Part 12 (2/2)

While Ivy expected nothing from her encounters with Mr. Rafferdy, the same could not be said for her mother. Mrs. Lockwell never failed to ask if she had seen Mr. Rafferdy if she was away even a minute longer than expected, and, thus confronted, Ivy could do nothing but confess the truth. Her mother's opinions were only further reinforced by Ivy's invitation to Lady Marsdel's house. It was Lily who divulged the news upon their return from church.

”He favors you, Ivy!” Mrs. Lockwell exclaimed after Ivy was forced to describe the particulars of the invitation. ”Oh, don't give me that look, for it's true. A gentleman does not go out of his way to walk with a young lady if he does not particularly like her. When he saw you he might have said he had business and gone on his way with a tip of his hat. Politeness would require no more of him. But it is more than being polite that he intends. To be invited to a party in the New Quarter-that is high praise! I do hope there is dancing. If there is dancing, he will dance with you all night, I am sure of it.”

”Mr. Garritt walked with us after church as well,” Lily said. ”He looked very well. Poor Mr. Rafferdy was quite plain next to him. You should have seen how charming he was, Mother.”

However, she paid Lily no attention, for Mrs. Lockwell's enthusiasm was always so wholly given that it could be bestowed upon but a single thing at a time. Only then her elation turned into a panic (the two sensations being often interconnected for her), because she did not know what Ivy could possibly wear to a party at the house of a n.o.ble lady. They must head for the finest dress shops Uphill at once, and cost could not be-no, must not be-of any sort of concern.

Despite Ivy's protests, Mrs. Lockwell might have swept them out the door that moment, but there came a crash from upstairs. Either Ca.s.sity was cleaning or Mr. Lockwell was agitated. Ivy went up to investigate.

It was her father. He had knocked over a stack of books. Once the books were picked up, Ivy sat with him until the full moon lofted above the rooftops of Gauldren's Heights. As its cool light bathed him, Mr. Lockwell grew placid, and Ivy was at last able to steal back downstairs. There she discovered that Mrs. Lockwell, having succ.u.mbed to a headache, had retired to her room. Ivy took supper with her sisters. It was a quiet affair, for Rose rarely had much to say, and Lily was unusually subdued.

Ivy was preoccupied herself as she took a candle into the parlor to consult the almanac and see how long the umbral would be. She was certain her mother was wrong, that Mr. Rafferdy in no way intended to make her an object of peculiar favor. On the contrary, his statements demonstrated that, for all his lively wit, he was a man of sense. To her this was a relief. She could never claim friends.h.i.+p with a man so frivolous as to think that two people of such widely disparate circ.u.mstance could ever hope to be united in any way other than by mere acquaintance.

She shut the almanac and turned from the secretary. As she did, the light of the candle illuminated her reflection in the window, facing her like a partner lined up at a ball.

”Why, yes, Mr. Rafferdy,” she said, ”I would like very much to dance.”

Ivy gave a courteous bow, and her reflection bowed in return. She picked up the hem of her dress and danced several steps as her mirrored partner did the same, s.h.i.+ning against the dark outside, a smile upon her face.

”What are you doing, Ivy?”

She stopped and turned to see Lily standing in the doorway.

”Nothing,” she said. ”I was just checking the almanac. The umbral is not to be long at all. We had better hurry to bed or it will be light before we fall asleep.”

Before Lily could say anything more, Ivy blew out the candle and left the darkened parlor.

O PPORTUNITY CAME AT last on the third lumenal after Brightday. According to the almanac, the day was to be twenty hours, and given its length most people would be taking a long rest in the afternoon. As her mother and sisters went upstairs to retire, Ivy excused herself on the pretext that she was not at all tired and that she thought she would venture out for a stroll.

”Of course you are too distracted to rest!” Mrs. Lockwell said. ”If I were going to an affair at Lady Marsdel's, I am sure I should be even more excited than you are and should be able to rest even less. But you do not want to look worn tonight. You must promise to sit quietly for a few hours when you come home, or else you will look ragged. And take your bonnet! You already have far too many freckles.”

