Chicks in Chainmail (21 page)

"Hello, Wilfred," Miss Rowena Spencer said, opening the top half of the kitchen door on a brisk March morning. "Have you come to do Papa's accounts again?"

Rowena Spencer was a damsel of that blonde bux-omness long celebrated by the less-respectable English poets, though Rowena herself was a young woman of impeccable probity. Her birth was the result of a delicately disregarded
mesalliance
between Lady Letitia Burroughs, only daughter of the Viscount Greystoke, and the village blacksmith, young Weland Spencer. Upon the occasion of the Viscountcy's devolution upon the broad shoulders of a distant cousin raised entirely in foreign parts by wildly unsuitable persons, Lady Letty had announced that rather than remain one more instant beneath Cousin John's roof, she would marry the first man she saw, the subject . of her vow being the fellow who was shoeing her horse at the time.

There were times at which Rowena Spencer wished that her late mother had been a shade less precipitate, but she was a stout-hearted English girl who embraced her present station with a stalwart heart while dreaming of better things.

One of those better things was Wilfred.

Wilfred Roland Oliver Charlemagne Lancelot Mallory was the only son and principal heir of Sir Arthur Mallory, a robust gentleman whose fortune obtained in equal measure from Scottish sheep and Birmingham mills. Young Wilfred had scarce nineteen summers to his credit, and—though his hair and eyes could charitably be called blond and blue—to name them so would be the most definite thing about Mr. Mallory's person.

"Hullo, Rowena," Wilfred said gloomily. "No, that isn't until the end of the week." He drooped endearingly upon the doorsill, reminding Rowena of a desolate dandelion. "Is your father in?" he pursued, for he was a polite young man, and cognizant of the social necessities.

Mr. Wilfred Mallory's greatest desire was to be an accountant: he had first salved that burning hunger in his maiden soul by preparing so rigorous a catalog of his father's extensive library that his work was quite the envy of the entire county. There had been numerous offers tendered for his services, but Sir Arthur had angrily rejected them all, saying that one in whose veins burned the immortal blood of the greatest of English kings (Sir Arthur having conveniently forgotten that he had purchased his title in 1807) would not stoop to clerking drudgery.

As Wilfred found himself without many outlets for his natural talents at Camelot Court, and the recipient of little peace within its walls, he had endeared himself to the tradespeople of Miching Malicho by a positive yearning to handle their accounts and billing, and for this reason he was much seen in the shops on High Street around the fifteenth of each month.

"He's at the smithy, of course," Rowena said. "But come inside, Wilfred—there's new bread made and the cloth laid for tea. Is it about the tourney?"

"So you know, then," Wilfred said despondently. "Does everyone know?"

"
Only
everyone in the county," Rowena said, in an attempt to be consoling. "And possibly London," she added.

Sir Arthur Mallory had taken up the new Gothic fashion embraced by Horace Walpole seventy years before, and with the inspiration of Strawberry Hill before him, Sir Arthur had taken the fruit of many successful years in the wool trade and erected his own homage to medieval chivalry and his own hotly-mooted ancestors. The erection of Camelot Court in the otherwise undistinguished border town of Miching Malicho (located between the Whiteadder and the Tweed, and of very little earthly import whatever) was far more than a nod to the current interest in the Gothic style: it represented, in fact, the first flowering of Sir Arthur's greatest obsession—to prove his descent from the legendary King Arthur himself, and, failing the seizin of the throne of England by genealogical means, the restoration of the Court of Camelot at the very least.

That Sir Arthur had not been invited to dine among the peers of the realm last year, when Prinny had finally legitimately assumed his father's dignities and the style of King George IV with all the medieval pomp and splendor that a blithe disregard for financial economy could muster, had been a crushing disappointment to Sir Arthur's medieval ambitions, it is true, but in all probability that gentleman would merely have retreated to the sanctuary of his anachronistic crenelations to lave his psychic wounds in the salt of resentment, were it not for The Book.

Ivanhoe.

Sir Walter Scott—the Wizard of the North, the Great Enchanter—was a noted
romancier
who could always be counted upon to produce something ornate and dramatic about the many injustices suffered by his beloved Highlanders, but, sales having fallen off on the
Waverly
series of late, he had turned his mind and his pen to a time and a place he hoped would be dearer to the hearts and pocketbooks of his reading public.

He called it
Ivanhoe
, and it burst upon the literary scene in December of 1819.

In February of 1821, Sir Arthur Mallory, cheated of the greater ceremony beyond his touch, determined that Camelot Court would be the site of a tourney that very summer.

"This is the outside of enough," Sir Arthur's son said forlornly. He seated himself at Rowena's well-scrubbed kitchen table and regarded the corn-gold curls, coral-pink lips, and gillyflower-blue eyes of his hostess without any particular approval. If the truth were told, Wilfred liked numbers much better than girls, although some girls—Rowena being one—were slightly less objectionable than others.

Rowena placed a mug of hard cider in front of him, along with the end of a not loaf fresh out of the oven. He was, she felt, too thin, and wanted feeding. "A tourney," Wilfred repeated, just in case either of them had forgotten the cause of his depression.

"Perhaps it will be amusing," Rowena suggested hopefully. "The banners, and the horses—and the armor."

"Do you know how to wear a suit of armor?" Wilfred moaned. "Do I? Do any of the half-mad antiquarians Papa is inviting? We have had nothing but the tourney for breakfast, nuncheon, and tea since he took this maggot into his head—the winner of the joust is to crown whom he will the Queen of Love and Beauty and ask what boon he will, and I am sure Papa would award Elaine's hand in marriage to the victor, did he think he could manage it without her turning him into a toad!"

"Ah," Rowena said. An idea was beginning to take strong possession of her, and she felt her heart beat faster. "And may anyone compete in this tourney?"

Wilfred—who had finished one large mug of alcoholic apple juice and was beginning on the second—laughed as harshly as so indefinite a young man might.

"Oh, aye—anyone who shows up with horse and armor will doubtless be invited—the more mysterious, the better! But there is one whom you will not find in the lists on the Feast of St. John, and that one, Miss Spencer, is I!"

It should not be particularly difficult
, Rowena told herself, looking about the now-deserted smithy (Papa having gone for his usual three-tankard lunch at the Bell and Candle, the local coaching house),
and it is my only chance to fix my interest with Wilfred
.

Rowena gazed about the Miching Malicho smithy with a practiced eye. Through this well-built structure at the edge of town came every horse, cart, and hinge in the county requiring shoeing or maintenance. Rowena had helped her father here on many an occasion. Now she was going to help .herself.

Wilfred said that anyone might compete. And that he would not. And that the winner could crown the Queen of Low and Beauty
—
who would sit beside him at the feast that Sir Arthur will hold thereafter
.

She picked up a crested helm that was lying in the corner, awaiting removal of its dents. Most of the armor gracing the halls of Sir Arthur's castle had been made here, there not being enough available from Samuel Pratt's fine antiquarian show rooms in Bond Street to nurture Sir Arthur's anachronistic mania.

And if what Wilfred—and local gossip—said was true, orders would soon be flooding in from all over the nation for improvement and custom-fitting of ancestral armor. In such confusion, it would be simplicity itself to add one more requisition.

So
all I have to do is win the tourney
—
and crown Wilfred. That should make him notice met

Nobody will notice me
. Elaine Mallory sat in the window seat of her tower laboratory, her battered green kerseymere dress wadded up around her knees as she sat curled up in the window seat. The heat from the athanor nestled in its straw-filled cradle did little to palliate the chill of the room, likewise the small alcohol-fed flames beneath certain of her other experiments.

If it was Wilfred Mallory's curse to have been born an ordinary chap into a family of monomaniacal eccentrics, Elaine's curse was to wish to have everything both ways.

