Eventually Magnusson opened the drawing room door and stood silently on the threshold until the shouting died away.
“I apologize,” he said. “I didn’t want to intrude. Ma’am, Ms. Simons is on the phone. I tried to put her off, but—”
“No,” said Lillian. She had heard the word so many times in the last hour that it sounded like meaningless gibberish. “Of course. I—”
Cyril walked out then, slipping the yoke of further conversation. His shoulder checked Magnusson as he pushed past, throwing the butler slightly off-balance. Magnusson recovered quickly and did not acknowledge the incident. “You’ll take the call?”
“Please,” she said, dreading it.
Honora sounded calm, collected, sympathetic. Everything Lillian did not feel.
“Lillian,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you, Honora.” Her professional persona settled in her veins like ice, slowing the frantic beat of her heart and cooling panic from her cheeks. “I … I should have told you he was … it happened suddenly. And I was trying to keep it quiet. It wasn’t my idea.”
Immediately, she wished she had not tacked the last bit on. It sounded both petulant and pathetic.
“I’m sure you’ll handle this with grace,” she said. “Just like you do everything.”
Lillian bit back sardonic laughter. “With things as they stand, I don’t know if I’m the best person to run your press conference this week.”
“About that…”
Of course. They would never keep her on after this.
“We had a cable just now from the sitting minister,” said Honora, “and … well, I’m afraid we have to let you go.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, as if reading from a script. “I understand.”
“Thank you.” The relief Honora breathed into her end of the line turned the words ragged, and Lillian pulled her cheek away from the receiver. “I truly am so, so sorry. If it was up to me…”
Lillian would still be sacked, but someone else would have made the call. “Goodnight,” she said, and rang off.
In the silence that followed, she heard a faint tap at the window. Then a second, building to a glassine susurrus that shifted with the wind. It had begun to sleet. Ice struck the windows like small ordinance. The smell of Solstice evergreen still lingered in the air as she sat facing another catastrophe from which she would have to rebuild her life. At least she had plenty of practice.
* * *
If someone had asked Cyril, an hour ago, if he planned to stay in Gedda, he’d have shrugged. He might even have said no, though he wouldn’t have been able to say where else he might go.
Now, he felt as if he had grown roots.
There was every possibility that he would die if he stayed. Lillian had made that very clear.
“Your—our—only hope of thriving, even surviving in Gedda was predicated on keeping things quiet,” she told him. “If one of the candidates decides to run with this banner behind them—and at least one of them will, believe me—it will probably turn into a tent show. You could end up on the scaffold. In front of the squad. And if somebody takes matters into their own hands before that, do you think I’d have any chance of justice?”
He hadn’t said it to her, then, but he had thought it: What about everyone else’s chance at justice? What about the people who had fled or fallen or died because of him? What about Cordelia?
For the first time in a long time, purpose filled him. A heavy one, and not the one he might have chosen for himself, but a purpose nonetheless. And it was such a relief to look up and see a satisfying end to this whole parade of horrors.
Who would be hurt by that? He had only ever inconvenienced his sister when they came close enough to interact. She probably hadn’t wanted him here for Solstice in the first place. And now look how his presence had embarrassed her.
He didn’t think she was completely heartless—it would hurt to lose her brother. But might it not also be a relief? Like the death of an aging parent or an expensive invalid.
And Aristide? Would survive. Had been surviving. Had decided Cyril was dead years ago. Even if he had come looking, he had also—wisely—given up.
The fact that he had looked at all … that fed some part of Cyril he would rather starve. The stubborn part. The animal bit of him that had dragged him back to Gedda, to his family, with Aristide. The part of him that didn’t want to die.
In his drafty room, he emptied out his pockets. Crusts of bread, Jinadh’s lighter, a melted piece of hard candy gone sticky in its wrapper. A penknife. A pocketknife. A knife from the table, still marked with a sheen of grease.
