Assassin’s Creed®

by Oliver Bowden

  (And if there was a moment when I might have asked him why, if he knew my pain, he spent so much of his time with Arno and not with me, then that was it. But I didn’t.)

  Little else was said before he left. Some time later I heard that he had left to go hunting – with Arno.

  The physician arrives soon. He never brings good news.

  ii.

  In my mind’s eye I revisit another meeting, two years before, when I was summoned to Father’s study for an audience with him and Mother, who unusually for her, wore a look of concern. I knew that there were serious matters they wanted to discuss when Olivier was asked to withdraw, the door closed and Father bid me take a seat.

  ‘Your mother tells me that your training is progressing well, Élise,’ he said.

  I nodded enthusiastically, looking from one to the other. ‘Yes, Father. Mr Weatherall says I’m going to be a bloody good sword fighter.’

  Father looked taken aback. ‘I see. One of Weatherall’s British expressions, no doubt. Well, I’m pleased to hear it. Obviously you take after your mother.’

  ‘You’re no slouch with a blade yourself, François,’ said Mother, with a hint of a smile.

  ‘You’ve reminded me it’s a while since we duelled.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a challenge, shall I?’

  He looked at her and for a moment the serious business was forgotten. I was forgotten. For a second it was just Mother and Father in the room, being playful and flirting with one another.

  And then, just as quickly as the moment had begun, it ended and the attention returned to me.

  ‘You are well on your way to becoming a Templar, Élise.’

  ‘When shall I be inducted, Papa?’ I asked him.

  ‘Your schooling will be finished at the Maison Royale in Saint-Cyr then you will become a fully fledged member of the Order and you will train to take my place.’

  I nodded.

  ‘First, though, there is something we have to tell you.’ He looked at Mother, their faces serious now. ‘It’s about Arno …’

  iii.

  Arno was by then my best friend, and I suppose the person I loved the most after my parents. Poor Ruth. She’d had to abandon any lasting hope she might have had that I would settle down to girlhood and begin taking an interest in those same girly things adored by others my age. With Arno on the estate not only did I have a playmate whenever I wanted one, but a boy playmate. Her dreams lay in ruins.

  I suppose, looking back, I had taken advantage of him rather. An orphan, he had come to us adrift, in need of direction, and I, of course, as much a fledgling Templar as a selfish little girl had made him ‘mine’. We were friends, and of the same age, but even so my role was one of older sister, and it was a role I had taken to with great gusto. I loved besting him in pretend sword fights. During Mr Weatherall’s training sessions I was a craven novice prone to mistakes and, as he was often pointing out, leading with my heart and not my head, but in play fights with Arno my novice skills made me a dazzling, spinning master. At other games – skipping, hopscotch, shuttlecock – we were evenly matched. But I always won at sword fighting.

  When the weather was fine we roamed the grounds of the estate, spying on Laurent and other staff, skimming stones on the lake. When it rained we stayed indoors and played backgammon, marbles or jacks. We spun hoops through the great corridors of the ground floor and wandered the floors above, hiding from housemaids and running giggling when they shooed us away.

  And that was how I spent my days: in the morning I was tutored, groomed for my adult life of leading the French Templars; the afternoon was when I let go of those responsibilities and instead of being an adult-in-waiting became a child again. Even then, though I never would have articulated it as such, I knew that Arno represented my escape.

  And, of course, nobody had failed to notice how close Arno and I had become.

  ‘Well, I’ve never seen you so happy,’ said Ruth resignedly.

  ‘You’re certainly very fond of your new playmate, aren’t you, Élise?’ from my mother.

  (Now – as I watch Arno sparring with my father in the yard and hear that they’ve gone hunting together – I wonder, was my mother just a tiny bit jealous that I had a significant other in my life? Now I know how she might have felt.)

  Yet it had never occurred to me that my friendship with Arno might be a cause for concern. Not until that very moment when I stood before them in the chamber and they told me they had something to say about him.

  iv.

