“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should—if I should—”
With shuddering breath and shaking body, Margaret stole from the bed and crept corpse-cold across the floor. Her hand slid against the wood of her door, found the cold knob, and closed tightly over it. With infinite care, trying desperately not to make the latch rattle in her own shaking hand, she worked the knob over and eased the door open.
There was a single light in the hall, just at the head of the stair. Otherwise the hall was empty and silent, and if she took the greatest possible care, she thought she could steal past Rupert’s door without him hearing her. After the scare he had given her, he would not expect her to be walking the halls at this hour. But Skander had called her a force to be reckoned with, and though in her tortured, flogged, horrified brain she felt no spark of heroic defiance, she reeled blindly on.
A thin bar of marigold light showed from beneath the master’s door, and that gave her some weak measure of comfort. He would be in there, locked up in his own brooding, too busy to anticipate her.
Like a whipped dog, cold, bent double, Margaret stole painfully down the stairs and padded barefoot across the entryway floor and through the dining room, taking each step with care lest she run up against something in the dark. Everything seemed impossibly long and far away, as though the House, like a dog in its sleep, stretched out in the night and was twice as big again as it ought to be. At last she reached the long kitchen hallway and her hands, sweeping along the wall, found and caught hold of the doorknob that led down into the damp cellars below.
She had nearly forgot about the stair. Having turned back the first time she had put it from her mind, content that she would not think nor need to think of it again. It was hardly the sort of place a woman ought to go, no matter how curious she might be. But now, for all its dampness, for all its loathsomeness, it seemed apart from Rupert’s hand, as though that earthy pit were too small, too unimportant for him—so to it and to its dampness she went, knowing full well that a night spent in such quarters would deliver a dolorous blow to her health.
She was too shaken to take comfort even in that.
It was like going back into time, walking down those stairs. The slimy damp, the noisome air, the almost physical pressure of dark, felt like the tomb of ages, and she was walking down its throat. She went down and around, from landing to landing, until at the fourth landing she knew she was almost to the bottom—and then she was at the bottom of the stairs, small in the long dimensionless room. Miles beneath the ground, ages from the present, walking in a dead stupor that was broken only by involuntary sobs she continued on, dragging herself across the floor. The cold had got into her bones and they ached, ached with a pain she had not known before. Every step was agony, but she kept doggedly on.
It was strange, she thought, how fear found strength the body never knew about before.
At last she reached the head of the untraversed stair. The light still burned down there: it jiggled and flashed and played on her bruised vision. Like a moth to a flame she went on, drawn by it, walking as if in a dream. She felt inexplicably safe now, so far away from Rupert and the world and everything that might do her harm. She walked among the dead down here. They would not hurt her. This was where she belonged.
It was a straight stair, carved into the rock around her, a stair of some dozen steps. A pleasant warmth wafted up from below. Margaret stepped down the last few steps, ducking to avoid the low header, and stood with her feet pressed into a hard dirt floor, blinking her eyes in the sudden glare of yellow light.
“Rhea!” a voice barked suddenly, startling her before she could see or get her bearings. “And here I thought you weren’t coming. Are you trying to starve me?”
Rigid as a bird, hands clutching the torn neck of her gown, she stood her ground and squinted into the light as a figure came around a pile of old wine crates and into view. Her heart, which had been misplaced already, lodged in her throat.
The fox stood as dead still in its tracks as Margaret stood, staring back at her with its ears forward, its mouth a little open. For a few heartbeats the two stood frozen, staring at each other, then the fox’s mouth began to move, soundlessly at first, then with bursts of half-finished thoughts until it finally blurted out,
“He
hasn’t
! Who the devil are you!”
She had not thought, when she had imagined this was a kind of valley of death, that she had been right. Skin crawling, she stared at the ruddy-furred ghost of the fox whose body Curoi and Talbot had worried into a bloody mess. “Y-you died!” she stammered. It took supreme will to hold her ground, but she managed it. And suddenly she was angry. Was it not enough that Rupert haunted her? What right did the fox have to haunt her as well? “You died! I watched them tear you apart!”