He wasn’t that man anymore: the one who slunk through the jungle and put scraps in his pockets. He didn’t need to carry knives. It made him feel naked to do it, but there was something luxurious in the feeling, too. A kind of horrible freedom.
Last of all he dug out a handful of cigarette butts. Shreds of charred tobacco stuck in the creases of his palm, clung to the lining of the pocket. With a turn of his wrist, he cast them into the grate to burn.
* * *
Aristide had been expecting the call, half dreading it, since he woke up to the story on the wireless. When it finally came it was a relief.
“He won’t go.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “He won’t leave. He said he’s staying.”
Aristide looked down at the papers on his hotel desk, though he didn’t register anything that was written on them. Just a mess of black hatch marks, numbers and letters jumbled, the rustle of his elbows in their midst. “What?”
“I told him it would be easiest to get out of the country the sooner he went and he just stared at me. I said I’d pay for him to go, find someplace for him to stay.”
“To be clear.” Aristide put the pads of his fingers against the blotter and pressed as if he could push the situation into order. “Did he say nothing, or did he say the word ‘no’?”
“Nothing at first. But … well, I may have … once things deteriorated from polite conversation, he did actually refuse. Vehemently.”
“What did he say, exactly?”
“He just kept saying no, and finally when I couldn’t stand it anymore and started shouting he … Mother and sons, he got this look in his eyes and asked where else he deserved to be.”
Aristide breathed deep to quell a surge of anger. Anger at Cyril: undeniably a traitor, an Ospie collaborator. Also, an idiot. Anger that he refused to flee. Anger that he had to.
When that subsided, he asked, “How did it get out?”
Breath turned the line to static: a fast exhalation, either laughter or a choked-off sob. Knowing Lillian, the latter shoved into the former’s clothes. “Stones, I’m an idiot.”
“Lillian,” he said, chest so tight he wondered if he oughtn’t to have accepted the amyl nitrate his last doctor had suggested. “What have you done?”
“It was Frye,” she said, too quickly. Then, “No, I mean … we were talking and I … it just came out.”
He realized he had stopped breathing, and sucked in air through a dry mouth, triggering a coughing fit.
“You,” he gasped, in between hacking. “You told Emmeline Frye … that Cyril—”
“It’s so much worse than that,” she said, and now she really was laughing. “You haven’t the smallest conception. Aristide, I told her she needed a hook, something to appeal to people’s emotions. In the very same conversation. And she took my rotten advice, and my brother. I didn’t even sell him, Aristide. I gave him away for free.”
Inured as he was to using people as leverage and currency, this should not have struck Aristide so deeply, in such a vulnerable place. Yet he found himself standing, shouting into the telephone, “He isn’t a commodity, Lillian. He’s worth more than whatever you were hoping you would get!”
And she was talking over him, too strident to be shrill, “You can’t have it both ways! You have no idea what I’m going through right now, and if you did you’d—”
<
br /> The door opened, revealing Daoud draped in a thick muffler and chesterfield, briefcase in one gloved hand and snow melting on his beard. He cocked his head, silently inquiring.
Aristide caught the rest of his rage behind clenched teeth and said, “What exactly did you ring me up for? Just to tear me tips to tail?”
He heard Lillian gather herself similarly, heard the restraint in her voice when she said, “A favor.”
“Oh? What kind?”
“Talk to him.”
Aristide’s bark of laughter made Daoud start, mussing the careful pile of folders he had taken from his briefcase and set at Aristide’s elbow. He raised his eyebrows, but Aristide shook his head. “What would I say?”
“Tell him he’ll be hanged,” she said. “What he did was wrong, but to die for it? He was cornered and coerced. He can’t shoulder the blame for everything that happened after. And what good will it do to let himself be executed? It isn’t as if his death will bring back the old federation.”
It had the rhythm of a litany. “You’ve told him this already. It won’t do any good for him to hear it from me.”
“Then tell him whatever you like. Whatever you think he’ll hear. He might listen to you.”
