Lady of Magick (30 page)

“Foul play of what sort, exactly?” said Gwendolen. Joanna glanced up at her in pleased surprise. “A powerful ward might be responsible, might it not? Or a sufficiently potent spell of concealment? And either might be used for a benign purpose, as easily as for a malevolent one.”

“That is so,” said Mór MacRury. “But a man whose circumstances demand wards and concealment-spells, and who also writes a letter which has one meaning to its intended recipient and another to those who do not know him well, is a man in difficulties, whether the wards and concealments are his enemies' or his own.”

“Yes, I see,” said Gwendolen.

“I tried a finding-spell this morning,” Sophie said glumly. “You can guess its outcome, I am sure. Either he is outside my range, or the same mechanism—whatever it may be—is interfering.”

Mór MacRury leant across the space between their chairs to squeeze Sophie's hand.

“In any event,” said Joanna, “we must go back to Lord de Courcy as soon as may be, with this news.”

“Yes,” said Sophie, raising her chin. For a moment she looked almost herself again; but then she said, “Yes, Jo, you must go at once.”

*   *   *

Joanna had feared that they might have difficulty in explaining to Lord de Courcy—who was not a mage any more than she was herself—the process by which they had come by their evidence. Fortunately, however, Mr. Powell appeared to understand all of it easily, and nodded briskly at things which Joanna herself found baffling.

“I know nothing to speak of about this Rory MacCrimmon,” he said, “though if he is a friend of Marshall's, my lord, you may be sure he is at least no fool. But Mór MacRury I do know, at any rate by reputation; she is one of the University's foremost experts on the craft of scrying. Whatever she has told you, Miss Callender, Miss Pryce, I believe we may rely on absolutely.”

Unless Mór MacRury considers herself an enemy of Britain,
Joanna thought. But she recalled Mór's tone of voice, her unconcealed anxiety for Sophie, for the missing Gray, and could not believe that even such a cause could have persuaded her to deception in a matter touching their safety.

“What we know, then,” said Lord de Courcy, folding his hands on the desk before him, “is this. First, that Monsieur Marshall was alive and well at breakfast on the morning of his disappearance, and said nothing to his wife at that time of any intention to leave Din Edin. Second, that at some point after his wife's leaving the house with a friend and before her return thither late in the afternoon, he received a message purporting to come from this house, and as a consequence allowed himself to be driven . . . somewhere.

“Third, that he certainly wrote the letters received from him by his wife and by his colleague Rory MacCrimmon—which may indicate that the latter had no involvement in the business, but may only mean that Marshall was not aware of his doing so—but, fourth, that one of them was written under duress, and its surface import dictated by some other person or persons unknown to us.”

His gaze flicked first to Mr. Powell, industriously taking notes, then to Joanna, who swallowed, licked dry lips, and said, “Yes, sir.”

“Fifth,” he continued, “that Monsieur Marshall has two points in common with four other men who have disappeared within the last twelvemonth, without satisfactory explanation: He is a stranger to Din Edin, and a powerful mage. Sixth”—and here his decided recital of facts took on a more hesitating quality—“that some . . . spell, or . . . other barrier, is preventing his being located by means of scrying.”

Mr. Powell raised his head. “Surely someone has tried a finding-spell?” he demanded.

Joanna regarded him levelly. “So I am told,” she said. “My sister has made several such attempts, she tells me, and I understand that both Rory MacCrimmon and Mór MacRury have also done so, without success.”

Again doubt flickered in her mind—how was she to know the difference between a mage who had attempted a finding-spell and a mage who only claimed to have done so?—and again she firmly quashed it.

“Duly noted, Miss Callender,” said Mr. Powell. He looked chastened and bent his head to his notes once more. “Which tells us only that Mr. Marshall is no longer here in Din Edin, or within the operative range of the said mages—which may be very considerable,” he added, with a nod to Joanna, “but cannot possibly extend beyond, say, a radius of fifty miles.”

