The Fatal Child

by John Dickinson

  And haven’t you done this before? When you fixed your eyes on the child Atti and ran away from all your duties, to the ruin of the Kingdom? That beautiful little thing, whom you wanted for yourself and told yourself, oh, so many good reasons why she should be yours and no one else’s? She was a reward – a flower beside the Path that you felt you could pick because of the virtue you had shown in following the Path so far. You should writhe in self-disgust, Thomas! You should weep for shame! And perhaps you should weep for Ambrose, too, who has told himself all the same beautiful things about her that you did, and has found out that they were lies.

  A roosting bird flew, startled, from a branch. Padry blinked. He was standing in a grove of trees, with their dark branches whispering in the dusk. He could hear wavelets lapping close by. Where …

  Oh yes. He had wandered down into the old outer works by the lakeshore.

  Once Trant castle had been much bigger. Once there had been buildings out here, enclosed in another wall or palisade. All that was gone now. Only, among these trees, there were still some old stones: the remains of a square court, with broken paving. A few round columns stood like stone trunks shorn of their limbs. And there, dimly seen among the trees, the shape of a wide-bowled fountain, just as there was in Tuscolo, or Velis; or in Ferroux for that matter, or Tarceny, or that strange house he had once found in the mountains.

  Trant, too, was one of the ancient houses of the Kingdom. Trant, too, had known loss and ruin and tears, tears, tears as the generations had passed. For these last twenty years it had stood empty, with no more meaning than a tombstone. The wind had sighed and the grasses waved where men and women had once been. Now the place was beginning to live again. All the Kingdom was beginning to live – at some cost to the King, and to his servants.

  Ayah! Enough self-pity! If you must seek reward, Thomas, then find it in the good work you have done. Find it in Ambrose, almost the last of your pupils. You beat him and barely regarded him. But you did teach him. So did other, better men now dead. And see! Now he is King over a healing land.

  Or find it in Sophia, Lady of Develin, who drove you to distraction in tutorial, and ten years later dictated the peace that put Ambrose on the throne. Or in Lex, now – hah! – to be Bishop of Tuscolo. Oh, how the old masters at Develin would have rolled their eyes and spluttered if anyone had suggested it at the Widow’s high table! Look, and say to yourself, My pupils! I had a hand in this! Could any schoolmaster ask for a greater reward?

  And yet always beware. The reward lies at the end of the Path, in the reunion of the soul with the Godhead. It does not lie beside the way. Nor does it lie in the steps that have been trodden. A pupil may betray his teaching at any time. The foot strays easily. A philosopher must not weep. The just man keeps walking, and keeps to the Path.

  He kept walking. He made his way down to the lakeshore, to the lap of the waves and the jetty, where the three small boats lay knocking at timbers that smelled freshly of the saw. At his belt his fingers found his three signs of Faithfulness: the Lantern, the Leaf and the Dragon. They were old friends. He could not remember how he had come by them, but by all the Angels they were the friends he needed now.

  He walked by the lake for an hour, as his lips and hands practised his private litany. When he turned for the castle and bed, the moon was up.

  It was the old moon, just past the full. The first fringes of shadow had begun to show on its face.

  XXIII

  The Forbidden Door

  he King returned from Trant. The Queen returned from her pilgrimage. Lex, once one of the lowliest clerks in the land, took the crozier of Tuscolo before the eyes of all the bishops. New settlements were decreed in Baldwin and Tower Bay. The court heaved and clamoured and bothered.

  More ambassadors came from Outland, talked of treaties, brought presents of strange incense and marvellous creatures, and left the courtiers aping their manners of dress and entertainment. Caps and headwear grew to outrageous shapes and sizes, shoulders broadened, the toes of shoes curled. Faces were painted. No edict caused Padry more grief that winter than the one in which he set out precisely how much of the face a count, lady, baron or knight might cover, and sternly forbade anyone but the royal couple to use gold.

