“A noble gesture,” De Rode replied. “And foolish.” He seized Henry by the shoulder and pushed him down the slope, at which point gravity asserted its supremacy over royalty. De Rode swept two of the younger, slower children up in his arms. “Now you,” he ordered Isabella, and, without hesitation, the queen obeyed, followed by the others who plunged behind her in a screaming wave.
Only De Rode was left to witness the birth of the arabian steed from the castle door, an opening only slightly larger than its startled eyes and, immediately behind it, the unlikely midwife: Prince Louis’ henchman Guilliam de Beauchamp - Bloodhand.
For an instant, their eyes locked, then Beauchamp swung himself up on the horse. By the time he settled in the saddle and looked up again, de Rode was gone. He dug his heels into the animal’s sides. The horse nearly sprang out of its skin and would have spilled its rider among the herbs had not the knight maintained a death’s grip on its mane. Once all four hooves thudded to the ground in a nervous tattoo, the space between the castle and the garden wall was bridged in an instant, but Beauchamp pulled up short at the opening; too narrow for the horse.
It seemed to de Rode, in a brief backward glance before hurling himself and an armload of children down the slope, that, for an instant, Beauchamp—atop his wildly pirouetting steed—might attempt to jump the wall which, given the weight of the horse’s own armor and that of its rider, would be fool-hardy in the extreme.
So captive was Beauchamp’s reason to bloodlust, however, that he wheeled the horse around, spurred it to the farthest eastern extent of the garden and charged the wall.
“Impossible!” de Rode told himself.
Chapter Nine
Oxburgh Hall, 1986
Huffy had made good on his threat to ‘come up there and deliver the news in person, ‘cause this ain’t the kind of thing you talk about on the phone.’ For the occasion he had rented a sporty European car that seemed to Albert, watching it pull up the long gravel drive, as if something very heavy must have been dropped on it from a significant height. He wondered how Huffy, not a small person, had gotten into such a low car.
The real entertainment, which lasted some thirty seconds, was watching him get out – a contortuous rearrangement of flesh that Jeremy proclaimed belonged inRipley’s Believe it Or Not. At last, having overcome both physics and gravity, the agent, his brow beaded with sweat, stood before Albert, waving an envelope in his face. “You’ve got to see this, my boy, my boy,” he said, barely able to get the last word out for want of breath.
Huffy only called Albert ‘my boy, my boy’, when Something Had Gone Terribly Wrong, which is to say quite often, owing to some defect in Huffy’s corpuscles that magnified everything to either a crisis or an emergency.
“Your shoe’s untied,” Jeremy Ash observed. “Careful you don’t trip and break your neck.”
“Ain’tmy neck worries me, Tinpan,” said Huffy, nevertheless—handing the envelope to the boy—he bent to thread the wayward lace. Why, and at what point in their relationship Huffy had taken to calling Jeremy ‘Tinpan’, no one could remember. Jeremy had been called worse, so he didn’t mind. He called Huffy ‘Huffman’ to his face, as if he couldn’t quite remember his real name. That’s just the way their intercourse had developed.
Jeremy Ash was a mystery to Huffy. Albert was an enigma, of course, but agents expect—in fact encourage—enigmatism in their clients. Time and again it had proven a highly marketable commodity, especially when manufactured on behalf of those in his stable whose talents were either waning or did not bear close critical scrutiny in the first place. Albert was not a member of that group, but the fact that he was genuinely enigmatic made him marketable by several factors of X.
Truth be told, fame baffled Huffy as much or more than it did Albert. Greed he could grasp. Quite easily, in fact. It was something you could convert into a nice sofa for the front parlor. Lust, too, was an appetite to whose appeal he could testify from personal experience. Gluttony, ditto; put him in front of a nice, fat Cornish pasty with lard sweating from its pores and he’d amen that sin with sauce on. The rest of the mortal sins, whatever they were, he imagined equally reasonable. But fame? He just didn’t get it. Time and again, it had been revealed to him as a beast that ate its offspring in small, cruel bites, and danced on their bones.