“Now,” Lord de Courcy said, “having established these facts of the matter, we may draw some logical inferences.” His tone—precise, even, almost didactic—so closely recalled what Sophie called Gray's lecturing voice that Joanna was abruptly, painfully glad of Sophie's absence. “First, that given the clear parallels in these cases—two such might be coincidence, but five?—we must consider the disappearances as linked. Second, that whatever Monsieur Marshall's present whereabouts, he did not come there of his own volition.”

“And, third,” said Joanna, “that he is not in Kernow. Because,” she added, as Mr. Powell seemed about to object, “if he
were
in Kernow, they—whoever
they
are—should have made him tell Sophie that he is somewhere else.”

“If I were to attempt to hide a man,” said Mr. Powell, “I should go to London; surely there can be no better bolt-hole for persons who wish not to be found.”

“Have you ever lived in London, Mr. Powell?” Joanna inquired.

“Not . . . lived, as such,” he admitted. “But I have been staying there quite often—”

“If
I
wished not to be found,” said Joanna, “I should not attempt to hide in London, for a kingdom. You are thinking, I am sure, that
concealment must be very easy in so large a city, so full of people who cannot possibly all know one another. But what I have discovered is that London is not so much a great city as a vast collection of villages, which are as quick to note the arrival of a stranger as any village anywhere; and that, where so many people live in such close proximity, nothing can long go unremarked—and almost any tongue can be loosened by the judicious application of coin. Surely Din Edin is not so very different? I have heard Lord de Courcy say as much, unless I am much mistaken.”

Mr. Powell—who had bristled a little, to begin with—was now nodding thoughtfully. It was fortunate, thought Joanna, that he had been long enough in Din Edin to lose the habit of treating women's opinions as surplus to requirements; though he was of Cymric birth, by his surname and his speech, which was perhaps not unimportant. What was it about Normandins and Englishmen (and here she thought irritably of her own father, as well as of Sieur Carel de Bayeux and his faction of the Privy Council) that made them so obtuse and so intransigent upon this point?

“And let us not forget,” said Lord de Courcy, “that if our second supposition is correct, they have had not one captive to conceal, but five.”

“Indeed,” she said.

“If not London or Din Edin, then,” said Mr. Powell, “where should you conceal yourself, should you require concealment?”

“In the country,” said Joanna at once, and Gwendolen nodded agreement. Joanna herself had never attempted to run away from home, until the night when Sophie had announced herself to be doing so; unlike Sophie, however, she had spent many a resentful hour in plotting how she might successfully abscond, either from her father's house or from her school in Kemper. “In my own country, where every croft and hayrick and fox-hole is known to me—where I am no stranger, and may therefore go unremarked, and perhaps command the loyalty of others—where there are places so isolated as to permit of true secrecy. Where”—she paused to swallow back a
wave of revulsion—“where a man might scream as loud as he liked, with no one to hear him.”

There was a long, fraught silence.

Joanna waited to be told that this was no fit subject of conversation for a young lady, or that she was overwrought and would be the better for a glass of watered wine and a good night's rest. Instead, however, Lord de Courcy said, “Your theory, then, is that once we have discovered who is responsible for these disappearances, we shall also have discovered—broadly speaking—where to look for them.”

“Yes,” said Joanna; “and also, I must suppose, what led them to do . . . whatever it is they have done, or are presently doing. But,” she added dejectedly, “as the
who
of the matter remains as much a mystery as ever, I do not see that it gets us any forwarder.”

The Ambassador's study fell silent again as all present contemplated this dispiriting conclusion.

“Might this,” said Mr. Powell, hesitating a little, “might it have any connexion to the Prince's betrothal to Lucia MacNeill?”

Joanna considered it. “I do not see how,” she said, “if it is true that mages were vanishing long before anyone outside Donald MacNeill's inner circle was let into the secret. And then, too, the mages who have vanished are all foreigners to Alba, but not all are British subjects . . .”

“It seems to me, moreover,” said Lord de Courcy dryly, “that if I were minded to kidnap subjects of a foreign kingdom for the purpose of revenge, or in order to hold them hostage against the carrying out of some scheme to which I objected, I should be foolish to do so in secret.”

