But that is not all.
Two more prominent and influential men in Sealey Head were also suffering from the harsh turn of Fortune. The shipping merchant, Mr. Blair, had lost three out of four of his ships in the terrible seas, and the fourth had been driven so far out of its charted path that no one knew where it had gone. Rumor sighted it far to the north, trapped in a perpetually frozen sea among the icebergs. Or in dry dock on an island in the tropics, whose people spoke no familiar language, so could not tell the sailors where they were in the world. Mr. Blair expended the last of his fortune to send a fifth ship out to search for the missing.
And all was equally unwell at Aislinn House. Lord Aislinn’s profligate ways had so depleted the family fortune that his daughter, Eloise, became his only hope. But a slender one at that: with no fortune, and a face like a vole, all small dull eyes and teeth, she had no prospects whatsoever. Not even the ambitious young Master Tibald Sproule, who had his eye on Aislinn House, would make an offer for her.
In such hideously difficult times, it seemed only a fortuitous stroke of luck would save the town. As luck would have it, it came, though not in any shape anyone could have expected.
Gwyneth stopped. The twins stared at her expectantly. Even their father had shifted a palm frond aside to gaze at her in wonder.
“Go on,” Crispin grunted.
“That’s all I have.”
“But the bell!” He bounced a little, impatiently, on the sofa. “You said it was about the bell.”
“I haven’t figured that part out yet. Not in this story. Nothing seems right.”
“I like all the catastrophes,” Pandora commented. “I hope there are more of them before you put everything aright.”
“I believe there will be. I haven’t yet made up my mind about which of its faces Luck will be wearing.” She laughed at their twin expressions, both of them astonished and annoyed at once. “I’m sorry. I was hoping you might have some suggestions for me.”
“I cannot imagine how you will rescue your poor characters,” Toland Blair told his daughter over the palm frond. “You’ve certainly made them wretched enough. I hope you’ll at least show mercy to your beleaguered merchant. But why the bell? Why do you keep going back to it?”
He was a big, weathered man with gray streaks in his hair and broad mustache. After his wife had died, he took to sea on his own merchant ships for long, wearying periods, returning briefly now and then to comment on his children’s heights and give them carved ivory animals, or wooden-soled sandals, or stranger things that Aunt Phoebe locked into a cupboard as soon as he had gone again. He was beginning to linger longer now on land; his seafaring eyes, wide and distant, were noticing again the wonders growing under his roof.
“It’s a mystery,” Gwyneth said simply.
He shook his papers straight on his desk and came out from behind the palms to poke at the fire.
“It’s nothing more than the ghostly echo of the bell on a ship that foundered off the headlands long ago. It tolled its last as it was dragged under the waves, just as the sun vanished into the sea. That’s what everyone says.”
“Do you believe that?”
He looked surprised. “I never thought about it.”
“I have.”
“I know you have.” He chuckled. “I’ve listened to your stories. The sea bell that the mermaid rings in vain every sunset to summon her long-dead lover. The bell tied around the neck of a gigantic hound let out only at sundown.”
Gwyneth flushed. “You heard that one?”
“That was my favorite,” Crispin said enthusiastically. “When it ate all the evil highwaymen.”
“I liked the bell on the path into fairyland,” Pandora said, “that signals the gate between worlds to open only at sunset.”
“Well,” Gwyneth sighed. “Nothing ever seems right to me.”
“Perhaps because the truth of the matter is that simple,” her father suggested. “That sad.”
She looked at him doubtfully. Aunt Phoebe opened the library door then, sent the twins up to bed. She came to stand next to her brother in a rare, contemplative moment. Both heads bent, her white hair in a bun, his gray and brown tied at his neck; they gazed silently together into the fire. Gwyneth swallowed a sudden, flaring ember of memory.
Then Phoebe raised her head, said briskly to him, “Gwyneth has been invited to go riding tomorrow with Raven Sproule and his sister to visit Lady Eglantyne.”
“Really.” Her father glanced at Gwyneth. His mustache twitched at the expression on her face.
“He seems quite interested in our Gwyneth.”
“Really,” he said again, still gazing at his daughter. She widened her eyes abruptly, crossed them. He looked away, clearing his throat noisily.
“Well,” he said only, “there is another tale in the making. Let’s see what she does with this one.”
Three
Emma found Ysabo in the closet under the grand staircase, where she kept the cloths and the brass polish for the carpet rods on the stairs.
From long experience, she kept one foot stuck out to hold the door open, and a good grip on the polish, while the vast hall shimmered into shape far beneath her. Ysabo was standing on a narrow stone landing, from which steps zigzagged forever, it seemed, down the wall. She smiled quickly, while Emma, her head reeling, stared down at knights in their black leather and armor and bright surcoats, so far below that the words in their deep voices echoed and bounced across the walls, became distorted, incoherent, voices in a dream. They had grown up together, the princess and the housemaid; they had known each other nearly all their lives.
“Sorry,” Emma whispered, an ear cocked for footsteps on the worn floorboards on her side. “I was just putting things away.”
“It’s all right. I’m always happy to see you.”
“Yes.” She allowed herself a rare smile, wondering that she remembered how in those sad, quiet days. “It’s good to see you, too. You look beautiful. Is it some special day?”
The princess was dressed in sage green, old lace, pearls as yellow as the foam that piled up on the shore sometimes in winter. The mass of her red, tightly curling hair had been pulled back into a cone of lace and gold wire. Amber the strange, speckled green-gold of her eyes hung from her earlobes and her neck. She made a little wry face at Emma’s words, a twist to too-thin lips, an arch of carroty brow in her colorless skin.
“My mother says I’m a goblin-child,” she had told Emma long ago, when they were both very small. She had added something that even now Emma wasn’t sure she understood. “Well, she would know.”
That day Ysabo answered, “It’s my birthday. Aveline says something wonderful will happen at supper tonight. All the knights will be celebrating with me.” The noise was increasing, crashing upward in waves against the stone walls. “I must go. The bell will ring soon, and, for one night in my life, instead of doing my usual supper rituals, I must go down in the company of Maeve and Aveline. I hope next time we will be able to talk.”
“Oh, so do I. It’s been too long.”
Ysabo smiled again, her face so bright that surely, Emma thought, in some other world it would be considered rare and hauntingly beautiful. She closed the door carefully. When she opened it again a moment later, she put the polish and the cloths on the shelf, hardly starting at all when the unexpected steps creaked across the floor toward her.