Plenilune (26 page)

But then she remembered that she was in her dressing-gown, her hair undone. She hesitated: the moment was lost. All that was left was an awful sense of shame.

Then, unexpectedly, she heard the familiar dry, cool voice of Lord Gro FitzDraco say, “She may wear his hood and jesses, but she is a haggard on his fist.”

There was an empty silence full of thoughts which Margaret could feel, one by one, as if they were each cold rain-drops falling on her hot skin. A long, tingling silence filled her with something like smugness, but kindlier, and she turned away with her lips pursed against a smile, liking Lord Gro better now than she had before.

After that she wandered oddly, composed of two or more parts and the feelings of colours: a part of her, an ashen-coloured part, was still weary as if it had been beaten. And it had, had it not? Dreamy, sometimes nightmarish images of the evening’s festivities sprang through her mind as she wandered down the empty passageways of Lookinglass. Each one struck at her like Rupert’s hand. Another part of her was cool and golden, sleepy-fierce and defiant—was it only the candlelight, or was it something greater? Yet another part of her, a far, back part which seemed to tag after her like a shadow, and seemed at other times to spring on ahead and look back at her from beyond the rim of candlelight, was the colour of a fox’s coat.

The ballroom was empty when she arrived. The servants had cleaned and gone their ways. The smarting scent of freshly extinguished candles gripped at Margaret’s throat. Tiny, ashen, and defiant at once, she pressed in between the huge doors and hesitated on the edge of that vast emptiness. The room was deathly quiet: from a distance she heard the wolf-howl of the wind running long-wise with the building. Where the orchestra had sat among its candles all was dark; the falcon in the floor was swallowed up in shadow. Only her spitting candle cast any glow and it seemed, small as it was, to make the dark around her deeper.

There is a moral in that
, she thought, looking back over her shoulder
, I shouldn’t wonder
.

No one was behind her, she could not imagine anyone could be before her, so she strode across the ballroom floor alone, candle lifted high. The light of it jinked elusively off the tall panelled windows—the dark outside seemed to turn and look in at her out of horrible eyes. She went on, discovering the first bank of chairs, then the one beyond it, and so on until at last she got to the first row and found her fan exactly as she had left it. It was not until she picked it up that a new part of her began talking: not ashen or golden, but frankly starched white and black, like a nurse’s outfit, and it told her that she had been ridiculous to come down alone in her dressing-gown. If anyone stumbled upon her, what would they think? As much as she was grateful to him, she did not imagine Lord Gro to be the sort to win men’s hearts over by eloquence and sound reasoning.

Regardless,
Margaret told the starch,
if I had not come down I would not have heard him—I would not have heard all of them—and I did
want
to know. Now I do, and I know where I stand in the game.

With a wiggle and shove she stowed the fan away in her dressing-gown pocket and retraced her steps to the hallway. There she deliberated and chose to continue southward through the building in the hopes that one of these passages emptied out onto the nave. She thought she could find her way back to her room from there.

It was uncanny how quiet the house was. The wind was the only sound she heard as she walked, and it was a from-time-to-time sound, like the surf, or a dream: she did not like it, for it bled the black into the white and turned things ashen again—she tasted ash in her mouth—and took away all charade of stability which Lookinglass imposed upon her attention. She was an exile: this wind was the wind of exile.

Sleep, sleep, my baby.

So, she and the wind were not the only ones awake. On the threshold of the nave Margaret turned back, hearing a sweet, light voice singing wanderingly behind one of the many doorways she had passed.

Sleep, sleep, my baby.

And when you wake

I’ll give you a little black pony—

Overcome by curiosity once more, Margaret stole back and set her hand upon the door from which came the singing. Even as she pushed, her better sense braced her for whatever might befall. The door swung open easily.

—With a coat of night

And eyes of dragon-fire.

Sleep, sleep, my baby.

