SILENCE PREVAILED WITHIN the carriage as it trundled back to the Blue Boar, where Zacharias would pass the night before travelling to Fobdown Purlieu the next day. Sir Stephen broke this finally with an encouraging:
“It must be a weight off your mind to have that done with, eh? I did not envy your dinner. If that joint ever came of a goat, the creature must have been as old as I upon its expiry.”
“Is that so? I did not notice it,” said Zacharias.
Sir Stephen believed Zacharias was low-spirited, not without reason. The day had not been a success, and the dinner that had wound it up had been painful. Mrs. Daubeney’s eagerness to please could not conceal her private distress, and Zacharias’s mind was clearly elsewhere. Receiving no better response to her brave sallies than “Indeed, yes. No. I beg your pardon,” Mrs. Daubeney had finally retired from the field, and waited out the dinner in stony silence.
Sir Stephen cast about for a means of raising Zacharias’s spirits. Zacharias must feel he had done nothing right today, but then he had hardly been prepared by his previous life’s work for the occasion.
“I think you did very well, all things considered. It is a difficult thing to know how to deal with females when one has no experience of the creatures,” said Sir Stephen. “But practise would give your manners the polish they want. I tell you what it is, Zacharias, you do not mix enough in society. Maria wishes you to pay court to some young lady, does she not? You are perhaps young for marriage, but it might do you good to get up a harmless flirtation. Why should not you turn the Spring Ball to your advantage, and contrive to be introduced to a few agreeable females then?”
This suggestion jolted Zacharias out of his waking dream. He stared at Sir Stephen in astonishment.
“Get up a flirtation, at such a time as this?” he exclaimed. “It is not to be thought of. I shall be too busy to have any time for society. Such a wholesale reform will require a great deal of time and energy.”
Now it was Sir Stephen’s turn to stare. He said:
“Wholesale reform? What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”
“The reform of the magical education of women, of course!” cried Zacharias. “I wonder that you need ask. Surely there can be no question that reform is needed. Pobjoy’s taking! I have never heard the like! Of course, it targets the seven centres of magic within the body; I ought to have known it by the name they gave it. But I would never have conceived of its being put to such ends. They are fortunate they have killed none of their students yet!”
Zacharias did not often allow himself the indulgence of being out of temper, but he was a young man, as few other than Sir Stephen and Lady Wythe now remembered, and he was deeply affected by all he had seen at Mrs. Daubeney’s school. The longer he pondered the day’s events—and he had ample time for pondering over dinner, since he had not troubled to make conversation—the more convinced he was that he had been wrong on the subject of feminine magic. Everyone was wrong on the subject. But that would certainly change.
Zacharias had been engrossed in schemes of improvement all evening. In his fancy he had trampled over old articles of faith, won a reluctant Society to his cause, and built vast palaces of learning peopled with healthy, useful thaumaturgesses. This prepared him ill for Sir Stephen’s response.
“Perhaps it is a little foolhardy of those women to employ Pobjoy, but it does not seem to have done the girls any harm. It is a clever thing they have done, to funnel the magic back into the ether. If we could persuade more of our women to practise the exercise we would be all the better for it. I declare I do not see what you are so alarmed about.”
“No, indeed. Why should I be alarmed that we require women to suppress their powers and disregard their instincts?” said Zacharias. “Why should it distress me that we punish any deviation so cruelly?”
Sir Stephen was surprised, though he was intimately familiar with the zeal for reform that lurked, unsuspected, within Zacharias. He had done his best to curb these instincts, and when the young Zacharias had protested, “Why, sir, you are a reformer yourself!” he had replied placidly, “But you have not my advantages, you know. Besides, I know my limits, my dear fellow—I know my limits!”
But that was the trouble with children, Sir Stephen reflected. They were confoundedly liable to pattern themselves upon one’s conduct, when one would rather they simply did what they were told. Of course Zacharias was no longer a child, but the years had not dampened his fervour. Zacharias had ever placed what he believed to be right above what was politic.
