The Children of the King

by Sonya Hartnett

  The rain had made the river faster but hardly deeper, and the girls gripped each other’s wrists and helped one another cross. They flinched to feel the water against their wellies, chortled when their boots slithered on the slick embankment and felled them to their hands and knees. But as they approached the ruins they grew subdued, and stepping through the cold still air Cecily had the thought that no one had ever laughed in this place — that throughout the long unspooling of the centuries the stones and their surrounding trees had never heard such a thing. Snow Castle had been built in silence to hold silence, and silently it had dropped in pieces to the ground. “I wish we’d brought Byron,” she whispered, and her words came out in fog that floated, as if captured and pondered, and then, as if dismissed, disappeared.

  May looked around at the remains of the castle. The jagged walls dripped water and oozed slime. Moss grew between the stones, and grey mould smudged them. Spiderwebs, lit by raindrops, sagged in every angle. Grass grew up the walls, long threads reaching for the sunlight; over the toppled stone it grovelled messily, without aim. As she walked into the ghostly core of the ruins, water smattered her to the elbows. “Hello?” she called.

  Hello, the castle replied.

  A flock of birds took flight somewhere; Cecily did not see and hardly heard them, but she felt it, their urgent flying away. The castle towered above the children, so little of itself remaining, yet so completely present — as if it had never needed ceilings and roofs and floors, this tattered wreckage being sufficient and even what it preferred. Cecily found herself scanning the highest reaches, where the raw edges of stone met the meek sky, not knowing what she expected to see up there but knowing she wouldn’t be surprised to see it, either — a watching eye, a reaching arm, a body encased in stone for centuries yet still faintly alive. With a shiver she bumped her gaze to earth, to the shelf where May had left the breakfast plate. The plate was gone, presumably returned to the kitchen by Jeremy; but the ground beneath the shelf showed a scattering of crumbs. Not the crumbs left by children or even by fairytale children, but crumbs thrown about by the investigations of birds.

  “Hello?” May called, louder this time.

  The castle growled back, Hello.

  “Is anybody here?”

  The castle wondered, Here? Anybody?

  “They’re not here.” Cecily’s heart was making its presence felt, knocking as if it wanted to tell her something.

  “Hello, are you here? You two boys?”

  Two boys here, two boys?

  They waited while the echo had its amusement, gambolling from wall to wall like a nasty clown. May placed a hand on a shoulder of stone, then snatched it back as though the marble burned. “They must have gone.”

  “The rain drove them off,” Cecily agreed — quietly, so the castle wouldn’t hear. And both girls thought of rain not as being wet and cold and to be avoided whenever possible, but rather as being talismanic, as if rain were related to garlic, and this was a place of vampires. May looked at the remains, the stumps of beams, the deep fireplaces, the arching gaps through which someone must have once surveyed the land. The ground around the walls had been dented into bowls by centuries of dripping water. In corners of stone hung clouds of fog like watchful forest animals, wary but also willing to attack. “I’m glad,” Cecily whispered. “I’m glad they’ve gone.” And it wasn’t the horridness of the brothers that made her glad, but because she didn’t wish to know anyone who could find these lonesome ruins a satisfactory place to be.

  May frowned. She was not quite ready to walk away. “Hello!” she hollered. “Is somebody here?”

  You will never leave this place, replied Snow Castle.

  At least that was what it seemed to say; Cecily whimpered, “May, let’s go. I’m cold. I don’t feel well. There’s no one here.”

  “All right,” conceded May. But as they walked away she kept glancing back, unconvinced.

  Returning to Heron Hall, the girls discovered they had missed a scene: Heloise was in her bedroom nursing upset feelings, Jeremy was in his own room fuming, and the household was stepping on tiptoe, leery of disturbing either of them. The housekeeper, Mrs Winter, was having tea in the kitchen with Cook; Cecily and May sidled into fuggy gaps around the stove, accepted tea and sultana biscuits, and prised from these two stone-faced women a little blood-warming gossip. While the girls had been playing in the outbuildings, oblivious to the whole world, Peregrine had come down with his overnight case, dealing commands to his staff as he went, clearly intending to depart the Hall and to do so in some hurry — Hobbs had the car running, the front door was already open. It was at the door that Peregrine had met Jeremy, the boy “spiky as the Labrador who ate the hedgehog,” according to Mrs Winter. “Not a clue what was happening, but still he wanted a piece of it. Mr Lockwood could have been off to keep an appointment with a Turkish firing-squad for all the lad knew, but still he wants to follow him about like a mutt.”

  Cecily paused in the work of shovelling biscuit into her mouth to explain, “He wants to be where the action is.”

  “Action! Your mother gave him action. Jeremy ! she says. I’ve just about had it with you!”

  “Ooh.” It was rare for Heloise to lose her temper with her favourite: Cecily was thrilled. “Mama was there too?”

  “She came into the hall at the same time as Mr Lockwood came downstairs, just in time to hear your brother plead Uncle, take me with you. As if he’s a setter and Mr Lockwood’s going duck-shooting. Mr Lockwood looks at him and says Jem, you know I can’t. And Mrs Lockwood says Jeremy, how many times must you be told? Until I am blue in the face? London is not safe! You are staying here, and you are not leaving! The lad starts whining, but your mother talks over him. I won’t have you arguing and resisting every moment of every day! Don’t you think I have enough worries? I’m amazed you can be so selfish!”

  Cecily was enjoying everything about this: the warmth of the stove, the sweetness of the tea, the meatiness of the gossip and, especially, the housekeeper’s impersonation of her mother. She reached for another biscuit, the very largest; tractored it in.

  “To which the lad starts dancing up and down in a devil of a fuss. Mother ! he screams — really screams, like a wounded rabbit. I’ll be safe with Uncle Peregrine, I’ll be safe with Father! Why can’t I go? And Mrs Lockwood shrieks Because you’re a child! You’re a hindrance, not a help! Do you think this is a game, Jeremy? That your father and uncle can leave aside the small matter of the war to attend the needs of a child?”

  Several crumbs popped out of Cecily: “Ho ho! Jem doesn’t like it when people call him a child.”

  “Apparently!” said Mrs Winter. “He didn’t care for it at all. I’m not a child! he bellows. If I had to, I could kill a man!”

  Cecily hooted; Cook shook her head. “Can you imagine!” The housekeeper couldn’t help grinning. “He’s springing about like a flea-bit yorkie, howling about killing people. You can guess how it went down with Mrs Lockwood — I thought she was going to be the lad’s first victim. Just roll over dead with her arms and legs in the air.”

  Cecily rocked in her chair at the picture, hands clamped to her face; but Cook said dourly, “You can laugh, little lady, but it’s a terrible thing. A sweet boy talking about killing people. Quite ready to step up and kill people. That’s what this war’s done.”

  “Jem couldn’t kill a butterfly!”

  “But that’s the thing, see? A boy who can’t kill a butterfly wants to kill a man. Where’s the good in that? Where’s the victory in that?”

  Cecily didn’t even try to understand what the woman was talking about, but reached instead for a biscuit. Mrs Winter slid the plate across the stove. “No more, pet, you’ll spoil your dinner.”

  “What was Mr Lockwood doing?” asked May.

  “Well, staring at mother and son in amazement! Probably wondering why he let such wild beasts take up residence in his house. You think I’m weak and stupid ! says the lad, and his mother, who’s
like a hissing cat, says What I think you are is infantile, and I’ve had enough of it! I’m fed up with the moroseness, the martyrdom. If you don’t improve your behaviour, I shall send you abroad.”

  “Oh!” