Lady of Magick (14 page)

Sophie whirled, flushing, and found herself face-to-face with the Erse lecturer whom she had seen at dinner talking with Rory MacCrimmon. She produced a panicked smile and held out her hand, Alban-fashion, then at once wished that she had not. The older woman clasped it, however, with a warm smile of her own, and with a rush of relief Sophie at last succeeded in recalling her name. “Meadhbh Ní Sabháin,” she said. “Yes, I am, in a small way; and yourself?”

“Sophie Marshall is too modest,” said Mór MacRury, looming up behind Meadhbh Ní Sabháin. Her arm was looped familiarly through Rory MacCrimmon's, as though they had been two women, or two men; as they were nearly of a height, however, it did not look so odd as it might have done. “She is a very fine musician, and well she knows it.”

“Mór,” said Sophie, half in greeting, half in protest. The heat that had begun to fade from her cheeks rushed back redoubled. “Rory.”

Mór MacRury drew away and spoke quietly to Meadhbh Ní Sabháin—not so quietly, however, that Sophie could not hear her. “If you wish to persuade Sophie Marshall to play and sing for you,” she said, with a smile just this side of wicked glee, “the way to go about it is to offer her a song for her collection.”

Sophie smiled at this portrait of herself, collecting songs as Conall MacLachlan collected butterflies. The giggle that next escaped her, despite her best efforts to maintain the dignity appropriate to a
scholar, brought home to her just how much wine she had drunk with her dinner.

I ought to know better than that. I
do
know better. Imagine the things I might have said, after two more glasses!

She took a deep breath.

“I should very much like to learn a new Erse song or two, Meadhbh Ní Sabháin,” she said, “if you do not dislike the idea.” It occurred to her that this was not her own house, and she added hastily, “And if our hostess has no objection.”

The Chancellor's lady was at this moment crossing the room towards them, and—before Sophie had quite come to terms with the situation—gathering her guests before her like a mother duck chivvying her ducklings.

“Now, Sophie Marshall,” she said, “Mór MacRury has been telling me great things of you. You will not deny us a song, I hope?”

Ceana MacLachlan—Sophie still found it difficult not to think of her as Mrs. Arthur Breck—was much younger than her husband, though not so young as Sophie; the Chancellor and his wife put her in mind, in fact, of her father and stepmother, though she had no reason to suppose their partnership equally fraught. Ceana MacLachlan's elegantly dressed hair was the colour of sunrise in winter, a soft gold just touched with rose, and she had her brother's cornflower-blue eyes and his trick of narrowing them at the object of her scrutiny; but if she shared his desire to extract information from Sophie, she concealed it to much better effect.

“I—” Sophie faltered. “I thank you, very much—I fear that Mór MacRury greatly flatters me—”

“Oh, Sophie, sing ‘Ailein Duinn,'” said Mór.

“Later, perhaps,” said Ceana MacLachlan. “I should like first to hear a song of
your
home, Sophie Marshall, as we are honouring our visitors this evening. And then perhaps Meadhbh Ní Sabháin may favour us with a song of Eire?”

“Oh! Yes, please,” cried Sophie, only just managing to refrain from clapping her hands.

Meadhbh Ní Sabháin smiled at her. “Certainly,” she said.

At their urging, Sophie sat down to the pianoforte. Her hands arranged themselves upon the keys, almost without her conscious intention, as she considered: A song of Breizh? Of London? Of Oxfordshire? The melodies that presented themselves to her mind were those she had been learning from Donella MacHutcheon, from Mór and Rory and even Catriona, and she chuckled again, ruefully; had she indeed become a collector of songs?

Well, it is a more sensible occupation than collecting butterflies, at any rate.

Behind her, a sudden gust of wind rattled against a window-pane.

“Oh!” said Sophie abruptly, straightening her spine.

She resettled her hands in the necessary positions, and began to play.

The trees they grow so high, and the leaves they do grow green,

she sang.

And many a cold winter night my love and I have seen.

Of a cold winter night, my love, you and I alone have been;

Whilst my bonny boy is young, he's a-growing.

This song of Somersetshire was one she had loved from a child, one which her stepfather had forbidden—for reasons obscure to her until much later—and which she had reclaimed, in some sense, as a badge of her freedom from him.

