Sorcery & Cecelia: Or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot (31 page)

James spoke to Papa as soon as we reached home, and Papa sent the announcement of our engagement to the
Gazette
this morning. Actually, he sent two announcements, for Aunt Elizabeth is to marry Mr. Wrexton. I am very pleased by this news, for I think they suit almost as well as James and I. You will understand when you meet Mr. Wrexton. I can hardly wait to see what Aunt Charlotte makes of it all!

I have asked James whether he would object to a double wedding with you and Thomas, and he seemed quite receptive to the idea. I do not wish to steal your thunder, however, so if either you or Thomas has any objection to this suggestion, do tell me at once. Papa and Aunt Elizabeth are bringing me to Town next week to have my bride-clothes made, and I can hardly contain my excitement. We shall have
such
a lot to talk about! For letters, no matter how satisfactory, can bear no comparison to seeing you face-to-face, and I am absolutely
wild
to meet your Thomas. From what you and James have told me, I feel as if I know him already.

Do let me know about the wedding, and don’t forget to tell me about Aunt Charlotte. She’ll probably turn purple.

Your ecstatically happy,

Cecy

17 July 1817

Schofìeld House, London

Dear Cecy,

Thomas says he might have known James would display his usual masterly grasp of tactics (I believe this is his way of saying that he is jealous of James for getting to hit Sir Hilary), and that he wishes you both very happy. You know I am delighted—I shall tell you so next week. It doesn’t seem possible that you haven’t even seen 11 Berkeley Square yet, let alone met Thomas.

Mr. Wrexton has been in London for two days. After he conveyed Sir Hilary to the Royal College, he came to inform us that Sir Hilary is to be stripped of his magic (and his membership in the College) and exiled to the continent. Once he delivered this very welcome news, he remained to consult with Lady Sylvia about the effect the double focus had on Thomas’s health in general and magic in particular. After twenty minutes spent scrutinizing Thomas from top to toe, they dismissed him, so he came to Berkeley Square to listen to me practice the spinet. Really, when inclined, he can sulk amazingly. Oliver simply isn’t in it.

Lady Sylvia and Thomas spent all afternoon yesterday asking me questions and conducting peculiar tests with items Lady Sylvia brought in on a tea tray. They have agreed on the verdict, apparently, but neither could be persuaded to tell me what it is. I should warn you that ever since her conversation with Mr. Wrexton, Lady Sylvia has been most anxious to meet you.

Thomas has no objection to a double wedding (nor do I, of course), provided you are willing to have a very hasty one. Thomas intends us to accompany Lady Sylvia when she returns to Paris, which she means to do as soon as possible. From there he wishes to go on to several cities he thinks I ought to see. (Among other things, he insists he will perish if he cannot take me to Venice and watch me fall into a canal.) These schemes of his for a rapid departure to the continent date from Sunday, when he called for me in Berkeley Square.

When he arrived, Aunt Charlotte was at her very worst. She was reading out religious tracts to me in an effort to bring me to a proper sense of shame concerning my behavior at Carlton House. (Not walking home or waltzing in Berkeley Square, mind you—consorting with Lady Sylvia’s friends.)

His arrival put a stop to that. After a very civil greeting to Aunt Charlotte and Georgy, he said, “I thought I would see if you cared to drive in the park with me, Kate. We could see if the ducks have returned to their pond after your rude invasion of their quarters.”

“Kate cannot go out today,” Aunt Charlotte said. “It will certainly rain later.”

Thomas appeared to be considering several alternative remarks, but he said nothing.

Abruptly it seemed to me to be a great shame that I should miss even one of Thomas’s remarks because of Aunt Charlotte and her ridiculous notions. So I said, “Nonsense, Aunt Charlotte. I shall go out. And if it rains, the ducks won’t care.”

Aunt Charlotte stared aghast as I prepared to depart. Then, spacing her words as carefully as if I were the half-wit Thomas has so often accused me of being, she said, “You cannot go. I have not given you leave to go.”

