The Midnight Queen (7 page)

He could not now linger there without her finding his behaviour suspicious; unfortunately, nor could he, as he had planned, climb the stairs to try the door of Lord Carteret's bedroom. Instead, therefore, he put his hands in his pockets and trudged away in the direction of the kitchen, as though returning empty-handed to the Professor.

Gray had intended only to avoid arousing suspicion; it appeared, however, that his dejection had instead evoked Gwenaëlle's sympathy for a fellow sufferer from her employer's caprices, for she said quietly, “Mr. Marshall, wait.”

Gray turned; she gave him a small smile and held up a key. “Mrs. Wallis's master key opens most of the doors in the house. This one too, it may be.”

Gwenaëlle looked carefully up and down the corridor before trying the key in the lock. For a moment it stuck fast, and she frowned; then she wiggled it gently, and with a soft click it turned.

Gray thanked her, and to his great relief she withdrew the key and went away about her business, leaving him to deal in solitude with the Professor's wards. This he had expected to present the more difficult challenge; releasing another mage's wards was always a tricky business, and Gray's present limits did not encourage optimism. To his surprise, however, the wards proved to be of the most basic kind, sufficient probably to protect the room against eavesdropping but, despite his very questionable intentions, offering no resistance to his crossing the threshold.

Gray had never been invited to enter this room, but it reminded him strongly of the Professor's study at Merlin: well stocked with claret, port, and brandy, a small selection of books tidily arrayed in glass-fronted cases, busts of Pythagoras and Apuleius. He had not time for a thorough search—even if he were fortunate and the Professor did not soon return to the house, Gwenaëlle might pass by again at any moment and hear him rummaging in drawers and pigeonholes—but he cast his eye over the contents of the desk and opened each of the drawers. The exercise was rendered less efficient by not knowing what it was he sought. There might have been a letter half written, a book open for consultation, some object concealed in a pigeonhole that resisted easy explanation, but there was not. There were, however, several codices stacked on one corner of the desk, and at the top of one stack a small leather-bound codex with a title in Breton stamped upon the cover—which surprised him a little, for he had never heard the Professor speak so much as a single word of that language. There was also a broken pen, one anomalous brown-and-tawny feather tossed carelessly in among the white goose-quills that were recognisably the Professor's. Might this have been abandoned by Lord Carteret? Gray pocketed it on the chance.

His hurried but systematic rummage concluded with the pockets of the powdering-gown that hung from a hook on the back of the door. Here at last he found something, or what might be something: a folded sheet of note-paper, at the top of which was written, in the Professor's careful hand, the words
lightly the gods' gifts
, and below it, in a different hand altogether, a long series of figures. Gray frowned at it. Could it possibly be of any significance? Surely, if it were, the Professor would not have been so careless with it? But he kept his study locked, and no doubt considered this a sufficient precaution.

Gray could not, he decided, take the chance of missing what might be a clue to the Professor's intentions. Stealing it would draw too much attention; was there time to make a new copy for himself? Quickly he collected pen, ink, and writing-paper from the desk and began copying the document. When he had finished—his copy scrawled so quickly as to be only just legible, but as accurate and complete as he could make it—he tucked the original back into the pocket where he had found it, and the copy into the front of his shirt.

After closing the door behind him, he spent an anxious few moments standing in the corridor with one hand spread over the lock, leaning his forehead against the oak and muttering first another prayer to Janus, then a locking-spell that he had read in the
Acta Societatis Magicam
, a few months and a lifetime ago. Though it was a small spell, he could not at first catch the trick of it, the shaping of his magick to persuade the tumblers to turn—the point was not to lock the door by magick, as he had planned to unlock it, but to induce it to lock itself as if with a key. On the third repetition, however, just as his hands were beginning to shake and his ears to imagine footsteps approaching behind him, the lock yielded with another soft click.

Gray exhaled raggedly, scrubbed his sleeve across the keyhole, and hastened away to the back stairs.

