‘You mean, because you don’t want me to.’
‘No, I mean, because I know you can’t help. There are things you just don’t understand,’ said Casimir. ‘What do you know about us, anyway? What do you know about Simeon? This time last year, you hadn’t even met him. You can’t help with what’s happening because you don’t know the first thing about our lives.’
‘No? Well, that cuts both ways, doesn’t it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It means,’ Ruth said, ‘that if I know comparatively little about your life, then you know nothing, nothing, at all about mine.’ Abruptly, she got up and went to the door. When she had bolted it, she sat down again on the settle. ‘How old are you, Casimir? Fourteen? Fifteen? I know you’re at the end of your apprenticeship, because Simeon has told me. I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you to wonder what I was doing when I was your age, so let me tell you. I was married. When I was thirteen, my father, whom you have just met, and my mother, who, when she was alive was even worse, forced me to marry a fifty-seven year-old margrave who legally owned me as if I were a table or an acre of land. I was sent out to his estate on the outer limits of Osterfall, five hours from the nearest town. I knew no one. My husband was a brute. For the first six months I was so distraught I wanted to kill myself. I spent two years being gut-wrenchingly terrified, another three growing slowly numb to everything which surrounded me, and then ten being bored to the point of despair. All I had for company were my books and my husband’s poor silly cousin, Tycho. Then a miracle happened. My husband died of a stroke and Princess Christina was called back to court by the Queen and offered me a place as her lady-in-waiting. If it were not for her, my father would long since have forced me into another sham marriage with yet another diseased and decrepit nobleman.
‘Do you understand why I’m telling you this? It’s because I want you to try and grasp why I am the way I am. You think I’m trying to steal Simeon away from you. Well, maybe I’ve unwittingly given you reason to think that, but the fact is that for the last nine months, I’ve seen your father maybe once a week, twice if I’m lucky. When he leaves Starberg, which I imagine he will quite soon, I will probably never see him again. That is how much I have had of your father’s life, Casimir. Begrudge it to me if you will, but at least remember you can go with him. I can’t. Compared to me, you are free as air.’
‘I’m not free,’ said Casimir. ‘Nobody’s really free. What Simeon says is a lie.’
‘Maybe it is,’ said Ruth. ‘But at least he gave me hope, for a little while, and I’m grateful for that.’
‘Simeon’s not free, either,’ said Casimir. ‘What do you know? You don’t even know what he really is. Simeon’s a magician. He trained in black magic when he was a child and the man who attacked me in the park is the son of his old master. Simeon destroyed his father’s memory and now Circastes is after him he’s practising magic again. He killed someone to save me. Now you know why we’re in trouble. What can you do to help?’
Ruth said nothing. She sat on the settle with her hands in her lap and looked at him. From the expression on her face Casimir could see she had guessed some or most of it, exactly how much, he did not know. She would have been stupid if she hadn’t, for the clues had been there from the beginning. Nevertheless, the revelation had still hurt her, the way it had hurt Casimir himself in the same situation the day before yesterday. Yet he also sensed that, in a very real way, Ruth didn’t care. To her, what Simeon was simply didn’t matter; what cut deeply was the fact that he had not trusted her enough to confide in her. Casimir knew the reason why his father had not done this, that it was from concern for her safety, not lack of trust. Simeon had not wanted to draw Ruth to Circastes’s attention. But Ruth did not know this. As far as she was aware, Simeon had simply kept her in ignorance because he did not want her to know.
‘Casimir,’ she said at last, ‘if this performance is designed to antagonise me, you’re going about it in completely the wrong way. I am not going to be manipulated like this. Whatever there is between you and Simeon is for you to sort out. Don’t try and put your guilt on my shoulders. It’s not my business. I am not your mother.’