  And one mild day, shortly after the new year, the King asked the Queen to go riding with him. It had not happened for months.

  Melissa could not ride and therefore could not accompany Atti beyond the stables. So for the first time since returning from the pilgrimage she was going to be free from Atti’s side. She thought that if Puck were in the stable when they waved the Queen off, she would catch his eye, maybe. Then perhaps she could walk with him and speak with him, and make things better between them. He was too good a body to be sour for weeks on end, wasn’t he?

  But he was not there when the Queen’s party reached the stable. Melissa’s eyes searched among the gentlemen-of-the-horses and knights-of-the-stirrup and all the other do-nothings who trailed around wherever the crowned heads went. She saw Master Copley and the chief farrier, the master blacksmith and great numbers of stable hands, all in their best rig and looking respectful; but Puck was not among them. And only then did she remember that all the scholars would be at their studies at this hour. Puck could not have been here even if he had wanted to be. Disappointment settled on her, cold and clingy, like wet clothes after a shower of rain.

  ‘Here, lass, hold this for a moment.’

  It was a little bearded man, one of the stableboys. He pushed something into Melissa’s hands as if to rid himself of it while helping one of the ladies-in-waiting into the saddle. Melissa took it without thinking. Then she realized that he did not want it back.

  It was small, wrapped in a canvas rag and tied with a straw.

  She looked up, surprised, into the man’s face. He winked and jerked his head just a fraction towards the school house across the courtyard. It’s from him.

  She gave him a quick smile to show she had understood. With the lady-in-waiting looking down on them it was all she could do.

  The Queen rode off to her meeting with the King in the meadows below the castle. The servants, and those ladies-in-waiting who had not been chosen to accompany her, made their way back to the living quarters. Melissa went briskly into the Queen’s bedchamber before anyone could think of something else for her to do. In that most private of the rooms of the palace, she opened her hand to see what Puck had sent.

  It was a tiny wooden carving of a kid goat, lying with its legs curled up under it. It was pretty, and beautifully smooth. She had not known that he could shape wood, but she was not surprised because he seemed to be full of little surprises like that. She wondered what else his hands could do.

  And she laughed aloud at that thought. (No, Melissa! No, be careful. First, be sure that you’re sure!) But it was a nice thing. She could make a brooch of it, if she could find a brooch-pin. Then she could wear it when she chose. And sooner or later he would see her wearing it, even if there was never a chance to speak to him without anyone hearing. Meanwhile …

  She went to the little closet where she was allowed to keep her things. She removed the little wallet in which she kept the small pile of coins which were her pay. She took from it the rag in which she kept her other treasure: the little white stone that Ambrose had left on the moonlit pavement in Tarceny, more than two years ago. She put the goat beside it on the cloth and looked at them together. Two treasures, two men. She could love two men, couldn’t she? Especially when they were both, in different ways, just a little beyond her reach.

  She folded the cloth up again and stowed it in the wallet. She was in the act of putting the wallet away again when a sound behind her made her start.

  It was Philip, one of the King’s pages, standing in the middle of the room. He had come through the door to the King’s bedchamber. How had he done that? The door should have been bolted!

  Unless – somehow – he had already been in here and unbolted it himself.

 
‘You are to come with me,’ Philip said. ‘He wants to speak with you.’

  He? The King?

  But wasn’t he supposed to be in the meadow, riding with the Queen?

  ‘Quickly,’ the man said. ‘No questions. And you are to tell no one.’

  She rose and followed him through the forbidden door.

  He was waiting for her in the Privy Council chamber. He was dressed in riding gear, pacing to and fro, impatient. He must know he was late for his meeting with the Queen.

  Two other men were with him. The Baron of Lackmere stood at the hearth, glowering into the cold ashes. Padry, the lord chancellor, sat on a stool against the wall. There was not even a guard at the outer door. Philip left. His footsteps faded down the passage. She was alone with the three men who between them held the reins of the Kingdom.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Melissa,’ said Ambrose. It was the first time he had spoken to her directly since they had come to Tuscolo. She curtseyed, as a good little serving maid should.

