by Gwynn White
You should have stuck to drinking N-Rgy, Floyd.
She threw one last item into her basket and then paid, getting several 10p coins in change. Outside the shop there was a phone booth. She went in—glancing over both shoulders, more frightened at this point than she had been at any time since she was on the clifftop with the ROCK shooting at her—and dialed.
“Number six Lion’s Claw Lane!”
“It’s me, Mrs. Lyle. Mum in?”
“Weeelll, I think she’s gone down to young Toll’s school. Not sure what’s happening but I think it’s some sort of protest. Haven’t I always said to Una, the teachers at that place are no better than terrorists. I don’t know why the Corporation school wasn’t good enough …”
As the cleverest in the family, ten-year-old Toll attended the Thamesside Free School, instead of the local Wessex Corporation school like his brothers and sisters. The Free School was not free, in fact the fees were a stretch for the Grants, but it was staffed by clever young teachers with degrees and ideals. Floating limply in a fog of relief, Leonie wondered if they were protesting against Oswald Day, or for him.
“Is Tollan there, then?”
“Oooh, I don’t think he’s back from work y—”
“Anyone, then! Please, Mrs Lyle!”
While she waited, she had to put two more 10p coins in.
“Lee-lee?”
“Maddy. Is everyone all right?”
“Course, why wouldn’t we be?”
She’d reached them in time. Thank God, thank God. “Listen, you’ve got to—”
“Do you know where my eyelash curler is? I can’t find it. I don’t suppose you borrowed it, but if you know where—”
“Bugger your eyelash curler.” It was strange how Maddy managed to sound quite like her namesake, Princess Madelaine, with her affected verbal mannerisms. “The twins probably took it to make a catapult. Listen. You’ve got to get out of the city. Everyone. Tell Mum and Tollan: they have to take the little ones to stay with Auntie Violet in Chelmsford. Try to get Mystie to go too, although I reckon that pillock she’s married to won’t. I’ll try to call again, but I may not be able to for a while. Tell them they have to get away and stay away until—until things settle down.”
“What’re you wittering on about?” Maddy forgot to sound posh. “You into something, Lee-lee? Is it your job?”
“Yes and no. Just bloody do it, all right?” She almost laughed, tears coming to her eyes, at the thought that she was caught between two Madelaines. But at least she knew how to make this one do as she said. “You’re not just a pretty face, our Maddy. You’ve a head on your shoulders, or you wouldn’t’ve got that job at the boutique. Well, I tell you what, you go and stay with one of your mates if you want to risk it. But it’s life and death for the others. So use that head of yours, make up some story if you have to, and get them out of the city. Can I count on you to do that?”
“Yeah.” Part sulky, part scared, and part—the good part—flattered that big sister Leonie was counting on her.
“Right then. I’ll try to call Auntie V tomorrow and I hope I’m going to find Mum and everyone there.” It wouldn’t be too hard for Oswald Day to track them down in Chelmsford, but as Leonie knew well, efficiency dropped off over surprisingly short distances, as soon as one lot of local authorities had to liaise with another lot. Her hope was that the whole drama would somehow be resolved before Oswald Day got around to the Grants.
“Wait! Lee-lee, where are you—”
Pip pip pip! Leonie’s stack of 10p coins had run out.
She exited the phone booth, wobbly on her legs. “Thank you, thank you,” she whispered aloud, swinging her shopping bags in circles.
But as she climbed back up the hill, doubts set in again. As she’d hoped, the Grants were apparently not at the top of Oswald Day’s to-do list. But once the penny dropped that Leonie was on the run with the princesses, the first thing he’d do would be to pull her family in for interrogation. Oh, he’d go after them as far as Chelmsford! Of course he would! And they’d put Tollan and Una to the question. And it didn’t make it any better to know that the law required torture to be followed by cures, to leave no lasting damage. It was the pain they’d go through. The pain she would have put them through, on account of what wasn’t even her job anymore.
Maybe she shouldn’t have called. They’d be more convincing if they stayed where they were. Going to Chelmsford would make them look guilty.
