Unexpected Magic (43 page)

The Count of Gairne stepped up onto the dais and interrupted their looking at one another. “Your Highness, these people were discovered riding about the countryside in direct contravention of your decree.”

The Prince nodded and went back to gazing at Alex. “I am sure they were,” he said. “They would be.”

The Count leaned down to the Prince, softly, looking at Alex too. “Your Highness, am I right in supposing that this is the person who had the temerity to assault you on the island?” He was almost whispering in the Prince's ear, but not quite. Cecilia, looking up at them, suddenly saw an angry little boy standing on the platform, too angry to notice that a fat, cruel beast was about to seize him, bite him, and strangle him. She nearly cried out to the Prince.

Then the Count stood up again and he was simply a stout and unfriendly man, and the Prince was a venomous young person thinking over a dozen awful things he could do to Alex now he had him in his power.

“Remember,” said Cecilia, very shrill and loud, because she was so much afraid for Alex, “remember that he did not assault you without provocation. You drew your sword on him—er—Your Highness.” Behind her, she heard the courtiers muttering. She was certain they were saying “Dreadful, loud girl,” or more stately words to that effect.

The Prince, instead of answering her, turned to the Count of Gairne, with that Courcy-like set of the head that Alex so much detested. “Yes,” he said, “they are supporters of Howeforce, it seems, and the boy even imagines that he has a claim to our coronet.”

Cecilia wrung her hands, despairing of ever being able to straighten this muddle out. The Count, she saw, was looking at them as if he were very interested, as if a whole crop of fresh, cold calculations had suddenly come into his head. “Honestly,” she said, “you have it all completely wrong!”

“Have I?” the Prince asked her coldly. “Then what were you doing riding to Gairne?”

Cecilia, to her consternation, blushed. She did not know why she
should
blush, but blush she did, on and on, until even her neck was hot. She was so amazed and embarrassed at the way she blushed that she could not say another word.

“You would call them traitors, Your Highness?” suggested the Count of Gairne, still looking calculatingly at them.

The Prince folded his arms. “Indeed, yes.” To Alex, he said: “You, I suppose, are by now aware that you have committed an act of lèse-majesté.” To Cecilia, he said: “As for you, I am sure you know that your precious friend Howeforce is now terrorizing our whole Principality and defying us at every turn.”

“No, indeed,” Cecilia answered in a whisper.

“Yes, indeed,” said the Prince. “It is a pity you are Outsiders. It makes the matter much more difficult. I shall have to keep you locked up while I consider what is to be done with you.” Then he looked over their heads and beckoned to people to come and take them away.

People began to come for them. Alex could hear their footsteps slowly advancing from behind. “Look here!” he said, fresh from school history, “don't you have any Habeas Corpus here?”

The Prince frowned and the footsteps stopped. “What,” he said, “is Habeas Corpus, in heaven's name?”

“It means,” said Alex, “that no one can imprison anyone else without a fair trial.”

The Prince was astonished, in the way that had so maddened Alex on the island. “How can it mean that? The Latin means ‘You may have the body,' surely—which is a fair way of saying that you are our prisoner.” He beckoned once more, and this time soldiers came, in green liveries heavily banded with black, and surrounded Alex and Cecilia. The Prince smiled. Then he bowed, and, thoroughly enjoying each word, he said, just as he had done on the island: “You may leave us now.”

Alex shook with rage. “You—you low-down, mean whelp!” he said. “You give me any more of that and I'll come up there and black your other eye. I'll lèse your majesty until your whole face is black and blue. I'll—” Soldiers took hold of his arms. Courtiers came up with drawn swords. Even the younger lady moved and looked at him in astonishment. “I'll do it to the lot of you!” Alex shouted.

The Prince laughed, absolutely delighted with how angry Alex was. “Take him away,” he said. “This is wonderful! Lock him up, and his sister too. Oh, Towerwood, I thank you with all my heart for finding these two Outsiders.” He turned to the Count of Gairne and shook his hand. The Count smiled, and Alex, in spite of his rage, was frightened, scared so that his spine seemed to ripple, by the way that the Count smiled.

Then they were marched off. To Cecilia's consternation, Alex was taken one way and she was courteously conducted in the opposite direction. She hung back and tried to protest. The young man in charge of the soldiers bowed.

“This way, my lady. The Prince's orders. Pray take my arm.” He held out one elbow elegantly to her. Cecilia, looking hopelessly around the soldiers, felt she would have to obey. Reluctantly, she put her fingers on his slender, black silk arm, and, with a last look back at Alex, came the way he took her.

All the way to the room where she was to be locked up, the courtier maddened her and embarrassed her with his politeness. He was young and pink and white and full of irritating elegances.

“Allow me to introduce myself, my lady. I am Hugo Lord Arbard at your service—at your service entirely.”

“Thank you,” said Cecilia wearily.

“You come at a sad time, my lady—a sad time. We are all in mourning, you understand, in mourning for our Prince who died just before Christmas. Such a man—such a man.”

“You must be very sad,” Cecilia said.

“Sad!” he exclaimed. “Why, words are too small to express—words fail!”

Cecilia thought: “I wish they would fail.”

Lord Arbard showed no signs of words failing him. If he was at a loss, he simply went on saying the same thing until he thought of a new phrase. Then he used the new phrase until he had worn that out. Most of what he said was about the dead Prince. Cecilia would have been interested if he had told her what the Prince had really been like, but all he said was that he had been wonderful, superlative, excellent, good, splendid—and not a word of real description.

