Lady of Magick (36 page)

Joanna watched her go, attempting to look encouraging whilst earnestly praying that Donald MacNeill might refuse to let his daughter anywhere near Quarry Close for the next month.

*   *   *

Sophie's letter to Lucia—in which she pleaded for a renewal of the MacNeill magick, so that she might continue her attempts to reach
Gray by means of a drawing-spell—produced a swift and damping reply, to the effect that Donald MacNeill had expressly forbidden any undertaking of the kind. The despondent mood into which Sophie fell as a result was not alleviated by a strong impression that Joanna was rather relieved than disappointed by this turn of events.

But hard on the heels of Lucia's letter came Lucia herself, again on foot and dressed as a University undergraduate, complete with a stack of codices and a quite plausible air of abstraction.

Sophie heard the knock at the door, but she paid it no heed until Donella MacHutcheon came into the sitting-room—where for the past hour Sophie had sat forlornly at the pianoforte, looking through sheets of music which she had not the heart to play, whilst behind her Gwendolen Pryce worked silently through the contents of the mending-basket—and said, “You have a visitor, Domina.”

She looked up just as Lucia followed Donella MacHutcheon into the room, throwing back the hood of her grey woollen cloak.

“What—”

“If my father learns what I am about,” said the heiress of Alba, cutting off Sophie's astonished protest, “I cannot say what he may do. I have almost no time; I pray you, let us not waste it in arguing. Come.”

She gestured at the sofa, and Sophie swallowed her questions—
What do you here? Surely you do not mean to defy your father's direct command, only to help me work a drawing-spell? Have you guessed what it is I truly mean to do with your magick?
—and obeyed.

The rite proceeded more quickly this time, for Lucia did not pause either to explain herself or to seek Sophie's consent for each separate step. Again the borrowed magick surged through Sophie, swift and sharp and hot, but she was ready for it now, and gentled it down more quickly than before.

She looked up at her deliverer, hoping that her expression might be capable of conveying her gratitude, for she could find no words adequate to the task. Whilst Lucia was smiling at her, beginning to clean her knife and tidy her materials away, the front door opened
once more as Gwendolen Pryce appeared in the sitting-room, pink-faced and breathing hard, with Joanna on her heels.

“Do you see?” she panted over her shoulder. “What did I tell you?”

“Sophie, what are you about?” Joanna demanded, reverting to Brezhoneg; as she drew closer, she exclaimed, “Your hand is bleeding! Sophie, what—”

Lucia frowned—whether because she could not understand the words or because the tone was only too comprehensible—and Sophie shifted into Latin to reply: “Is this not what you wished for, Jo?”

Joanna could not reasonably deny it—though
demanded
might be a better term than
wished
—but she looked as though she should have liked very much to do so, and Sophie's belly clenched: She had been right, then, that Joanna had never wished for this at all. That, in fact, in setting such a condition on Sophie's participation in whatever rescue attempt she might be concocting with Gwendolen, her aim had been to strand her sister in Din Edin, safely out of the way under the eyes of Lord de Courcy and her father's loyal guardsmen.

“I wished—that is, I thought—”

Did you think, can you truly have thought, that I should send you off into certain danger to rescue
my husband
, and myself stay here and rot?

Lucia had finished packing away her things; she rose to her feet with her arms full of books, saying quietly in Gaelic, “I must go. May your gods keep you, Sophie Marshall of Britain.”

She bent and kissed Sophie's upturned brow; their shared magick flared minutely at the point of contact, like—

Sophie resolutely set aside the thought of what it was like.

“And may your gods smile upon you, Lucia MacNeill of Alba,” she said.

Lucia straightened her back, pulled up the hood of her cloak, and sailed past Joanna and Gwendolen like a small, imperious ship of war.

“I am coming with you, Jo,” said Sophie, the moment she heard the door close behind her visitor. “I beg you will not waste precious time in attempting to stop me.”

