Heroes: A Raconteur House Anthology

by Honor Raconteur

  Salmon stares at me for a time. “Yes, yes, quite.” He frowns over his pipe. “So you did not earn your cross in proper battle, then. Some secret ungentlemanly tomfoolery, what?”

  I do not rise to his bait. “Some might call it so, yes, sir. But we all play our parts in service to the Crown.”

  “Yes, well.” His tone softens. “Such is the nature of warfare now, my boy. No honour left in it any more. Can't be helped.”

  His tone is paternal now, even familiar. He speaks to me as a sailor, a junior officer, and not as a baron, but I allow the lapse and even encourage it since I flatter myself that it means he begins to accept my authenticity. Besides, the title is no more mine than the medal. I've used it for so long, however, that no one still lives who has inclination or means to question it.

  “Yet I am curious, sir,” he continues. “The Caroline ported in China for some time.” He raises an eyebrow, implying a question which I must preempt. Detail is my enemy, especially if I am pressed to discuss the Orient, which I have never seen, with the former Commander of China Station.

  “Forgive me, Sir Nowell.” I look to Admiral Paterson for support. “With all due respect, even now, Her Majesty's government neither affirms nor denies my actions. The situation, as you know, is still delicate.” I leave him to conclude for himself which situation I mean. After all, a man's own assumptions carry more weight than another's lies. Surely some situation in the Asian theatre of operations must still be delicate or we would need no presence there. “You understand my hesitation to speak of it.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” nods Paterson. He is obviously uncomfortable with the tone of the conversation and seems desperate to change the subject.

  Salmon laughs. “In the Far East, everything is delicate!” We are all just sailors here, his tone says. Come, boast a bit. Give me the tree on which I will hang you. “Come, Lord Briton, you may speak freely. When it comes to naval actions, Her Majesty keeps no secrets from me.”

  “I beg your pardon, Lord Admiral,” I smile again but without warmth, “but I would not be overheard by those from whom she may.”

  Checkmate.

  Salmon scowls and puffs on his pipe. “Quite.”

  I am desperate to excuse myself, to put myself on the opposite corner of the ballroom. I would rather avoid giving him another word, and I am well aware that I may not be as lucky in our next confrontation. At the same time, I can see how his goodwill could be useful to my present enterprise, perhaps even crucial. So I allow him to save face by not pressing the point, and instead, follow Paterson in small talk touching on other naval officers and gentlemen in the room.

  By virtue of his station as Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Nowell is at last led away to be seated for luncheon with the earl's family, the bridal party and the higher nobility, for which both Admiral Paterson and I are grateful. Whether Salmon is now convinced of my authenticity or simply forced to concede for the moment, I am content that I have given him nothing more with which to challenge me.

  We take our places at a table of moderate prestige as befits an admiral and his guest. The earl's maître frets to see that I, a baron, have been seated amongst military officers and apologises, but as I came under Admiral Paterson's invitation as his guest, I assure the poor man that any lapse in etiquette is my own. Besides, I tell him behind my hand, being a navy man myself, I am less likely to embarrass myself with this company than amongst the dowager countesses.

  Admiral Paterson is a consummate politician, which is why he was my first target in this enterprise, and he does not disappoint me. Once introductions and pleasantries are dispatched around the table, he engages the other guests in small talk whilst I watch and listen and bide my time, waiting for my moment to approach the earl.

  The Right Honourable Archibald Primrose, Fifth Earl of Rosebery, regards me through a haze of cigar smoke and a swirl of rich amber in a snifter.

  With all traditional obligations and superstitions faithfully discharged, the bride and groom have at last left for their honeymoon. As much as ten breaths later so as not to appear anxious to depart, most of their guests have also taken their leave, including, to my great relief, the Prince and Princess of Wales. The throngs on the street have been shooed away from the windows by servants, having looked their fill upon the gifts and the now destroyed cake. Lady Sybil, the bride's unfortunate elder sister, acts in her late mother's stead as hostess, and she has retired with the remaining ladies to one of the upstairs drawing rooms, leaving a select group of gentlemen to share the earl's more intimate hospitality of brandy and tobacco. All who remain are peers save Admiral Salmon, who stays by virtue of his esteemed station, and Admiral Paterson, who stays by virtue of mine, as I am his guest.