Yet those children, that desperate, pathetic breed of human for whom fame was oxygen, surged toward it like a drowning swimmer clawing toward the surface from an impossible depth. No sacrifice—especially of others—was too great to make to break through that surface tension and into that rarified air, only to find that the atmosphere was of an inhospitable world, and corrosively toxic.
There was something metaphysical in that.
Huffy was part Irish and, therefore, became progressively more metaphysical and poetic as his Guinness got shallow enough to see through. However poetic or prosaic, this is what Huffy thought of most of his clients. The task that formed the bedrock of his profession was to latch on to the teat of fleeting success and wring every drop from it before it ceased to lactate. If he could siphon off even a small percentage of his client’s ephemeral fortune and, in their name, stuff it into interest-bearing investments before it went up their noses or into their veins, there might be enough to see them through the dismal years of their decline.
That was part of what he did for his clients, because he knew what his clients could never grasp; there comes a point when the world will cease to care.
Then there was Albert, a different fauna altogether.
The aura that surrounded him was genuine. He had never sought nor wanted fame. It had sought him, lured by the siren’s call of the Gift laid upon him like a mantle he was forever trying to shrug off. Albert’s talent left even Huffy’s considerable gift for hyperbole wanting.
That was one udder that would be forever engorged, so Huffy handled it with kid gloves lest it developed blisters.
But Jeremy Ash? He was no more creative than a box of cockles, and more nuisance than a bag of cats. Why Albert had taken him to his bosom, Huffy couldn’t fathom; why he tended out on him like a nursemaid—or servant, even—Huffy just couldn’t make out, any more than he knew what to do with him.
He stood and, retrieving the envelope from Jeremy Ash, turned to Albert. “It’s yours.”
“My neck?”
“Well, your health.” He waved the envelope some more. “You need to see this.” He opened the folder and removed two slips of paper, joined to one another by a paper clip. “Let’s go inside somewhere I can lay these out.”
Moments later Albert and Huffy were seated in mismatched high-backed chairs with soft seats, staring down at the two pieces of paper which Huffy had placed on the table. One looked like a contract of some kind. There were places where blank lines had been filled in, some with his name and other particulars and others filled in with handwriting even more indecipherable than his own.
Albert was concentrating on seeming interested. The top of one page had a shield on it, and some scrolly words in Latin under the logo ofSt. Thomas Hospital, London.
“That’s the hospital I was in.” He pointed at the crest.
“Right you are, Cocky,” said Huffy, “an’ before you scarpered off like the monkey what remembered where he stuffed the nuts, they done tests on you, din’t they?”
They had.
“One of which was to put your head in a little box and push the button.”
Albert remembered that. He’d felt claustrophobic at the time, but had been too drugged to move. Come to think of it, it seemed he’d been under some kind of restraint at the time. The box had made a whirring noise, like electronic cicadas all having their tails pulled; if cicadas had tails. He’d learned about cicadas in Tryon, North Carolina which was where God apparently kept them.
“That’s what this is,” said Huffy, tapping the other paper. “An MRI. You know what that is Al?”
“Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” said Albert, to which Huffy did
n’t know what to say, except, “Right the first time. It’s like a picture inside your head.”
“Yes,” said Albert. “This is my brain?”
“Lady of Spain,” said Huffy, which Albert—having become familiar over the years with the rhyming slang particular to Huffy’s neighborhood—interpreted as ‘Right as rain.’
Rather than picking the picture up, Albert bent over the table and studied it carefully. He was surprised there was no music in it. Perhaps the machine hadn’t been working properly that day. “Is there something wrong?”
“That’s what the doctors wanted to see you about, but when I told ‘em as how you wouldn’t see ‘em on no circs, they said I had to show you this.” He leaned in close beside Albert and pointed at an aerial view of a little black island surrounded by a white beach on the picture of the negative. “You see that little bit there?”