“I am going, Aunt Charlotte,” I replied calmly. “I don’t see why you insist on making my last few days in this house as uncomfortable as possible, but I recommend you find some other diversion to occupy you when I am married and gone. Perhaps you should read a few tracts to Georgy—don’t you think she ought to know how improper it is for young ladies to dance on the Sabbath? The Grenvilles will have dancing after supper tonight, won’t they, Georgy?” Georgina looked daggers at me.

“And perhaps you should remind Georgy that Michael Aubrey is only a second son,” I continued unscrupulously.

Aunt Charlotte’s voice dropped into trembling disbelief. “Katherine Talgarth, do you presume to tell me how to look after Georgina?”

“Well, yes, Aunt Charlotte, I must. Particularly since she’s learned to play silver loo and shows every sign of turning into as reckless a gamester as Grandfather, despite your chaperonage.”

“Kate!” Georgy sprang up with a shriek. “You beastly sneak! Cut line!”

“And you’ve let her pick up the most dreadful sporting cant, Aunt Charlotte,” I added. “Another thing you should know—that goat of Squire Bryant’s? Well, it was all Georgy’s idea—she said it would be pointless to confess after you and Aunt Elizabeth had already punished Cecy and me anyway.”

Georgy and Aunt Charlotte advanced on me, shouting in counterpoint until the prisms of the chandelier chimed softly overhead. “And moreover,” I informed Aunt Charlotte, “Papa always referred to you as ‘that interfering harpy.’ ”

Georgina blanched and Aunt Charlotte stiffened, speechless. I felt Thomas grip my arm. “Come away, Kate. Come tell me all about Squire Bryant’s goat, before you give your aunt an apoplexy.”

So we went driving in the park. I shall spend the next week at Schofield House with Lady Sylvia, since I have, in Thomas’s words, “made Berkeley Square too hot to hold me.” He adds that you have a fortnight to get here before, double ring or single, he brings me up before a clergyman and marries me. He is set upon flying the country for the continent. Typically, he has decided (without consulting anyone’s wishes but his own) to make our wedding trip into a peculiar sort of Grand Tour. I hope you don’t mind too greatly. I don’t mind at all. In fact, I’m looking forward to it very much. (Not the canal, though.)

Love,

Kate

CAROLINE

I
DON’T KNOW WHO
invented the Letter Game (which I have heard called Persona Letters, or even Ghost Letters) but Ellen Kushner introduced it to me. I believe it originated as an acting exercise, one character writing a letter “in persona” to another.

The game has no rules, except that the players must never reveal their idea of the plot to one another. It helps to imply in the first letter why the two characters must write to each other and not meet in person.

The Letter Games I’ve played previously were usually a matter of two or three letters each, spaced about a month apart, during summer vacation. When it was time to return to school, we abandoned our characters in mid-intrigue, usually on the verge of a duel, a crime, or a coup d’état. Our letters were long on gossip and short on plot, but they provided good clean fun for the cost of a postage stamp.

PAT

Caroline first mentioned the Letter Game over the tea table, appropriately enough, in April of 1986. I was among the fascinated listeners who pumped her for more information, more directions, more details. I was intrigued by the possibilities and anxious to try it, so I badgered Caroline into agreeing to play, with the provision that I write the first letter. I dashed home at the end of the afternoon, full of enthusiasm.

As the opener of the letter exchange, I was responsible for choosing a setting, as well as for defining my own character. I decided on England just after the Napoleonic Wars, in an alternate universe in which magic really worked, just to spice things up a little. I knew Caroline shared my interest in both subjects, and I figured we would have a lot of fun working out a more detailed background as we went along. Little did I know what was in store!

CAROLINE

For the first few letters, things went quite calmly, with Pat writing as Cecelia and me writing as Kate, both of us having fun making up alternate history. Then, about the time Oliver disappeared at Vauxhall, I started to get a little obsessed with the game. A letter every few weeks wasn’t enough anymore. Luckily, Pat felt the same way. We began to exchange letters more frequently. Although we still didn’t reveal plot details, we met for lunch once a week and found ourselves discussing the characters as though they were members of our families. We were caught in a perfect balance between the desire to show off for each other and the desire to know how the story would come out. The day I knew this particular Letter Game had a life of its own was the day I came home to discover the latest letter from Cecelia tucked under my door. Written on the back was, “Don’t be
too
amazed. I sent it by one of the footmen.”