  “The Eurydice,” Rosebery says with an amused smile. “An interesting notion, Briton. But wasn't the wreckage refloated and broken up twenty years ago?” He looks around to the others for agreement. “Yes, I'm certain that's what I heard.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir.” I set down my brandy. “Only part of the ship was refloated, and with mixed success, at that. The rest of her hull is thought to be still off the coast of Wight, possibly carried as far away as Belgium by now, though I place her somewhere along Ponthieu. The rest of her might indeed have broken apart by now, but if any compartment may yet be intact, I propose to recover the contents, if only to keep them out of foreign hands.”

  The other gentlemen have only half-listened until now, but at the mention of possible intrigue, their ears prick up like so many hounds. Now I have but to keep their attention.

  Rosebery notices the other gentlemen's interest, as well. “Assuming, of course, that the old girl carried anything worth recovering. What do you think, Admiral Paterson?”

  “It is not out of the question.” Sir Joseph rises to refill his snifter himself, not waiting for a servant. “I would have expected Her Majesty's representatives to have sought for any valuable cargo, but given the way the ship went to pieces when they refloated her....” He shook his head. “Terrible, just terrible. I must agree with Lord Briton. If she was carrying anything of value, it were better we should recover it than some French tourists.”

  “I heard she was fast for a frigate,” says the young Lord Gerald Prescott with a grin. The boy is hardly more than twenty, but he will one day be the seventeenth Viscount of Cloverston and a formidable ally. He is a recruiting bill in motion, handsome and blond in his mess dress uniform. He interrogated me quite thoroughly over luncheon regarding my service, more so than even Sir Nowell, but for different reasons. His were the general questions of an eager young lieutenant who has yet to see battle, and I was pleased to be able to speak more or less honestly with him. In my life, the freedom to speak honestly is a rare pleasure.

  “Oh, frightfully fast, yes,” answers Paterson. “I've never been so seasick as when I went aboard to inspect that ship. She was built shallow in the draught, you see, like the old Viking ships, but she stood too high in the drink and got knocked about by the calmest seas. I was not surprised to hear she'd foundered, only that it took so long to happen.”

  “To the fallen,” Sir Nowell lifts his glass solemnly.

  “To the fallen.” We drink and sit in silence for a time, no one wanting to break the solemnity.

  “That was not a proud day for Her Majesty's navy,” Sir Nowell continues at last. He takes his pipe from his mouth. “That Elliot was a damn fool. And now there's talk of a ghost ship, a mysterious three-masted frigate which appears during storms off Ventnor Port. Every unexplained wreck in the channel, and her name comes up. What a lot of rubbish.”

  I feel the mood shift and I fear the conversation will drift away from my proposal, but I must not press the point.

  “Oh, a ghost ship indeed,” Paterson laughs merrily. “Hobgoblins and horse apples. But see here, for all that Elliot's design was disastrous, Eurydice's workmanship was above reproach. A bit of luck, and I think it possible that, as Lord Briton says, certain compartments or perhaps even
just containers within those compartments might have held fast.” He gives me a wink. Just that quickly, he has redirected the conversation back to my proposal.

  “Forgive me,” interrupts Emerson Baron Laurel, who once served as a naval officer and whose title was conferred upon him recently by the queen. He is at once the lowest ranking nobleman in the room and one of the most important to this venture by virtue of his ownership of a small shipping fleet in Portsmouth. “The Eurydice was just a training ship in my time. At the risk of seeming vulgar, what salvage are you anticipating?”

  The room falls silent. This is the question of the evening, after all, and this is where my proposal lives or dies.

  “Training vessels,” I begin cautiously, “are not always just training vessels, much the way fishing ships are not always fishing ships.”

