Plenilune (24 page)

Fear not slander, censure rash;

Thou hast finisht joy and moan:

All lovers young, all lovers must,

Consign to thee and come to dust.

Their voices, harp’s and woman’s together, rose up hauntingly toward the arched rafters of the ballroom hall and hung there as if on golden wings, hovering, tremulous, and seemed to draw all the light out of the room so that it was dark to Margaret, dark and hollow and golden with singular song. Slowly her hands unclenched.

No exorciser harm thee!

Nor no witchcraft charm thee!

Ghost unlaid forbear thee!

Nothing ill come near thee!

Quiet consummation have;

And renowned be thy grave!

With this potent benediction the queen’s voice fell away from the harp’s into the silence, and still the harp played on softly, softly under her hands, until it, too, hushed into the quiet dark. Margaret’s eyes were fixed on her and could not look away, for her song, like the panpipe’s, bore a power she had never known music to possess. The queen sat with her head bowed by the instrument, the flat of her hands upon the still strings…and then she turned her head slowly, turned up her amber-coloured eyes, and looked back at Margaret as if they were the only people in the room. As with Lord Gro she felt something run between them, but what she did not know, only that it sent shivers along the backs of her arms.

The gaze turned away and the queen smiled to her audience. Someone began clapping and the rest followed. She rose, curtsied, and Skander stepped forward to thank her and help with the harp.

Rupert leaned in, his hand on Margaret’s arm. “It is in my mind,” he whispered, “that you hate Plenilune a little less now.”

She flung a hot look at him, all the splendour of Queen Romage’s song whistling down the wind. “Plenilune, perhaps,” she retorted. “But not you.”

His brows flickered betrayingly, but he only took her by the arm and raised her up; cold now, cold from the eerie song and Rupert’s persistent attacks at her will, she laid her fan down on the seat cushion as she left. It was one less thing to carry about with her, one less thing of his to be concerned with.

“What do we do now?” she asked dispassionately. The orchestra seemed to be retiring for an interim and there was a definite flutter of apprehensive expectation in the air.

Rupert took a firmer hold on her arm. “We go to light the fires—which is a thing
your
people have not done in many generations. How faithless you all are!” His tone was one of mockery and triumph.

But his blow fell wide of Margaret. Far from attending to his words, she had caught sight at that moment of Skander on the east side of the room. He was talking with a lady in a great swan’s dress and his figure was one of contradiction. Even at that distance she could see the idle, genial softness in his countenance—but when her eyes travelled to his hands, which hung at his sides, she saw they were clenched to white. He seemed on the verge of leaving politely, the woman intent on holding him back—for
her
figure was one of rigid constraint. Whatever she spoke to him, Margaret thought it could not be pleasant.

Well, I shan’t stick my neck out for you again
, the young woman thought savagely.

Abruptly Skander bowed and stepped away. With a snap and muffled thunder of feathers the woman opened a fan and whirled away like a cloud driven by an angry wind.

Margaret lost sight of him. The crowd came between, moving out of the ballroom and down a long, high, dark passage which was full of draughts. Margaret shivered and wished for a wrap, but there did not seem time to get one and she would not have asked Rupert. She went with him until they reached a high beaten copper door, tabbied with red glint and verdigris, and were let out into the dark, windy garden. The wind rushed at Margaret, sending her red skirts dancing, and she clenched her fists to keep from recoiling or being carried off on the gale. What a wild night on which to light bonfires!

The crowd fanned out naturally, making room, and as she looked about she found they were on a wide, level place of short grass bordered by a thick, square hedge of ilex. Other than three dark lump-shaped objects in the middle of the lawn, there was no other feature in the square. The emptiness of the sky reigned supreme, despite its stars, and seemed closer and deeper than ever before, and made Margaret seem small indeed.

Skander reappeared at their side momentarily, looking, Margaret noticed, somewhat overrun and trying not to show it. “How are you enjoying yourself, Margaret?” he asked in a preoccupied tone.

“Well,” she replied, then added, fearing she had been rude, “it is very Good King Whenceitwas.”

