Plenilune (15 page)

She almost reached out to stroke the fur behind his ears, but caught herself at the last moment and looked away.

“I can manage to be in the same house as Rupert,” she protested stiffly, hotly, “but to be in a carriage for an entire day’s ride, to be that close to—to such an
evil
man…He is
evil
.”

“Then best we not provoke the devil,” said the fox gently. “The wall is too high to jump at present, Miss Coventry. Let’s run along it for a while to see if there are any gaps in it further on.”

She shut her eyes and shook her head, confused, furious, crushed, tired, ridiculously comforted by the presence of a fox. “Please call me Margaret. It is absurd that you call me ‘Miss Coventry.’ “

The fox grinned. “As it pleases you! Does this mean I can expect more interviews in the future?” He looked around at the cellar, his eyes taking the yellow light of the lamp and flashing like the watered scales of a fish. “It gets so damnably lonesome down here. No one ever comes down except for Rhea, and even then she takes it upon herself to forget.”

While he was looking away, Margaret cast an eye over the lean body of the fox. He was underfed, which made him seem taller and lankier, and behind the faint mockery of his friendly wall eyes she thought she saw a haunted look. “Of course I will try. I will not promise, in case I cannot keep the promise. I don’t know how long I will be away at Lookinglass.”

“No, of course, I understand. Take care of yourself and dress warmly.” He looked at her quizzically. “You wouldn’t happen to have a switchblade about you, would you?”

She looked blearily at him, askance. “A switchblade? Of course not.”

He sniffed. “No, I didn’t think so. Well, do attempt to enjoy yourself. I hear Rupert’s relative is a passing good chap.”

“You mean Skander Rime?” She saw the young man’s face again, so like Rupert, suspicious but at the same time open and friendly. He was a kindly, sporting figure. “He isn’t so bad. But Rupert hates him. I’m afraid to give too much attention to him lest Rupert think of something particularly nasty to do to his cousin. I w-wouldn’t put it past him.”

“No, nor I.” The fox heaved a great sigh, flanks expanding, and climbed to his feet. His great red brush of a tail swept the ground behind him and he carried himself, for all that he was a fox, rather royally and, for all that he was a fox, with a rather supercilious air about the tilt of his nose. “Now we have settled it. You must go with Rupert tomorrow to Lookinglass and be a good girl and take care of yourself, and be the prettiest girl at the gala. It is late now, and far past time for any more talking. You had better get yourself to bed. It is hardly an appropriate hour,” he added, pausing to sit down and give his left ear a brutal clawing with a hind foot, “for young ladies to be out of bed and walking about.” He sniffed prodigiously and shook his head as if to put his ear back in place, and remained seated, looking up at her in a cocky, attentive manner.

With the obedience of blind weariness Margaret got stiffly to her feet. She was still shaking, but from cold now more than from terror. There was a moment in which the world blurred and shifted dangerously to the side, each blinking image like single pearls sliding off a string…but then the warm pressure of the fox’s flank against her calf steadied her.

“Will you be all right up the stair?” he was asking as her vision cleared. “Take it one step at a time. What were you thinking, coming all the way down here in your nightgown…?”

He fussed gently around her as she walked toward the stair, making the occasional jest which she felt vaguely guilty for not hearing clearly and not laughing at. But she stopped, wide awake with a pang of terror, when she realized that he left her several paces from the stair and was not coming with her any farther.

He sat primly on the dirt floor, his flaming bush of a tail wrapped up before himself with the fluffy white tip of it mingling with the fluffy white of his waistcoat. The lamp diffused its light around his head, making for him a kind of hero’s aureole.

“Aren’t you coming?” she asked, thrusting the words at him like a knife.

His whiskers twitched wryly. “Well, no. I would, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

She stared at him. He was small, coloured like fire and darkness and the plume of blackthorn, with all the vivacity and gallantry of the three. Yet he did not come. In her crushed weariness her reason deserted her, and in its place her intuition felt that he was the sort of person who, when flint struck steel, would prove to be a coward.

You are always alone, Margaret
.

“Good-night, fox,” she said.

His teeth flashed in an apologetic smile. “Good-night, Margaret. Be careful.”

