The Bell at Sealey Head

Eight

On her rare half-days off of work, Emma went looking for her mother.

That morning, she brought Lady Eglantyne and Sophie their breakfasts. Then she cleaned the grates, laid new fires, and tidied their rooms. Lady Eglantyne, her pink, sunken eyes filmy with sleep as she sat up in bed, murmured a few words now and then to her teacup or to her toast, which she politely refrained from eating. Sophie coaxed a few spoonfuls of porridge into her and a couple of strawberries. Dr. Grantham was shown up, in time to keep her from nodding off into her poached egg.

“No word yet,” Emma heard him tell Sophie before she took the tray back down.

“Nothing yet,” she told Mrs. Haw in the kitchen, and “Not yet,” to Mrs. Blakeley and Fitch, who were in the butler’s pantry polishing silver that hadn’t been used in years. Ever since the doctor had sent his letter posthaste to Landringham, Mrs. Blakeley had been obsessively counting things. Bed linens, towels, plates, forks, wineglasses, chairs. She vacillated between tearing the dust covers off the furniture and airing the rooms, or leaving such matters until the heir had given them a definite date of arrival.

“No use undoing what we’ll only have to do over again if she doesn’t come for months,” she kept saying. And, with panic in her eyes: “What will we do with their horses? The stables have been empty for years. To say nothing of the garden.”

“Worry when it’s time to worry,” Mrs. Haw told her, sighing resignedly. “I can’t fret over cooking meals single-handedly for guests I can’t even count yet. Besides, we don’t even know if we’ll be kept on.” Mrs. Blakeley was rendered speechless at the thought. Mrs. Haw shrugged her massive shoulders, working her way around a potato skin with her knife. “Let’s wait to worry until we’re told why we need to.”

In the midst of such uncertainty, nobody remembered that it was Emma’s half-day off. She didn’t remind them. Mrs. Blakeley was liable to find a dozen things for Emma to do, and a dozen reasons why she should give up her half-day and do them. At noon, Emma took her apron and cap off, put her walking shoes on, and slipped out the boot room door.

She walked through the woods in the direction of the tree house first, though she had no real expectation of finding Hesper there. She could be anywhere on that sunny, genial day. The trees, maple, elm, birch, busy leafing out among the coastal pine after a weary winter, preened their leaves in the wind like birds flaunting their colors.

Anything—wild ginger, mushrooms, hawthorn, violets, honeysuckle—might have caught her mother’s eye, or tantalized her nose, sent her clambering over hill and dale, filling the many pockets of her apron. As well, she might be napping under a bush. Or walking to town in her old clamming boots to buy a fish or a book. Sometimes Emma missed her completely, had to leave a gift and a message on her table in greeting.

That afternoon, Hesper was easy to find. Emma saw her from a distance among the trees, working the debris out of a new patch of garden near her house. Her arms and legs were bare, golden; the hoe wheeled and flashed around her in the light. Her hair, a mass of long, gray-brown curls, streamed in the wind like the tree boughs. She wore an old dress with the sleeves torn out, and the skirt raggedly shortened to her knees. As though she sensed someone’s eyes on her, she let the hoe drop abruptly, turned, shading her eyes with her hand. Emma heard her voice, deep and delighted, blown up the hill by the wind.

“Emma!”

“Dr. Grantham has sent for Lady Eglantyne’s heir,” Emma said breathlessly after they hugged, news tumbling randomly out of her, for she hadn’t seen Hesper for nearly a month. “Mrs. Haw thinks we might all be discharged.”

“Good,” her mother said, washing her hands in a bucket beside the door. “Then you can come and live with me.”

“Lady Eglantyne is still alive, though she hardly eats, and mostly sleeps. The doctor said if you have anything left for him to try, bring it up to the house.”

“I will.” She dried her hands on an old apron, smiling at Emma. The lines were deep around her eyes and mouth in her lean, sun-browned face. But her smile seemed younger than ever. “How are you, girl? You look a little shadowy around the edges. Come in, and I’ll make you a tea for that.”

She disappeared into the crazed house, the huge, hollowed tree trunk with a thatched roof, smaller huts and lean-tos built up around the openings hewn into its bole, the whole looking like a weird colony of mushrooms burgeoning off one another and held together by climbing roses and flowering vines. A chimney smoked improbably amid the thatch, attached to the thick stone hearth within the tree. One of the lean-tos, Emma knew, was entirely filled with books and papers.

Emma followed. A thought shook her as she stepped across the threshold, and she froze. “The princess. What will happen to her if I leave? If someone else—some stranger wanting towels—finds her behind the linen closet door instead?”

“I’d worry more about the stranger,” her mother said cryptically and pulled a stool made of unstripped white birch saplings out from under an oak door laid on trestles for a table. “From what I can tell, that’s a very dangerous house.”

Emma sat down on the stool, staring at Hesper. “For Ysabo?”

“For any stranger that chances in.”

“What have you found out about it?”