“I think,” said Aristide, forceful and precise as a nail driven home, “you have greatly misconstrued my relationship with your brother. Good day.”
When he rang off, the force of the receiver into the cradle made the ringer jangle.
“Lillian?” said Daoud.
In answer, Aristide closed his eyes and ground his teeth.
“How is she?”
“As you might expect.” He fell back in his chair, sighing heavily as if he could purge the conversation, and nodded at the folders. “What are those?”
“Customs forms,” he said. “Cargo manifests. All things associated with bringing a vessel into this harbor and unloading our wares. I had thought we might review them, but if you need…” He trailed off, as if unsure what Aristide might need in this situation.
In fact, even Aristide wasn’t sure. To go forward with the deal would put money in the pocket of a woman who had as good as tied a noose around Cyril’s neck. But to falter now would break Cross-Costa to little purpose. Aristide did not like grand gestures if they were also useless. A boycott that accomplished nothing wasn’t a statement; it was pathetic. To that end, “No. I’m quite ready to look at them.”
Daoud sat down gingerly across from him and lifted the cover of the first document. He paused halfway, clearly struggling with words that wouldn’t come. “Aristide. I apologize, but … I overheard the last part of your conversation and … what is your relationship to Mr. DePaul at this time?”
That wasn’t even a conversation he was ready to have with himself, let alone with his … secretary. Or whatever Daoud was to him. So. “Certainly nothing to do with imports and exports. Shall we begin?”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Frye’s numbers in the polls began to rise. She had followed Lillian’s advice to the letter—or her campaign manager had—and entered onto the scene well-armed with a point-by-point implementation plan for a series of tribunals: retroactive justice for all the folk who had been wronged by the Ospies. And the whole state of Amberlough, the whole rotten country, had been grievously wronged by Cyril.
Saeger played a poor game of catch-up after Frye’s strong start out of the gate. This was where her Catwalk connections ought to have served her best, but Frye had been given lead time, leaving Saeger floundering in the dust. There was no way she could approach the issue without agreeing with the opposition. Her efforts made her sound conciliatory and slightly pitiful, which—like white silk—looked ill on her.
«You’ll make yourself crazy,» said Jinadh, when Magnusson brought Lillian’s habitual stack of papers to the breakfast table.
“I’m not already?” she asked, trying for levity and missing by a hair. Jinadh made a face she might have taken exception to, if the news had not been more important.
The Telegraph, the Clarion, Federal Call, Farbourgh Times … she’d revised her subscriptions in the wake of the disaster after Solstice. International affairs had fallen rather by the wayside, in her order of priorities.
She traced a headline with one finger. «Frye is proposing judges already, and she isn’t even in the Cliff House. If she’s elected, she’s really going to do this.»
«Starting with your brother, I assume.»
«That’s the implication.» She had kept many of their conversations in Porashtu over the last week, half out of caution and half out of embarrassment. None of the staff could speak it, so it gave her some scant privacy in dealing with Cyril’s disgrace, and her own.
Jinadh watched her over his coffee, brows drawn together. «How flexible do you think her definition of ‘collaboration’ will be?»
«Do you mean, will it include me?» She put a little milk in her porridge. «There is no way to know without more … hmm.» A switch, to find the word. “Context.”
«Ah, so it’s wait and see. Your favorite thing, I know.» His smile coaxed an answering one from her, though it wavered badly.
«I think I will be safe,» she said. «I think most people will be. This is a stunt. She will follow through to make good on the campaign promise, but after—» She couldn’t make herself say after what, «—After, she may not push very much.»
«She might lose control of it, if people latch onto the idea. Have you read the opinion pieces yet? Or any letters to the editor?»
She raised an eyebrow over the top of her paper. «How did you get to them before me?»
«Only the ones in the Observer,» he said; the paper where he edited arts and culture. It currently sat somewhere in the middle of Lillian’s stack. «I snuck a proof copy. And speaking of … » A glance at the clock, and he dropped his napkin onto his plate. «I’ll see you this evening, moon-eyes.»