6 | Lookinglass House

The evening was washed in a warm rose light damson as Margaret’s palfrey, following after Rupert’s, came up the last stretch of the metalled road through a beech-wood, crossed the stone bridge that spanned the chasm, and came in sight at last of Lookinglass. The light, diffusing over everything—the turf, the numerous sprawling tangles of blackthorn and furze, the steeply descending pine-woods, the cascade in the chasm—hardened along the skyline with the furnace-colour of a flame, but the air cut like cold iron in Margaret’s lungs.

Rupert had not said a word about her lip. When she had risen in the morning, stiff and hardly rested, she had looked in the mirror and found her lip conspicuously swollen and broken inside. There was no time to do anything about it, and nothing that could be done. She had suffered with cool dignity the dark, almost sadistic, mirthless smile that had been in Rhea’s eyes while she dressed and packed and, as the sun was just rising, met Rupert in the stable yard. The lip had stung so dreadfully for several hours that it took much of Margaret’s will to keep her mind off the pain, but by noon the crisp November air had numbed it, as well as all the other features of her face. Between the cold of the air and the cold of Rupert, who had not tried much to make conversation with her, she had retreated back within herself to a warm place that was, perversely, the fiery colour of a fox’s coat.

As if waking from his thoughts, Rupert stirred in the saddle. The rings in the reins jinked brightly in the late autumn air as he shifted them, raising his hand to indicate the rocky cliff face ahead.

“There you are,” he said, almost as if he were presenting it to her. “There is Lookinglass. Don’t mind the precarious visage: she is as sturdy a manor as Marenové House.”

Through her frosty crust and the swimming golden air Margaret stared up—
up
—at Lookinglass. Even in that yellow light the walls and buildings, climbing like a square-boned dragon up the steeply sloping fellside, were a hue of pale blue stone. The level rays of the sun struck off dozens—hundreds—of windows, flashing them all back at her with a power that Margaret thought was enough to reach Earth. It stabbed at her as the shepherd’s panpipe had, only more war-like, as if the monstrously delicate construction, growing, it seemed, out of the soil of the fells, was the tip of a spear ready to be dropped from on high. She looked up past its many courts and terraces to the topmost tower, a single octagonal tower rising above everything to etch its powerful figure against the molten November sky. She wished with a strong longing to be up there, and to look out on a landscape hammered out of bronze.

They left the bridge behind. The roar of the cascade made the air tremble all around them and the spray of it gathered on Margaret’s bare cheeks and turned them pale. The road became gravel and stone corduroys raised out of the floor of the lower terrace; it took them up a gentle slope, past the clusters of limed timber houses, horse-sheds, long-barns, the smithy and the glass-blower and the slight, ever-present reek of the butcher’s to the first gate of Lookinglass. It stood open, and she and Rupert passed through unhindered. The guards on duty must have known Rupert by sight for they straightened at once, grim, eyes level-set, and did not speak a word as their little cavalcade passed by.

They never turned, but Margaret could feel their eyes on the back of her neck.

The light seemed to grow stronger the higher they went. Though she kept herself properly still and never turned her head, Margaret was looking all about as they went up through the levels, past the baths and the church and the common meeting hall, through the exquisite court of horses, a block given over entirely to Skander’s mounts. The single tower at the top of all which stabbed upward still and made the heavens bleed a deepening blue, reeled like a compass-point to the pole-star above them, its angle sharper and sharper the closer they came. Margaret was careful not to look at it much now: the sheer stupendous height of the thing made her head swim.

After all its curtain walls, Margaret had almost expected the House itself to look somewhat small and ridiculous—a small thing couched defensively behind a mind-numbing tonnage of stone. So she caught her breath in spite of herself when they passed up through the last gate—guarded by watchtowers and garlanded in hoarwithy—and came under the light-spangled shadow of the House.

