FOUR KINGS: A Novel

by M. D. Elster

  “Anaïs?” he called, more softly now that he was near. He lightly pushed the door ajar. “Let’s go downstairs. I’ve lit a great many candles in the sitting room. The windows have all been boarded up in that room. I don’t think the hurricane can harm us there.”

  “All right,” I agreed. The page was still tucked in the pocket of my house-pants. I followed him downstairs.

  A chorus of candles sputtered in the sitting room; it smelled like a church, but at least we could see. No light came in through the tall plantation windows, not even moonlight, for earlier that day my stepfather had paid the gardener overtime to stay and help board them up with plywood. After our windows were done, the gardener had hurried home, presumably to do the same to his own house. Now the wind of the hurricane howled terribly through the cracks. I’d noticed, too, as we’d passed by the foyer that water was streaming in through the brass mail slot and making puddles on the floor. Our house, as large and stately as it was, felt a little like a ship out at sea.

  “Where is Colette?” I asked. It suddenly dawned on me that my stepfather and I were all alone in the house.

  “Earlier this evening, she went to the club,” he said. “She left some jewelry there; she says hurricanes give looters ideas. She had wanted to return home to be with us, but now that the storm has grown, I expect she’ll stay put for the remainder of the evening.”

  That was a lie, I knew. They’d had a fight. I’d heard them bickering. Of course, I couldn’t know they’d had the same fight he’d had years ago in London with my mother. Either way, she’d made some excuse to leave — something neither one of them believed, and she’d left. She was so angry and upset, she didn’t want to be near him during the storm.

  All I knew was that they’d argued, and that now, he didn’t seem at all worried. I wondered then, if he wasn’t perhaps hoping the storm would do his dirty work for him. A man couldn’t be charged for the death of a woman who had died in one of New Orleans’s famous hurricanes. I remembered my mission, and made an excuse to leave the room.

  I had already snuck into my stepfather’s study and gotten the safe open when I heard the terrible noise of the oak tree toppling over and crashing through the roof of the sitting room. It sounded as though the house was cracking in two. For the briefest of seconds, I worried that my stepfather might be injured, that he might be dead even, crushed under a beam or a tree branch.

  “Anaïs! Anaïs!” came his voice, and I knew right away from the sound of it, that he wasn’t hurt. In that moment, my worry for him turned into panicked fear for myself.

  “Anaïs!” he repeated again, entering the room. “Dear God, this house is falling down around our ears!” He appeared — momentarily, at least — relieved to see me, and to see that I was uninjured. Then, as his eyes roved over my person and he took note of the fact I was indeed standing in his study, that the location of his safe was no longer a secret, that I had violated the lock, his face darkened.

  “I would ask you what you’re doing in here, but it appears you already seem to know your way around,” he said dryly.

  “I remembered,” I said to him. “After all these years… I remember what I saw that night in London. You convinced me it wasn’t so, but it’s come back to me. I remember everything.”

  Outside his study window, lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. Bright, greenish light lit up my stepfather’s face and died instantly away. The storm was right on top of us now, and everything began sliding together in my mind: The storm, the bombs, the rattling windowpanes, the howling wind and the howling sirens.

  “You struck her over the head with a lamp,” I said in a low voice.

  “I often wondered if you saw that,” my stepfather said, his voice smooth, almost amused-sounding. “I suppose now I have my answer.” He smoothed the tailored jacket he was wearing. “And yet you stayed with me all those years… Pretty quick to trade your loyalties, weren’t you? I suppose that’s why we got on so well. Did you know? — there were times I forgot you aren’t my own flesh and blood.”

  Those words — the words I’d spent so many years longing to hear — stabbed me in the heart. I felt sick.

  “You were taking out insurance policies…” I said, holding up a fistful of letters and envelopes from the safe, “and profiting from their deaths.”

  “You hardly complained when it paid for your passage to America, or your chocolates, or your books,” he replied.

  “You were selling names to the Germans,” I blurted out in reply, sick.