“That is so,” Mr. Powell conceded. “Nevertheless, sir, you cannot deny that there
are
objections to this scheme, and very strong ones, in certain quarters, and it is only reasonable to suppose that—”

“Einion,” said Courcy sharply, startling Joanna with the vehemence of his tone and Mr. Powell, evidently, by the use of his given name. “I should advise you to take careful thought before making such an accusation against the priests of the Cailleach, from your position as a guest of the Alban Court. You should not, I hope and
trust, be so foolish as to stand on the mustering-ground of a battalion of His Majesty's army, and offer insult to the priests of Mithras?”

“If the boot fits—”

“But if the priests of the Cailleach were indeed responsible,” said Joanna, keeping her voice even with some effort, “then surely, as the Ambassador says, they should have made their actions, and the reasons for those actions, public knowledge. You suspect them of holding British subjects captive in an effort to stop Lucia MacNeill's marriage; but any such scheme must depend entirely on our knowledge—on the
Ambassador's
knowledge, and through him, the attention of His Majesty—of what they intend, of what they
want
.”

Mr. Powell pressed his thin lips together tightly, stared over Joanna's shoulder, and said nothing.

His employer, on the other hand, now looked at her with all his attention. “I take it, Miss Callender,” he said evenly, “that Sieur Germain de Kergabet still supposes you to be making an innocent visit to your sister, saving your mandate to scrape an acquaintance with Lucia MacNeill?”

To anyone else, it might have seemed a
non sequitur
, but Joanna—with Courcy's steady, speculative gaze now focused entirely upon her—parsed the chain of unstated connexions without difficulty, and was forced to concede that even a Normandin may be capable of learning from experience.

“You are correct, my lord,” she said. “In this matter, I am at present an envoy for no one but myself.”

Mr. Powell raised his eyebrows.

“You are here alone, are you not?” Lord de Courcy inquired.

“She is not alone, my lord,” said Gwendolen, sitting up—if it were possible—even taller.

“Your pardon, Mademoiselle Pryce.” He inclined his head politely; then, turning again to Joanna, he said, “You are not, however, in any sense part of an official delegation?”

“No,” said Joanna. “I came here by prior arrangement, in the company of Lady MacConnachie—that is, of Sìleas Barra MacNeill—on an
entirely
innocent visit to my sister, without the least inkling of
what I should find when I arrived. Though I dare say,” she added, somewhat against her better judgement, “that if Kergabet had had any idea, Gwendolen and I should never have been permitted to leave London.”

“And yet, knowing this,” Mr. Powell said indignantly, “you insisted upon staying here—”

“My sister will not leave Alba without her husband, and I have certainly no notion of leaving Alba without my sister,” said Joanna.

“—and thought nothing of taking matters into your own hands, in a foreign city, hundreds of miles from London, essentially alone—”

“That will do, Einion.” Courcy's voice was low, even, and impossible to be disobeyed, and Mr. Powell shut his mouth with an almost audible snap. Joanna's heart sank.

Lord de Courcy turned back to her. “Both you and your sister appear to be in the habit of taking foolish risks for the sake of those who have earned your loyalty,” he said, “and I suspect that I have not yet seen the last of yours.” One corner of his mouth quirked up minutely. “I do hope that your guardians will refrain from punishing you for it; the kingdom needs young people with your species of talent as much as it needs mages.”

Joanna blinked at him, too gobsmacked even to flush at the unexpected compliment. “You . . . you do not intend to send us back to London? . . . sir?”

“Certainly not!” said Lord de Courcy. “On the contrary: I intend to take you—and your sister, if she can be persuaded—to see Donald MacNeill.”

“Sir!” Mr. Powell protested, but weakly.

“And as soon as the thing can be managed. For the first time we are in possession of genuine evidence of wrongdoing, and as the matter now so nearly concerns the Princess Royal, Donald MacNeill would not thank us for keeping him in the dark.”