Ivy made all the required promises, then was out the door. The long afternoon had grown hot, and those few people in evidence on Whitward Street moved as if through water rather than air. Ivy shut the gate behind her and walked as quickly as she could Downhill.

Her gold hair clung to her cheeks by the time she reached Albring's shop. She had decided it best to retrieve the lace right away, in order to give her as much time as possible for her investigations.

It took several knocks on the door to summon a girl who did not look pleased at being roused from her afternoon rest. She fetched Ivy the parcel of lace wrapped in paper and handed it over without a word. Ivy had no time to utter even a hasty thank-you before the door was shut again. She put the parcel under her arm and searched for a hack cab.

She was forced to walk several streets over to Hinsdon Street but at last managed to find a cab to hire, though first she had to wake the driver, who sat nodding in his seat.

The cab was an exorbitant expense but one she had resolved to bear, for she did not know the streets of the Old City and could not navigate them una.s.sisted.

”To Durrow Street, please,” she told the driver.

The man gave her an odd look, but she handed him the fare before he could speak-a quarter regal, enough to buy a whole box of candles.

He took the coins. ”What cross, miss?”

”I'm afraid I don't know,” she confessed.

”Durrow Street is more than a mile long, miss, and one fare ain't enough for me to spend all day driving up and down it.”

Ivy's cheeks glowed, and not from the heat. Already her plan had gone awry! She did not know the address of the old house, and asking her mother about such things had been out of the question. She had thought simply to direct the cab to Durrow Street, that she would recognize the house upon pa.s.sing by it. However, the illogic of this plan now struck her.

The driver glowered at her. Sweat trickled down beside the crimson bulb of his nose.

”Take me to Beanore's Fountain,” she said, remembering how once her father had walked with her to the monument from the house. He had sat her on the edge of the fountain and told her stories about the ancient queen. It was one of Ivy's few and earliest memories of their time on Durrow Street. She had been small; it could not have been far from the house. The driver flicked the reins, and the cab rattled down Hinsdon Street and through the Hillgate.

It had been many years since Ivy had been to the Old City-not since she had come here with Mr. Lockwell in the days just before his affliction struck him. There were a variety of bookshops in this part of Invarel he had liked to frequent, and he had brought her with him on two or three occasions.

To Ivy the shops had been marvels, crowded with shelves of books, and stacks of books, and chests overflowing with more old books. She remembered the smell inside: musty-sweet with paper and leather and turpentine. So thick was the atmosphere of mystery in one such shop, she fancied that over the years some measure of the ink had sublimated from the pages, suffusing the very air with knowledge, so that one could gain wisdom merely by drawing a breath. She had shut her eyes and inhaled deeply, but a dizziness came upon her before any sort of enlightenment, and next she knew she was standing in the street with her father pinching her cheeks.

The cab rattled past a storefront, and Ivy glimpsed rows of books beyond dim windows. Was that one of the places her father had visited? One shop had hung a sign above the door painted with an eye; she remembered how it seemed to stare at her. However, this shop had no sign at all. Still, Ivy was tempted to stop the driver, to look in the shop and see what books they might have concerning magick.

She dismissed the notion; there was no time for delay. Besides, it was clear after her failed attempt to work an enchantment that she would not progress in the study of magick without help. It was just such help she was seeking now. There was something at the house on Durrow Street they wanted, the two magicians who had come to the door that night. And if she could promise it to them, they would help her. She was sure of it.

The cab maneuvered through the labyrinth of narrow lanes. Around a corner the fountain came into view, its marble etched and gray, and Beanore in her chariot with a bronze crown and a cape of pigeons, all just as Ivy remembered it. The cab stopped, and Ivy was ushered out.