  ‘Arno is of Assassin descent,’ said my father.

  And a little bit of my world shook.

  ‘But …’ I began, and tried to reconcile two pictures in my mind. One of Arno in his shiny buckle shoes, waistcoat and jacket, running through the hallways of the chateau and steering his hoop with his stick. The other of the Assassin doctor in the alleyway, his hat tall in the fog.

  ‘Assassins are our enemy.’

  Mother and Father shared a glance. ‘Their aims are opposed to ours, it’s true,’ he said.

  My mind was racing. ‘But … but does this mean Arno will want to kill me?’

  Mother moved forward to comfort me. ‘No, my dear, no, it doesn’t mean that at all. Arno is still your friend. Though his father, Charles Dorian, was an Assassin, Arno himself knew nothing of his destiny. No doubt he would have been told, in time; perhaps on his tenth birthday as we were planning to do with you. But as it stands he entered this house unaware of what the future had in store for him.’

  ‘He is not an Assassin then. Simply the son of an Assassin.’

  Again they looked to one another. ‘He will have certain innate characteristics, Élise. In many ways Arno is, was and always will be an Assassin – it’s just that he doesn’t know it.’

  ‘But if he doesn’t know it then we shall never be enemies.’

  ‘That is quite correct,’ said Father. ‘In fact, we believe his nature might be overcome by nurture.’

  ‘François …’ said Mother warningly.

  ‘What do you mean, Father?’ I asked, my eyes darting from him to her, noting her discomfort.

  ‘I mean that you have a certain influence over him, do you not?’ asked Father.

  I felt myself colouring. Was it so obvious?

  ‘Perhaps, Father …’

  ‘He looks up to you, Élise, and why not? It is gratifying to see. Most encouraging.’

  ‘François –’ Mother said again, but he stopped her with an appraised hand.

  ‘Please, my darling, leave this to me.’

  I watched them carefully.

  ‘There is no reason why you, as Arno’s friend and playmate, can’t begin to educate him in our ways.’

  ‘Indoctrinate him, François?’ A flash of anger from my mother.

  ‘Guide him, my dear.’

  ‘Guide him in a manner that goes against his nature?’

  ‘How do we know? Perhaps Élise is right that he is not an Assassin until he’s made one. Perhaps we can save him from the clutches of his people.’

  ‘The Assassins don’t know he’s here?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t believe so.’

  ‘Then there’s no reason he need be found out.’

  ‘That’s quite right, Élise.’

  ‘Then he needn’t be … anything.’

  A look of confusion crossed my father’s face. ‘I’m sorry, my dear, I don’t quite follow.’

  What I wanted to say was leave him out of this. Let Arno be for me, nothing to do with the way we see the world, the way we want to shape the world – let the bit of my life I share with Arno be free of all that.

  ‘I think,’ said Mother, ‘that what Elise is trying to say is –’ she spread her hands – ‘what’s the rush?’

  He pursed his lips, not especially liking this wall of resistance thrown up by his womenfolk. ‘He is my ward. A child of this house. He will be brought up according to the doctrines of the house. To put it bluntly, we need to get to him before
the Assassins do.’

  ‘We have no reason to fear that the Assassins will ever discover his existence,’ she pressed.

  ‘We cannot be sure. If the Assassins reach him they will bring him into the Order. He would not be able to resist.’

  ‘If he would not be able to resist, then how can it be right to steer him otherwise?’ I pleaded, though my reasons for doing so were more personal than ideological. ‘How can it be right for us to go against what fate has in store for him?’

  He fixed me with a hard look. ‘Do you want Arno to be your enemy?’

  ‘No,’ I said, impassioned.

  ‘Then the best way to be sure of that is to bring him round to our way of thinking –’

  ‘Yes, François, but not now,’ interrupted Mother. ‘Not just yet? Not when the children are so young.’