“Hmm?” Skander was already looking away as if for something that should be there and was not, not fully attending to her. Margaret, cold, blind weary, and not at all sure, now that she thought about it, that she had got it right, chose to let it pass without further attempt at explanation. Skander muttered something, shot her a hurried glance and smile, and melted off with a mixture of reluctance and haste which puzzled her.

Her stomach growled in the low murmuring quiet of people moving and talking. She pulled it in and clenched her fists. “Will we eat after this?” she asked.

“Yes, afterward,” said Rupert. He, too, sounded preoccupied, but not flustered, and when she looked at him she saw a low, slumbering pleasure in his darkened face. He drew in an immense breath, as though he were breathing in the crowd, the lumps, the ilex, the turf, the dark, the hill, the sky, the stars, the night itself, all down into his lungs, his veins, his soul. But all he said was, “There will be snow tomorrow.”

The tall octagonal tower cut off the view to the north; all clear views of the sky showed up bee-black and star-spangled. Margaret tried pulling in a deep breath to get the tell-tale scent of snow, but she tasted nothing. The cold wind cut deeply into her lungs, nothing more. Colder still and hungry now, in addition to being weary, she huddled bewilderedly next to Rupert’s unbending figure, waiting for someone to light the fires.

Someone brushed by her in the dark. Shying into Rupert’s elbow, she peered into the deep-green gloom—a gloom slashed with velvet black and studded with silver stars—and saw that it was Mark Roy, backlit by the light from the House, accompanied by two young men. The smaller of the two, the one most like Mark Roy, was one she recognized: he had called Lord Gro away earlier, and had given her a disapproving look. The second was taller, thinner, and in the dim light of the House Margaret saw his mane of hair was streaked with red. It reminded her of someone, or perhaps of several people, but she did not quite know who.

As if feeling her glance, the tall young man with the red-lined hair flung a look back at her. Her own face was hidden in shadow, but she saw a bemused flicker of geniality pass over the other’s features.

“Who was that?” she asked when they had passed on.

Rupert was looking off another way. His voice came muffledly: “You know Mark Roy. Those were Aikin Ironside and Brand, his sons. Aikin is much like Centurion in temperament—I do not trust him, though his blade is quick to bite deep. Brand—” Rupert looked round and peered, too, into the gloom after them to where they stood in the ring that was forming round the piles of wood. “Brand has high sentiment and a short temper. He knows how to be violent. He may make a good friend.”

She could almost see Rupert’s malicious will undermining the three standing in the dark distance. “And what if I don’t like him as a friend?”

“You will not much like any of my friends.”

“No,” she said helplessly, after a brief and futile struggle with something in herself. “No, I suppose not.”

Aikin Ironside
. She said the name to herself several times until she had looked and felt all round it.
Aikin Ironside. A strong name. Him I should like to be my friend.

It was odd how something so simple—the name of a stranger—could remind her with a debilitating pang that she was only a young lady, little more than a girl.

From the other side of the lawn, leftward along a long line of spectators, Margaret’s eye caught the feeble leap and splutter of a newly-lit torch. Her attention was drawn to it, off Mark Roy and Aikin Ironside, Brand and Rupert: the light took and strengthened, and seemed to send its flame walking down the line with a flick of a fiery wrist, pulling out from among the crowd a jink of gold here, an upsweep of blue plume there, the darkness of a cloak in another place into which the light ran and hid and put itself out. All down the line figures haloed in thin angry lines of candlelight from the House windows had a sudden light and shadow on their faces. How terrible they all looked, Margaret thought with a shudder. How awful, like transfixed gods the world thought it had killed long ago. Like Puck, with a gleeful prancing, the light came out from among them, casting a chancy glow every which way on the grass. Margaret never saw who held the torch; the curious thing was, the person did not seem to matter. The light was going out to wake them, to thrust a fire back into the heart of them, and this great ring of silent, wax-work gods would soon spring to life again.

The ballroom, the dancing, the heat and noise, seemed far behind them.

As though playing coy, the torchlight cavorted round all three wood-piles, then dodged in and out between them, leaving a corkscrew of blue smoke on the air behind it. The wind stirred the blue, fanning it out, feathering it softly; the rich scent of it woke something in Margaret which scared her.

