“Why?”
Again the lenses flashed at him, signaling a swift comprehension of matters at hand. “Why did I come here to this rough place at the edge of the land?”
“Yes.”
“Because I was reading one afternoon in my study in the middle of the great noisy city of Landringham on the other side of Rurex, and I heard the bell toll the sun down on Sealey Head.” Judd stared at him; he nudged a bag gently with his boot. “In one of my books. Among my eccentricities is the pursuit of things mysterious, otherworldly, magical. There is magic in this place. I want to find it.”
Judd found his voice after a moment. “Can I borrow the book?”
“I hoped you’d ask. You would recognize names mentioned.”
“I never recognized anything magic around here.”
“You live in it.”
“People say the bell’s just an echo of something that happened a long time ago. Live here long enough, you don’t hear it anymore.”
“Did you? Stop hearing it?”
He shook his head. “No. I always wondered . . . It’s just a sound, though. Vanishes the moment you hear it. It comes out of nowhere. How do you go about finding nowhere?”
“I have no idea,” Ridley said simply. “But I’m here, and I intend to find a way. If you have time to spare, perhaps you’ll help me?”
“I think I could eke out the odd hour here and there,” Judd answered dazedly.
“Good,” Ridley said, with his quick, pleased smile. He added, “Does Mrs. Quinn brew the ale here, too?”
“No. You’re in luck there. Come downstairs. I’ll put some supper together for you.”
“There’s more magic in a tankard of ale than in most of the world, some days,” the scholar mused as he followed Judd through the quiet inn to the kitchen. “Along with transforming memory and a very rugged road, it’s usually there under your nose when you need it. You must only recognize the magic. That’s what the books say, anyway. In the raw ends of the earth, in a tankard of ale. Perhaps, one day, even in Mrs. Quinn’s cooking.”
“Never,” Judd said flatly, and went for the eggs and sausage in the larder instead.
Two
Gwyneth Blair heard the bell as the last, dying ember of light guttered into the cloud bank over the sea, and put down her pen.
She looked over the cobbled street, her father’s warehouses, and the bobbing masts in the harbor from the highest room in the house, just below the peaked roof, where the sharply slanting walls made the place unfit for anything but brooms or a writer. She had wedged a tiny writing table under the single window, a rickety affair from the schoolroom, whose surface her older brother had riddled with a penknife when he was bored. An ugly cushion, covered with lime ribbons and liver-colored velvet, that she had purloined from the parlor protected her from the split in the scullery stool she had rescued from the trashman’s wagon. There was just room enough in the angle between the table legs and the roof for a small tin chest into which she dropped the pages of unfinished stories. When they were completed, various things happened to them. Some she read to the twins; others she took to the bookseller, Mr. Trent, for comment. Most were consigned to the dark under her bed, to be considered when she was in a better mood. A few she took down to the garden and burned.
It grew dark quickly in the tiny room after the sun went down. She dried her pen, capped her ink, dropped a half-covered page into the chest. She sat a moment longer, following the ebb tide out of the harbor, through the rocky channel where a fishing boat foundered, invariably, once a year, and out to the restless deeps, already growing shadowy with dusk.
The bell had haunted her as long as she could remember.
It was the first thing she had written about, years earlier, the most exciting, the most dreadful piece of writing she had ever done. That had gone under her bed and never come out. Since then, her written explanations of the mystery of the bell had grown more sophisticated, more complex. Most still ended up under the bed. Some she showed to Mr. Trent, who held the common local belief about the phenomenon but enjoyed what he called her excursions into the imagination.
The makeshift latch on the peaked door rattled up and down. Gwyneth, who had heard no footsteps on the steep, narrow stairs, moved quickly, dodging the ceiling as she stood from long practice, and opened the door.
The baby of the family grinned at her toothily. She was not yet three, a plump, golden-haired, violet-eyed armful. Of all of the siblings, she most resembled their mother, who had died a few months after her birth. No wonder Gwyneth had heard no steps; Dulcie had done away with her shoes again, and who knew where this time?
“Tantie says come down.”
“I’m coming. Where, you miserable child, have you hidden your shoes?”
“Guess.”
“Indeed.” Gwyneth hoisted Dulcie up into her arms. “Do you think our father has nothing better to do than send his ships out to exotic lands to bring you back new shoes?”
“The bird is here for tea,” Dulcie said complacently, knocking Gwyneth’s spectacles askew with her dimpled elbow. “And Dary.”
Gwyneth stifled a sigh, as well as a few thoughts unwise to express around the chatterbox Dulcie. “How wonderful,” she said flatly. “How extremely pleasant for all of us to be favored by the magnificent presence of the bird.”
She started carefully down the stairs, keeping an eye out for stray shoes. She, too, had inherited their mother’s curly gold hair, but her eyes were practically colorless, gray as a fogbank with no storm in sight, and she had somehow grown nearly as tall as their father. That this did not discourage Raven Sproule, the bird, from seeking her out over his cup of tea never ceased to amaze her.
What ails the man? she wondered, putting Dulcie down to walk at the bottom of the stairs. I’m a merchant’s daughter who wears spectacles and spends a good deal of her life in an attic. Has his father run through the family fortune already?
She remembered to plant a smile on her face as she opened the parlor door.
Their mother, who had rarely used the dark, windowless room, had furnished it with her least favored items, hence the lime-and-liver cushion. Curiosities their father had gleaned from his ships wound up there: lamps made of seashells, animal-skin carpets complete with eyes and teeth, a huge round brass table, a folding screen painted with a snake coiling among jungle plants and flicking its tongue toward a squawking fledgling in its nest, an entire collection, in various sizes and styles, of ships in bottles. The more interesting oddments had been pilfered by the twins: the strange drums and rattles, the deeply bellowing conch shells, the peculiar games with polished stones for counters, the curtain made of strands of beads and minute stuffed hummingbirds. What was left was uncomfortable, ugly, or too bizarre even for the twins.
Aunt Phoebe considered the room an educational gift to the inhabitants of Sealey Head, a sort of museum, and opened it to guests as often as she could. She sometimes wore the thin shawls with their bright, glinting threads while she poured tea, though the pinks and oranges rarely matched her habitual somber shades. She had come to live with her brother and care for his children after his wife died. It was, Gwyneth had thought at the time, like continually tripping over, or having to avoid, some cumbersome foreign object her father had brought home and constantly shifted into inconvenient places. But they gradually learned to live around her, for, despite her stodginess, she had a good heart.
“There you are,” she purred in her deep voice, as Gwyneth entered. Raven Sproule, trying to smile with his mouth full, was having his customary effect on Phoebe. Daria was there, too, his younger sister, all flutterings and lace, doing that thing with her gooseberry eyes. Her long lashes went winking and blinking up and down a few times at Gwyneth; she complained of weak vision, even to total strangers, as she peered confidingly at them.