“The island?”
Jeremy leaned in as far as he could without upsetting himself.
“Island,” Huffy echoed. “That’s right. An island in your brain. You know what that is?”
Albert didn’t want to know.
“They think it’s a tumor. You know what a tumor is?”
Albert had an idea it was something like a red balloon that grew where it wasn’t supposed to, and then burst. That’s what he said.
“That’s as good an explanation as any,” said Huffy. “Well, as to red, I can’t say, but this here balloon you got . . . they say it might have been there years.”
Albert put his fingers to his forehead. “I didn’t know that.”
“No,” said Huffy. “Now, they says to tell it you that if it’s been there as long as may be, it prob’ly hain’t goin’ to burst, least not anytime soon.”
“What would happen if it did?” Jeremy Ash wanted to know.
Huffy made a pistol of his hand, held it to his temple and pulled the trigger, together with the appropriate sound effects.
Albert winced and wondered if he was wrong not to have spoken to a doctor.
“But it’s not going to do that, right?” said Jeremy, taking the words out of Albert’s mouth.
Huffy holstered his pistol in his vest pocket. “Not likely.”
“So, they can take it out, right?”
“Well, that’s the thing, Tinpan. That’s the thing. You see, something shifted that tumor, didn’t it? A blow to the head, more likely, says the doctor.” He tilted his head and examined Albert through the lop-sided horizon of his granny-glasses. “You had a blow to the head recently, Al?”
Albert shook his head then, considering the possibility that doing so might shift the tumor even further out of place, stopped shaking. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, you’d know,” said Huffy. “No doubt. A great ruddy whack it would take, the doc says. You’d know if you’d been on the receivin’ end of a great ruddy whack, wouldn’t you Al?”
Albert was about to say that yes, probably he would, when Jeremy Ash—he of the prodigious memory—spoke up. “How about when that guy beat you up down in South Carolina.”
Now, that was a thought. “North Carolina,” Albert said, more specifically. “Tryon.”
“Yeah, you remember that?”
This was the first Huffy had heard of it. “Somebody beat you up?”
“Jimbo,” said Albert. Even the memory was painful. “He hit me.”
“Kneed him in the face, is what he did.”
Huffy was impressed. If someone asked him to make a list of everyone he knew who might be kneed in the face, his Most Cherished Client would not have been among those present. “You got kneed in the face?”
Albert didn’t want to talk about it.
Jeremy Ash did. “By this guy about seven feet tall, built like . . .”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Albert.
“A was tryin’ to take him down ‘cause he was hasslin’ this girl.”
“Cindy,” said Albert, who, in saying that he didn’t want to talk about it had meant that he didn’t wantanyone to talk about it. He was reminded that Abraham Lincoln, writing a letter of condolence to a Mrs. Bixby on the loss of her five sons in battle, had said ‘I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming.’ It was one of those occasional worddocks that stuck in his brain and tumbled out at unexpected times. Why it should do so now was obvious; Albert was realizing—once again—how weak and fruitless must be any word of his which should attempt to beguile silence from Jeremy Ash. As long as he was going to have to listen to the story anyway, he wanted to make sure those with speaking parts appeared in the credits.
“Her name was Cindy.”
“Cindy. Right. Whatever,” said Jeremy.
“A regular knight in shining armor, is our Al!” Huffy slapped Albert on the back. “Savin’ a damsel in distress! Fancy that! Quite a jolt, was it?”
If having one’s head jerked from one’s neck by sheer force could be considered a jolt, then yes, it was a jolt. Albert didn’t want to think about it. “What does the doctor say about this?” he tapped the picture.
“And he got clocked before that, too. At the School. Remember, A?”