  “Quite,” growls Sir Nowell, blowing a curl of smoke out of his nose. “Those of us with beards will recall that in '78, the Turks and the Greeks were rattling sabers. France was meddling in it, of course, as were we, and everybody was suspicious of everyone. But as a training ship, Eurydice could bob innocently about, here and there, all but unnoticed. If memory serves, she was returning from the Antilles when she went down.” He raises an eyebrow and looks around the room. “Lords, this is serious business. Whilst any intelligence she might have obtained near the French islands is no longer timely, its mere existence, particularly if discovered by the French, could prove embarrassing to the Crown.”

  “As would any official poking about for it by Her Majesty's navy,” Paterson adds smoothly, “which is why no one has pursued it before now, and why I support this private venture. It's all on the up and up, with salvaging rights obtained from both Her Majesty and the French government.”

  Intelligence. I keep the presence of mind to nod agreement with the admirals as if this was exactly what I had in mind. I had hoped to pique the nobles' greed with simple promises of sunken gold meant to finance war efforts or baubles traded between heads of state, but the admirals have invoked their patriotism. They cannot possibly decline.

  Sir Nowell, my sudden ally, reminds them of the English rivalry with the French, so ancient and so deep that despite nearly a century without open war between the two powers, the mere mention of thwarting the French still fires English blood. Of those assembled, only I can appreciate the irony of invoking this rivalry for my cause.

  The English crown they are so keen to protect is held hostage by frauds, put in place over eight hundred years ago by the very people they would keep from finding its secrets now. Oh, they have passed the crown from family to family, bickering and battling, assassinating each other, but in the end, no matter which head wears the crown, it is part of the same incestuous rabble. Not one of their kings can claim to share a single drop of blood with the last true King of England, not since the Norman thief ripped the crown from his head.

  My king, Harold Godwinson.

  The Normans claim that my sovereign's last words were, “I should not have betrayed you.” They lie. Then again, the enemy also swelled our numbers in the telling from fewer than ten thousand to over a million to gild their victory. Embroidering tales is the privilege of victors, not of the vanquished.

  The idea that King Harold cowered at the feet of his murderers and confessed betrayal is what comes of Normans trying to interpret our ways. They could not know that the dying breath of the last king of England was too precious to waste on something as selfish as a confession.

  No, indeed, he spoke only one word––fradwr. Betrayer. But had he meant the word for his Norman murderers, he would have spoken it in Norman. He did not. Neither did he say hereflyma in his native Saxon.

  The word was a Welsh doom for a Welsh man. In that impossible moment, the moment which should have been my king's moment of victory and not his death, his last word was a desperate plea, not to the Normans' Christian God and not even to his Saxon gods, but to the last of the land's native gods. He hurled his judgment and a curse after a fleeing deserter, one Morgetiud ap Aeddan and barred him from the afterlife of Annwn.

  Over the ages, priests and witches have hinted that my doom is not eternal. They whisper to me of redemption, of restoring what I destroyed, but these are only whispers. The gods are not forthcoming. Still, it is in hope of this redemption that I labour. To rest at last in Annwn, to beg and receive the pardon of my king at last...'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, as Hamlet might say.

  The Eurydice, in fact, means nothing to me. She is just a conveniently located pretext for my venture. What I seek lies deeper in the channel silt, a far more ancient ship whose name has been lost to the ages, and if these noblemen had the least inkling of what she was thought to carry or why I might want it, or more importantly, what it would mean to their stolen aristocracy and their entire way of life, they would never help me to raise her.

  I chase the darkness from my thoughts and hear their unanimous agreement with my proposal and their oaths of support. The men rise for a toast to our venture's success, and I rise with them.

  “To what was lost,” the earl says, lifting his glass, “and its safe recovery.”

  “To what was lost, indeed.”

  I relate the adventures of the day in her native Welsh, one of a few tongues we have in common. The gentle sounds speak of home to us both, though they barely resemble the Welsh of my childhood. The illusion is imperfect, yet were the fine modern trappings of our rented rooms not so visible in the moonlight, I could imagine we were in my old home in Sussex. Were I there, of course, were the many centuries of my life but a nightmare from which I might wake, my Ceridwen could not be with me, for she is a child of her time as I am a child of mine.