Then they came to a small room. Lord Arbard bowed and handed Cecilia inside. “With the greatest regret, my lady—enormous sorrow, great regret, I fear I must leave you now. Adieu, au revoir, until we meet again—as I trust we shall.”

“Lord Arbard,” Cecilia said, thoroughly irritated, “you are really much too polite.”

He took it as a compliment. He bowed lower than ever and kissed his fingers to her. “Sweet lady, adieu.” Then he shut the door behind him—nor did he forget to bolt it as he went, for all his politeness—and Cecilia was alone in a small bare room. There was one chair, very hard and upright. Cecilia sat down on it and worried for a long time about Alex. She knew how Alex detested the boy in black, and now it was only too apparent that the Prince detested Alex quite as much. Now he had Alex completely in his power, and it looked—since he did not know about Habeas Corpus—that the Prince had absolute power in this strange country. Worse still, she thought, it looked as if he enjoyed his power. She tried to make allowances: he was only about Alex's age—though she felt Alex would have been nicer in the same position—and, of course, he could only have had this power for a fortnight at the most. The Prince, his father, must have been killed the day the outlaw came to the farmhouse.

This took her onto Robert Lord Howeforce. He was supposed to have killed the Prince, of course. His situation was much worse than she had realized. And now he was said to be terrorizing the countryside. Cecilia hoped and tried to believe that he was not. But then, she thought, how did she know? She had seen him for an hour or so and she had decided to believe in him. He had looked as if he was telling the truth when he said he had not killed the Prince. But all these people seemed to think he had.

“Oh,” said Cecilia. “Have I been very silly?” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth because someone was unbolting the door.

To her utter amazement, it was the elder of the two beautiful ladies. She came hurriedly into the room, wild and wide-eyed, and looked at Cecilia as if Cecilia were a huntress and she some kind of hunted beast. Cecilia, for all her amazement, remembered that this was probably a great lady. She stood up and made her best curtsey.

The lady did not seem to notice. “Madam,” she said, in a deep breathless voice, “madam, what brings you and your brother to this land? Is it true you were seeking for Howeforce?”

Cecilia thought: “I might as well admit it. Everyone is probably quite sure we were, anyway.” So she said bravely: “Yes, your ladyship. We—we had met him before, you see.”

The lady pounced on this. “Met him? How?” Then as Cecilia hesitated, remembering how scornful the Prince had been of the way the outlaw had gone Outside, the lady said impatiently: “You need have no secrets from me. I am Robert's mother. Now tell me quickly, for my time is short.”

“His mother!” Cecilia thought. “Then what
is
she doing in the Court?” She curtsied again, and told the lady about the way the outlaw had spent the night at the farm.

“Have you proof?” the lady demanded. “I must have proof, for there is treachery everywhere. This realm is a most perilous place just now and, I fear, will be more so before long.”

Then Cecilia, rather shyly, because she felt a fool to have kept it, brought out the paper torn from the book of sermons with the little orange seal on it. The lady took it and looked at it eagerly.

“Yes,” she said. “This is Robert's seal. He—Conrad of Towerwood, who calls himself Count of Gairne—he uses the device of the tower. I think I will believe you, girl.”

“I am telling the truth,” Cecilia said, a little stiffly. “You can see from the printing on the paper. And there is a picture of Queen Victoria underneath.”

“Yes, yes,” said the lady. “I will take this, so that my son can see it. We must see to your safety and your brother's, girl, for the realm is in deadly danger while Conrad of Towerwood can lay his hands on either of you. Will you trust me with this token?”

“Yes,” Cecilia answered reluctantly, “of course.” She was not sure that she liked this lady's distracted, high-handed manner; and the way she called her “girl” was uncomfortably like the way Lady Courcy spoke. “Might I have it back, your ladyship, when you have finished with it?”

The lady smiled. It was a comforting, sweet smile, which made her look a great deal less sad and wild. “Of course you may, my dear. I see you value it. You can trust me. I am the daughter of a Prince, the sister of a Prince, and, indeed, the aunt of a Prince. You may trust my word.”

“Thank you,” said Cecilia humbly. She curtsied again as the lady hurried away and, when she was alone again, she sat down with tears in her eyes. Before long, there were tears all over her face and her handkerchief was soaked. “I see,” she thought. “The Prince who was killed was our outlaw's uncle. And he had killed one uncle before. He should have said—he might have told us!”

A little later, a maid brought Cecilia some food on a tray. It looked delicious, but Cecilia did not want it. After a while, another maid took it away, and Cecilia still sat in her chair. Then the short winter day began to be over. There was no light, and the room grew completely dark. Cecilia did not care.

“I wish we had gone to the Courcy party,” she said. “This is a judgment on us for being so wicked. Now no one will ever know what became of us.”

Then someone softly unbolted the door. Cecilia bravely stood up. “I am to be led out by night and put to death,” she thought. A man came quickly in with a small flickering lantern. He held the light up and looked at her.

It was Robert Lord Howeforce again, changed and stern and commanding-looking in a gray coat of mail. Cecilia put her hands over her mouth and backed away from him. “What do you want?”

Lord Howeforce smiled. “I seem to terrify you every time you see me,” he said. “You must come quickly with me—er—Cecilia. You are not safe here. I have searched for your brother too, but he is not to be found. It seems that the Prince has taken him away somewhere. Pray God both of them are safe.”