Read Snow White and Rose Red Online
Authors: Patricia Wrede
Snow White and Rose Red (28 page)
“If it is not Hugh’s ... decline that troubles your mother, why do you say she thinks this work unsafe?” John asked with a comprehensive wave that included Rosamund, Blanche, the oaks and beeches, and the bear lying stretched in the sun.
“‘Tis talk that Mother fears, not Hugh,” Rosamund replied absently, picking up another withe.
“What talk?” John said, and when Rosamund looked up in evident surprise he added apologetically, “Remember that I’ve been in London near a fortnight.”
Rosamund shrugged. “There’s rumor of black magic in the town, and foul witchcraft, and of devils in the forest, and whenever such things are talked of, Mother starts to fret.”
“Belike she hath good reason,” John said, frowning.
“Belike the fault is yours she hath,” Rosamund snapped back. “‘Twas you who misled Master Kirton’s hunt, and that’s the root of all this gossip.”
“That is but part,” Blanche corrected gently. “There would be talk of Dee and Kelly no matter what the tales were of the hunt.”
“An there be talk of Dee—” John began, but Rosamund interrupted him.
“There!” she said, holding up the willow halter. “‘Tis done. Art ready, Blanche?”
“A moment only,” Blanche replied, carefully placing the last pebble. “Hugh! Come hither, and let us make trial of this latest charm. ”
But when the halter had been placed about the bear’s neck, and John had led him across Blanche’s pebbles and back, there was no visible improvement in Hugh’s condition. Blanche turned her head away, hiding her face from the other three while Rosamund and John scattered the pebbles and destroyed the halter, and she was even quieter than usual on the walk back to the cottage.
The repeated failures finally convinced John that the key to Hugh’s release lay, somewhere in the Dee household. He began watching it, and tried several times to gain entry to the house in hopes of finding the solution he sought so desperately. He was not successful, but on his third attempt (posing as a rag-and-bone picker) he noticed recent traces of Faerie visitors in the kitchen garden.
The resumption of activity within the crystal, however obscure, gave John Dee the confidence to meet his distinguished foreign visitors without trepidation. Ned Kelly, however, was not so sanguine, particularly since they were unable to coax any further response whatever from the glowing ball. In the weeks that followed May Eve the two men tried everything they could think of, to no avail. Kelly even made a ten-day trip to London, ostensibly on business but in reality to search for some obscure ingredients for use in one of their spells. Nothing did any good.
Madini’s efforts to obtain the crystal were likewise frustrated. Through the lamp she could watch what passed inside the study, but the wards Dee and Kelly had placed around it blocked her every attempt to steal the crystal. She could not free the power trapped within it, nor even use Hugh’s purloined magic for herself. Dee and Kelly controlled the crystal, and it would obey no other master.
Direct action having proven useless, Madini turned to roundabout methods. She discovered that she could use the link between the lamp and the crystal to project a simulacrum of herself into Dee’s study. Through this image, she began methodically searching the room whenever Dee and Kelly were absent, noting the location and manner of each of the protections the wizards had placed around the study and looking for a crack in their defenses. The servants could not see her, whatever form she wore, so for her own amusement, Madini took to varying the shape of her projection, one day doing her work as a crone and the next as a young man or perhaps a beggar or a child.
One evening in late May, some three weeks after the theft of the lamp, Madini uncovered the lamp to find Dee and Kelly pictured on its side. The two men were seated in a corner of the study, to one side of the inscribed table where the crystal lay.
“I am beholden to God for the good will of the Polish Prince,” Dee said. “I would you had been here, Ned, to see the honor that he did me!”
“You’ve spoken of little else for this whole week past,” Kelly replied irritably. “Can you not look ahead a little? He honors you now for your learning—”
“He favors me greatly,” Dee said. “He hath asked me to provide him a book, like unto that which I made for the Queen her gracious majesty these two years past, to show the argument for his title.”
“Histories and generations are very well, but what will this Prince Laski say when he asks you to make gold for him and you cannot do so?”
“He is a great man, Ned, and he hath striven to confound the malice of the court toward me. ‘Tis not possible that such a man would value gold over knowledge.”
Madini chuckled contemptuously as she watched Kelly roll his eyes, and she decided that this foolish conversation was no reason to delay the continuation of her search. She pondered a moment, considering what shape to send out, then bent over the lamp.
Ned Kelly broke off in mid-sentence as Madini’s projection appeared in the room. “John! Do you see her?”
“What is it, Ned?” Dee said, straightening up.
“A child, a girl of seven or nine, with dark hair rolled up in front and hanging very long behind,” Kelly answered in a low voice.
“Her gown changeth color, now red, now green, and she doth move among your books and they give way around her.”
Madini turned. Kelly’s eyes were wide and fixed on her, and she suffered an unpleasant shock. She had become accustomed to working freely in the study, invisible to all the mortals; to find someone who could see her was a jolt.
“Whose maiden are you?” Dee demanded, reaching for the quill pen with which he took notes on the work he and Kelly did.