She turned around. Got halfway back down the hill, nearly running, before she remembered that calling back from the same pay phone might trigger a trace. Her shoulders slumped.
She imagined keeping on walking. She imagined reaching the Union Street police station—she’d seen it on her tour of the local pawnshops—and saying to the pointyheads on duty: D’you want to get a promotion? Yes? Maybe a reward, too?
And she was at the door of the B&B. Before she went in, she rubbed her cheeks with her hands, rubbing away tears and the rain that had mingled with them.
Madelaine was watching television. Fiona was crawling around on the grimy carpet. Elspeth was not there.
“Where’s she gone?” Leonie said. “I told you not to leave the room!”
She dropped her shopping bags and pulled the Z4 out from under the chair. She inserted the magazine, slung the weapon on her shoulder and put her coat back on over it. She threw the scattered items of baby kit back into the changing bag. “Did she say where she was going?”
“It hardly matters what she said, does it?” Madelaine answered at last.
Leonie lost patience. She walked over and turned off the television. “Your Highness, listen to me! She’s betrayed us!”
The princess jumped up. “Damn you, I know she’s betrayed us!” Her lips wrinkled back from her little pearly teeth, and she hit Leonie in the face. The blow smarted, rather than hurt. HRH wasn’t very strong. However, she wore a number of rings set with gems, one of which drew blood. Leonie just stood there while the warm droplet tickled its way down her face, because if she moved she might hit the princess back, and then she’d really be in trouble.
Imagine you’re back in the Tabbies, she told herself. Imagine she’s got the right to hit you, because anyone with a hairknot can hit anyone without one, and that’s just the way the world works, forever and ever amen.
Madelaine turned away to pick up the crying baby, and Leonie wiped the blood off her cheek. “Must’ve gone the other way,” she mumbled. “Or sneaked past while I was in the phone booth. Could’ve hailed a cab, come to that. We’ve got to shift.” She loaded herself down with bags. “You take the baby …”
Madelaine laughed oddly. “That’s the queer thing. Elspeth adores Fifi. She would never leave her with me …”
The proprietress of St. Jeremy’s must’ve been lying in wait, because she pounced on them at the foot of the stairs. “Dinner will be served at six thirty, my lady. It’s a lovely beef steak we’ve got in for you. Would you like me to puree it for the wee one?”
“My lady’s not staying,” Leonie said. “She’s unimpressed in the extreme. A perfect tip, that room is, and you’d better plead with her not to complain to your lord. By the way, you want to try Bleechol on that carpet.”
“You used the room, you’ve got to pay for it,” the woman whined, reddening. “It’s five pounds for the evening package.”
“I knew this was no better than a knocking-shop! Fair enough, cock: you can have your dirty gelt.” She tossed a few pound notes at the woman and headed for the door.
Out in the car, Madelaine flopped limply in the back seat, Fiona on her lap. “I trusted her,” she whispered.
Just what your dad said about Oswald Day. You lot are used to trusting, aren’t you? I reckon that’s how you got into this shit in the first place.
She gunned the old Vauxhall out of the driveway, down the hill, windscreen wipers splashing. The St. Jeremy’s woman had twigged that Madelaine was a lady born. Would she have recorded their license
plate? If she was in the habit of allowing couples to shack up in her establishment for the afternoon, yes. She’d keep records for blackmail purposes, standard practice.
Slowing for a red light, Leonie felt momentarily hopeless. Then she remembered something she’d seen on their way into the city, and glanced at the dashboard clock. Five thirty. Might just make it.
The used car dealership on the coast road was dark by the time they got there, the Christmas lights strung around the lot switched off. Leonie caught the owner locking up the office.
She’d left Madelaine and the baby a hundred yards up the road, in a field. She’d borrowed the princess’s spare black jumper, rolled her jeans halfway to the knee, slicked her hair flat to her skull with gel from Madelaine’s toilet bag, and outlined her eyes with the princess’s black kohl. It was an approximation of the look she used to adopt when doing walkthroughs in the Armagh estates: tough slut, ugly-on-purpose. Exaggerating her London accent rather than trying to hide it, she talked the used car dealer into taking the Vauxhall in exchange for a ’73 Mini and a hundred quid. He thought the Vauxhall was stolen, of course. He also thought he was screwing her over, and he was right about that. The Mini was the crummiest set of wheels on the lot.