The guest rooms allotted to Viscount Carteret were neither locked nor warded. It would have looked suspicious, Gray supposed, to lock one's door in a house in which one had been welcomed as a guest; did the lack of wards—even against listeners—suggest that Lord Carteret had not sufficient talent to set them?

Given the lack of such precautions, it was not to be supposed that Gray would find any incriminating object or document lying about in plain view. Having shut the door behind himself, therefore, he began his search with the sorts of hiding-places he might have used himself. There was nothing interesting on the top of the wardrobe, beneath the bed with the necessary, under the washbasin, or tucked between the dressing-table and the wall; nothing in the pockets of any of Lord Carteret's coats or concealed among his linens. There were no stacks of books that might have concealed papers; the small escritoire had but one drawer, which proved to contain only perfectly innocuous writing-paper, ink-bottle, and pounce-box.

Gray carefully avoided passing before the window, which faced backwards, lest he be seen from without, but suspended his search periodically to cast an eye down into the park. To do so he approached the window from the side, on his knees, and peered through the pane in the bottom corner. He was glad of this precaution when he spied the Professor and his guest, still some distance away, walking unhurriedly back towards the house; in his hasty retreat from the window, his glance fell upon a lacquered dispatch-box which had been secreted in the narrow space between the wardrobe and the outer wall, on the far side of the window.

Gray scuttled across the gap and drew the box from its hiding-place. It was locked, of course, but as he had managed to relock the door of the Professor's study . . .

The small lock yielded without protest to one of his collection of unlocking-spells. Inside were what appeared to be a letter, folded but unaddressed and still unsealed, and a small leather-bound codex. Gray extracted the letter and studied the close, crabbed script. His heart beat faster; it was another inexplicable series of figures, written, he was almost certain, in the same hand as those he had found in the Professor's dressing-gown pocket.

He crept back to the window and, seeing Lord Carteret and the Professor still strolling about the gardens, apparently absorbed in conversation, took pen and ink and added this new series of figures to his copy of the first set. When he had finished, returned the original to the dispatch-box, and tucked the copy back into the breast of his shirt, he turned his attention to the codex.

It appeared to be a diary; dates and engagements were recorded in the same crabbed hand, with occasional names but a preponderance of initials. Gray's pulse quickened as he found the date of his expedition with Taylor and the others noted together with the initials
AC
and
M
, though in fact it left him none the wiser—
AC
must be the Professor, but
M
might be anyone in the kingdom. Gray was unshakably persuaded, however, that whoever
M
was, he would speak in an imposing basso.

He turned the pages eagerly but found nothing that, even to his mistrustful eye, presented the least appearance of suspicion, nor the least clue to the identity of
M
. It was immediately evident, however, that any passage longer than a few words was written in some private cipher—not the same one used in the letter, for rather than figures it consisted of roughly word-sized groups of Greek characters.

Gray knew an agonised moment of indecision. Nearly every page of the diary was filled with cryptic or enciphered notations, which at present he could make nothing of. He had certainly not time to copy the whole of it and did not dare take it away with him, but still less could he see any way to determine which passages, even should he succeed in deciphering them, might be of use to him. The entire exercise, moreover, had begun to make him uneasy, for the gods knew what state secrets might be quite properly concealed in the papers of a man with responsibilities such as Lord Carteret's. Gray had no business here that he could defend. Still, Lord Carteret had been in the Professor's Oxford rooms, had certainly spoken of some plan to harm the Master of Merlin in some way, whether bodily or not. And so Gray, despite his misgivings, found the most recent additions to the diary, one of them dated to the previous day, and transcribed them onto another sheet of the Professor's writing-paper before carefully replacing the book in the dispatch-box. The box was locked by the same expedient as the Professor's study—the spell was easier to work this time, whether because of that prior success or because this much smaller lock required a proportionally smaller expenditure of magick—and restored to its place of concealment, and Gray was half out of the room before, with a stifled “Horns of Herne!” he turned back, retrieved the dispatch-box, and polished away the handprints from its glossy surface with the tail of his shirt.