Elaine Guinevere Astolat Mallory was a well-grown damsel of three-and-twenty, the pleasing effect of her black hair and brown eyes—and a most agreeable countenance for one whose marriage settlements were known to be so large—marred only slightly by a certain randomness of toilette and a tendency to slouch. While her dowry ensured no lack of eligible suitors for her hand, her lamentable tendency to quiz young hopefuls upon their Latin and Greek made it likely that she would be keeping house beneath her father's roof for many a year to come.

This did not normally cast Elaine's spirits so far into the dismals as it might be supposed,
as
Elaine was the recipient of a generous allowance, the entire North Tower to her personal use, and a strong tendency to follow in her father's footsteps: she was studying sorcery.

However, what was tolerable and even agreeable when it was unknown to those whose regard must always be solicited became far otherwise when it was to be held up to consideration before an audience drawn from naif the persons of
ton
resident in the counties of England.

There would be a Queen of Love and Beauty chosen at the Mallorean Tourney, and it was, after all, only reasonable that the daughter of the tourney's host should receive this encomium.

And she wouldn't. No matter who won. Even if by some miracle Wilfred were to win (unlikely in the extreme, as he was so far refusing even to ride in the opening procession) he would be unlikely to remember to choose her, no matter how black-and-blue she pinched him the night before.

Oh, if only
she
had a champion to ride into battle for her!

Elaine's gaze sharpened, looking not to the meters of glass tubing and flasks of bubbling reagents, but to the bookshelf beyond. Slowly she got to her feet and crossed the room.

There, between a copy of Francis Barrett's
The Magus
and John Dee's
Talismantic Inteligencer
was a copy of The Book. She flipped it open and began to read, her lips moving as she told over the familiar description of a knight, raven-haired and ebon-eyed, his skin burnt black in the fires of Outremerian suns. The most puissant, the most ascetic, the most able knight and Templar in all Christendom.

All she had to do was find some way to get him.

News of Sir Arthur's entertainment was broadcast across an England desperate for diversion and uneasy beneath the rule of their new (and most unsatisfactory) king. All over England, the thought of dusting off great-grandfather's armor, borrowing the tenant's best plowhorse, and going off to tourney, took on a lustre that no sensible pastime could match.

Sir Arthur spent lavishly. There was the venue of the event itself to be constructed; tilt-yard and melee field, as well as the grandstands from which the entertainment was to be watched. There was the small army of seamstresses, at a half-shilling a day, needed to sew up the cloaks, tabards, surcoats, shield covers, pavilions, banners, bannerets, pennons, gonfalons, and the ornamental swagging that would decorate both the tourney field and the banqueting hall.

The banquet itself had grown to a feast with covers for five hundred souls, three hundred of whom would have to be accommodated at trestle tables on the south lawn, their revelries lit by torches. And that was only the beginning.

In fact, if not for the
chere amie
who had been (so she said), drawn to Miching Malicho by news of the tourney, Sir Arthur might have given it up altogether.

Sir Arthur, in short, had met a lady.

Mrs. Titania Underbill's vague personal antecedents were more than offset by her opulent personal charms. The young widow (Mr. Underhill having exited the scene in a manner equally inexplicit) had, upon inspecting it, found Camelot Court so quaint, so charming, yet so comfortable and modern, that she had quickly extracted an invitation from Sir Arthur to hold herself his guest for the indefinite future.

"It's disgusting," Elaine had said.

"It isn't quite the thing," her brother had responded, and the siblings had found themselves as close to agreement as they had been any time these past two decades.

What neither of them suspected was that Mrs. Underhill reciprocated their feelings, and felt that she could certainty dispense with both of Sir Arthur's inconvenient children before settling into a domestic arrangement with their father.

The Mallorean Tourney would be the perfect opportunity.

By day Rowena Spencer aided her father at the forge. By night she first crafted a suit of armor, and then a sword and shield. Once these items were hers, her evening hours were devoted to practice, since to bear away the prize at the tourney she had to win against all comers.