But it went, and that was all she cared about. That, and the hundred quid.
She picked up Madelaine and Fiona and drove.
“We’re going the wrong way,” said Madelaine, now in the front seat with the baby.
Leonie pulled into a layby and switched off the engine.
“Is something the matter?” The princess sounded exasperated.
“I’m tired.”
“Oh.”
Leonie dragged herself back from the brink. The darkness receded. “What do you mean, we’re going the wrong way? I’m circling around the city. It might be easier to get across the Devon border under cover of darkness.”
“We need to go back into Plymouth.”
“Why?”
Madelaine’s profile was inscrutable in the dark. “I wish to take a ferry to Ireland.”
Leonie stared at her. “Your Highness … I thought we were going to Kent.”
“Yes,” Maewyn said. “Elspeth also believes we are going to Kent, and that is what she will tell my husband. I don’t know what I should have done if she hadn’t gone of her own accord. We should have had to kill her, I suppose. No great loss.”
Leunie felt a prickle of admiration. Madelaine had known Elspeth was likely to betray her, and had deliberately misled her to cover their tracks.
But her dawning relief died as the last thing Madelaine had said sank in.
“Your Highness, you want to take a ferry …? To Ireland?”
“My father communicated his last wishes to me, and I shall do his will!”
It all came back then, what she’d heard behind the rhododendrons at Acton Castle. She tried to think how to ask Madelaine what she had in mind to do in Ireland, without admitting that she’d eavesdropped on the king. Then she decided to just ask. “Are you looking for this Black Mother party, then?”
“How do you know about her?”
“Oh, a friend told me about her.” She hadn’t actually put two and two together until it came out of her mouth. “He said she’s back, and the king is making a sacrifice to her, because she’d be a useful ally. I dunno, that’s just what he said.”
“He was well-informed, this friend of yours,” Madelaine said suspiciously.
“He was Irish. Was. He’s dead. Your Highness, I don’t know anything about this business, but I’ve got quite a strong impression that the Black Mother’s dangerous, not someone you want to just drop in on. Are you sure …?”
“Oh, I’m sure I can get her on side,” Madelaine said. “You’re quie right: she’s said to have an awful lot of pull. It does seem fickle to get in bed with the IRA, but I suppose we haven’t much choice, now that everyone in the whole kingdom has turned against us. Anyway, Daddy said she’s the only one who can get us out of this hole. So I’m going to persuade her to help me avenge him.”
“Er … how?”
“I’ll offer her a nice house, a color television, and a savings account. That will probably do it.”
“Your Highness …”
Leonie’s courage stalled out. She sat in the driving seat, conscious of Madelaine’s growing impatience. Any moment now the princess would ask her why they weren’t already on their way to the port.
At last she pulled herself together. “Your Highness, I’m sorry, but this is outrageous. We can’t just mince around the realm like this. A ferry to Ireland?”
Silence. The baby squeaked in the dark like a bat.
Leonie took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to disguise you.” She reached into her bag of groceries.
“D-disguise me?”
Leonie took out of the bag the last thing she had bought: a pair of scissors. “The hair,” she said, keeping her voice calm and deferent. “It’s got to go.”
“No! No! I can’t—you aren’t suggesting—” The princess shrank as far away from Leonie as she could get, holding the baby in front of her like a shield. “How dare, how dare you!”
She’s afraid of me now. Funny. She wasn’t scared to hit me when I had a Z4 slung on, but she’s terrified of a pair of scissors.
“It’s your choice, Your Highness. But if you don’t let me cut it, we’re not going anywhere. I can’t take the risk, in all conscience.”