“You had always a soft heart, and I suppose you were distressed by that girl,” said Sir Stephen. “But consider the privations a thaumaturge must suffer, Zacharias. You know better than anyone the cost of sorcery.” His voice dropped. “Think of how you are placed yourself—think of Leofric, and all you have suffered on his account, and mine. Would you subject women to that?”
Zacharias hesitated for the first time.
“I do not propose that women seek to pass for sorcerers,” he said slowly. “Indeed, I could wish the nation had no need of sorcerers at all. I have no anxiety regarding the effect of ordinary magic on women, however. You have met many a house- and hedgewitch yourself—they invariably live to a great old age.”
“Oh, that sort of thing is all very well for charwomen and chambermaids,” said Sir Stephen impatiently. “But their use of magic to lighten their burdens is no argument for imposing such evils upon females of the better classes.”
“What needs to be stifled by daily recitations of a curse can hardly be described as an imposition,” retorted Zacharias. “I am not sure I credit these tales of the peculiar dangers of magic for women. After all, did not the Society say much the same of me? That my body could not support, nor my mind comprehend, the subtleties of the craft? You championed my abilities in the teeth of their opposition. Can you truly say, sir, that I should not seek to do for women what you did for me?”
Zacharias had not always been grateful for the form Sir Stephen’s defence of his abilities had taken in the past. Though he had never doubted his guardian’s attachment, being Sir Stephen’s protégé had at times felt like being a touring attraction—a dancing bear on its lead. But Zacharias knew he could say nothing so well calculated to silence Sir Stephen.
Sir Stephen looked as though he did not know whether to be pleased or dismayed. He assumed a cantankerous expression, and said, huffing and puffing:
“There were no pamphlets calling for me to be strung up for invented failures! But I suppose you will pursue these crotchets whatever I say. You are of age, and if you will not consider your own security, there is nothing I can do to prevent your risking yourself. But I wash my hands of the matter—I throw you off entirely, mind! When it all ends in disaster, remember I told you I would have nothing to do with it!”
• • •
YOU should certainly include a chapter on goety,” said Sir Stephen.
Since Zacharias could only start for Fobdown Purlieu in the morning, he had begun sketching out his plan to reform women’s magical education, by way of putting his evening to good use. He lay down his pen, stealing a look at the clock.
It was a quarter past eleven, and he was the only living person in the coffee-room, the inn having given over the apartment to him. He longed to massage his forehead, but he had no wish to remind Sir Stephen of his malady—Sir Stephen was bound to insist that he go to bed.
Zacharias knew he would suffer an attack of his complaint that evening—it was presaged, as always, by light-headedness, and hallucinations of strange shapes, lights and noises. But it would only strike at midnight, and he was loath to stop his labours before then. If he left off now it was a matter of real doubt when he would return to them again.
Sir Stephen had hovered at Zacharias’s shoulder, muttering imprecations, but he was soon absorbed in the work despite himself. The task of devising a suitable syllabus was too interesting for him to refrain from commenting, however doubtful he might feel of its utility.
“I cannot think necromancy a suitable subject for girls,” said Zacharias.
“This is what comes of being acquainted only with missish London females,” said Sir Stephen, who had, not an hour ago, been inveighing against teaching women any magic, for fear it should be too much for them. “Childbirth is no very delicate process, and it is women who lay out the dead, so pray include the study of necromancy, and let us have no more argument. If you insist on instructing females it must be a comprehensive education, and no magical education can be complete without imparting a proper understanding of the darker arts.”
“I wonder whether necromancy ought not to be followed by the study of household magics,” said Zacharias musingly. “That might serve as a capital counterbalance to spirit-speaking.”
“I thought you wished to train serious practitioners,” exclaimed Sir Stephen. “If your desire is to turn out a phalanx of magical cooks, there is no need for reform. Your magical females can apprentice themselves to any village witch or wise woman—there are scores of the creatures, however hard the Society may try to pretend they do not exist. But I cannot see that their lore has any earthly relevance to a thaumaturgical education.”