Even for the
envoy of King Henry of Britain, to arrange an audience with Donald MacNeill of Alba was not the work of a moment. The next several days, therefore, Joanna, Sophie, and Gwendolen spent quietly—or unquietly, as their several humours dictated—at home in Quarry Close, awaiting a summons from Lord de Courcy.

On the afternoon of the third day, and for at least the fifth time since Mór MacRury's unexpected visit, Joanna came out of the kitchen to find Sophie curled on the sofa with her arms about her drawn-up knees, staring sightlessly at a faint tea-stain upon the sitting-room carpet. Joanna put a hand on her shoulder; Sophie acknowledged neither the gesture nor, indeed, her sister's presence. Joanna set her teeth and counted to ten in Greek; then she said quietly, “Sophie, Donella MacHutcheon has left a ragout and an apple tart for our dinner.”

Sophie deigned to acknowledge this, but only by turning away into the back of the sofa.

Joanna stared for a moment at the wings of Sophie's shoulder-blades, sharply visible through nightdress and dressing-gown as they had not been whilst she retained the habit of dressing for the day and the season.

“Sophie,” she said, “I beg you will exert yourself! I do not blame you for worrying over Gray—I am very much worried myself—but you must see that you are not helping matters by— by—”

Sophie raised her head. To Joanna's dismay, her sister's dark eyes filled with tears, which overflowed unnoticed and ran in shining tracks down her face. “I cannot help it, Jo,” she said softly. “I have tried—I am trying—but I cannot help it.”

Joanna sank down on the sofa and drew her sister into her arms. Sophie's head sank onto her shoulder, but she did not return the embrace.

“Sophie,” Joanna whispered. “Sophie,
please
.” She was near to weeping herself, in terror and exasperation. “I cannot bear to see you wasting away. Promise me you will eat a little dinner, at the least!”

Sophie drew a great breath and sat up, extricating herself from Joanna's embrace. “I am not hungry,” she said distantly. Her face was pale and damp, her eyes reddened, and she made no effort either to wipe the tears away or to conceal them by magick; Joanna, hiding her own alarm as best she could, got out her own handkerchief and gently blotted her sister's face.

“Please?” she said. “To oblige me?”

Sophie sighed. “To oblige you, Jo,” she agreed.

She allowed herself to be led away to the dinner-table, and—to her credit, and Joanna's relief—made a visible effort to consume the delicately flavoured
ragoût de veau
which Donella MacHutcheon had concocted for the express purpose of tempting her palate. More than half of her portion still remained, however, when she laid down her fork and declared, in a voice wrung thin with exhaustion, that she could eat no more.

Joanna suppressed a sigh and forbore to comment.

*   *   *

Her conversation with Gwendolen after Sophie had gone upstairs to bed, however, was less restrained.

She had never doubted that Sophie and Gray loved one another—had herself, with Jenny, schemed and manoeuvred to force them into
confessing their feelings—but that this was the truth of love, this desperate dependence, had not before occurred to her. Sophie, single-handed saviour of her king and kingdom, reduced to moping by day and sobbing into her pillow by night, by the absence of her husband: It did not bear thinking of.

“Is it this that young girls dream of and sigh over, truly?” she demanded at last. Gwendolen's eyebrows flew up at her savage tone. “If I was ever so foolish as to harbour such dreams myself, I shall certainly not do so again.”

“It seems to me,” said Gwendolen mildly, “that you may be drawing too strong a conclusion from too small a set of observations.”

Joanna gave her a long, repressive stare, and they went up to bed in silence.

*   *   *

When Rory MacCrimmon called late in the following afternoon, on his way home from the University, with yet another stack of books, to ask after Sophie—who had not so much as left her room today, and had consumed nothing but half a bowl of oatmeal porridge and a cup of tea—Joanna could not help answering him candidly, that Sophie was very ill, and she herself at the end of her tether.

Rory MacCrimmon gave her a long, considering look and invited her to walk with him for half an hour.

“Walk with you, where?” Joanna said, suspicion for the moment overruling gratitude.