“Sophie—”

“No.”
Sophie surged up from the sofa, drew herself up to her full height, and fixed her sister with the most daunting stare she could muster. “You do not know me very well, Joanna Callender, if you thought I should sit quiet and safe in Din Edin whilst you risked your life and Gwendolen's for the sake of
my husband
.”

“And
you
do not know
me
at all,” Joanna retorted, standing on tiptoe to glare directly into Sophie's eyes, “if you imagine me capable of dragging you into mortal danger when you are already half dead.”

The worst of it was that Joanna was quite right—for a certain value of
right
which was calculated from prudence and logic and sober good sense, taking no account of constancy, or heartache, or love. She should regret this, she knew, when her borrowed magick faded—her mind might now be sharp again, the fug of melancholy cleared away, but after nearly a month's debilitating lethargy, her body could not recover its strength in an instant, and was running on pure nerve—but the very notion of leaving Gray to his fate, when she might have helped him . . . ! Not to speak of sending her younger sister into a danger which ought to have been her own to face.

But if logic were to be Joanna's weapon, then Sophie should try her hand at wielding it also.

“The closer I am to Gray,” she said again, “the less I shall be ‘half dead.'”

Joanna's silence was not concession, but neither was it an objection.

“And I am not helpless now,” said Sophie, encouraged; “I can do things. Useful things. If the plan is not to be taken prisoner, then you shall need concealment; they will all be on the alert now. And,” she concluded, carefully keeping the triumph out of her voice, “you are speaking of a journey all the way to Mull, and I am the only one of us who can speak Gaelic.”

“That much is true, Jo,” said Miss Pryce. She spoke slowly and reluctantly, and when Joanna turned to glare at her, she shrugged one shoulder and said, “I do not like the thought of it any more than you do, but . . . we have few enough arrows in our quiver, and I should be
a liar if I estimated our odds of success any lower with Mrs. Marshall than without her.”

I thank you for that ringing endorsement, Miss Pryce,
thought Sophie dryly, but she held her tongue.

“That has nothing to do with the case,” said Joanna furiously.

“It has
everything
to do with it, Jo.” Sophie kept her voice low and even. “You need me, and I need you; and Gray needs all of us.”

*   *   *

Joanna sat down at Sophie's desk (no one—not even Sophie herself—being permitted to use Gray's) and, after several false starts, closed her letter to Jenny with vague reassurances which, however, were not so vague as to raise suspicion.

Or so I hope.

“Well, it will have to do,” she said aloud, and folded the letter up to seal it.

She looked thoughtfully at Sophie's paper-knife. After a moment, she slipped it into her pocket and went down to the kitchen to look for a whetstone.

*   *   *

Joanna woke very early next morning, after a restless night, and found herself alone in the Marshalls' spare bedroom. This circumstance was not unusual—Gwendolen was an early riser by nature as well as by habit and, upon finding soon after their arrival that Donella MacHutcheon did not generally arrive in Quarry Close until well after sun-up, had appointed to herself the task of making the morning tea—but Joanna's unpropitious dreams lingered, and she admitted to herself that she should have been glad of the tangible evidence of life provided by Gwendolen's quiet breathing on the far side of the bed.

She washed and dressed with brisk efficiency, descended the staircase (avoiding the creaky step, so as not to risk waking Sophie), and made her way into the kitchen.

“Good morning,” she said, and stopped dead.

There was a strange boy sitting at the kitchen table, eating an apple.

They looked at one another for a moment—the boy nonchalant, Joanna silently frantic. Who in Hades was he, and by what magick, trickery, or violence had he got into Sophie's house?

Then the boy swallowed his mouthful of apple, gave Joanna a cheerful grin, and said in Gwendolen's voice, “Good morning, Jo!”

Joanna sat down heavily on the nearest chair, for her knees seemed no longer willing to do their office.

“Your
hair
,” she said, without altogether intending it. Last evening Gwendolen's hair, plaited for the night, had hung down nearly to her waist, a dark rope against her pale nightdress; now her face was framed by a mass of loose curls, which softened its angular lines without at all detracting from the graceful curve of her throat. “How did you—”

It was astounding how well she carried off her masquerade: the hair, indeed, scarcely registered beside the confident set of her shoulders, the careless sprawl of her trousered legs, the rakish tilt of her head.