“Whose man are you?” Madini retorted.
Dee looked in Kelly’s direction. Kelly, his eyes still fixed on Madini’s insubstantial presence, said, “She answers, whose man are you. ”
Dee nodded and noted it on a sheet of paper. Then he responded, “I am a servant of God, both by my bound duty and also, I hope, by his adoption.”
Madini stared at him for a long moment. By now she knew the location of every protective symbol and spell with which Dee and Kelly guarded their workroom, but the knowledge did her little good without the ability to erase them. It had not previously occurred to her that she might influence the men themselves directly. She half lowered her eyelids and smiled at Kelly. “Am I not a fine maiden?” she said, and then, remembering that she had given her projection the form of a child, she added, “Give me leave to play in your house.”
Kelly repeated her words to Dee, who wrote rapidly. “My mother told me she would come and dwell here,” Madini went on, paving the way for another appearance in a more mature guise.
Neither of the men responded. Madini resumed walking up and down the room, and Kelly’s eyes never left her. “She goes up and down, with the most lively gestures of a young girl playing by herself,” he said, and Dee copied assiduously.
Hiding a derisive smile, Madini turned to a perspective glass in the corner of the study and pretended to listen intently. “One speaks to her from the corner of the study there,” Kelly reported, “but I see none besides herself.”
Madini, sneering inwardly at the mortals’ gullibility, began a one-sided conversation with the glass, which Kelly reported in the same detached tone.
At last Dee grew tired of waiting for his unexpected, unseen guest to say or do something of substance. “Tell me who you are,” he demanded, and he would not be put off by her evasions.
“I am a poor little maiden,” Madini responded, and then, despite her best efforts to give a false reply, “... Madini.”
Greatly taken aback, Madini turned the interview into other channels. She pretended to read off lists of kings of England and related nobility from a book her image took from a pocket, and so succeeded in avoiding Dee’s further questions about her home. The tactic had an unforeseen consequence; after listening to twenty minutes of Plantagenets, Mortimers, and Lacys, Dee asked her to declare the pedigree of the Polish Prince.
By this time Madini had had enough of the game, so she once more returned an evasive answer. She was careful, however, to leave Dee with some hope of success at a later time before she covered the lamp so that her childish image vanished from the study. She was well pleased with the reactions of the two humans to her manipulations, but she was furiously angry that Dee, through the power of the crystal, had forced her to give her real name. The mortal wizard’s presumption alone was enough to enrage her; that he had been successful added fuel to the fire and gave her one more reason‘to hate the lands outside of Faerie.
Nonetheless, she decided, after much thought, to continue as she had begun. The possibilities were great, and Madini was supremely confident that she would be more than a match for any merely human magic, now that she was prepared for it. For a brief time, she considered laying the problem before the Queen, but in the end dismissed the idea. The Queen’s sympathies lay with the mortal world; it was all too likely that she would remain blind to the pitfalls of continued commerce between the realms. It would be better, Madini decided, for her to handle the matter herself.
For the next month, Madini appeared in Dee’s study at irregular intervals and under various names. At each appearance she coaxed, commanded, or dropped broad but casual hints regarding the removal or replacement of the spells that guarded the study from Faerie interference. To her chagrin, she found the men less easily manipulated than she had expected. They were perfectly willing to add whatever strange and outlandish symbols she could devise, but her best efforts could not persuade them to remove even one of the charms that kept her from the crystal.
Joan Bowes became aware of the late-night lights at the Dee house almost as soon as they appeared. It was not long before it occurred to her that Masters Dee and Kelly might be more willing to deal in questionable magic than the Widow Arden had been. Her employer, Master Rundel, no longer interested her, but the newcomer called John Rimer was another matter. Joan would have given a great deal to attract his attention. It would be pleasant to score a triumph over the Widow and her daughters.
Joan had, however, learned a lesson from her unpleasant encounter with the Widow the previous fall. This time, she approached the matter circumspectly. After some consideration, she decided to apply to Ned Kelly, who was, in her opinion, more likely to listen sympathetically to her fabricated tale.
She accosted Kelly in the street near the market one damp grey afternoon in June, having decided (after much thought) that an apparently accidental meeting would attract less attention than would a visit to the sorcerer’s house. Joan stepped in front of Kelly as he hurried along the muddy street and said, “Your pardon, Master, but are you not that Edward Kelly who lives by the river?”
“I am.” Kelly stopped and studied Joan with far from academic care. Apparently he liked what he saw, for he smiled warmly at her. “Why do you look for me?”
“I’ve heard that you can do great things,” Joan answered with simulated diffidence. “I thought perhaps you’d lend me your aid.”
The warmth left Kelly’s expression. “Knowledge and secret lore are not for casual use. They require great effort and dedication, even in the least of their practices.” He paused. “Nor is the cost of studying them small.”
“I am only a poor maid-servant,” Joan said, “and I have but little money. Yet perhaps I could pay you in some other fashion.” She tilted her head as if to examine Kelly’s face and ran the palm of her left hand slowly down the side of her waist and hip.
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