It was a matter of moments to traverse the corridor to the servants' stair and ascend to his own bedroom. Once there, Gray retrieved his writing-case from beneath a stack of grimoires on his desk and spoke the words to suspend the spell that locked it. Then he began patting his pockets for the key.

It was not until he had exhausted all possible pockets and resorted to a further trial of the unlocking-spell that left him dizzy and gasping—
I have found my limit, then,
he reflected sourly—that, raising a hand to tug at his collar, he remembered that he had hung the key on a length of twine about his neck.

The pen and the papers safely locked away alongside Jenny's letters and Arzhur Gautier's handkerchief, he crept down the stairs again and made his way back to the spadework he had abandoned in the kitchen garden.

*   *   *

Lord Carteret departed a few days later, having given no visible sign that Gray's incursion into his private papers had been remarked upon—unless it were some little added contempt in his gaze. The contempt was certainly justified; Gray had sat up late every evening since, poring over the purloined documents until his eyes swam and his head ached, but they remained as cryptic as ever, and Gray as much in the dark as before. He felt slow and stupid, as though he had drunk too much wine, and no amount of sleep or fresh air seemed to clear his head.

The fog slowly lifted over the ensuing days, until Gray regained sufficient self-command to recognise that what had seemed an ordinary lock on Lord Carteret's dispatch-case must have had some defensive spell upon it, designed to befuddle intruders.

He had yet to break Lord Carteret's ciphers, however. He felt sure that if he could only have had the help of his friend Evans-Hughes—who delighted in puzzles and ciphers of all sorts, and was gifted at scrying besides—the documents must have rendered up their secrets in short order, but given the circumstances of their last meeting, he could not imagine that Evans-Hughes would be at all disposed to help him, even if they had not been separated by nearly the width of the kingdom.

Might Master Alcuin be of some assistance in this? Gray had written his former tutor several letters—in the same cautious vein as his first letter to Jenny—but he had as yet received no reply, which made him suspect something amiss. The Professor had certainly had the Proctors on his side, and the gods alone knew how many of the other Fellows; the Porters too, it might be. If that were so, it would be foolhardy to make such an inflammatory request in a letter that might be opened and read by any of these. Though the cipher in the diary might perhaps be couched as merely a puzzling passage of Greek . . .

Gray took the pages out yet again and laid them flat on his desk to peer at them by candlelight. Whatever the language was, it was certainly not Greek; the passages he had copied filled both sides of one sheet and one side of a second, yet in all that text there was not a single word he recognised, and there were too many letter combinations that ought not to occur in that language. Nor had Lord Carteret simply used Greek characters to render text in some other tongue—or, at any rate, not Latin, English, Français, Cymric, Kernowek, or Brezhoneg. Most probable, then, that the text had been first enciphered in its original language, then transliterated into the Greek alphabet. Gray supposed vaguely that the original language might also be Erse or the Gàidhlig of Alba, but he had no particular reason to suppose that Lord Carteret spoke either one.

He turned back to the ciphered letters, if letters they were, and tried to recall everything he had ever heard from Evans-Hughes on the subject of cryptography. He had run through what he was sure must be every possible simple substitution of figures for letters, to no avail. But there were other types of ciphers that used figures, if only he could remember what they were.

And why did that almost nonsensical phrase in plain Latin—
lightly the gods' gifts
—seem so familiar?

Sleep overtook him before he arrived at an answer to this question, and when, some hours later, he awoke, woolly-headed and stiff from sleeping at his desk, his bleary eyes opened upon the same few words.
Lightly the gods' gifts . . .

The candle at his elbow flared, guttered, and died. In the sudden darkness, a period crystallised in Gray's mind, and he sat up so abruptly that his head swam.
The gods' gifts are lightly given, and as lightly reclaimed.
It was a line from the
Sapientia Delphi
.