‘Yes, and I’m not your son.’ As he said this Casimir suddenly realised why she annoyed him. Ruth expected him to act like an adult, but constantly put him in positions where it was impossible to behave like one; she not only treated him as if he was inadequate, she made him feel it. He stood up. ‘You think just because you sleep with my father it gives you the right to tell me what to do. Well, it doesn’t. You think I don’t remember my mother, but I do. She had red hair, and she wore green sandals and played the guitar. She was beautiful and Simeon loved her. Who do you think you are, telling me what to do?’
He had gone too far. Ruth’s face, which had gone white, then very pink, suddenly crumpled, and her eyes brimmed and overflowed with tears. She fumbled for a handkerchief, couldn’t find one, and pointed to the door.
‘Get out. Now. This minute. Leave this house, Casimir, and don’t come back.’
Casimir went. There was no point in staying, or in apologising for what he had said. Nevertheless, he felt ashamed of himself. The only thing he could truly remember of Jessica and Simeon was the way they had quarrelled. In lying, he knew he had somehow diminished his mother even further.
Halfway back to Fish Lane, Casimir remembered the letter he had put in his pocket and pulled it out. He unfolded it, paused by a poulterer’s shop where the Christmas birds in their bright plumage hung in the window, and read the first few sentences. The letter was dated Saturday morning, a few hours after the disastrous firework display, and was clearly an apology. Simeon had always expressed himself better on paper than in spoken words, but this was so direct and eloquent and painful, it was as impossible to read as it would have been to stand by and watch two lovers kiss. Casimir refolded it. As he did, he caught a glimpse of print on one of the underlying pages, and realised that he had picked up another letter as well.
The scrawled handwriting on the second letter was immediately familiar, though, since it was unsigned, it took Casimir a few moments to recognise it was the same as that on the letter Tycho had delivered yesterday. It was brief, an invitation to dinner at the Duck and Drake, and it enclosed a pamphlet. Casimir stood and read this through to the end. When he had finished, he put it back into his pocket and rejoined the throngs of people on the street. He still did not know where Simeon was. But a horrible suspicion was forming in his mind, and he knew that if he was right, Simeon was playing some deep and dangerous game of his own, and that he no longer knew what his father was capable of or not.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Casimir did not go back to Fish Lane. There did not seem to be any immediate point. He did not want to meet the man from the ordnance and the likelihood of Simeon’s return seemed to be dwindling rapidly. Instead, he did what he often did when he wanted uninterrupted space around him. He went to the cathedral and sat in one of the deserted side chapels to think.
By the time he arrived, the service the queen had been attending was almost over. Casimir, who had forgotten about it, sneaked in by the west door through a reverberating cloud of brass music. A Household Guardsman looked askance at him as he passed, but otherwise nobody paid him any attention at all. Unlike most of the neighbouring buildings, the cathedral was truly ancient. King Frederik had not been especially interested in churches and had refrained from ripping it down during the great re-building program of the previous reign. But he had not spent any money on it either, and had stolen the best of its carvings for his new summer palace at Frederiksberg. As a result the great building was in a poor state of repair, and the chapel had been completely stripped. One wreath of greenery stood under a memorial to Carl-Frederik, the young brother of Margrave Greitz. Otherwise it was empty. Casimir liked it both for its scale and its unfussiness, and most of all for the fact that hardly anyone else went there. It was dark and cold and if he was quiet nobody was likely to find him, par
ticularly today, when all the attention was focussed on the service just finishing in the main nave.
Casimir lit a candle to give himself some light and settled back in a corner where he could not be seen. Nearby, Carl-Frederik’s memorial tablet told of a boy of exceptional promise (unpromising ones had a higher survival rate, thought Casimir cynically), who had died in mysterious circumstances twenty years before. His parents promised revenge against the enemy responsible for his death, sentiments which had always struck Casimir as uneasy for a tombstone, especially one in a church. Nevertheless, he supposed Carl-Frederik’s parents had meant what they said. Gossip had always attributed the boy’s death to the jealousy of Princess Christina’s mother, Astrid, whose own downfall had followed not long afterwards. Casimir shifted his position so he did not have to look at the inscription. Given his own situation, the word ‘revenge’ had too many uncomfortable resonances.