  At this, his eyes narrowed and his thin moustache twitched. He reached up and gave it a twist. “What do you know about that?”

  “I know what my mother told me,” I said, and reached into my pocket to produce the folded up fairytale page.

  “What is that?” he snorted.

  “A message from my mother. She stole your black book, and that’s why you were fighting that night,” I said.

  This, I could see, had him rattled. “Another mystery I’d always wondered about,” he said. “I don’t suppose you know where that book got off to, now do you?”

  I don’t know if he could see my face in the dark, but either way, I know he felt it when I smiled at him. “I do,” was all I said in reply.

  We glared at each other for the space of a full minute, and then he began to approach.

  “Don’t come near me!” I screamed out. “Don’t come near me,” I repeated, for good measure.

  “Anaïs!” I heard another voice call my name. I turned, and in the weak light of the flashlight, I saw Jules standing in the doorway. He was holding my stepfather’s gun — the one my stepfather kept in a drawer in his office at the nightclub. “Back away from her,” he ordered my stepfather, and gestured for me to move past my stepfather, to the doorway where Jules waited to put a protective arm around me.

  I stared at him in disbelief. His sudden presence was surreal to me. I later found out that Jules had come at that late hour, in that terrible storm, to check on me. For weeks, Colette had confided her misgivings about my stepfather in Jules, understanding him to be my closest friend, and a protective figure in my life. In short, Colette understood a simple fact that I didn’t fully grasp for some reason: Jules cared very deeply for me. And so did Colette. She had sent him here.

  I made it safely to the doorway. At first, when I got there, I hugged onto Jules, feeling weak and frightened.

  “Come on,” Jules said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  “During the middle of a hurricane?” my stepfather snorted.

  Jules didn’t reply, he only turned to steer me away from my stepfather’s study, and everything in it. But then something strange took hold of me. I reached for the gun, tore it out of Jules’ hand, and whirled around, pointing it at my stepfather.

  My stepfather looked me over, a surprised expression on his face. Then he began to laugh. It was a deep rumble, and slowly filled up the whole room, making me feel sick to my stomach. Then — in the blink of an eye — my stepfather lunged for Jules. Still, to this day, I’m not certain what he intended to do with Jules. Knock him over? Use him as a shield?

  “Anaïs, don’t shoot!” I heard Jules shout.

  It didn’t matter. The gun went off before my stepfather made it more than a few inches.

  For some reason, I remember that part in smaller bits. Perhaps my memory is still not completely whole. I remember hearing the loud, ear-splitting bang. I remember seeing the muzzle-flash. I remember feeling the snappy, thudding kickback of the gun. I remember smelling a strange sulfurous scent. My stepfather dropped to the ground, knocked utterly unconscious. I thought he was dead.

  Eventually, it was Jules who filled me in on what happened next. I still can’t quite recall that part. From what he has told me, I have pieced together the following: Jules took the gun away from me. I rushed to my stepfather’s side, and immediately began administering medical aid. According to Jules, I worked frantically, but also seemed as
though I knew what I was about. He helped. We staunched the wound. Jules ripped his shirt at my direction and I tied a tourniquet. It is a little ironic, to think of this part, of course. All those years of studying medical books, of dreaming about becoming a doctor, and here I was, using the knowledge that one father had worked so hard to bring me, in order to save another father who didn’t deserve it.

  We patched him up as best we cold and decided to go for more help. The electricity was down, the telephone was out, and help could only be gotten on foot, so Jules was left to run into town to fetch someone. It was after he left that I must have been struck on the head by a piece of falling beam. That is the only explanation that makes any sense. I must have returned to the sitting room to inspect the damage and get a look at the hurricane, wondering how Jules might fare outside.

  Doctors say that the concussion combined with the shock of having confronted my stepfather and shot him would be enough to account for the strange, feral state I exhibited when I was eventually found, wandering around the French Quarter, tearing at my hair, babbling and screaming nonsense at people.

  All of this came back to me the night before Mr. Duval was due to call his first witness.