Rory MacCrimmon waved a careless hand. “Nowhere in particular,” he said. “It appears to me that you should be the better for some fresh air, and perhaps when you have had your outing, I may escort your friend likewise, whilst you take your turn at dancing attendance upon your sister.”

Gwendolen, somewhat to Joanna's surprise (though it was true that Gwendolen was no great respecter of proprieties), encouraged this plan, and so she found herself walking along Grove-street with her gloved hand tucked into Rory MacCrimmon's arm, and talking at great length of her anxiety over Sophie.

“Is your sister often subject to such despondency?” Rory MacCrimmon inquired. “Some people are, I know.”

Joanna considered this question. “I . . . do not think so,” she said slowly. “Of course I have seen her unhappy”—desperately unhappy, indeed, and with cause enough, the gods knew!—“and it is a very trying situation, but this is beyond everything. What alarms me most is that . . . I am not sure how best to explain . . . that she is concealing nothing from me.”

“But surely you should not wish her to conceal—”

“You misunderstand me,” said Joanna, clenching her free hand to keep her voice even. “Sophie, you see, practises concealment as naturally as breathing. But I am explaining myself very ill! I do not mean that she lies or misleads—indeed, she is tiresomely truthful!—I am speaking only of her magick. She has done nothing to conceal how wretched she is, from me or from anybody else; I must conclude, then, either that she does not care who sees it, or that she does wish to hide it, and cannot. If you knew Sophie as I do—”

“Cannot?”
Rory MacCrimmon said sharply. “Do you mean that you believe her magick to be affected?”

“I am the last person to consult on such a question,” said Joanna, rather bitterly.
If only Master Alcuin were here! Even Lady Maëlle would know better than I what to do.
“I have no more magickal talent than that lamppost, and I dare say you should do better to ask the oak-tree we passed in the little square a few moments ago.”

“But you know your sister,” he persisted.

“I knew my sister once,” said Joanna. Ought she to tell this very new acquaintance what she was thinking about? But he was a mage, and thus likely to understand things magickal; and he was a friend of Gray's, and thus unlikely to be either a bounder or a fool.
And it is not as though I am spoilt for choice.

“When we were children,” she said at last, very quietly, “she threw stones at a pair of grown men, to try to stop them hurting our mother.” That tale carried many a bitter memory, and she swallowed back a furious half sob. “For years she stole out of her bedroom at night, in the dark, to study in my father's library, because she was
only
a girl
and he would not let her learn magickal theory, and when at last he caught her at it and set out to stop her, she smashed the drawing-room to flinders—well, she did not
mean
to do exactly that, of course—and ran away from home, and married Gray. It is not
like
Sophie to sit moping at home like—like a fair damosel in a minstrel-tale, when someone she loves may be in danger. I do not at all know what to make of it.”

They walked on some way without speaking; glancing up, Joanna saw that her companion was frowning, apparently lost in thought.

“Joanna Callender,” he said at last, “you were at your sister's wedding?”

“Of course,” said Joanna, turning to frown at this
non sequitur
. “Why do you ask?”

“I collect,” he said, “that it was rather a hasty affair?”

“Well . . . yes,” she conceded.
How much does he know already?
“Very hasty, in fact. We— There were reasons to proceed without delay.”

“I suppose it was not a Roman rite, then.”

“Oh! No, it was terribly Roman,” said Joanna, and was astonished when her companion abruptly stopped walking, dropped her arm, and seized both of her hands in an urgent grip. “Because . . . because if they were only handfasted, Lady Maëlle said, then—”

“Will you describe the rite for me?” Rory MacCrimmon interrupted urgently. “As exactly as you can?”

He tucked her left hand into the crook of his arm once more, and they resumed their interrupted trajectory.

Still frowning, she marshalled the details in her mind and told the tale as clearly as she could manage: the irritable and slightly furtive-looking priest of Tamesis, the declarations and the vows, the wedding-cord and the offerings . . .

“A cake of spelt?” he demanded. “They shared a cake of spelt?”

