The Midnight Queen (18 page)

Sophie had so much to do merely in remaining Arthur Randal that for some time she scarcely heard what was being said—until Gray's words pulled her back to reality: “Not such proofs as might generally be recognised as such, my lord. I own they are more in the nature of deductions and inferences; the documents we have seen are copies, and name no names, but Master Alcuin agrees with me that the danger to you is genuine.”

It sounded absurd, and Gray must know it, but his tone remained confident, his gaze earnestly fixed on the powerful man before him. Sophie listened, impressed by his composure, as—still firmly in the character of Ned Dunstan, student in good standing of Marlowe College, whom no one had ever believed guilty in a violent death—he relayed the results of their various overhearings, the documents they had deciphered, and the testimony of a scry-mage (whose identity he skilfully evaded mentioning) as to the Professor's intent.

“It happens, my lord,” Gray continued, “that a former student of Master Alcuin's is one of those on whose information our account relies. He has had the ill fortune to be suspected by Professor Callender, of knowing what he ought not; and as Master Alcuin will confirm, since receiving a letter on the subject from this man, sent from an inn not far from the Professor's country estate, he has been watched, and followed, both in College and in the town.”

“This is quite true, my lord.”

“And what of the student himself?” Lord Halifax inquired of Master Alcuin.

“I regret, my lord, that I may not name the man in question,” the latter replied. “I have made a promise to that effect. But I may and do assure you that he is a man on whose integrity you may rely absolutely.”

Sophie fancied that Gray sat a little straighter.

Lord Halifax made no reply to this; instead he turned to Gray and said, “The substance of your theory, then, is a conspiracy by Oxford Fellows and men at Court, whose goal is murder and possible regicide; and the presiding genius of this dread scheme is none other than Appius Callender.”

Sophie had feared that Lord Halifax must see their tale for the tissue of lies it was, but instead—worse—he threw back his head and laughed.

“Callender!” he said, still chuckling. “This is good luck indeed! Of all men, I think I should best prefer that it be he who plots my downfall. An excellent joke, young Dunstan.”

“My lord, he has been ever your enemy,” Master Alcuin reminded his superior; his tone held a note of reproach.

“He has,” said Lord Halifax, sobering a little, “and he has been ever a pompous, small-minded fool—he has not the wit, I think, to be anything more. It has always puzzled me, frankly, that he should ever have achieved either a doctor's robes or a Professorship. I do not doubt that he would very much enjoy plotting my death, and—who knows?—perhaps that of His Majesty as well. I should be very much astonished, however, if he should succeed in arranging either. You may depend, I think, on its being all a fanciful project of self-aggrandisement.”

The Master of Merlin sat back in his chair, folding together his long, sensitive fingers. “Alcuin,” he said, smiling kindly, “and you young men, I thank you for your concern for my welfare; I am touched indeed. I assure you, however, that I am quite safe, and beg you will not worry yourselves further on my account.”

It was unmistakably a dismissal. Sophie was half inclined towards one last, desperate outpouring of truth, in order to convince him, but what could she do but tell him what Gray had left out? And this would be a desperate stroke indeed; now he was amused, but if he should discover their deception, and, worse yet, the clandestine intrusion of a
woman
into Merlin's sacred groves . . .

Lord Halifax's manservant showed them out, and they retreated with all seemly haste to Master Alcuin's rooms. The latter again took up his informative patter, but his heart seemed no longer in it—nor could Sophie contrive to rekindle her fascination of only an hour before.

As she trailed the two men back through the oaken door, Master Alcuin stretched up to whisper something to Gray, who stooped down to hear him. “Your
cariadferch
has done you a world of good, my boy,” he murmured, and Sophie, straining her ears, frowned at the unfamiliar word. “You stand much straighter now than you used, and your stammer has quite gone.”

Quite unaccountably, Gray's ears went pink.

*   *   *

Gray slumped dejectedly into the long-legged wheelback chair he had been used to frequent as an undergraduate, which seemed to sigh a little and welcome him back into its embrace. “I brought that humiliation on all of us myself, I suppose,” he said.