“Well, for one thing it’s very old magic,” Hesper said, putting this and that from her jars into the teapot. “I don’t know how old, and I don’t know whose.” She paused, a spoonful of rose hips suspended above the pot; lines rippled across her brow. “There’s so little to be found . . . It’s all secrets, between lines, allusions in letters, hints in diaries. But for at least a couple of centuries, if not longer. People writing about stories their children invented, ghosts their servants or some lord in his cups saw. Doors open, they get a glimpse—but nobody sees the whole of it. Ever.”

“How much did you see?”

“Enough to astonish me. Enough to make me wonder . . .” She turned to unhook the steaming kettle hanging above the fire, added water to her mix. She hung it back up, then sat down herself, elbows on the table, gazing at her daughter. “You be careful, girl. Don’t even think of crossing into that.”

Emma shook her head vehemently, braid bouncing on her shoulder blades. “No. I did invite the princess here, though, after the knight hit her. She said she couldn’t abandon the ritual.”

“What knight?”

“The one she asked why. Why she had to marry him.”

Hesper, absolutely still on her chair, echoed the word silently, “Why?” Then she said abruptly, “Wait. Wait. I have to write this down.”

“You didn’t know this part?

“Not the part where anybody ever asked why.”

Emma told her that part, sipping tea with a dollop of honey in it, holding the warm cup against her cheeks, her forehead, like a soothing hand.

“I guess I wouldn’t mind so much,” she said, while Hesper scribbled the last of her tale into the end papers of an apothecary’s remedy book.

“Mind what?”

“Leaving Aislinn House, after Lady Eglantyne dies. I could get a job in town, take care of us both. Especially if there’s nobody I know left in the house after the heir comes and brings her own staff.”

Her mother gave her a skewed look above her raised cup. “You don’t really think Miss Miranda Beryl of Landringham would settle herself into this backwater.”

“How do you know her name?”

“Ah, gossip. It holds the world together. The doctor’s been asking around town about her, who might know her.” Hesper took another sip. “Strange that even Lady Eglantyne’s own solicitors are reluctant to write to Miss Beryl. As though they know she’d never stay, and Lady Eglantyne’s death might mean the end of the family affairs in Sealey Head.”

“She’s Lady Eglantyne’s family. She should be here.”

“Have you heard Lady Eglantyne talk about her great-niece?”

Emma sighed. “No. She doesn’t talk much at all. She mostly dreams. Maybe nobody wants Miranda Beryl here. Nobody wants any changes.”

They ate bread and curds and a spicy beef sausage someone had given Hesper in payment. Then Emma took off her shoes and stockings, tucked up her skirt, and helped her mother clear the garden for cabbages, carrots, spinach, beans, and radishes. Hesper had already weeded the herb garden; scents of rosemary and sage teased Emma’s nose as she worked.

“You should walk into town,” Hesper protested as the sun, going its way, began to shift the patterns of tree shadows around them into the garden. “Breathe the sea air, see some younger faces.”

“Right now I’m doing this,” Emma answered, attacking a prodigious burdock root with satisfaction. “I’m seeing you.”

Later, when they had downed tools, washed off the dirt, and perched themselves on a sunlit log for cups of mint tea and a bowl of wild strawberries, Emma asked her mother, “Why did you leave Aislinn House if you were only going to sit in the tree house thinking about it? There, you could just open a door and see more pieces of the mystery.”

Hesper shook her head. Her thick, springy hair had collected an assortment of petals, twigs, a couple of insects trying to find their way out, sprigs of herbs she had tucked behind her ear for later. One of the insects, a tiny red beetle, flew away at the movement; Emma reached out and brushed the spider off.

“I never saw like you did. I caught glimpses of a great many people doing incomprehensible things. Some of them made me uneasy. The knights fully armed. That great pack of crows flying rings around the tower. Once when I opened the stillroom pantry, I thought they would come streaming through the doorway after me. I couldn’t say for certain that anyone even saw me. Except the crows. Maybe it’s a rare thing in her world that your friend Ysabo sees you as clearly as you see her. I left Aislinn House because I wanted more time of my own to find out about it. And because—” She smiled, tilting her face into the light. “I like being outdoors. I guessed that people would come seeking my remedies no matter where I kept myself. And out here, I can go barefoot.”

Emma stayed for supper, which was great fat dried mushrooms plumped up with water and fried in butter, a salad of dandelion and violet leaves, and the curly tips of ferns, fish from the market her mother had smoked, and ale—another payment. Emma, a bit sore from her exertions and pleasantly relaxed from the ale, heard the bell on her way through the woods. The light faded around her. The trees thinned, opened to reveal the unkempt hedges and overrun gardens of Aislinn House, all but lost in wildness.

She went in the way she had left, through the boot room. She took the back stairs to her room to rebraid her hair and change her shoes before she went down to the kitchen for gossip and to see if anyone noticed she had gone.

Mrs. Blakeley found her in the hallway between the stairs and the kitchen. “Emma!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been? We looked everywhere for you.”

“Why?” Emma asked quickly, searching the housekeeper’s face. Her normal pallor was blotchy with color; her eyes, usually weary and preoccupied, looked wide and a bit stunned. There was no sign of tears; Lady Eglantyne must still be alive. “I took my half-day. I went to see my mother.”