His anger against Ruth was fading. Part of Casimir realised that, in antagonising her, he had just made a big mistake. When he had told her she could not help them, he had been thinking primarily of their dilemma with Circastes. But the magician was not their only problem. Ruth had connections at court, and at the very least, she might have been able to find some way of stopping the ordnance snooping into their affairs. She could also have shed some light on the outrageous pamphlet Casimir had just discovered on her desk. Casimir took it out of his pocket and covertly re-read the first few paragraphs. The pamphlet was called ‘On the Death of Monarchs’, and there seemed something perversely apt in the act of perusing it here, with the queen herself just behind the great fluted pillars that separated the nave from the chapel. Casimir thought his uncle would have appreciated the irony, but while Joachim might have distributed the pamphlet if the stakes were high enough, even he would have been unlikely to have approved its contents. By its very nature, it had to be anonymous, but the confused ranting style had Tycho written all over it. Casimir did not wonder that Ruth had told him to burn Simeon’s copy. The only wonder was, she had not yet burned her own.
According to the pamphlet, the government would soon be swept away by a glorious revolution. The queen, her cousin the procurator, and Princess Christina would all be assassinated and everyone would be free to do as they pleased. To help readers prepare, instructions followed on the use of firearms, the properties of gunpowder, and the manufacture of bombs. The author concluded by saying that, since only the briefest detail could be given in so short a work, the interested reader was referred to the treatise, On Gunpowder and Explosives by Simeon Runciman. Casimir, who knew his father had written just such a work at the request of the Comptroller of the Ordnance, felt sick at the thought of what this casual reference might imply for their safety. He could not believe that Tycho could be so stupid or irresponsible as to cite his father’s name in such an openly seditious work. For Simeon was not, had never been a violent man.
Simeon did not believe in monarchs. He did not believe in any government save that of the individual conscience, which he believed to be the ultimate arbiter. But he was also a pragmatist used to living in the real world. He had never pushed his philosophies on anyone—the main reason he had never run foul of the Queen’s Guard—and he had never advocated violence in order to put his ideas across. Simeon had had a bellyful of killing in the army; had seen too many good men blown to pieces for no real reason. To him, fighting was something one did because one had to, and was better left to professionals. Tycho’s cork-brained incitement to revolution was about as far from his convictions as it was possible to get, and Casimir could not have believed his father would willingly have become involved with it, had he not already been acting so horribly out of character.
A thought that had been forming for some time on the edge of Casimir’s consciousness came finally into focus. Ever since Circastes’s attack on Friday night they had been waiting for the magician to return. Yet they had seen nothing of him. Suppose, though, the magician was already working out his threatened revenge? Suppose everything that had gone wrong since Friday night—the Queen’s Guard, the ordnance man, and, most of all, Simeon’s strange behaviour—was directly attributable to the magician’s influence?
The music died and in the nave, Casimir could hear a blessing echoing richly off the vaulted walls. The response came back from the congregation, and then there was a recessional followed by rustlings and conversation growing slowly louder as the people attending the service dispersed. Casimir put the pamphlet back into his pocket and left the chapel. By the time he reached the nave the queen had gone. Her throne, a fanciful gilded structure draped with crimson silk and ermine, still stood on a dais near the pulpit. A smaller, less ornate throne stood beside it and its presence gave Casimir a moment’s pause, for strictly speaking, he was sure Margrave Greitz had no right to sit on the dais until after he and the queen were married. He felt a twinge of unease. The political ramifications of the forthcoming royal wedding were something Casimir had not given a great deal of thought to. For the first time, perhaps because of the Queen’s Guard’s unwelcome interest in his own life, the trepidation felt by others on the matter seemed to have substance.