He kissed the top of her head on his way out of the dining room, to polish the pages Lillian usually set aside. It was tempting to turn to them now, to read about marriages and parties and theatre and art, but that would be avoidance, which would not serve her in the end.
An essay in the Clarion proposed several people who, in the author’s opinion, deserved the judgment of a tribunal as much as Cyril did, if not more. There was something perversely comforting in that. He wasn’t as hated as Karol Kramer, for instance, warden of the largest Cultham internment camp, or Acherby’s erstwhile adviser Victor Hale.
Kramer’s name came up again in an interview with Saeger, who wanted to know what had inspired Frye’s sudden pivot into compassion for victims of the Ospies, when she had let that aspect of recent history lie largely silent in her campaign.
Kramer killed good friends of mine, said Saeger. Or at least stood by and watched them die of dysentery and exposure. More Chuli died on his watch than their people could really afford. There’s hardly a whole family left in the Culthams now. If we’re going to start stringing up Ospies, he would be my first choice over DePaul any day.
Unfortunately, neither Kramer nor any of his contemporaries seemed to be in the country right now. Or, if they were, they had gone very close to the ground, leaving Cyril standing solitary in the field and ready to be struck by a mortar or bullets or a bolt of lightning. Whatever was coming, it would hit him first and hardest, and he would not be prepared. Because he refused to be.
His guilt she could understand. But this misplaced sense of duty … it was going to get him killed, and the blood would splatter her and her family. If he wouldn’t protect himself, she would have to do it for him.
* * *
Lillian had left strict instructions that Cyril and Stephen were not to leave the grounds of the estate.
Jinadh went with her to the city—work wouldn’t wait for a family crisis, especially if Lillian had been sacked. Which she had been. Overhearing that conversation from the hall, Cyril gleaned Honora’s half of it from Lillian’s responses. Given his inferences
about the family’s financial situation, Cyril could understand why Jinadh left Cyril alone with his son. But he could also tell the man didn’t like it one bit.
“Be good,” he said to Stephen on the steps of the house. “Like your mother says.” Then he cast a narrow-eyed glance at Cyril. His mouth moved as though he might speak, but in the end he only gave a tense nod and joined Lillian in the back of the auto.
The car pulled away, leaving Cyril and Stephen standing at the top of the wide front steps.
“Go for a walk?” asked Cyril. “I’ll pack a picnic.”
Stephen shrugged.
Magnusson cleared his throat.
“Don’t worry,” said Cyril. “We’ll stay on the grounds. And we won’t get into any trouble.”
Which was how they ended up in Cyril’s childhood haunt: a clearing at the center of the far windbreak. When the overbearing expectations of Damesfort and the DePaul family had grown too strangling, he had run out here to play soldier, hero, hunter, spy. It was the greatest distance you could put between yourself and the village, yourself and Damesfort. The nearest ears belonged to sheep, and even those were at the far end of the field for the moment.
“What are we doing out here?” asked Stephen. He reached into the pocket of his knickerbockers and pulled out a toffee. When he dropped the wrapper, Cyril snatched it from the ground and tucked it roughly back into the pocket from whence it had come.
“Bad as a cigarette butt,” he said, patting his newly empty pocket out of habit. “Folk come by and see a stack of toffee wrappers, they know they didn’t just fall from the sky.”
He saw a teenage retort build, stall, and crumble before Stephen gave a nod very like his father’s and kept his own counsel.
“Give me one?” Cyril asked. “A toffee, I mean.”
Stephen handed one over. Cyril examined it, almost put it in his pocket, and then remembered he wouldn’t need to save it for later. There wouldn’t be much of a later, for him. He unwrapped the candy and put it in his mouth. It was slightly stale, and hard, so it went into his cheek to soften while he unloaded the mouse-eaten game bag he’d brought along.
Amnesty Page 16