Lady of Magick Read Online Free Page A

downstairs to her mother.
    â€œAunty Jo!” said Agatha, putting up her arms. “Aunty Jo!”
    Joanna therefore descended the stairs slowly and awkwardly, with Agatha on one hip and her papers and reticule under the other arm.
    Sieur Germain was below in the hall with Mr. Fowler, putting on his hat. Joanna handed Agatha back to the nursery-maid and thrust her head into the breakfast-room to call a hasty farewell to Jenny; then she clattered down the stairs and, after taking a moment to tie her bonnet-strings and compose herself into the picture of a dignified young lady of good family, followed Sieur Germain and his secretary out of the front door.
    *   *   *
    The morning’s meeting with the Alban ambassador was interrupted by a page bearing a message.
    The outer sheet was directed to Sieur Germain and proved, on Joanna’s unfolding it, to be a perfectly unobjectionable—though also perfectly unnecessary—memorandum. Folded within, however, was a second sheet of paper, directed to herself. With growing dread, she unfolded it and beheld what was unmistakably a sonnet:
    In those dear eyes of soft and wintry hue
    Within whose depths my heart is daily drown’d—
    Flushing with mortification, Joanna stuffed the sonnet into her reticule and handed the memorandum along the table to her patron.
    The meeting dragged on for a further hour, whilst Joanna took precise and dispassionate notes on Alban marriage customs for Sieur Germain and inwardly wrestled with the problem of the sonnet. She did not doubt its author, for it was by no means the first such . . . tribute . . . she had received; as feigning ignorance seemed only to have made her admirer more persistent, the time had clearly come to take a firmer hand.
    When at last the conclave was adjourned, therefore, she touchedher patron’s arm and murmured, “I shall be with you shortly; I must just have a word with Prince Roland.”
    â€œCertainly,” said Sieur Germain. “I shall be with His Majesty in the audience chamber.”
    Joanna smiled pleasantly at the Crown Prince, who could have no notion what his brother had been up to. “Ned,” she said, “where might I find Roland?”
    â€œWhy, out in the gardens, I suppose,” said Prince Edward, looking puzzled. “Or perhaps the library.”
    It took her some time to locate Roland, having first to shake off his elder brother’s earnest escort and elude the assistance of a series of pages and stewards. At length, however, she ran him to earth in the Fountain Court, where he was engaged in teasing a peacock by imitating its gait.
    Joanna stood for some moments unnoticed, watching him and shaking her head in affectionate exasperation; though a great trial to her at present, Roland had not lost his talent for making her laugh.
    â€œRoland!” she said at last, waving his latest poetical effort at him. “Whatever do you mean by this?”
    The Prince turned towards her with a glad cry of “Joanna!” Then seeming to register her general failure to fling herself into his arms, he said, somewhat deflated, “Did not you like my sonnet?”
    â€œRoland,” said Joanna, exasperation once again overriding amusement, “you have no business to be writing sonnets to me! Or to anyone else, for that matter—but most especially to me. What would your mother and father say?”
    Roland looked down and scuffed at the turf with one shoe. “I do not see that it is any of their business,” he muttered.
    â€œOf course it is their business!” said Joanna. “You are second in line to the throne of Britain, until Ned has a son.”
    â€œBut Sophie—” Roland began.
    â€œI should not take Sophie as a pattern, if I were you,” said Joanna. “Unless of course you have been yearning all this time for a draughty garret in Oxford, and said nothing about it to