When, at the end of the burden, she struck into the interlude, Sophie became aware that the hum of conversation had grown quieter, and eyes were turning towards her. She knew, of course, that her playing and singing were not altogether easy, and not only because Ceana MacLachlan's pianoforte was stiffer than her own well-worn instrument in Quarry Close. Amongst her close acquaintance, it might be no great matter if her singing should transmit her mood to her listeners; here, however, it would not do, being just the sort of
uninvited, unacknowledged influence which Dougal MacAngus, the lecturer in magickal ethics, called
an unjustifiable violation of the subject's will
. So far as she was able, therefore, she exerted herself to convey nothing in her singing but the songs themselves.

It was astonishingly difficult.

She reached the final verse at last and slid into the refrain:

I'll sit and I'll mourn his fate until the day I die,

And I'll watch all o'er his child while he's growing . . .

Then, slumping a little and briefly closing her eyes, she lifted her hands from the keyboard and folded them in her lap.

She had just time to notice that the room was very quiet—quieter than she could at all account for—before the company erupted into applause.

When pressed for another song, she ceded to Mór MacRury's reiterated request for “Ailein Duinn,” and then in turn petitioned those listeners who had gathered round the pianoforte to contribute a song to her collection—having decided that if she were to be known here in any case as a collector of popular songs, no great harm could come of embracing the title.

Meadhbh Ní Sabháin obliged with an unaccompanied song which she called a
caoineadh
. The music-room fell silent, little by little, as she sang; Sophie, coming back to herself at last to find tears drying on her cheeks, was not in the least astonished to be told that the
caoineadh
was a mourning-song. The one she had sung, Meadhbh Ní Sabháin explained, had been made by her own grandmother, upon the death of her first husband, and sung in the family ever since.

“We have had a song of mine, Mór MacRury,” said Meadhbh Ní Sabháin, smiling across the pianoforte despite the almost sombre mood of the room; “will you give us a song of yours?”

“Oh, yes, Mór, do,” said Sophie eagerly. “‘Fear a' Bhàta,' perhaps? That is Gray's favourite, you know.” Sophie did not sing it for him often; though Mór called it hopeful, it seemed to her almost as boundlessly sad as “Ailein Duinn.”

Mór, having surely anticipated some such request, accepted it gracefully, though there was a shadow of something in her bright blue eyes that looked very like anxiety. “You will play for me?” she said, moving to stand at Sophie's right, and Sophie nodded.

Mór MacRury, by her own admission, was an indifferent player upon the pianoforte, and only a little more skilled upon the harp, having had no opportunity to learn either as a girl. She had a sharp ear, however, and had learnt to show her voice to best advantage. It was a rich contralto, warm and deep, the colour of burnt sugar; and she invested the words of her song—composed, she had explained to Sophie, by a young woman whose betrothed had been feared lost at sea—with a yearning beauty that made Sophie wonder whether Mór had herself lost a husband or lover. Sophie could scarcely imagine asking such a question of anyone, however, and of the formidable, self-contained Mór MacRury still less.

The final verse of the song flowed into its refrain, and Sophie could not help adding a soft descant above the melody. Mór's vocal range was so much lower than her own that it was very like singing in harmony with Gray, though entirely without the characteristic shiver of magick passing between them.

Fhir a' Bhàta, na hóro eile,

Fhir a' Bhàta, na hóro eile,

Fhir a' Bhàta, na hóro eile,

Mo shoraidh slàn leat 's gach àit' an téid thu!

Their listeners applauded, and Mór retired from the field, wearing an expression of quiet satisfaction.

The impromptu concert seemed then at an end, and the gathering round the pianoforte dispersed. Before the end of the evening, however, Ceana MacLachlan sought Sophie out in her husband's library—where she was pleasantly engaged with Gray, Rory, and Professor Maghrebin in comparing two versions of an ancient atlas of the Mediterranean coast—to request another song.

Sophie, still fearful of giving offence, acquiesced with her most
pleasant smile, though she had begun to feel rather like a performing bear.

“Perhaps a duet?” she suggested, catching at Gray's hand as they passed out of the room.