“And—now!” breathed Rupert quickly. With an upthrust of his hand, like a magician conjuring, he made a sudden gesture that made her start, and the smudge and sharp outline of fire in the dark darted into the farthest of the pyres. The light sank like a gigantic newly-lit candle, wondered if it meant to be serious or not, and in a few heartbeats the light sprang aloft, roaring richly with the scent of cedar and pine through the timber tangle. Margaret’s stomach tightened as the fire crawled and jumped upward, etching clear-cut silhouettes of branches against the ilex darkness, branches that looked like fingers trying to drag heaven down to a burning end.

Bee-bright the torch zoomed to the middle pyre and stung its heap: the air was roaring with burning and the light hurt Margaret’s eyes. By the time the last pyre was lit, and the crowd of wax-work gods came to life with a joyous explosion of cheers and applause, she had to turn her head away from the brightness, though instinctively she clapped with the crowd.

But Margaret could not help feeling that she had missed the import of the bonfires. The firelit ring of faces, all laughing easily, breaking bronze with skin and ivory with flashing teeth, those features seemed to understand, she thought, looking round on them all. They understood it instinctively as a thing they had been raised with. To them the bonfires meant something, something perhaps symbolic and sacral, something ancient and comfortable that honoured time. But as Rupert moved away to talk with someone, Margaret lingered behind, once again feeling adrift from the colourful menagerie of people. She lingered because the awful crawling feeling had not dissipated, but had worsened, because the bonfires flung open an inner door to her and lost their happy, comfortable feeling. As an outsider, which she felt keenly, they could never have that feeling for her: instead they turned her a frank, open, honest face, and they told her what they really were. Was it primeval? She hurried on from the thought of pagan, because she did not like it and she knew it did not fit. She did not know what the fires said—their language was starkly different from her own—but she knew it was awful and real and Plenilune.

Yes, it was Plenilune.

“Margaret?”

She jumped violently at Skander’s voice in her ear. She had been staring narrowly into the fire and her eyes came away sparking red, smudging his down-turned face. If he looked concerned—which he sounded—she could not see him clearly enough to tell. “I thought you had gone away to be busy,” she said, blinking hard and trying to be light-hearted.

“I am sorry I have been too busy to attend to you.” He held out an arm and pulled her in Rupert’s direction. “I know there are few familiar faces in this crowd.”

There, I have offended him!
In an attempt to smooth her rough words over, she purred casually, “Oh no, nothing of the sort. People have been very friendly, if they are strangers.” She peered at the bonfires again: the pillars of fire were high now, throwing up sparks into the empty gash of night, but the heat was low and the wind that stirred the ilex was biting cold. Almost she dared to mention the comitissa—the words were on her lips—when she killed them hastily and gave instead a little choked noise that she tried to cover up by saying, “This cold makes one hungry!”

“Doesn’t it? We will go in, presently, and have a bite to eat. Ah, here is my cousin…”

He said they would “have a bite to eat,” and Margaret had rather crestfallenly expected titbits and finger-foods such as she had eaten all her life at tea-parties and fine social gatherings. She had not expected the banquet wing which awaited them, nor the tables groaning with their burdens of food. Such a mixture of spices, colours, sweets and savouries mingled in the air as to baffle her senses. For the first fifteen minutes of the meal, positioned—not unlike the sardines in front of her—between Rupert de la Mare and the enormous Earl of the Ritts of Trammel, she was too overwhelmed to have any appetite. But as the sights and sounds and smells settled and became distinct, like a moth about a flame, and her weariness resurfaced along with her gnawing hunger, she gingerly began to feast with the rest.

It was a culinary experience to rival any she had ever witnessed, full of all the pomp of red royal feasting, but it would have been dull for her had it not been for one small, disturbing instance. Rupert was talking with someone down the table just out of her reach, someone she did not recognize, and her enormous neighbour was so busy making delicate cuts in a titanic pork loin that she was cut off from him, too, and felt awkward trying to strike up a conversation with his agonized face. The two women across the table seemed suspiciously careful not to catch her eye. But she had wanted to eat, she told herself, wrestling with grim disappointment and fury at the snub, so she was here to eat.