  ‘I have to ask you some questions, Melissa. I’m sorry about this, but I must. And I have to ask you not to tell anyone that I have asked them. Not even the Queen. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Thank you. You went with Her Majesty the Queen on her pilgrimage to Jent, did you not?’

  ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’ A horrible, dull feeling crept into Melissa’s heart. That pilgrimage. She knew where this was going.

  ‘Don’t be afraid. You accompanied the Queen all through the journey, did you not? You know whom she met and what she did?’

  Whom she met. Yes.

  ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Did she meet with anyone on the way?’

  ‘Why yes, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Who?’

  Melissa hesitated. ‘There was – there was an abbot and his followers. He was also going to Jent, and the Queen let him join our party for safety. There was my Lady Faul, who—’

  ‘Early in the journey. At the manor of Haventry.’

  She looked into his eyes.

  ‘Did she meet with anyone at Haventry?’ the King insisted gently.

  She could have reached out and touched his cheek, run her fingers through the short hairs of his beard, whispered to him: Don’t be sad. You mustn’t be sad. (Did she meet with anyone at Haventry?)

  ‘No, Your Majesty,’ she said, and her heart thumped once, like a knock at a hollow door.

  ‘You spent the night there, but the lord was not present?’

  ‘He was not, Your Majesty.’

  The King sighed. ‘Thank you, Melissa. You have helped me greatly. And I am glad – more glad than I can say – that it is you of all people who looks after the Queen. I haven’t forgotten that I have promised you a favour, should you ever ask for it. You must not forget it either.’

  ‘No, Your Majesty.’

  ‘You may go.’

  She curtseyed and slunk out of the chamber. She felt like a whipped dog.

  He didn’t want me to tell him, she said to herself. She said it over and over as she made her way down the empty corridor.

  It was there in his eyes. He did not want me to tell him.

  He did not want me to say what she did.

  XXIV

  Love’s Last Stand

  un, Baron of Lackmere, jerked himself away from the cold hearth.

  ‘Well, what else was she going to say?’ he growled. ‘Next time, let me do the asking. Then we’ll get at the truth soon enough.’

  ‘Gueronius was not at Haventry,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘No? But he left his castle at Appleton, which is a day’s journey away, a day before Her Majesty turns aside from her route with a small escort to see Haventry, which is a place of no especial interest except that it is one of the manors of Gueronius. And on her return from her pilgrimage nothing will do but that she must plan another, this time to Luckingham, which is a shrine of no great importance but lies close to another of Gueronius’s manors. And I ask: Why this sudden delight in pilgrimage?’

  Ambrose made a sudden, angry gesture. ‘You’ve never understood her! You don’t want to understand her, Aun! What do you think it’s like, living with nightmares like that? Nightmares? That hardly begins to—’

  ‘I remember being woken, up here in the castle, by screaming from below the walls,’ said Padry. ‘I lay wondering who it was that was torturing an animal. In the morning I found that it had come from the convent, and that it had been her.’

  ‘I used to be able to go to her,’ Ambrose said sombrely. ‘I could stand beside her and tell her to turn and face the one she feared. I’m still sure that was right. If she could only face it and speak to it, she could begin to control it. But then I brought her here, became King for her, and we made her do that act of submission. I made myself a part of the thing that is her enemy. Aun, it was I who suggested that she seek the Angels and the shrines. If I can’t be a comfort to her any more, I pray that at least they can. And now I must go to her, because she is waiting in the meadows for me. I hope she never learns that I tricked her this morning in order to talk with Melissa, because that will only make it worse still—’ He turned for the door.

  ‘Stop,’ said Aun. ‘I haven’t finished yet.’

  The King halted.

  ‘Maybe she is doing what you told her,’ said Aun. ‘Had you thought of that?’