As Joanna stared, Gwendolen's smile faded. “Do you dislike it so much?” she said. “It will grow back, you know. If I only put it up under a cap, I should be forever in danger of the cap's falling off.”

Joanna stood up again and went round the table to stand behind Gwendolen's chair. “It suits you,” she said. “I should not have thought it, but it suits you very well.”

“Oh,” said Gwendolen, and Joanna discovered that her right hand had risen, without volition or indeed conscious thought on her part, to ruffle the soft dark curls.

Gwendolen tilted her head back, dislodging Joanna's fingers, and resumed her boyish grin, but Joanna fancied that it was not quite so insouciant as formerly. Then she pushed back her chair (narrowly missing Joanna's toes) and jumped up to attend to the kettle.

*   *   *

“You see the advantages, of course,” said Gwendolen, when the tea was made and they were seated on either side of the kitchen table, drinking it. “In Alba, women may travel together unescorted as a matter of course, but in Britain almost never; your tale of Elinor and Harriet will be the more plausible for having their cousin George in the party, in place of Louisa. And George will be able to speak to people whom Elinor and Harriet never could.”

“
Not
George,” said Joanna firmly.

Gwendolen frowned. “Why not? I have just been explaining—”

“Oh! No, I did not mean that we ought to have Louisa instead,” Joanna said. “But George is Gray and Jenny's dreadful elder brother, you see. Perhaps you might be . . . Arthur, instead? Or Denis, or Gaëtan?”

“Or Gaël,” Gwendolen suggested, her mouth tilting up at one corner, “as I am wearing his best suit of clothes.”

Joanna was surprised into laughing aloud. She studied Gwendolen's neat trousers, shirt, and coat—the polished riding-boots, she saw now that she was looking carefully, were Gwendolen's own. They were not a gentleman's clothes, exactly, but the lines seemed to be drawn rather differently in Alba; and where they were going, distinctions of this sort were highly unlikely to matter.

“I hope you did not steal them, Gwen?” she said.

“Of course not!” Gwendolen looked scandalised. “I asked very politely, and I gave him enough coin to replace them. And I did not steal that, either,” she added, with a reproachful look at Joanna; “Lady Kergabet is astonishingly generous, and makes me a much larger allowance than I can possibly spend.”

Joanna acknowledged this to be entirely in character.

“He was quite pleased with the transaction, in point of fact,” Gwendolen continued, “for he has never liked this shade of blue.” She tugged gently at the collar of Gaël's best coat. “Though I am not sure how he means to explain the alteration to Lady Kergabet.”

This time, the smile she directed across the table at Joanna was no more than a crinkling-up of her dark eyes; but it made Joanna grin recklessly in return.

“Morgan,” said Gwendolen after a moment. “That is the name I used when last I ran away dressed as a boy—but nobody in Alba knows it. Morgan Prichard. What say you, Jo?”

“Harriet, you mean,” said Joanna.

“My apologies, dear cousin.” Gwendolen's voice went slightly deeper and very slightly rougher about the edges. “Should you care to dance, Harriet?”

Joanna goggled at her. “By Thalia's masque, you ought to be on the stage!”

After all, however, if she were to be Harriet Dunstan again, she ought to do the thing properly. When Gwendolen held out her hand, therefore, in the best gentlemanly manner, Joanna took it.

At once she was swept into a sort of manic reel, danced to and fro across Sophie's kitchen, which left them both breathless and laughing. When finally they spun to a halt and dropped hands, and Joanna (in character as Harriet) curtseyed whilst Gwendolen (equally in character as Morgan) made her elegant leg, and they looked respectively up and down at one another, Joanna felt quite capable of facing down any number of inimical MacAlpines.