The fox looked startled. “I died, madam? When? How so? I think I ought to remember my own death.”
She stood a moment in thoughtful silence, looking carefully over the fox. Foxes all looked so alike, perhaps it was not the same one. It could be only the poor lighting, but she thought perhaps this fox’s fur was not so vibrantly red as the other’s had been.
“Oh,” she said, relaxing slightly. “I beg your pardon. I think I mistook you for someone else.”
“Rum luck on his part,” said the fox, and he sat down, drawing his bushy tail around his forepaws. “Now, as I was saying—would you be so kind as to tell me who you are and how the devil you got here? Because you oughtn’t be.”
“Don’t think I don’t know that,” said Margaret snappishly, more than ever convinced that she had wandered into a dream. “The devil brought me here to make me marry him.”
The fox jumped up, letting loose a single derisive bark. “Hark! He did, did he?” Then he resumed his seat, carefully arranging his leggy limbs and long brush. “Well,” he said in a more gentle tone, “that’s rum luck on
your
part. Rum luck seems to be positively flowing in these parts.”
“I am Margaret Coventry,” she said for the sake of saying something familiar. “Who are you—and—how do you talk?”
“I am heartily sorry to meet you, Miss Coventry.” The fox gave a little imperial sniff and held out a paw, which Margaret came forward and took, feeling very surreal as she did so. It was warm and furry and the pads were deliciously smooth under her fingers. “I’m a sort of jester,” he went on, “but a poor fox can only think of so many jokes and Rupert, who will not laugh at anything worth laughing at, put me down here.”
“Are you enchanted?” she asked.
“Yes, an enchanted talking fox. The wonders you see these days! Like young women trekking about in nightgowns in the middle of the—hang yourself,” he broke off, lunging forward to peer up into her face. “What happened to you? You’re bleeding! Did Rupert hurt you?”
Her hand flew to her lip and came away sticky and red and tasting like iron.
“You look positively awful, if I may say so,” the fox went on, getting up and turning in a worried circle about her. “Have a seat. No, no, just sit. There are no seats.”
Stiffly Margaret folded up on the dirt floor and the fox sat beside her, ears perked, head canted, peering attentively into her face.
“Did Rupert hurt you?” the fox asked again when she had settled. His voice was thin, but imperious, and thrust at Margaret like a knife.
Pride struggled for a moment with Margaret’s vacant sense of horror. It was ridiculous, it was dream-like, to be conversing with a fox—but it was her only way out and in the end, reluctantly, hating herself for it, she pushed away her pride.
“Yes.”
The fox wiggled himself into a more comfortable position. He seemed to be waiting; she knew he was waiting for her to go on, but the brutalized blankness of her mind resisted her attempts to begin.
“I—I don’t know…”
“Never mind,” he said gently. “Just start at the beginning.”
The beginning. The grey-rimed image of the Leeds train station jerked and squealed into her mind. She began, and once she had begun it came out in a rush, as though she were vomiting out her story. “I was going to Naples. My sisters are all idiots and my cousin ran away with an architect, and I was the only one left to recover the family name. My mother had me sent to Naples to stay with some relatives and catch a husband. My relatives didn’t know. It was going to be a surprise. I would have gone cheerfully, but my mother
pushed
me. She pushed me so hard. I hate being pushed. I would have gone. I would have been happy. She needn’t have
pushed
me. But Rupert was on the train and he kidnapped me and brought me here. I’ve been here since mid-October. He tells me that he will have me marry him so that he can be Overlord of Plenilune. His cousin made him a wager, that if he could woo a woman he could win the throne—or whatever it is they call it here—so he kidnapped me. But he hasn’t won me yet.” She laughed, shakily, sickly. “He woos with iron! How does he expect to win a woman with iron?
“I’ve hated my time here. Everything is so different—so half-familiar, and so different. I don’t know anyone. No one can help me. I don’t even know if I want to go home anymore. That’s why I came down here: to die.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the fox give a little angry start of surprise.