“Oh, if only the gentlemen had come earlier; you could have taken them with you.”

“What gentlemen?”

“You might have told us, Emma. Well. At least they came in time for the letter.”

“What letter?”

“It’s down in the kitchen. Mr. Fitch was reading it to Mrs. Haw. She kept something warm for you. Oh, Emma.” She pressed her fingers against the ancient black fabric over her bosom. “We have so much to do.”

“She’s coming?” Emma breathed, her skin prickling oddly.

“Miss Miranda Beryl, and her maids, household staff, friends, carriages, horses, stablers—I don’t remember who all. Fortunately, we were able to warn Mr. Cauley. Come down, read the letter yourself. You’ll see what we need to think about.”

She hurried Emma downstairs. Fitch was writing a list, while Mrs. Haw, involved in a seemingly endless comment about life that was interspersed with items to be purchased, broke off mid-mutton at the sight of Emma.

“Oh, there you are,” she said tremulously. “We thought you’d run off and left us to ourselves with all this.”

Emma pulled out a chair, sat down. “All what?” she asked Fitch. He pushed the letter across the table, looking more alert than he’d been in years at the prospect of company. Even the tufts of hair above his ears seemed glossier.

“Lady Eglantyne’s heir will be here in two days,” he told her. “We must prepare the house.”

“Two days!” She stared at him incredulously, then ran her eyes quickly over the letter, which was mauve, lightly scented, and in clear, quite elegant handwriting. She stared again at the butler, and whispered in horror, “Oh, Mr. Fitch.”

“Now, don’t panic. Once the lady is here, we’ll have plenty of staff to help us.”

“Help themselves to our jobs, more likely,” Mrs. Haw muttered.

“An undercook, three kitchen maids, two housemaids, stablers—”

“What about the stable roof? It’s all but fallen in. And the bedrooms haven’t been dusted for decades. And where will we put everyone?”

“We can only do what we can, Emma,” Fitch said firmly. “The lady will have to understand that. And since Judd Cauley from the inn was here when the letter came, we were able to show him Miss Beryl’s request that he ready rooms at the inn for friends and staff we might not be able to accommodate.”

“I see,” Emma said. Her voice still shook, but it was regaining strength. She rubbed her face with chilly fingers, trying to grasp an elusive thread of thought. “Judd Cauley.” She found it finally. “Why was Mr. Cauley here at all?”

“He and his friend came to see you,” Mrs. Blakeley answered.

“Me!”

“Well, your mother, actually. But they stopped here to ask you for directions. We couldn’t find you.”

“I was there, helping her with her garden,” Emma said dazedly. She looked at Mrs. Blakeley. “His friend?”

“Mr. Ridley Dow.” To Emma’s astonishment, the housekeeper came within memory of a smile. “Quite a handsome, nicely spoken young man he is, too. From Landringham, and staying at the inn as well.”

“But what did they want with my mother?”

“Who knows? An herb, an ointment, something for the horses—They were quite disappointed that we couldn’t find you. Mr. Dow was all for wandering about in the woods on the chance they might run across the tree house. But then we showed Mr. Cauley the letter, and he said he had to get back and put his own house in order.”

“The harbor inn is much closer to Aislinn House than his inn,” Emma said practically.

“Judd Cauley pointed that out, too,” Fitch said, “to his credit. The staff might be moved there later. But according to her letter, Miss Beryl preferred the inn on the cliff with the magnificent view for her friends. One of them must have known about it, I would guess. Mr. Cauley seemed a bit panicky himself when he left.”

“He at least has a working stable. What has he to panic about?” Mrs. Blakeley demanded.

“His cook,” Mrs. Haw said pithily, rapping a stirring spoon against the stew pot on the stove. “One night of her, and they’ll all be moving to the harbor. Are you hungry, Emma?”

“I ate with my mother, thank you, Mrs. Haw.”

“Nettles and bark, no doubt.”

“Close,” Emma agreed. She was silent, still wondering what a Mr. Ridley Dow from the great city of Landringham, in which presumably one could find everything in the world, would want with a wood witch in Sealey Head who lived in a tree. “They didn’t give any reason at all for wanting to see my mother? If it was urgent, she could go to them.”

Fitch shook his head slightly. “Not urgent, no.” But he seemed slightly puzzled. “Mrs. Blakeley offered to open up the old stillroom for Mr. Dow, let him look for what he needed there. He wasn’t interested. He did ask an odd question. But maybe it only seemed odd because he’s a visitor and we’re used to it.”

“Used to what?” Emma asked.

“The bell. He asked if we heard it more clearly in the house than outside. I don’t know why he thought we might.” He scratched a feathery brow. “I had to admit I scarcely hear it anywhere, anymore.”

“I never do,” Mrs. Blakeley agreed. “It’s just another noise the world makes. Doesn’t mean anything.” She reached out, patted Emma’s shoulder, and Emma, rendered transfixed in her chair, blinked oddly gritty eyes and felt herself turn human again. “We must be up and doing before the birds, tomorrow. Best get your rest.”