  He looked from one protesting face to the other and appeared to soften. ‘You two,’ he said with a smile. ‘Very well. Do as you wish for the time being. We shall review the situation later.’

  I shot a grateful look at my mother.

  What will I do without her?

  v.

  She fell ill soon after that, and was confined to her rooms, which stayed darkened day and night, that part of the house out of bounds to all but her lady’s maid, Justine, my father and me, and three nurses who were hired to look after her, who were all called Marie.

  To the rest of the house, she began to cease to exist. Though my morning routine stayed the same, I was with my governor and then in the woods at the edge of our grounds, learning swording with Mr Weatherall. I no longer whiled afternoons away with Arno; instead I spent them at my mother’s bedside, clasping her hand as the Maries fussed around us.

  I watched as Arno began to gravitate towards my father. I watched my father find comfort away from the stress of Mother’s illness in being his guardian. My father and I were both trying to cope with the gradual loss of Mother, both finding different ways to do it. The laughter in my life faded away.

  vi.

  I used to have a dream. Only it wasn’t a dream because I was awake. I suppose you’d have to say it was a fantasy. In the fantasy I was sitting on a throne. I know how it may sound, but after all, if you can’t admit it to your journal when can you admit it? I am sitting on a throne before my subjects who in the daydream have no identity but who I suppose must be Templars. They are assembled before me, the Grand Master. And you know it’s not a particularly serious daydream because I’m sitting before them as a ten-year-old girl, the throne way too big for me, my legs sticking out, my arms not even long enough to reach over the arms of the chair. I am the least monarch-like monarch you can possibly imagine, but it’s a daydream and that’s the way daydreams go sometimes. What’s important about this daydream isn’t that I turn myself into a king, nor that I have brought my ascendance to Grand Master forward by decades. What’s significant about it for me, and what I cling to, is that sitting at either side of me are my mother and father.

  Each day that she grows a little weaker and closer to death, and each day that he gravitates closer towards Arno, the impression of them at my side becomes more and more indistinct.

  15 April 1778

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you, Élise, before I go.’

  She took my hand and her grip was so frail. My shoulders shook as I began to sob. ‘No, please, Mother, no …’

  ‘Hush, child, be strong. Be strong for me. I am being taken from you and you must see that as a test of your strength. You must be strong, not only for yourself, but also for your father. My passing makes him vulnerable to the raised voices of the Order. You must be a voice in his other ear, Élise. You must press for the third way.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can. And one day you will be the Grand Master, and you must lead the Order, abiding by your own principles. The principles in which you believe.’

  ‘They are yours, Mother.’

  She dropped my hand and reached to stroke my cheek. Her eyes were cloudy and the smile floated on her face. ‘They are principles founded on compassion, Élise, and you have so much of that. So much of it. You know, I’m so proud of you. I couldn’t have hoped for a more wonderful daughter. In you, I see the best of your father and the best of me. I couldn’t have asked for more, Élise, and I will die happy – happy to have known you and honoured to have witnessed the birth of your greatness.’

  ‘No, Mother, please, no.’

  The words were spoken between sobs that wracked my body. My hands gripped her upper arm through the sheets. Her so-thin upper arm through the sheets. As though by holding it I might prevent her soul departing.

  Her red hair was spread across the pillow. Her eyes fluttered. ‘Please call your father, if you would,’ she said in a voice that was too weak and too soft, as though the life were slipping out of her. I rushed to the door, flung it open, called for one of the Maries to fetch Father, slammed the door shut again and returned to her side, but it was as though the end was coming quickly now, and as death settled over her she looked at me with watering eyes and the fondest smile I have ever seen.

  ‘Please look after each other,’ she said. ‘I love you both so very much.’

  18 April 1778

  i.

  And I have frozen. I wander rooms, breathing the fusty smell I had come to associate with her illness, and know that we will have to open the curtains and fresh air will banish the scent, but not wanting that because it will mean she has gone, and I can’t accept that.