Loath though Joanna
was to admit it, it was true that the addition to their party of Sophie—of a Sophie, that is, perhaps not altogether herself, but certainly restored to something like it—was both encouraging and enormously useful. In the service of this cause, and with Lucia MacNeill's borrowed magick almost visibly thrumming in her veins, she was taut and focused, entirely free of both irksome doubts and tedious melancholy. It was she who had procured them seats in a mail-coach bound for Glaschu, under the names of Elinor Graham, Harriet Dunstan, and Morgan Prichard; she who had done the hard magickal labour of creating a seeming of herself, which should sit at the pianoforte for some hours as she ordinarily did, to be seen by anyone who looked in at the window; and it was thanks to her concealing magick that they were rattling along in a coach full of strangers more impecunious than themselves—not one of whom paid them any mind at all—before the day's guardsmen, Menez and Tredinnick (and thus Lord de Courcy), had any notion that they had so much as left the house.

The broad outlines of this part of the plan had been Joanna's, but she could certainly not have carried it off so well without Sophie—
Sophie who sat composedly beside her, knitting (knitting!) something on large needles with a soft, heavy wool, and looking nothing at all like herself.

When they came to their destination, they should again be relying heavily on Sophie's magick, first to slip unnoticed into Castle MacAlpine, and then to escape with—in the best case—five rescued prisoners, or—in the worst case—sufficiently damning information to spur Donald MacNeill to immediate action. Joanna eyed her sidelong, uneasy.

At their first halt—some three hours into the journey, at a posting-inn of vaguely unsalubrious appearance—Gwendolen sprang down from the top of the coach, attempting without much success to conceal her delight in being out of doors in the spring sunshine, behind if not astride a team of fast horses. Joanna rather envied her this outside position, for which she had volunteered when the number of passengers proved greater than could be accommodated inside; the interior of the coach was hot and close, and smelt strongly of damp wool and of the roasted chestnuts which several of her fellow passengers had been sharing out between them for the first hour of the journey. Equally she envied Sophie her unruffled calm, despite knowing it to be entirely fictitious.

“Should you like me to fetch you some wine, Harriet?” Gwendolen asked her, in English; and, turning to Sophie, “Elinor?”

Joanna's lips twitched; had Gwendolen been taking lessons from Lady MacConnachie's superior manservant, then? “At the next halt, perhaps, cousin,” she said. “We shall walk apart a little; mind you do not let the coach depart without us!”

She took Sophie's arm and steered her away towards the least crowded corner of the inn-yard, swinging wide about a stack of crates each of which appeared to contain at least one deeply offended goose.

“What is it?” Sophie demanded, sotto voce, the moment they were out of earshot of the rest.

“Nothing,” said Joanna, surprised; “I only wanted to ask whether you felt quite well.”

“Perfectly, I thank you,” said Sophie. She frowned. “Why?”

“Because . . .”
Because you look and speak and behave like a stranger, and you are so much better at it than you used to be, and it puts me quite off my stride.
Joanna lowered her voice. “Because this masquerade must be costing you a great deal of magick, and we cannot know how much or how little you may have to spare.” Besides her own disguise, Sophie's concealing magick was also, more subtly, protecting Joanna and Gwendolen, by rendering them unremarkable and deflecting from them any unfriendly attention.

Sophie's face—or, rather, the apple-cheeked, befreckled face she had assumed this morning, together with a very slightly more curvaceous version of her general shape, and a riot of auburn curls—grew briefly introspective. “I think . . . I think we have no cause to worry as yet.”

Joanna nodded warily. Sophie's expression, so often difficult to read, was now entirely inscrutable, cloaked as she was in the mysterious Elinor Graham.

The name worried her a little, too:
Elinor Graham.
Sophie had briefly been Elinor during their flight from Callender Hall three years ago; and Graham of course was Gray, whose Borders-born mother had once been Agatha Graham. “Is that not something of a risk?” she had asked Sophie, cautiously, on its first being proposed, but had desisted thereafter, in the face of Sophie's frosty stare.