Sleep, sleep, my baby…

As the last notes were coming out of the singer’s mouth the singer looked up. Margaret found the woman as her intuition had expected: a fine-boned, tall woman, with demurely plaited hair that shone in the lamplight, soft grey eyes with a little fierceness in the depths of them, and a puzzled smile about the lips. There was a pregnant silence for a few minutes—neither woman moved—and in that time Margaret was able to place her as the fur-enshrouded woman who had ridden up that morning with Lord Bloodburn from Hol. How different the two were! Brother and sister or man and wife, whichever they were, she could not have imagined them more different. The fierceness in the woman’s eyes was tiny, like a single spark, and was there only because of the small bundle of a thing which she held in her arms. All else had been quenched.

There sit I should Rupert ever conquer me.

“Why do you sit here in the dark, madam?” asked Margaret, lifting higher her candle to see better. “It is well past the child’s bedtime.”

She schooled her voice to be gentle and watched with satisfaction as the face before her remained open and hesitantly friendly. “The dark is peaceful,” the woman replied.

“And the bedtime?” Margaret was not sure why she persisted, since it was none of her business, but the quiet horror of the woman kept her from saying good-night and turning away.

The woman turned her head to the babe—one heavy plait slid over her mantled shoulder and encircled the thing. One tiny hand reached out and grasped it energetically. “The cub sleeps poorly—and consequently so do I—but likes rather to play. So I sit in the dark and shush him.”

Margaret took three steps forward and positioned herself by the woman so that she could look down into the child’s face. The light did not seem to dazzle it: it played with the braid with its chubby, useless little fingers that seemed more like an octopus’s limbs than a human’s. The thing was pale and golden and white, and did not look at all disposed to falling asleep. Margaret’s mother, disagreeable in most things, unaccountably held that babies were adorable, while Margaret, despite her attempts in the past to be temperate and sociable, had always felt that babies were rather ugly. This baby, she found, was not exactly ugly, but nor was it beautiful. It was a blunt-faced, determined little thing, trying to eat with the teeth it did not have the braid which its mother was working to dislodge from its grasp.

“The cub made a long morning journey and is in a strange place. Why does he not sleep, like a sensible baby, or at least cry?”

She had guessed at the outset that the child was the pride of the mother’s heart, and possibly her only thing worth living for. Now the woman proved it. With a flash of her eyes she looked up into Margaret’s face, a grim smile yanking at her mouth. “The cub is a great cub, and does not cry at silly things. True, he tries me, but then all babes are trying. Nevertheless, he is a great cub.”

“So.” Margaret sank stiffly down into an adjacent chair and set the candle on the table with a small deliberate click. “The cub is great, and he will look after his mother in her old age, I’m sure. Out of gratitude.”

The eyes lost their fierceness and darted almost guiltily down to the child’s face. “Yes,” she said quietly, but she did not sound sincere.

Margaret waited in the ensuing silence for the woman to say something more on her own account, but the normal space of silence passed on unbroken and stretched into awkwardness—though, she noted, neither of them showed it—and one after the other Margaret picked up and discarded things she could say. Ought she to mention the strange old woman from the meal hall? Ought she to say good-night, having so deliberately come in, and go back to bed? Ought she ask if the pale, golden-haired woman had a pleasant evening? No, not that—her brows pulled together a moment. It would be insulting to mention pleasantries with
this
woman. She debated strongly and rather desperately with the suggestion of taking the child herself to give the poor mother a moment’s rest, but in the end, deciding her courage was not up to that, she said, simply and quietly,

“I am Margaret, by the way.”

The blue-grey eyes like sapphires that had been crushed out under someone’s heel flickered up into her own and hung there a moment in a face that had an unfathomable look. “Yes,” she said at last. “I did know that…I am Kinloss, Bloodburn’s wife.”

Margaret jerked a smile across her face with conscious effort. “And I knew that, though no one told me your name. I saw you come up with your husband this morning—or yesterday morning. Is it a very long way from Hol?”

She had hoped Kinloss would be mildly pleased that she had a passing familiarity with the names of their places, but the woman’s face registered little beyond acute pain as the cub burbled and moved at that moment. Margaret’s hands shifted first forward and then back as she fought with her fear of the tiny thing and her concern for the mother.