“Ought we to have told him the whole truth?” Sophie asked, hesitant. She had taken off her coat and rolled her shirtsleeves up to her elbows, and sat perched on the edge of an armchair with her chin in her hands. “He must have been angry, I know, but perhaps he might have been . . . startled into considering the threat more seriously . . .”

Gray sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I was so
certain
,” he said, disgusted with himself. “How could I have thought—”

“That is quite enough, Marshall.” He had rarely heard Master Alcuin speak so sharply. “Self-pity does no good to anyone. We must think what is best to do.”

“I must go back again, of course.” Gray had not meant to express his impatience so clearly. “The question is—”

He stopped abruptly. What ailed him, that he should be prey to such stupidity? It was not only for the
Sapientia Delphi
that they had wanted Master Alcuin's bookshelves.

“Magister!” He caught feverishly at his tutor's sleeve. “Have you still your collection of works on poisons?”

*   *   *

Sophie busied herself at the hearth and in Master Alcuin's spartan pantry, producing at length a pot of tea and a plate of bread-and-butter. She was not particularly hungry, but after an hour's frustrating attempts to help in the search for whatever the others might be looking for, it had seemed wiser to make some other use of herself. To find herself, in any collection of three people, the one most inclined to such domesticity, ought to have amused her; as it was, she was merely flustered and annoyed by her burnt fingers and indifferent success, and regretted that she had not appreciated Mrs. Wallis as she ought.

Carefully, balancing a heavy wooden tray laden with teapot and crockery and the heaping plate of bread-and-butter, she shouldered open the door of the study. The hinges creaked, but the sound drew no notice from the two men who sat on either side of the desk, leaning their elbows on strata of open codices and half-unravelled scrolls. Master Alcuin absently wound the end of his beard round one finger, first one way and then the other; Gray held a fistful of hair in his right hand, on which rested the weight of his head, and chewed the knuckle of his left forefinger in an abstracted manner.

Sophie cleared her throat, to no effect.

“Master Alcuin. Gray,” she said loudly. “I have made tea. Shall I pour some out for you?”

At hearing their names both of them jumped, and despite herself Sophie had to suppress a chuckle at the symmetry of their movements.

“I should very much like some tea, Miss Sophie,” Master Alcuin said after a moment, rising from his seat and smiling at her with anxious eyes. “And I thank you. I dare say it would do us all good to rest from our labours for a little.”

“Yes,” said Gray, who was staring again. “It is here somewhere, I know, but we can neither of us find it, and my eyes are quite . . .” He rubbed at them with one hand.

Sophie set out to pour the tea, only to remember that she had not been able to find any milk. As she began to apologise, their host waved a hand at her and said, “Please, do not trouble yourself; I shall fetch the milk.” He murmured something under his breath and held out his right hand; there was a small sound from the direction of the pantry, and a moment later a little crockery milk-jug sailed through the door and floated neatly onto his outstretched palm. Sophie grinned, delighted. “An unseen summoning! You must teach me to do that next,” she told Gray.

“Must you, Magister?” Gray rebuked his teacher, but there was the ghost of a smile in his eyes. He helped himself to a slice of bread-and-butter, appearing not to notice that the bread was an inch thick at one end, and almost translucent at the other.

While they munched and sipped contentedly, Sophie, teacup in hand, drifted over to the desk and began idly turning pages. A small, ancient-looking codex had become almost entirely buried under its larger fellows, so that only a corner protruded from the mass; curious, she tugged at it gently. When at last it came free, she regarded its hand-tooled leather binding with a shock of recognition.

*   *   *

“I have seen this book before!” Sophie exclaimed, holding up a little leather-covered codex, crumbling at the edges. “In the library at Callender Hall. Not
this
book, I mean, but another copy of the same one. I remember noticing it because—”

Gray swallowed a mouthful of bread-and-butter and deposited his half-empty cup precariously on the top of a bookcase. “What is it?” he demanded, holding out his hand. “Let me see.” Master Alcuin had put down his cup, too, and come to look over Sophie's shoulder. “Fascinating,” he said. “I believed this to be the only copy extant.”