“Yes,” said Joanna, baffled; “and then Sophie said,
Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia
, and Gray said the same—only the other way about, you know—and then the thunderstorm stopped.”

Rory MacCrimmon looked down at her, his face very grim and a
little pale beneath its dusting of freckles. “A marriage
confarreatio
,” he said softly, as though to himself. “It would have to be that.” And then, in almost a shout, “Brìghde's tears! What did that priest think he was playing at?”

As this outburst only increased Joanna's bewilderment, she had no answer to give, and they walked on for a little time without speaking; they were no longer walking leisurely and aimlessly, but going somewhere with all reasonable speed. Joanna wondered which of Sophie's guardsmen was following her now, and she made a mental note to apologise to him later for leading him such a merry chase to no purpose.

At last Rory MacCrimmon said, “Marriage
confarreatio
is a form of marriage that the gods make—the conqueror-gods, the gods of Rome—and only they can unmake it.”

“Well . . . yes,” Joanna conceded. “That was the general idea.” Throwing caution to the winds, she added, “It was the most important idea, in fact—that Sophie should not be free to marry anyone else.”

He gave her an odd look. “Perhaps,” he said, “but—in old Rome it was only the patrician class who married in that way, and then
very carefully
, with due attention to lineages and talents, because if both parties to such a marriage are mages, the rite does not only bind
them
but also binds their magicks.”

“Binds their magicks . . . to what?” Joanna said.

Rory MacCrimmon looked surprised. “Why, to one another,” he said. “I—somewhere I have got a book which explains the matter properly—”

They stopped before a small, neat house in Drummond-street, and Rory MacCrimmon opened the front door—it was not locked—and ushered Joanna inside. He called a greeting in Gaelic to someone within, and a woman's voice answered him; but whoever it belonged to, Joanna was evidently not to discover, for Rory MacCrimmon waved her to a seat in a formal and evidently little used sitting-room and disappeared.

When at length he returned, he carried in his left hand a thick octavo codex, whose spine was faded to a watery pale blue.

“Here,” he said, and handed it to Joanna. The leather binding which was so badly faded on the spine remained deep green on the front board, across which was stamped in gold the title
On the Laws of Matrimonium and Familia from the Days of the Caesars to Our Own
, and below it a name—
Charles Augustus Beauharnais, Mag.D.
—and a date which showed the book to be nearly a hundred years old.

Rory MacCrimmon opened the book to the place he had marked with what appeared to be a length of fingering wool and tapped a forefinger halfway down the recto folio, saying, “There.”

The text, to Joanna's relief, was printed clearly in perfectly ordinary Latin, and thus was not difficult to decipher:

Marriage
confarreatio. See also coemptio, usus;
marriage
sine manu;
handfasting and lesser forms of marriage.

Whereas the law of Rome originally dictated that only the offspring of marriage
confarreatio
could marry by this rite, no such requirement now exists, to the author's knowledge, in the territories of the former Empire, which nevertheless maintain a form of the rite
confarreatio.
In their original forms, the rite
confarreatio
and the rite
coemptio
were more sharply delineated than the rites known by these names today, the modern rite
confarreatio
having absorbed, for instance, the vow
“
ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia”
from the rite
coemptio
, and the rite
coemptio
the requirement of witnesses and offerings from the rite
confarreatio
—

Rory MacCrimmon turned the page impatiently and ran a long forefinger down the following verso folio, then the succeeding recto.

“Aha!” he said, tapping his finger on a paragraph halfway down the latter. “Here we are.”

Joanna bent her head again and read:

The chief distinction of the rite
confarreatio
—and, concomitantly, the reason for which it is now so seldom employed—is the strong legal link which it forges between husband and wife. In the time of the Empire as today, a marriage
confarreatio
, once consummated, could not
be dissolved by mutual agreement of the families party to the betrothal, but required in addition a countervailing rite of dissolution or divorcement, conducted by a priest of the same order (
cf.
Flamen Dialis). It is for this reason considered, in practical terms, a binding form of marriage (
cf.
marriage
usus
; marriage
coemptio
; handfasting).