  Sometimes I find myself picturing my stepfather on the day he’d woken up from his comatose state: His eyes fluttering open, black lashes beating over pale, piercing blue irises. The nurses suddenly flitting around him like nervous birds, He’s awake! He’s awake! And then the doctor marching solemnly into the room with his long white lab-coat.

  Please, rest easy, Mr. Reynard… you’ve suffered a terrible gunshot wound that severed your left brachial artery, very near your heart… to be honest, we weren’t optimistic that you were going to wake up. You can be proud of yourself; you must be very strong. And the shooter has been caught, so you needn’t worry about any of that. Just rest…

  I picture my stepfather snapping to attention. Shooter? — he would immediately want to know.

  Yes, they caught him. The Assistant D.A. is quite eager to try him.

  Him?

  Why, yes… that young colored boy who worked in your nightclub — Jules Martin, I think his name was?

  I picture my stepfather lying there on his pillows, staring up at the ceiling, trying to sort through the logistics. And then, when Colette brought me to the hospital and he saw me — how utterly, stupidly, vapidly clueless I was — he saw his chance to rewrite my memory yet again.

  I shudder to imagine his thoughts. You were quick to trade your loyalties, he’d said. Perhaps that’s why we got on so well. An unwitting partner in crime. That’s what I was to him. And yet, some part of me suspects he enjoyed this — the thought of a partner — as though he was not alone in this world. As though I chose him, deep down knowing he was a monster.

  He was wrong.

  He was wrong, and once on the witness stand, the girl within me who remembered everything that had been done to me, and everything I had done to others I loved, finally seized her chance to speak. What she said changed both our lives forever.

  CHAPTER 39.

  Before I even open my eyes, the first thing I notice is the scent in the air: iodine, dusty radiator, and sheets that have been slightly singed by an iron.

  I am, I realize, back in the asylum. I suppose there is some logic to the decision to bring me back here. After all, I began screaming on the witness stand. In front of the judge and all those people, I claimed to have shot my stepfather. If the latter statement is false, I belong in an insane asylum. And if it is true… perhaps I belong in an insane asylum all the more.

  When I open my eyes and look around the room I see I am back in the North Wing, in what looks to be the very same room they put me in just after the hurricane. How ironic it is to have come full-circle. But this time is different, for I am different: I remember everything.

  Unlike my first time in this hospital, when I woke up to find Nurse Kitching folding bandages, there is no one in the room with me this time. I am alone. The window is dark; it must be nighttime. Dressed in a hospital gown, I climb out of bed and creep over to the window to look out. The hallway appears to be empty. And quiet. The last time I woke up in the middle of the night to find the asylum so quiet was when Mr. Fletcher was summoning me with the key.

  I am on tiptoe, peeping through the small square of a window in the door, when I glance down and see something on the floor: A playing card, and on top of it, a key. I pick these two items up and stare at them, incredulous. The key looks exactly like the key to the asylum’s boiler room door — the key I believed I’d hidden in my bedroom during the time I was sent home with Colette. I see familiar engravings on the bow of the key: Clubs, hearts, spades, and diamonds. I turn my attention to the playing card. It, too, is unmistakably the card I have been carrying around with me, the Jack of Hearts I thought I hid in a drawer in my bedroom along with the key. The jack with his roguish expression and curled moustache, a tiny rip at the top left corner of the card.

  Someone is sending for me, calling me back to the Land of the Four Kings, and I think I know why.

  Sneaking downstairs to the basement has become easy. I’ve had a reasonable amount of practice at it, not to mention the fact the asylum itself always seems to cooperate, as though the institution has a will of its own, or else is enchanted by magic. Once again, I find myself hurrying along empty corridors, evading detection from nurses who appear to be altogether nonexistent.

  The key fits in the lock, and seconds later I am sprinting across the lawn and ducking into the tree line. The woods are fresh and dewy, the moon is full. I dart through the hollow log, down the sloping hillside thronged with birch trees, and make my way immediately to the road the will lead through Commoners’ Village to Harpy’s Cross. From there I take the road north.