  The only reply comes from the stray dogs in the street below yipping and barking at their shadows, and I fancy she pays more attention to them than to me.

  My evening clothes are put away in the armoire tonight rather than tossed with chaotic abandon on the floor. This saddens me. It is not my ardor which has cooled, but hers. For all that she understands my nature better than even I, each day shows her the same man who has not yet reached his thirtieth year, a man who catches the smiles of fresh-faced maids on the Strand, whilst her looking glass grows more and more unkind. So she fusses and frets to preserve for me the memory of a girl long lost, and in so doing, she obscures the woman I have grown to love. In her frustration, she neither believes nor trusts that I can still love her, and so she withdraws from me. Soon, she will tell me that I should remarry and let her pose as my mother to avoid attention. Not long after that, she will die, and my heart will break, as it always does.

  “I drank with them, of course,” I offer to the emptiness, “and thus are we engaged. The Eurydice shall be raised, and with any luck, so shall the Aethelfrith.”

  Her silence tells me she has fallen asleep, but when I look, her eyes shine at me. Her head, framed in smoky ringlets, is propped upon her hand, and the bedclothes are drawn up under her arm.

  “If, by some miracle, you discover the Aethelfrith,” she says at last, “assuming you find the casket intact, what are you expecting to find?”

  I look at her through the darkness, not sure how to answer. I never saw the chest, much less what was in it. I only know what was whispered amongst the soldiery, that it contained sacred relics of the gods to ease our conquest of the Norman lands. But she knows this.

  “Cari,” I sigh at last, feeling my spirits sink in spite of my evening's small triumph, “you know that I will not be freed by any single act, not after so long.” What I might once have corrected with a blade at the right throat or a word in the right ear has had forty generations and more to splinter and spread like cracks through porcelain. I smile gently and touch her shoulder. “I must chip at this, bit by bit. You've always known this.”

  “But this is such a small chip for so much trouble. Is it worth the risk for what little you will gain, Morgetiud?”

  “Yes, my darling, it is.” I feel a twinge of anger that she should c
hoose this moment, when we are so very close, to cast doubt upon our enterprise. “The contents of the casket will mark one more Norman lie struck down. One more thread unraveled from their damned tapestry. Perhaps this will be the last act, the one that frees me from my curse, but I hold little hope for that. Precisely what we find inside matters little. Whatever it is, it will be one more piece of truth.”

  She squeezes my hand. “My darling, you have committed so many years to finding this wreck.”

  “We both have, my love.” I take her hand and kiss her fingers, encouraged by this small show of affection from her. “You have been terribly patient. The more I unravel the Norman lies, the more certain I am that my redemption lies in restoring Harold's empire, in returning the empire to what it should have been. The lost casket is the key, I am certain! Once we find it, then––”

  “Then what? Whatever is inside will go into the national museum as a curiosity, just like all the rubbish they bring back from Egypt. That will be that. Morgetiud, nothing will change!”

  “Something will change! People will no longer be able to deny that the Crown was stolen. Then I will be one step closer.”

  She drops my hand and rolls away from me, and I feel as if I have been slapped.

  “What is it?”

  Her voice is so quiet, I can barely hear her. “Where does this path lead?”

  I am not sure how to answer. She knows where this leads and has known for almost thirty years.

  “It ends in death, Morgetiud,” she says with a shiver. “How can you want that?'

  “If I wanted death, my love, I could have it.” I do not tell her that I have, in fact, wanted death many times. I do not age, and I do not take sick, but I can be injured, which I take to mean that I can be killed. For a time, the idea of causing my own death obsessed me. But each time I came to the precipice, ready to take my life in my despair, ready to desert my life the way I deserted my king and embrace the nothingness, I retreat. Is it cowardice that stays my hand or something else? I cannot know. “But death is not what I want, not now. What I cannot have, and what I dearly want, is to pass into Annwn after I finally grow old. With you.” My words ring hollow. The likelihood that I should redeem myself within her lifetime is vanishingly small. I love her absolutely, but I am not a fool. We both know that after she is gone, I will love again.