“It took us three days and this morning—yesterday morning—to reach Lookinglass,” replied Kinloss when she could. “But I don’t mind,” she went on with an unexpected flush of personality after Margaret had thought she would fall silent again. “I don’t mind. It is peaceful here.”

Margaret stared blankly at the beautiful, thin, quenched woman and did not know quite what she felt. Pity and horror were foremost, confusion not far behind and, aft of that, a fox-coloured, clear-cut, dreadful understanding. With little effort she let the horror take charge. The yellow-lit picture of Kinloss and her baby, alone in the dark which was their only friend, was a picture that was beginning to look more and more like a nightmare. How familiar nightmare pictures were becoming!

Margaret put out one knee and bent both, head inclined demurely though she felt as though she moved and spoke in a dream. “I must go. Good-night, my lady. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

Kinloss said nothing. Margaret retreated to the door and had a last fleeting image of a long face looking at her from a distance, lips parted as if a moment from speaking. But too much time passed between them and it seemed Kinloss had begun to think again—for reason, Margaret knew, is the great murderer of blind courage—and Kinloss remained silent. The door clicked softly shut between them.

When she found it, the nave was rather awful to face alone. It was huge and lightless—she had left her candle with Kinloss—and the sound of the wind outside made the room hum ominously around her. Moving through the cotton darkness, moving between the black bulks of pillars and the smaller black bodies of tables and chairs, she found the stairs and took comfort in the familiar, thoughtless rhythm of mounting them. She stopped once to look back over her shoulder, down into the swimming dark below, and wondered if she had heard something else move behind her. Was it Kinloss come after her, or the old woman from supper, or—worst of all, far worse than going mad—was it Rupert? In brief breathlessness, all her insides held in the tight grip of her stomach muscles, she listened with her lip caught painfully between her teeth. But either she was going mad or it had been only the wind, for no one came. The motionless dark remained unmoved and she passed on up the stair and down the rarely-lit passages trying to find her own room.

She had found the head of her own corridor only to hear a new noise hard by, just behind the nearest door. A familiar voice was speaking: having eavesdropped once already she moved closer without a second thought. She reflected with a grim sort of humour that she was getting rather experienced in leaning against closed doors without being detected.

“—never had to solicit your opinions,” said a rough, panther-coloured voice.

“Oh, you’ve done very well with her.” Skander’s tone was both sincere and bitingly caustic. “She looked beautiful this evening—charming, assured—in that red gown she looked like a goddess.” There was a brief, hot silence and swift step on the floor. “But you can’t hide that look in her eye, Rupert. She looks
hunted
. And don’t think I was the only one to notice! FitzDraco, who does not go out of his way to say anything, marked to me her countenance.”

“Truly?” came Rupert’s voice turned languid again: that dark, sleepy, velvet tone which made Margaret’s skin crawl with cold loathing. “I wasn’t aware FitzDraco was wont to mark any woman.”

The tension of the following silence was so great that Margaret could almost see Skander’s face, white with choked rage. At last he said, in a tone low and awful, “I do not know what you mean to do, Rupert, but I swear if you hurt her—I swear you will regret it. Don’t be a fool. I
swear
you will regret it.”

Her lungs spasmed. The breath she took was an involuntary, hiccupping one which sounded like the crack of a hunter’s gun in the quiet. She clapped her hand over her mouth and kept perfectly still.

There was a long silence, still longer than before, then a swift sound of movement somewhere as of someone rising, and Rupert’s voice, changed from roughness to softness to a horrible tone of evil, replied,

“No one provokes me with impunity. Look well that you do not cross paths with me, or it will be the last thing you do.”

She knew Skander was coming. Any minute now he would break away from that stark murderer’s glare and stalk away—it took a brave man to put that face behind him—and come through the door. She had to turn away. But the fire which FitzDraco had struck in her had gone pitifully out. She had to leave but she could not move. The wind had been knocked out of her. She knew that if Rupert caught her he would be in a mood to kill her, quickly, with his hands on either side of her head and a quick snap around.