“Oh!” Ceana MacLachlan turned to him with a delighted and slightly acquisitive smile. “You are a musician, also, Magister?”

Perhaps Ceana MacLachlan is a collector, like her brother,
thought Sophie,
but of useful dinner-guests rather than
Lepidoptera
.

When they regained the music-room, a debate was going forward between the Chancellor and several of his local guests—for the benefit of their Erse colleagues—as to whether the best views of the city were to be obtained from Castle Hill or from the peak of Arthur's Seat.

Sophie resumed her former seat at the pianoforte, and Gray stood at her back, his left hand resting on her right shoulder.

To assuage her nerves, Sophie fell back on their first and favourite duet, the song of the Border Country which they had sung together long before either had any suspicion of what they should one day be to one another.

Gray's resonant baritone carried the melody, steady and clear; the chord progression was so familiar that Sophie's fingers could execute it almost without conscious thought, leaving the most of her attention to the more interesting question of devising an obbligato. Though she had devoted many hours and a great deal of paper and ink to the annotation of melodies acquired from other sources, Sophie had never tried to pin her improvised descants to the page; it was part of the joy of singing with Gray—unshakable in any melody, once learnt—that she need never sing a descant the same way twice.

Gray's hand on her shoulder warmed her skin, a tangible connexion mirroring the ephemeral link that hummed between them. Sophie forgot their audience entirely, forgot that she was surrounded by near strangers, and surrendered to the joy of the song.

When the final chord died away, she came full awake once more to a deep, unnerving silence.

Gray's fingers tightened along her collar-bone, in warning or in
reassurance; she blinked, with a small reflexive shake of her head, and raised her eyes to look about her.

Apprehension seized her at the sight of a dozen faces staring wide-eyed back at her. Had she set her magick loose, even briefly, without intending it? Or unknowingly committed some breach of custom, some insult to the Chancellor's hospitality?

At last Arthur Breck himself cleared his throat and said gruffly, “That was well sung; I congratulate you.”

Sophie bowed her head again in pleased relief, and Gray relaxed his hold upon her shoulder.

The silence having been broken, conversations again struck up around the room. Sophie rose from her seat, flashed a brief, tense smile at Gray, and took shelter in the corner behind the standing harp—which was taller than herself and thus offered the best possibility of concealment—to regain her composure. Her back against the oak panelling, she pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and took a deep breath.

Hearing footsteps, she raised her head, expecting to see Gray—but instead beheld Mór MacRury, approaching with her slim hands clasped about her elbows and a tense, troubled expression on her face.

“Mór—” Sophie faltered. “Are . . . are you quite well?”

Mór's blue eyes studied her, uncomfortably sharp. “I do not understand you, Sophie Marshall,” she said at last.

Sophie could think of no reply.

“Your husband told me,” Mór continued, “that you and he
are much in the habit of working spells in concert
. Is this what you meant?”

Sophie's shoulders tensed, even as the more rational part of her mind pointed out that she had survived far worse things than an awkward conversation about the nature and idiosyncrasies of her magick.

“I am not altogether sure what you mean,” she said—carefully, but with perfect truth.

Mór's russet brows crimped briefly, a flash of impatience that vanished almost as soon as it appeared. “You forget that I see what most cannot.”

“Well, then,” began Sophie, “perhaps—”

“Do tell us, Mór MacRury.” Mór started at the sound of Gray's voice as he stepped up behind her. “What is it that you see?”

*   *   *

With the pianoforte at his back, Gray listened with only half an ear to the conversation around him, keeping an eye firmly on Sophie. She had (as Gray had more than half expected, after having been so much stared at) withdrawn to a secluded corner, where she might feel less like a specimen under glass. At present she was half concealed behind a large harp, her dark head bowed and her hands pressed to her eyes: both trying not to weep and reading herself a stern lecture on the foolishness of her feelings—a habit which he earnestly hoped that she might soon leave behind—and trying, too, to resist the lure of her native magick. If only she were not so determined upon this point . . . ! Her self-imposed restrictions were already wearing upon her, perhaps more than she knew; though of course it was her secret to keep if she chose, he could not think such secrecy needful, in a place where the heiress to the throne could dine in the University Refectory quite without remark.