in the pool of oil.
“Again!” Dulcie instructed with delight. Gwyneth put her down quickly, went to help the besieged innkeeper.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, shaking with what looked like acute embarrassment or an imminent explosion of laughter.
“Never mind,” Aunt Phoebe said with unexpected gallantry. “Is it the fish-jaw lantern, I hope? Leave it. We can’t stay in here with that dreadful smell. Let’s join Toland in the library. Gwyneth, help me with the tea trays. Pandora, you call Ivy to clear it—Pandora? Where is that child? Always vanishing, the pair of them. Gwyneth, you call Ivy, and Mr. Cauley will help me with the tea things.”
“Are you sure you trust me with them?” Judd asked, wending his way cautiously around a spiky bamboo chair.
“Of course. You would not dare drop my second-best teapot.”
In the library, Dr. Grantham snared Judd to ask about his father; Raven and Daria gravitated toward Toland to question him further about this friend of his who flowed in the bright wake of the heir to Aislinn House. Gwyneth, pouring fresh tea, found herself gazing into Ridley Dow’s parched cup.
She refilled it, aware of his dark, speculative gaze behind his spectacles. She set the teapot down and met it, every bit as curious as he.
“Judd told me you think the bell has to do with magic,” she said. “When he said the word, I realized I had no idea what it means. Outside of a fairy tale, I mean. What might magic be in the prosaic little world of Sealey Head? When a fishing boat sinks into the deep, not a wish or a word will bring it up again. You’d think if magic were around, that’s one of the first things people might do with it.”
He nodded. “Bring the dead to life. Surely that would be an enormously powerful impulse.” He sipped tea, went on slowly, “I tend to believe that there are varying degrees of power.”
“Power.”
“Magical ability. When you learn to read, you begin with very simple words, very short sentences. So, I think, magic is learned. One small word at a time.”
“What word?” she asked, entranced. “Give me an example.”
“Well. For instance, the bell. Suppose it has nothing at all to do with the sea.”
“Oh,” she said, disconcerted, thinking of her latest tale.
“In theory,” he assured her. “In life, anything is possible.
Suppose, in some complex world just beyond our eyesight, the bell is rung by someone very much alive and not at all wet.”
“Oh,” she said again, disappointed now. “But I’ve written such things many times, Mr. Dow. The only true magic is in my pen. You can no more find that world within Sealey Head than you can dive headfirst into a piece of paper.”
He smiled. “I would like to read those stories, Miss Blair.”
“You are changing the subject. Is magic so difficult to define?”
“Perhaps the bell isn’t a good place to start. It is subject to all kinds of explanations, none of which can be proven or disproven.” He took another sip of tea, meditated a moment. “Think of some action you never think about doing, you just do. Lighting a candle. Shutting a door. Putting your cup down on your saucer.”
“Yes,” she said, doing it.
“Suppose you could learn to look at a candle and kindle a fire in your mind that will light the wick across the room.”
“Well, that’s not—How could that be possible?”
“How, indeed? That would be magic.”
He smiled, and she saw the reflection of candle fire in his lenses.
She turned swiftly, nearly spilling her tea. One of a pair of candles on her father’s desk beyond the potted palms burned in the shadows. He had forgotten to extinguish it, she thought, when he was summoned to tea by Aunt Phoebe. But she did not convince herself; her fingers had gone cold. She looked back at Ridley, blinking; he said nothing, his eyes hidden behind the reflection.
Then the fire was gone, and there was Raven at one of her elbows suddenly, and Daria at the other, intent on the stranger who had come to Sealey Head.
“Tell us what you know of Miranda Beryl,” Daria pleaded. “Likes, dislikes, gossip—any scrap at all. We are fascinated. It is the most exciting thing ever to happen in Sealey Head. You will be here for our party, won’t you? Judd said he thought you might be staying for some time.”
“Judd said he hoped you might be,” the innkeeper amended, joining them, and added to Ridley, “I must get back to see to my father, and any stray guests who might have ventured in to alarm Mrs. Quinn.”
“I’ll bid you good evening, too, then,” Ridley said promptly, setting his cup on the table.
“But you were going to tell us tales of Landringham,” Daria exclaimed. “You must stay!”
“Don’t let me take you away from such agreeable company,” Judd protested, at which Ridley cast one of his opaque, light-glazed glances.
“Even I have business to attend to,” he answered amiably. “I like to work in the evenings.”
“Then you must come to supper at Sproule Manor,” Daria said firmly. “Our cook is the second-best along this part of the coast. Our mother will send you an invitation very soon, and you can tell us everything there is to know about life in the city.”
“I look forward to it.” He met Gwyneth’s eyes again. “I hope to explore your thoughts about the bell much further, Miss Blair.”
“Yes,” she said a trifle dazedly. “Though in the light of—ah—your own reflections, mine seem strangely insubstantial.
Good night, Judd. Please come again soon. We forgot to talk about books.”
“Fish oil intruded,” he murmured. He hesitated, wanting to say more, she sensed, and she smiled encouragingly. But Raven spoke first, and suddenly she was watching Judd’s back, accompanying the astonishing Mr. Dow out the door.
Well, she thought, during a little moment of silence while Raven and Daria bit into tea cakes simultaneously. Well, then. I shall just have to borrow a book.
Seven
Ysabo brought the scrap bowl down from the tower.
No one else was allowed up there, not even the kitchen maid who carried the bowl up the kitchen stairs to the hall every morning and met the princess to give it to her. She waited there while the princess fed the crows, then took the bowl from her with a curtsy and vanished back down into the depths. She kept her eyes and chin lowered, never presumed to speak, and never expected the princess to acknowledge her existence by a word or a glance.
But Ysabo was in a mood to examine everything that had to do with the ritual. Since the moment when she saw herself as part of a pattern, as vital as the ringing of the bell or the daily gathering of the crows, she had been consumed with a strange, desperate need to understand. What exactly was the pattern? And exactly whose pattern was it? Before, filling cups and tossing scraps, she had felt useful but replaceable. Anyone could do what she did every day. Now, seeing her fate in the ritual, she wondered suddenly, intensely: How far back in time did that line of children go who had inherited this piece of the pattern? How far forward into the future would the unborn children go?
What would happen if everything stopped?
So, that morning, she started to scrutinize the details of her days. Beginning with the scrap bowl. It changed daily, she had thought, according to the amount that filled it. For the first time, she realized that the bowl itself never changed; only its size varied. The bowl was silver and copper, always gleaming; it must have been polished daily. Still, it seemed very old, with its odd lumps of uncut jewels decorating the sides, the ribbons of copper wandering randomly over it, the shadow, here and there, of age that no care could remove.