“I thought—I have nowhere to go. My family does not care for me. Rupert is impossible. I’m caught…I was supposed to go with Rupert tomorrow to Lookinglass; his cousin is throwing a gala, and I’m to come out so everyone can get to know me. Only, I feel I can’t do it, living with Rupert as I am and not married to him. It sounds horrid when I say it like that—how much more horrid will it sound to others who don’t know my situation? I can’t open myself up to that kind of censure. This is precisely what I was going to Naples to avoid!”
There was a lamp set on the wine-crate, a hurricane lamp that was burning brightly and valiantly with the colour of broom and amber. She stared into it until her eyes smarted, and wondered if there was a world in which broom and amber really burned like that, where flames were flowers, where flowers were flames…
“I wonder if Heaven laughs,” she added quietly, “to do this thing to me.”
The black-tipped ears of the dog-fox twisted backward, thoughtful, but he remained silent.
She breathed a deep, shaking breath, rustling a little, finding herself again. After that first tumultuous explanation she felt spent, beaten and wrung like a piece of washing. The nightmare quality of her life, which had seeped through her fingers as she had cast up these events out of her belly for the fox to hear, was quickly rising again as, like a vivid spectre, the horror of the past hour loomed over her. She began again, but this time in a carefully detached monotone, as if thereby to avoid the sting of terror.
“Rupert had told Skander that he had lost his commentaries by…by Songmartin. He said he had misplaced them. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but this morning I found them behind the kitchen wing, deliberately burnt beyond repair. And then I knew—or maybe I had always known it—but I knew clearly then that Rupert was evil—
evil
. He is wicked. I can taste it in my mouth. He is
wicked—wicked!
And I could not go with him or marry him because of that. And…and I told him so.”
Her courage faltered and dissipated like smoke. She could still taste her own blood on her lip and it made her sick.
The fox, with his voice the thinness and softness of a feather, and somehow as comforting, said, “You told him so, and it was that he took the telling hardly.”
She shook her head. “He took it…strangely. He said nothing, but sent me away to my room where I would be alone, I thought, for good. I was alone for hours, but just as I was preparing for bed he came—” She set her hand to her aching forehead. “He was drunk. He set on me and fr—fr—
frightened
me. He told me I would come because he said so, and that would be the end of it. I thought—I thought he was—because he was so drunk—”
The fox laid a paw on her forearm. “There, now. Forget about that. Rupert is a devil, but I can say that he won’t take an unwilling partner. It’s one of the few things that can be said for him.”
She caught her trembling lip between her teeth and crushed it until it stung like fire. Her wrist still hurt where Rupert had gripped it, hurt enough to bruise, though in this dim yellow light she could not see it well enough to tell what it was doing. And the fox, as if following the line of her thoughts, leaned forward with a little sidewise, hesitant movement, and drew his tongue along the veined hollow of her wrist. His tongue was warm, her skin cold, and it was strangely and ridiculously strengthening.
“I don’t know what to do,” she admitted.
The fox lay down and put his head on his paws, got up again to shake himself, and lay down once more. “I’m not advocating any marriages,” he began with a condescending sniff, “but I think you ought to go. It won’t be as bad as all that.”
“No?” Her tone rose with a surge of scorn. “It is easy for you to say—you are just a fox!”
He turned his head on his paws and grinned, all his perfect white fangs showing. “So? So! But does it really matter what people think? You have yourself to think about, and though I think it unlikely that Rupert would press himself against your will, I would not put beatings past him.” He groaned and stretched out one back leg so that he looked more like a heeler lounging at the side of a shepherd’s fire than a fox. “As honourable jester and fool, I’ve had my own beatings from his hand.”
She gazed down at him frowningly, and he gazed back, still, with that perfect stillness that animals can have, the light making a crescent moon on the edge of his eyes, the inside of his eyes deeply and darkly blue. He was without a doubt the most irreverent fox she could ever think to meet, and the most unamusing jester she had thought to know. If this was a dream, it was the most vivid, poignant, uncomfortable dream she had ever had—yet somehow, as with the sea, as with the rolling upward tawny of the fells, she felt safe in that powerful discomfort, even as it crushed her.