Silently she handed over the book, and Gray looked at it in consternation, for he too had seen it before, atop a stack of codices on the Professor's desk in Breizh. “
Treatise . . . on the uses of . . .
what is that word?
both . . . and . . . deadly
? . . .” Defeated by his imperfect knowledge of the language, he returned the book to Sophie and inquired penitently, “Could you translate, please?”

She smiled a little. “Your Brezhoneg has improved,” she commented, and then turned her attention to the volume in her hand. “
Treatise on the uses of poisons, both noxious and deadly, with the methods of procuring and compounding them . . .
” she read. “It is the only book in this language that I ever saw in the Professor's library that was not my mother's, and the only book of any sort devoted to poisons. And when last I looked for it—I had read only a little of it, you see, and meant to read the rest—it was not there. I thought it mislaid, but suppose the Professor had taken it, like the
Sapientia Delphi
?”

“He had,” said Gray. “I saw it in his study, whilst I was—” He cast a guilty glance at Master Alcuin, and cleared his throat. “During Lord Carteret's visit to Callender Hall.”

“Then . . . you think the ‘method' Lord Carteret speaks of is something in this book?” Sophie turned it over, then back again.

“Well,” said Gray, “why else should he have such a book? I have never known him to take any interest in poisons, or seen any books on the subject in his rooms here, and by your own account he had none in Breizh either. And I think we may be sure that poisoning is what they plan. We know that they wish to ensure that no connexion is apparent between themselves and Lord Halifax's death, and what other sort of
method
could possibly take such a time to prepare, or—”

Oh.
Oh.

“Whatever Taylor and Woodville were after,” he said, “on the night Gautier died, was something the Professor needed for . . .
this
. Something he could not otherwise acquire without arousing suspicion.”

*   *   *

“The name of this one means ‘heart's delight,'” said Sophie, some three-quarters of an hour and twenty pages later; she underlined the words with a finger as she read. Absorbed in the work of translating, she was so close to Gray that his every breath brought him the faint, heady lavender-and-rosemary scent of her hair. Master Alcuin sat at her other side, taking rapid notes of Sophie's translations.

“A sort of horrible joke, I suppose,” she went on. “The victim's heart, it says, ‘will appear to have stopped quite naturally'; a few drops only are needed, and it can be given in any draught of wine, ale, or mead.”

“If that is so,” said Master Alcuin, “we have found the Golden Fleece of poisoners.”

“‘To brew it requires—'” Sophie paused, frowning; after a moment her expression cleared, and she continued: “‘To brew it requires three separate distillations, carried out over a period of several months . . .'”

As he listened, a series of hitherto baffling details slipped into place in Gray's mind, and he went cold with dread.

“. . . too much groundwork left to lay . . .”

“‘Many of the ingredients are readily available,'” Sophie read, “‘but three there are that may be more difficult to obtain: the foxglove, which must be fresh and not dried or otherwise preserved; the distilled venom of . . .' Whatever can that be? Oh—‘of the
Africk cobra
'—I should not like to think how one obtains
that
; and . . .” She paused again, evidently puzzled, and Gray's feeling of dread deepened so that he half expected his teeth to begin chattering. “Look at this word,” she invited, “and see if it looks like Cymric or Kernowek or . . .”

Gray looked, and thought, and clamped his lips shut against a rising wave of nausea.

“A great pity your students failed you so badly, Professor . . . I know that you were counting on them to provide—”

To provide what?

The answer presented itself to Gray's mind in the form of Henry Taylor, clasping a carved teakwood box protectively against his chest.

“Yes,” he said bleakly. “It could certainly have been that.”

Master Alcuin leant across to look at the place marked by Sophie's finger. He blanched and clasped his hands together. “Do you truly believe this, Marshall?” His voice was low and urgent. “Are you absolutely certain? To accuse a Senior Fellow of such barbarity—”