  When she was ill I wanted her back to full health. Now she is dead I just want her here. I just want her in the house.

  This morning I watched from my window as three carriages arrived on the gravel outside and valets lowered steps and began to load them with trunks. Shortly afterwards the three Maries appeared and began giving each other kisses goodbye. They wore black and dabbed their eyes and of course they grieved for Mother but it was a temporary grief by necessity, because their work here was over, payment made, and they would go to tend to other dying women and feel the same passing sadness when that next appointment came to an end.

  I tried not to think of their departure as being in indecent haste. I tried not to resent them leaving me alone with my grief. They were hardly alone in not knowing the depth of my feeling. Mother had made Father promise not to observe the usual mourning rituals, and so the curtains of the lower floors stayed open and nor was the furniture cloaked in black. There were newer members of staff who had known only Mother briefly, or never met her at all. The mother I remembered was beautiful and graceful and protective, but to them she was remote. She wasn’t really a person. She was a weak lady in bed, and a lot of households had one of those. Even more than the Maries, their mourning was nothing more than a brief pang of sadness.

  And so the household carried on almost as though nothing had happened, just a few of us truly grieving, the few who had known and loved Mother as she was. When I caught Justine’s eye I could see in her a reflection of my own deep pain. She had been the only member of staff allowed in Mother’s rooms during the sickness.

  ‘Oh, mademoiselle’ she said, and as her shoulders began to heave I took her hand and thanked her for everything she’d done, assuring her that Mother had been so grateful for her care. She curtsied, thanked me for my comfort and left.

  We were like two survivors of a great battle sharing memories with our eyes. She, Father and I were the only three remaining in the chateau who had tended to Mother as she died.

  It has been two days now and though Father had held me at her bedside on the night of her passing I haven’t seen him since. Ruth tells me that he has remained in his rooms weeping, but that very soon he will find the strength to emerge and that I shouldn’t worry for him; I should think of myself. She clasped me to her, pulling me into her bosom and rubbing my back as though trying to wind me.

  ‘Let it out, child,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t keep it all inside.’

  But I wriggled away, thanking
her, telling her that will be all – a bit haughty, the way I imagine May Carroll speaks to her maid.

  There’s nothing to let out is the problem. I feel nothing.

  Unable to stand the upper floors any longer, I left to wander the chateau, passing through the hallways like a ghost.

  ‘Élise …’ Arno lurked at one end of a hallway with his hat held in his hand and his cheeks red as though having just been running. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your mother, Élise.’

  ‘Thank you, Arno,’ I said. The corridor seemed too long between us. He was hopping from one foot to another. ‘It was expected, not at all a shock, and though of course I’m grieving, I’m grateful I was able to be with her until the end.’

  He nodded sympathetically, not really understanding, and I could see why because everything in his world remained unchanged. To him a lady he barely knew, who had lived in a part of the house he wasn’t allowed to visit, had died, and that made people that he cared for sad. But that was it.

  ‘Perhaps we could play later,’ I said. ‘After our lessons.’ And he brightened.

  He was probably missing Father, I reasoned, watching him go.

  ii.

  I spent the morning with the governor and met Arno again at the door as he entered to begin his own lessons. Our timetables were ordered so that Arno should be with the governor while I trained with Mr Weatherall, so that he would never see me swording. (Perhaps in his own journal one day he will talk of signposts towards the moment when the penny dropped. ‘It never occurred to me to question why she was so adept at sword fighting …’). And then I left by a rear door and walked along the line of topiary until I came to the woodland at the bottom and took the path to where Mr Weatherall sat on a stump waiting for me. He used to sit with his legs crossed and the tails of his jacket arranged over the stump, cutting quite a dash, but whereas before he had bounded from it to greet me, the light dancing in his eyes, a smile never far from his lips, now his head was bowed as though he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Beside him on the seat was a box about a foot and a half long and a hand wide.