Despite her need for haste, she could not help lingering a moment at the fountain. As a girl Ivy had loved stories of Queen Beanore, and her father had often indulged her with tales of the oldest days of Altania. Beanore was the daughter of the king of one of Altania's southern realms. This was over sixteen centuries ago, when the island had not a single monarch as it did today but rather a collection of thains and petty kings who ruled and fought over twenty little chiefdoms.

When the armies of Tharos sailed across the sea and attacked, Beanore's father was one of the first to fall in battle. The other realms would have succ.u.mbed quickly to the Tharosian legions commanded by the young emperor Veradian. However, Beanore fas.h.i.+oned a bow from a willow switch and with a single shot was able to inflict a great wound upon Veradian. Then she called the other chieftains to unite with her to drive the Tharosians back, and against the common enemy they set aside their squabbling. They swore allegiance to Beanore, and so the first monarch to rule all of Altania was not a king but rather a queen, and under her banner-with its silver branch and golden leaves-they drove the Tharosians back across the sea.

Veradian never returned to Altania himself; the wound from the arrow had weakened him, and after a few years he died. But in time his son sailed across the sea with more s.h.i.+ps, and while Beanore held them back for many years, in the end the forces of Tharos were too much. She was captured and forced to abdicate her crown, relinquis.h.i.+ng it to Veradian's son. However, before she could be dragged in chains back to Tharos, she escaped, riding into the deep green forest that covered most of the island in that time. She was never seen again.

Some said Beanore was the last true Altanian monarch, for all of the island's rulers after that time were descended of the line of Tharos, or more lately of the Mabingorian houses out of the north. And in all the centuries since, Altania had been ruled only once more by a queen.

A man walked past Ivy and gave her a look. His clothes were as drab as the pigeons. His eyes were weathered like the stone of the monument. She became aware that there were others like him lingering about the fountain in small groups. Despite the afternoon swelter, a chill came upon her. She gripped the packet of lace, then moved down the street-not too quickly, yet quickly enough.

I VY RECOGNIZED THE house the moment she laid eyes upon it.

Indeed, so familiar did its shape seem to her that she wondered how she could have had difficulty picturing it. The ruddy stone, the tall windows, the peaks of the gables, even the gargoyles grimacing from the cornices-she remembered everything as she saw it.

The house was farther from the fountain than she had thought; she could only suppose her father had carried her part of the way that day long ago, or else they had driven and she had forgotten it. She had begun to despair as she walked by countless unfamiliar houses and shops, past nameless closes and ancient little graveyards.

Then the street bent a little, and there it was, set in its own yard and bordered by an iron fence. The other houses pressed in close, but with that fence, and the aloofness granted by the yard, and its reddish stone so unlike the gray of the buildings all around, the house gave the impression that it had been there long before the rest.

By the time Ivy reached the gate, her heart was pounding, but she could not claim it was from exertion. She glanced over her shoulder. The street was growing more crowded as people started to rouse from their afternoon torpor and ventured out to take advantage of the last hours of the long lumenal. However, no one looked at her as they went about their business.

a.s.sured she was not an object of attention, Ivy moved to the gate. There was a heavy lock, but this was no surprise. She drew a key from her pocket, which she had taken from one of the drawers of the secretary in the parlor. While her mother had never told her what the key was for, Ivy had long known it was the key to the house on Durrow Street. It was overlarge and heavy. She put it to the lock.

Before she could turn the key, the gate swung open. It had been shut but in no way latched.

Ivy frowned. How strange that the gate was not locked! Had it been so all these years? She withdrew the key, and as she did she noticed several marks around the keyhole. They looked like scratches in the iron, or rather like scorch marks, being silvery and radiating out from the lock in sharp lines. Perhaps at some point thieves had shot the lock with a gun in order to break in and rob the house.

Except that could not be, for the lock wasn't broken. She turned the key and was able to lock the mechanism easily, then unlock it again. She withdrew the key and touched one of the scorch marks. A bit of the silver residue stained her finger.

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