*   *   *

In Glaschu Sophie procured both rooms for the night at a respectable-looking inn and—by way of a voluble half-hour's conversation in Gaelic with the innkeeper's daughter, of which Joanna understood no more than half a dozen words—the names of several boats known to take passengers to Mull.

“You mean ships,” Joanna corrected reflexively, when this welcome news was imparted to her, in a low voice, over supper in the inn's common dining-room. It was an effort to avoid slipping into Brezhoneg, but a necessary one; to account for Sophie's serviceable but imperfect Gaelic, Elinor Graham must be a child of the Borders, and the others, who spoke no Gaelic at all, her English cousins.

Sophie's—Elinor's—mouth crimped. “No,” she said, “boats. I hope you have neither of you any objection to fish.”

Joanna chuckled at the mental image of the Princess Royal perching amongst some oblivious fisherman's catch; Sophie frowned at her with Elinor Graham's heavy auburn brows.

“I am sorry,” Joanna said. “Pray continue, Elinor dear.”

The frown relaxed a little—although she could still read in Elinor's hazel-green eyes Sophie's dread of being mocked or laughed at—as Sophie explained that the same trading-boats ferried cargoes—including fish—and passengers from the larger seagoing vessels that put into deeper harbours on the coast along the River Clyde into Glaschu, and goods and passengers out to those same harbours, and Joanna committed the names and descriptions of promising boats and their proprietors to memory.

“Morgan and I shall go and speak to them,” said Sophie, when Gwendolen had gone to fetch back a jug of wine—and perhaps a scrap or two of gossip—from the barmaid.

“My going to haggle with fishermen will offend Morgan's sense of propriety far less than your doing so,” Joanna protested.

“But you have no Gaelic, Harriet,” said Sophie, “and they will have no English and no Français.”

The look in her eyes said, more clearly than any words,
You could not have managed this without me
. Though Joanna was not entirely prepared to concede this, it was certain that they should have had infinitely more difficulty over the business, and she saw the wary tension fade from Sophie as this understanding passed between them.

“We shall all go,” she said, by way of concession.

Joanna, for her part, did not relax until—having consulted with Gwendolen on the pretext of walking about the town, with Morgan for escort—they were safely ensconced in their modest bedchamber, behind a reasonably solid door and Sophie's wards, and she could at last look her own sister in the face once more.

*   *   *

They were up before the sun to pursue their quarry, and the ebbing tide found them seated on oilcloth-wrapped bales of woven cloth, amidst a small party of women somewhat older than themselves, on the deck of a tubby fore-and-aft-rigged craft bound for Dùn Breatainn, where they should attempt to find passage to Mull.

Their fellow passengers were apparently well acquainted both with one another and with the journey and its sights. Their voluble and unceasing conversation (or as much of it as Sophie could comprehend, for they all spoke very quickly and in an unfamiliar accent) revolved entirely around some set of persons evidently known to them all, and they seemed to take no notice either of the sun rising through a bank of brilliant cloud on the eastern horizon or of the faintly greening hills and tidy villages along the river's banks. From time to time, looking up from their knitting, they darted an interested glance at the Sasunnach strangers; Sophie's bland smile and concealing magick, however, prevented the glances' developing into anything further.

It was not safety, but it was at any rate something like.

Abhainn Chluaidh—the River Clyde, as the folk of the Borders named it—stretched wide and blue, and their tubby little boat ran on the tide with a fresh breeze blowing almost dead astern to speed it along.
Mother Goddess, bountiful and kind,
Sophie prayed,
great Abhainn Chluaidh and mighty Neptune, may it so continue.

By the time the boat set them ashore at Dùn Breatainn, Sophie had learnt—largely by paying close attention to their conversation, but also by means of a few calculatedly diffident overtures of her own—that the Alban women hailed from Eilean Arainn, or the isle of Arran, and were bound for home. This was disappointing in that it removed them as a possible source of intelligence on the quickest and safest means of reaching Castle MacAlpine; on the other hand, it meant that they should soon be parted from Sophie and her friends and thus should not have time to become suspicious of them.