  At the entrance to the Unicorn King’s castle the stag-headed guards acknowledge me and send for someone to escort me through the gates and onto the castle grounds. As I wait, I notice there is a great deal of commotion around the castle; peasants and merchants bustle to and fro over the wide, flat, glass bridge that is ordinarily serene.

  “The execution is scheduled to take place today,” one of the guards tells me when I ask. My heart gives a heavy pump. Time passes differently in the Land of the Four Kings; I am relieved not to have arrived a day or two later than I have. I have reached a conclusion, and if I am right, there is, I think, something important I must do.

  “Ah, you’ve returned!” I hear a voice say. I turn and see walrus-headed Dr. Wickham striding towards me, nervously smoothing his moustache with his fingers. He is, of course, the last creature I’d like to see, but if he will help me get into the castle, so be it.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” he says to the guards. “I will escort the human to the king.”

  “First I’d like to see the fox,” I say.

  “Oh, of course,” Dr. Wickham says. “Mr. Fletcher — or I suppose I ought to say ‘Sir Fletcher’ now he’s been knighted. You’re quite right; he’ll want to see you first, too, before anyone else. I shall take you to him. Right this way.”

  I hardly want to make small talk with Dr. Wickham, but we wind up walking for longer than I anticipate. It isn’t just a matter of traversing the city; once inside, I follow Dr. Wickham to a remote part of the castle I haven’t seen before. The longer we walk, the quieter the castle becomes, and the servants grow fewer and further between. I grow wary. Finally, after going up two flights of stairs and walking to the end of a long, narrow glass hallway, Dr. Wickham stops in front of a door. He reaches into a pocket in his long robes and produces a key.

  “Is there some public area where he can receive me?” I ask nervously. “I don’t want to disturb Mr. Fletcher in his private chambers.”

  “Nonsense!” Dr. Wickham replies. “The fox loves you and thinks of you like family. I’m quite certain he’d like to receive you here. It’s cozier this way.”

  He turns the key and pushes the door open. It is a loun
ge, with bookshelves, armchairs, a fireplace. It appears to be part of a suite; I think I glimpse a bed in an adjacent room. I scan the room and don’t see Mr. Fletcher anywhere. Then I glimpse a bushy red tail poking out from an armchair with its back turned towards us.

  “Hello, Anaïs,” comes Mr. Fletcher’s voice. He rises, revealing himself, and turns to look at me, grinning his polished smile. Then he gestures to the chair opposite him. “Please, sit. Let’s have a little chat.”

  Dr. Wickham leaves the room, and — exactly as I’d worried — I hear the key in the door again, locking it.

  “You seemed so distressed when I saw you last and gave you the news that it was time to put our land behind you. I thought you might come back,” Mr. Fletcher says, smiling, “but not so soon.”

  “I came as soon as I found your message.”

  His fox-face furrows up as he frowns. “Message?”

  “The key. And the playing card. The Jack of Hearts.”

  His face continues to look confounded for a moment, but then it relaxes. “Yes… of course — my message. Yes… welcome.”

  “Perhaps you don’t want to welcome me just yet,” I say. He looks at me inquisitively. “I think you know why I’ve come, Mr. Fletcher.”

  “Ah! It is Sir Fletcher now,” he says. He smiles.

  “Ah, yes,” I say, “Dr. Wickham mentioned you’d been knighted. Congratulations.” I pause, and smile back at him. “Was it worth the price?”

  He blinks innocently. “Price?”

  “Sir Lewin’s life,” I say, keeping my voice calm and even. “Among the other lives you’ve taken.”

  I expect him to react, but on the contrary, Mr. Fletcher doesn’t seem surprised whatsoever by my accusation.

  “What gave me away?” he asks in a pleasant, nonchalant voice, as though we are only making polite small talk.

  “Plenty. But to begin, you said that among the incriminating items found in Sir Lewin’s satchel, there was a written order from the Lion King.”