Madelaine kept crying. The scissors drew forth a grief deeper and more inconsolable than the death of her father had. Leonie waited, watching the mirrors, bracing every time a vehicle swept past the layby, but none of them ever slowed down. Maybe switching vehicles had successfully thrown the pursuit off … for now.
“All right,” Madelaine sobbed.
“All right what, Your Highness?”
“All right, you can cut it! Daddy did keep talking about sacrifice. I suppose this is what he meant. Should I get out of the car?”
“I’m glad you’re being sensible, Your Highness. Yes, get out and come around to my side.” Leonie opened her door. Madelaine squatted in the grass, sheltered by the car door from any oncoming traffic. She pulled the pins out of her hairknot and dramatically hurled them into the ditch.
Leonie bit back a swear. Now she’d have to guddle for those. She said, “Bend your head over so the bits don’t go down your neck. Here’s a plastic bag to put it in; hold it for me.”
In the dark, the princess’s nape glowed white, whiter than any commoner’s. After all that fuss, Leonie found that she had to set her teeth and force herself to saw through the first thick hank of hair. Madelaine squeaked as the scissors brushed her neck.
“Chin up, Your Highness. I’m a good hair-stylist. At least, I’ve got nine little brothers and sisters and I used to do trims for all of them. I’ll make you look like a pin-up model, you just wait … Save you time in the bath, too.”
At last it was done. Madelaine sprang back into the car, fluffed her newly shorn curls in the rearview mirror, and moaned. “Oh, Fifi! Oh, look what the horrid woman’s done to Mama! Oh, oh …”
“It’ll grow back.” Leonie knelt on the verge, fossicking in the icy muck of the ditch where Madelaine had thrown her hairpins.
“You—I’m sorry, I don’t think I actually caught your name?”
Crikey. The princess was right. Neither she nor Elspeth had ever bothered to ask Leonie’s name. That was something, maybe: a dodgy link in the chain that would lead Oswald Day to Leonie’s family.
She found one of the hairpins and fished it out. The 24-carat gold lion’s head on the end was clogged with mud. “Leonie Grant, Intelligence Company.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“So am I,” Madelaine said. “That’s funny.”
Was the princess now trying to be friendly? Still fossicking for the other hairpin, Leunie had no time for it. On the point of giving up, she stuck her finger on the hairpin’s sharp
point. She chucked it into the plastic bag with Madelaine’s hair and got back into the car, wiping her hands and arms on the upholstery, which couldn’t get much mingier. Her fingers had gone numb. She fumbled the cap off the lemonade, poured it down her throat.
Madelaine and Fiona were in the back seat again, having gravitated as if by some law of nature to the proper place for royalty. Leonie didn’t care. She started the engine. They’d head straight to the port and buy tickets for the overnight car ferry to Cork. The quicker they got on that boat, the better their chances of getting off again before Oswald Day thought to look for them there. It would mean sleeping in the car on board. Hard routine.
Madelaine leaned forward between the seats. “I said, that’s funny,” she said with a tinge of glee.
“Funny? What’s funny?”
“You’re the same age I am, but I thought you were much older. I suppose you’ve had a hard life.”
Leonie gritted her teeth. “Lie down now, Your Highness, and see if you and the baby can get some sleep.”
31
Ran
That Night. Dublin Castle
Ran didn’t believe in the Worldcracker anymore, but he couldn’t just throw it away. In the end he’d left it in the mews. Keep it for me, he’d told Honor. Up there would do. The top of the perch frame was secured to the rafters. Honor had dropped the sword on top of a beam, dislodging a shower of dust and mouse poo onto Ran’s upturned face. It would be safe there. No one climbed the perch frame except once a year during spring cleaning.
But in the middle of the night he woke with a sense of danger so imperative that he didn’t question it.
He rolled out of bed and pulled his warm sheepskin smock on over his pyjamas. The smock had been Piers’s; it came down to his knees. “Nurse!”
Grumble, grumble, scrape, scrape. The door opened a crack. Ran squeezed out into the hall. Vast in her night uniform of white flannels, hair tousled, his nurse gazed down at him. “Nightmare, my lord?”