Dùn Breatainn, though much less populous than Glaschu, possessed a minuscule dispatch office from which one might send an express to Din Edin. Sophie visited it early on the morning after their
arrival, and there deposited an express letter directed to Mór MacRury, in which was enclosed a sealed note to Lucia MacNeill.

We are on our way to Castle MacAlpine,
it read,
as I expect you have guessed, and I have not the least idea what we shall find there. I beg you will find a way to send some manner of assistance. If the rescue does not come off quietly, I expect there will be fireworks, and the time for subtlety will be at an end; please, if there is any possibility of your managing it, get word to Angus Ferguson's company—though I hope he may not still be in command—that should they see or hear anything suspicious from the castle or its environs, they are to come at once in what force they may.

Nothing might come of it, she thought with a sigh as she sealed the letter, but at least she should not have left the way untried.

*   *   *

The journey by water to Mull—requiring as it did a wide circuit about Arran and the long, narrow peninsula of Cinn Tìre, even before the voyage north through the sound—was the longest any of them had ever undertaken, not to mention the most costly. Sophie's repeated prayers to Neptune notwithstanding, the sea was choppy and the voyage punctuated by what the sailors called
little squalls
, which the latter took in stride, assuring Sophie and Joanna that the storms of winter had been far worse and appearing not to remark how little comfort this brought them. Joanna's typically stoical demeanour did not spare her from sea-sickness, nor did her outrage at the resulting indignities in any way alleviate them; Sophie, having found her sea-legs a little more quickly, was almost glad for the care of nursing her sister—though it meant spending much of her time belowdecks, where the air was close and none too fresh—for otherwise the slow passing of time must have pushed her close to madness.

The worst of it was that she could feel Lucia MacNeill's magick ebbing. At the same time, as the good ship
Muireall
inched closer to
her port of call on the southern coast of Mull, she could feel her own magick stirring, but it came in fits and starts, and was not enough, not yet, even to begin to make up the lack.
No, that is not the worst of it: the worst is that we have had no reliable news since leaving Glaschu.

They had inquired, of course; finding a ship bound for Mull, willing to take on three Sasunnach passengers of dubious provenance, and able to satisfy the requirements of respectable accommodation as well as the limitations of Sophie's increasingly thin purse, had taken more time than Sophie had felt they had to spare, the one side benefit of which was that the delay afforded them plenty of time for both eavesdropping upon and openly questioning every traveller they could find who had lately set foot on that isle. The accounts thus gleaned, however, were so various and contradictory as to be entirely useless as intelligence. There were shades and spirits haunting the old castle (as it was invariably called); there had been a pitched battle—riots—a rout of Angus Ferguson's company by men of Clan MacAlpine, or the other way about—pillaging and rapine—peaceful demonstrations—the accepted chieftain of Clan MacAlpine had been ousted by a rival claimant, or had shut that rival up in the old castle to keep him out of the way—the castle had been fired, and its forests burnt, or its walls had been levelled, or the force sent against it had been laughably inept—the people of the Ross of Mull were cowering in fright, or they were taking up arms against Donald MacNeill, or they were fleeing in fishing-boats, or they had welcomed Donald MacNeill's troops with open arms because all through the winter their clan chieftain had let them starve.

“None of them look particularly hungry to me,” Gwendolen had said, when Sophie related this last.

“Perhaps,” Sophie had replied thoughtfully, “those we have met are the lucky few who have succeeded in making their escape.”

Joanna scoffed at this, however. “Donald MacNeill is not a fool,” she said, “and he does not rely on rumour and happenstance for news of what befalls his subjects. If the folk of Mull had been starving to death by their clan chieftain's fault, you may be sure that he should have intervened long before now.”

At Sophie's look of mild surprise, she added, “You do not suppose that your father—”

Sophie and Gwendolen had both hushed her then, for they were standing in the inn-yard in full daylight; but in the dark of a night aboard ship Sophie was a little ashamed to recall that she had required reminding that her father was not, in fact, a tyrant content to see his people starve.