me as though—”

By now Mrs. Pryce was also on her feet, sputtering in outrage.

“My dear,” said Mr. Pryce.

“Mrs. Pryce, you forget yourself,” said Jenny.

At a glance from Jenny, Joanna rose from her seat and drew Gwendolen away from the incipient altercation. “If you will only sit still and be quiet,” she said, low, “Jenny will sort it all out.”

It was not advice which Joanna would have welcomed herself, in like circumstances, and Gwendolen's expression said very clearly that she liked it no better. Joanna caught both her hands, looked earnestly up into her face (wishing again that Gwen were not quite so tall, or that she herself were a little taller), and said, “Jenny knows what she is about—you have never met her mother, but I have—and they will hear what she says, as they never could persuade themselves to hear you. Do come and sit with me, Gwen.”

Gwendolen looked from her father's face to Jenny's, and sat.

Joanna thought back to her first January in London—when the incipient arrival of Agatha had brought Jenny's mother to Carrington-street, affording Joanna the opportunity to observe at close quarters a person whom, on the evidence of many conversations overheard and meaningful looks exchanged between those of her acquaintance who knew Mrs. Edmond Marshall best, she firmly expected to detest. And, indeed, their acquaintance did not begin on a promising note: Mrs. Marshall sailed into Jenny's sitting-room one bitterly cold morning, resplendent in aubergine silk, and beholding Jenny reclining upon the sofa, devoted no more than three sentences to congratulating her on her husband's recent elevation and commiserating with
her uncomfortable state, before launching into an eloquent and impassioned diatribe on the appalling behaviour of her own second son. Joanna and Lady Maëlle had watched in astonishment as Jenny, ordinarily so adept at turning an unfortunate conversational current, failed utterly to swim against the tide of her mother's ire, and had waded in to her rescue in a manner not at all to Mrs. Marshall's liking.

But though Jenny might be discomposed, even sometimes cowed, by her own mother, faced with the parents of anybody else, she became a paragon of calm, implacable persuasion.

And it seemed that she had decided—very much to Joanna's surprise, and also to Gwendolen's, if her wide eyes and open mouth were any indication—to persuade Mr. and Mrs. Pryce to lend her, for some indefinite period, their eldest unmarried daughter.

“We should of course expect you to continue whatever allowance you were accustomed to grant Gwendolen for her clothing and pin-money, before her removal to the Griffith-Rowlands',” she said pleasantly, between sips of tea from a delicate porcelain cup painted with laurel-leaves, “and to contribute as necessary to any extraordinary expenses; otherwise, however, we should treat her as a member of the family, with the same privileges and opportunities as are afforded to my sister-in-law Joanna.” She smiled. “Through such an arrangement, you should be offering her the best possible opportunity of establishing herself in the world, at comparatively little trouble and expense to yourselves.”

Mr. Pryce's expression conveyed suspicion as well as considerable relief; his wife, on the other hand, had altogether ceased to pretend that she was not delighted at the prospect of going home without her stepdaughter, rather than with her.

“This is a very generous offer, Lady Kergabet,” said Mr. Pryce, slowly, warily. “Extraordinarily generous, for Gwendolen has not been brought up to such high aspirations, and though Mrs. Griffith-Rowland was kind enough to take her on as a favour to my wife, she seems not even to have made a success of such a little thing as
teaching a few children their letters. I am curious, I confess, as to what benefit you can be expecting to gain in return.”

Joanna controlled an instinctive wince and felt Gwendolen, close beside her, fail to do so; such a question, from a guest to his hostess, dangerously approached outright insult, and to hear her beloved Jenny, generous and patient almost to a fault, so nearly accused of some base ulterior motive, made her long to disregard her own counsel to keep silence.

At the same time, however, she could not be sorry that Gwendolen's father hesitated even thus much before seizing the opportunity to be rid of his troublesome child.