That particular banshee had since taken up residence in Albert’s dreams where, from time to time, it descended upon him yet again through carefully bundled parcels of moonlight that sliced an otherwise darkened hallway (which, in the immediate aftermath of the incident, students had christened Albert Hall) into neat segments; nor had the impact when his head hit the floor, long-since carpeted, diminished beyond the point of acute recall. “That’s what got him put in the hospital, and that’s where he met me. Right A?”
“So this little island,” said Albert, feeling, with renewed vigor, the weakness and fruitlessness of his words, “is what a tumor looks like.”
“You got hittwice!” Huffy was doubly impressed. He hadn’t realized that piano players—apart from those who played for tips in a certain class of bar—were such vortices of violence. “What happened that time?”
Albert was determined to make himself clear this time. He leveled a meaningful glare at Jeremy Ash. “We’re not going to talk about that.”
“We’re not?”
“No.”
Jeremy felt like he was failing in his duty to his public not relating such a juicy tale, but sometimes the maestro had to have his way and this, judging from that indecipherable but meaningful look in his eyes, was one of those times. “Too bad.”
Huffy figured he could coax the facts from Jeremy Ash without too much trouble some other time.
“Anyway, if one of those blows—or both of ‘em—jogged that little island loose, well, that’s why he wants to see you.”
“The doctor?”
“Right. I have his card, and his number. You want me to make an appointment?”
“No.”
“Let me rephrase,” said the agent to his meal ticket, “you’re going to see him. When would be convenient?”
Albert’s rationale on the subject was, to him, unassailable, and boiled down to a simple Socratic statement: doctors deal exclusively in bad news. People who made appointments with doctors got bad news. “Ergo,” he said aloud in response to his thoughts.
“Beg pardon?”
“I’ve seen too many doctors lately. I don’t want to see him.”
Huffy seldom had difficulty bending Albert, however reluctant, to his will. “But he’s got something important to tell you . . . about your tumor.”
Which is exactly why I don’t want to see him, Albert thought. He was left with a choice between two evils: go to the doctor and get the bad news, or put up with Huffy’s whining at him which would continue until he went anyway. “I can go Friday.”
“You’ve got a concert in Rotterdam Friday.”
“Then—what month is it?”
“October.”
“How about spring? We could come back in spring. Maybe it will be gone by then.”
“And maybe it’ll have taken you with it!” Huffy tapped the photo with an emphatic finger. “This is not somethin’ to play about with, lad. You’re going to see him tomorrow. He’ll come up here.”
That, at least, was a relief. Recent experience had convinced Albert that hospitals were places people congregated to exchange one disease for another, or to have parts of themselves removed. He looked at Jeremy and shuddered.
“Do they do something?” said Albert, looking at the picture. “Tumors?”
Huffy shrugged. “Different things. Sometimes they’re terminal, sometimes they give you headaches, or make you forgetful, dizzy.”
“They eat your brain,” said Jeremy Ash added helpfully.
“They do?” asked Albert, for whom the possibility was not without appeal. It was his brain that was so full of unpleasant memories. Maybe if parts of it could be selectively eaten, leaving him just the part he needed to make music; but that was probably his heart.
The face Huffy turned at Jeremy, seeming undecided about what expression to form in response to the suggestion, filtered through the wide selection at its disposal. He’d never heard of tumors eating the brain, but he’d never heard they didn’t. His mouth was waiting for him to say something, so he said: “You’re a strange boy.”
His physiognomy settled into place as he turned it toward Albert. “He says it, that tumor . . .” he nodded at Albert’s forehead, “might be what made you faint. Wouldn’t take much. Just a little change in blood pressure from, oh I don’t know, surprise or shock to the system, something like that, and . . .” bending his elbow at a right angle, he illustrated the effect by slapping it to the horizontal, again with sound effects. “Wham!”
“Wham,” Albert echoed.
“You faint.”
“I do.”
“In fact,” said Huffy, speaking on no more authority than that he’d been eavesdropping on the doctor and nurse involved in the evaluation of Albert’s test, “it could be responsible for any number of things.”
Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Page 12