So the summer went, with Pat and me exchanging letters at every opportunity and driving our friends to the screaming point with gossip about the characters. (Never about the plot, I hasten to add.) I began to break china. Pat began to say things like, “We simply must
do something
!” without realizing it. We had
fun.

The Letter Game ended around Labor Day. Pat and I took one entire Saturday to go through the letters and pull out loose ends that distracted from the story as it finally turned out. We sent the results off and we got lucky. We were able to publish the Game. But we didn’t play the Letter Game to publish it. We played because it was fun.

PAT

Caroline is entirely correct in saying we did not discuss plot with each other. In the interest of complete disclosure, however, I must confess that we did, to some extent, discuss timing. Specifically, sometime around the middle of August I asked her, “How many more letters is it going to take you to get rid of Miranda? I need to know so I can get rid of Sir Hilary pretty much at the same time.” She thought for a while and said, “Two or three, at most.” And she did. And that was the extent of the mutual planning we did.

When Caroline and I finally sat down with Kate and Cecy’s collected correspondence, we weren’t quite sure what we had (aside from a lot of fun). I don’t remember which of us was first to stare at the untidy heap of paper and say, “This is a
book
.” Looking at the letters with the sapient eyes of authors, rather than simply as correspondents, we could see places where the timing of events was wrong, important occurrences that were never explained, minor characters who had suddenly become important, and plot threads that had never gone anywhere. We set out to fix these problems.

Revising the letters was nearly as much fun as writing them in the first place. We argued happily about Georgy and Aunt Charlotte and Oliver. Caroline put in Thomas’s reminiscing about James’s career as A.D.C. to the Duke of Wellington; I retaliated with James’s comment about Thomas being mentioned in dispatches. Thomas got to snub Oliver in the park; James was badgered into expanding on Lady Jersey’s confused tale about Thomas’s brother, Edward. And so it went.

Eventually, we had to admit that we were finished and sent the manuscript off to the kind and farsighted editor who’d bought it. The finished version really isn’t very different from the letters we exchanged during that hectic six months; some things are clearer (we hope), and a few things were dropped. Here it is: We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

For more than twenty years, Patricia Collins Wrede (b. 1953) has expanded the boundaries of fantasy writing. Born in Chicago to a large, literary family, Wrede spent her childhood immersed in the Chronicles of Narnia, classic fairy tales, and L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz—a foundation in imagined worlds that paved the way for her future career.

After receiving a degree in biology from Carleton College in 1974, Wrede completed an MBA at the University of Minnesota, and began working as a financial analyst in the late 1970s. In her spare time, Wrede wrote fantasy stories in the vein of the classic novels she read as a child. Her love of fantasy even fueled an interest in tabletop role-playing games: Lyra, the first gaming world that Wrede invented, was based on the unpublished work-in-progress that would become
Shadow Magic
. In 1980 she became a founding member of a group of Minneapolis-based, fantasy-fiction authors known as the Interstate Writers’ Workshop, or Scribblies, with whom she later worked on the critically acclaimed Liavek shared-world anthology series.

That same year, Wrede sold her first novel,
Shadow Magic
, which was published in 1982. It was the public debut of Lyra, a magical world shared by four races whose cultural differences see them constantly at odds. Wrede used Lyra as the setting for four more novels:
Daughter of Witches
(1984),
The Harp of Imach Thyssel
(1985),
Caught in Crystal
(1987), and
The Raven Ring
(1994). Wrede’s strong prose, sense of humor, and powerful female leads drew special attention to her early novels. Her quick success allowed her to begin writing fulltime.

Though the Lyra novels found popularity with audiences of all ages, Wrede aims her more recent work at young-adult readers, beginning with her four-book Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which follow the adventures of a young princess who becomes apprenticed to a dragon. Her other fantasy series include the Cecelia and Kate novels, cowritten with Caroline Stevermer and set in Regency England; the Mairelon books, which also take place in Regency England; and the Frontier Magic trilogy, based on Old West pioneers.