  Ambrose glared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that you had better sit down and think damned hard about this. The one thing I couldn’t work out was why she would dally with Gueronius of all people. When I fear someone, I run from them. Or I work to destroy them. But that’s not what you told her to do. You told her to take control of him. That’s what she’s up to – believe it. The second thing is, a husband can choose to shut his eyes to what his wife is doing. A king can’t. Too many of us depend on you. And if Gueronius is in it, then it’s not just cuckoldry, it’s treason. And he’s still building those cannon-things of his—’

  ‘Aun. Let me tell you I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Don’t you? Others do. Whispers are already starting. How do you think I heard about it?’

  Ambrose took a long breath. ‘Padry?’ he said.

  ‘Your Majesty, I had not heard it before now,’ sighed Padry. ‘But – if there are rumours, then yes, we must consider it carefully.’

  And objectively. And how were any of them to do that?

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ muttered Ambrose.

  ‘Then you must find out,’ said Aun.

  ‘I just have!’ Ambrose waved his hand at the door through which Melissa had disappeared.

  ‘Have you? Bring the girl back and put her on the rack and then see what she—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t want to do that either. Not to her. But any of the Queen’s other attendants—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘All right then,’ said the baron grimly. ‘You’ll shut your eyes to what she’s done. You’ll give her one more chance – and that girl has let you do it. But from now on you must watch to see what your Queen does next. Watch with both eyes open. Put a spy in her—’

  ‘No, Aun!’

  The two men glared at each other.

  ‘She’s my wife,’ said Ambrose. ‘I will not have a spy set on her.’

  ‘She’s your wife,’ said Aun. ‘It is your right to know what she does.’

  ‘I’m going to trust her. That’s my right, too. It’s not my fault that you don’t. You talk to me about what’s in her head. What about yours? Why can’t you trust, ever?’

  ‘Trust, is it?’ growled Aun. ‘I know how this bit of the talk goes. In a moment it’ll be about forgiving, too. I always know I’ve got you in a corner when you talk to me about forgiving.’

  ‘I hadn’t been going to,’ said Ambrose coldly. ‘But perhaps it’s not a bad idea. And that reminds me. Padry, I think we need a marshal in the south. To watch over the southern frontiers, and organize an ar
med force if the wild men ever raid in strength. Why not the son of our baron here? What do you say?’

  Aun scowled.

  ‘Your Majesty will know that I do not love the man myself,’ said Padry carefully. ‘Although I admit that he has discharged such offices as you have already granted him with reasonable purpose and honesty …’

  ‘Draft me a letter to him, laying out the necessary rights and duties. Baron, your son will be a great man. You should be proud …’

  ‘I will do as you wish, Your Majesty,’ said Padry. ‘But ’ - and he fixed the King with his eye – ‘but I believe we stray from the matter in hand.’

  The King looked from one adviser to the other. He turned away. He paced slowly to the hearth and faced them again. His back was to the dead fire.

  ‘I have the right to love her,’ he said. ‘King or not, I love her. That is my first law. Everything else can follow in its place. I will believe in her, even if all the world doubts her.’

  They looked at him and he looked back. The wind moaned in the chimney.

  A year ago, thought Padry, he would have spoken three words and settled it. Not now. His confidence had been eaten away. There was a frailty in his defiance that invited contradiction. Did he know? Did he understand what had happened to him? Perhaps he did. Perhaps he knew that he was blinding himself. But he was still doing it. Still the young man would lean on his love and tell himself that she was true.

  And it was Thomas Padry who must play the corrupter.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘You may believe if the world doubts. But can you save if the world is betrayed?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The world we know depends upon you. Some good it has already had from you. But for the most part it still waits. What of the children in the furrows? We were to have the Church take up their schooling, but on that we have hardly begun. What of the poor? What of Outland? If we believe, and our belief is misplaced, your rule will fall. Your people will wait in vain. More, they will suffer with us. Do we have a right to condemn them?’