The late light, caught up here like yellow wine in a glass, struck off the House’s numerous windows and scattered it brokenly all over the courtyard. Here the gold air was embroidered with silver. The House itself was loftier-built than Marenové, which was squat and somewhat sullen of appearance: it had the delicacy and liveability of a working cathedral with its soaring gables and pinnacles, its ramparts decorated in verdigris copper. The front doors were double and immense, the porch semi-circular and spacious. It struck Margaret that, though Skander Rime was unaccustomed to, and did not enjoy, entertaining, he had a happily situated home in which to host his guests.

As they entered the courtyard there was a fine stir from the low private stable wing; of a sudden it seemed a hundred dogs began to bark from somewhere behind a long colonnade and a row of yews. From out of the stable wing came half a dozen hands, all of them smartly clad in black with polished rubbers on their feet. Crows, dozens of crows, erupted from a garden and scattered dark across the sky. The noise, the commotion, broke on Margaret with a startling violence and she sat rigid in the saddle, by all appearances waiting to be helped down—in reality, waiting for the world to stop reeling.

Between Livy and the stable hands, the palfreys and Rupert’s champagne were quickly arranged and preparations were swiftly going forward to accommodate the expected guests. Rhea, in her quiet way, busied herself with arranging Margaret’s things. It was Rupert who came for Margaret.

She had always known he would. He swung off his palfrey, delivered it over to the care of a stable hand, and swung round, fetching a glance over the crowd until he saw her nearby. Like a black heron he stalked through the cheerfully chaotic mess, the only seemingly solid thing about her small, surreal world, and with a cool half-smile reached up to lift her down. Margaret felt her insides crawl and shrink in on themselves as his hands closed around her waist. It was by instinct that she put her hands on his shoulders to keep her own balance; everything else was crawling away from him.

The late light glinted in his eye as he looked slantwise at her. “There, here we are,” he said in a low tone under the shriek and clatter of horses and the call of men—and she understood him to mean, not merely “Here we are,” but “Here we are, and you will play your part to my satisfaction.”

She could not have spoken had she wanted to. Her throat was cold and constricted. With a stiff movement she broke her gaze and looked away from him, wearing her chin high.

Rupert’s hand moved to her wrist and tightened, warningly.

“Rhea,” she called, a little sharply for his hand hurt.

The maid straightened from seeing to the latches on a trunk and regarded her, coolly, quietly, the dark hostility just lingering behind her eyes.

“Rhea, I will want my brown muslin for this evening’s supper. Have it laid out for me.”

The maid nodded wordlessly and turned away with her characteristically fluid motion which was at once beautiful and insolent.

It was strange how quiet rage could so compose a spirit. The constant, unspoken insolence of the maid roused the old rage in Margaret, subsuming the fear of Rupert’s presence. It still pulsed inside her, quietly, far down at the base of her being, but for now she thought she could move on in spite of it. With an effort that was almost visible, she composed herself.

A familiar, disconsolate shriek turned her attention to the House steps. Skander Rime stood on the threshold, hanging for an instant supreme and detached above them, Thairm bating on his wrist. Even at that distance she saw the swift cool look of displeasure lash across his eyes when he saw his cousin, but then his eye fell on her and he smiled—a real, warm smile. With a practiced movement he turned aside to his manservant—who seemed in his big blue tunic to be rather like a massive blue-jay—and passed the gyrfalcon off on him, then descended the steps toward them.

He looked a lot more solid and imposing here under the shadow of his own tower than he had in the shadows of Marenové House. His friendly bulk swung toward them, and Margaret noticed for the first time that he showed signs of becoming bow-legged in the future. No matter—she smiled shyly—he would sit a horse to the end of his days and be happy.

Provided she was careful his days were not cut short.

“Lady Margaret!” He took her free hand and raised it to his lips. “So, you have come. It is a pleasure to have you.”

As she made her reply, she could see behind the veil of his eyes that he had not been certain she would come. She wondered if he would rather she had not. “But of course,” she said with affected gaiety, dipping low. “I had no choice.” Rising, she added to soften the blow, “Who would miss a gala thrown by you?”

But both Rupert and Skander had caught the jab. The former’s pressure on her arm increased a fraction; the latter’s eyes lit up with a serious, mocking light that fetched in Rupert with their glance.

“Do not count the chickens before they have hatched, Miss Coventry. You are the first to arrive and the punch has yet to be sampled.”