“Why, as to that, the low magics may produce spells as intricate and exacting as anything by the name of thaumaturgy,” said Zacharias. “One witch, a Mrs. Hudson, showed me a spell which ensured her cooking never burnt, the principle of which was as philosophical as any thaumaturge could wish. The spell bound together time and the ideal, compelling both to meet at the desired point. An ingenious receipt, one she learnt at her grandmother’s knee. I took a copy of it.”
He rose to look for the receipt among his journals, but it was not among the books he had spread out upon the table and floor. Zacharias reached for his luggage, which sat in a dark corner of the coffee-room, but as he did so he stumbled over an obstacle he had not perceived before.
“Pray do not step on my case,” said a small, clear voice.
Zacharias realised three things:
Sir Stephen had vanished.
At his feet was a worn old valise, which was not his.
On the floor sat a young woman. She rose, moving stiffly, as if she had been sitting for a considerable time.
The room, lit by the dwindling fire in the grate, was full of soft dark shadows, and the lamp on Zacharias’s desk threw only a small circle of light. But his visitor had not relied upon the dimness of the room to conceal her presence. She still wore the rags of an invisibility enchantment, that Zacharias had torn by treading upon it.
It was a cleverly worked spell, surprisingly original in design, but it would not have so practised upon Zacharias’s senses if he had not been tired and taken up with his thoughts. He had not expected to see anything other than shadows in the corners of the room, and so he had seen no more.
Even so, he was horrified at his lapse. He gazed openmouthed at the young woman, and this was when Zacharias arrived at a fourth realisation: it was Miss Gentleman, whom he had seen that morning fending off hexes.
“Now you have seen me, please may I sleep on the chaise longue?” she said. She seemed perfectly collected, as though it were an everyday matter to her to intrude upon the most prominent magician of his generation. “It is late, and I should like to rest for the journey tomorrow.”
Zacharias was so perplexed by the situation that he let this pass without comment. “How did you contrive to enter this room?”
“I turned left before the stairs, and opened the second door,” said Prunella. “The maid’s directions were clear enough, and there are not so many rooms that one is easily lost.”
It briefly occurred to Zacharias to wonder whether the young woman was speaking a foreign language, and he had simply failed to notice it. He did not seem to be following her meaning at all.
“There must be some mistake,” he said. “How did you persuade the landlord to let you in?”
“Oh, that was no trouble at all,” said Prunella. “The Headeys have a new maid, who does not know the village. I told her I was a courtier from Fairyland disguised as a mortal female, and that I had an appointment to confer with the Sorcerer Royal. She is a superstitious creature and let me in directly, so I came up here to wait for you.”
“How long were you sitting here in the dark?” said Zacharias. He undertook a hasty mental review of his conversation. How fortunate it was that he had been engaged in a discussion of educational reform. As explosive as the Society would find his plans, they were not nearly so great a secret as the Government’s negotiations with Janda Baik, or the manoeuvrings of the Fairy Court.
“I came when everyone had sat down to dinner,” said Prunella. “I slept a while, so I was not very bored. The floor was excessively uncomfortable, however. I should much prefer the chaise longue, if you have no objection.”
Another man, surprised by a female so abandoned to all considerations of propriety as to saunter unasked into his room and demand the use of his chaise longue, might have so forgotten his manners as either to eject her without further ado, or to grow offensively familiar. Not so Zacharias. The latter course would never have occurred to him, and if the former presented any appeal, it was banished by the chatter of Prunella’s teeth as she spoke, and the trembling of her hands.
The instinct of hospitality Lady Wythe had instilled in Zacharias came to the fore. The girl must be returned to the school, it was clear, but first she must be looked to.
“Pray sit,” he said, handing her to a chair by the fire. “I will ring the landlord for tea. May I ask why I have been honoured with this visit?”
Prunella seated herself, holding the battered old valise on her knee.
“Of course,” she said. “I am coming with you to London.”