Across the aisle, the queen’s musicians were packing up. Casimir went out into the cloister, where in winter there was a permanent soup kitchen, and lined up for a free bowl of thick broth and a chunk of black bread. The woman behind the pot looked at him suspiciously—he had pulled the trick before, and was too well-fed looking—but she handed him the food anyway, and he ate it ravenously. Simeon, who claimed not to believe in God and had never entered a church in Casimir’s memory, would no doubt have ticked him off for taking food from the mouths of the poor. But Casimir was hungry, and this afternoon it occurred to him that a man who spoke with dread of tearing holes in the fabric of creation had no right to call himself an atheist anyway. If Simeon did not believe in God, it was probably because he had good reason to be afraid of him.
Casimir’s next step was to try and find Tycho. After giving the matter some thought he went to Thursdays’ print shop. It was a favourite haunt of his and Simeon’s, a real bookshop with a reading room and library, that had somehow managed to beat the Queen’s Guard and stay in operation. It had done this chiefly because its owners, Will and Annice Thursday, were not native Ostermarkans. Most of what they published was for export, and Will was a bad businessman, too interested in helping third rate writers to ever make his print shop thrive. Casimir knew him and Annice slightly. They were friends of Simeon’s, and on Wednesdays, their half-closing day, he and his father went to read the books and newspapers in the reading room. The shop was also a meeting place for friends and gossips and one of Joachim’s first ports of call when he came to Starberg in search of stock. It was also, appropriately enough, the place where Tycho and Simeon had met.
At the cathedral gate Casimir turned left instead of right, then right again. He passed under a low stone archway and emerged into a narrow court full of bookshops. The Dolphin. . . The Courier…The Boar’s Head Press. From some of the shops came the muffled thuds and clanks of printing presses at work. Lead waterspouts in the shape of printers’ devils dripped water onto the cobblestones and the puddles were stained black with ink. Halfway down the street a window with books and maps was surmounted by a green signboard:
W. & A. Thursday
Printers, Booksellers and Stationers
Circulating Library
Casimir pushed open the door and went inside.
There was nobody behind the counter, but a baby was crying upstairs and the workroom door was open. A man with a shaggy moustache was sitting at a table, setting type in a composing stick. Three printing presses were ranged about the room and damp sheets of paper were looped up like washing overhead. There were great trays of type, an ink-stained sink, and other equipment Casimir did not know the use of. Will lifted his hand when he saw Casimir and beckoned him in. When he had finished setting the line of type, he checked it against the written page he was working f
rom and slid it from the composing stick into a metal tray.
‘Hello, Cas,’ he said. ‘You’ve been making yourself scarce, lately. How can I help you?’
‘Have you seen my father?’
‘Not lately. But then, I’ve been busy. Baby’s been keeping us on our toes.’
‘Have you seen Tycho, by any chance?’
Will gave him an appraising look. ‘Why?’
Casimir took the pamphlet out of his pocket and laid it briefly on the table. ‘He gave us this. I want to speak with him about it.’
Will glanced at the paper. Casimir waited. It was a gamble, but someone had to have printed the thing, and Will and Annice were the obvious candidates. Will gave no sign of recognising the pamphlet but said, ‘As a matter of fact, he’s upstairs. He’s been living in our garret for the last few weeks: Annice felt sorry for him and took him in. Up two flights, last door on the landing. Knock four times and he’ll know it’s a friend.’
‘Thanks.’ Casimir was not entirely sure he wanted Tycho’s friendship, but it seemed churlish to say so. He went upstairs, found the door and knocked four times. A moment later a voice called out,
‘Come in.’
Casimir opened the door.
Tycho’s room was under the roof, an attic not unlike Casimir’s own. It was better fitted out, though, with its own stove, clothes press, table and chairs. The great revolutionary had been making coffee on the stovetop and the milk had boiled over; a half-eaten lunch of bread, meat and cheese sat on the table and there was a stink of sour beer. The floor was covered with papers, books, dirty dishes and discarded clothes. Tycho himself was dressed in the same brown velvet outfit he had been wearing the day before, but with one difference: an empty sword belt was now slung over his shoulder. On the table lay the sword itself, a Spanish one with a fancy hilt. When he saw Casimir, he scowled.
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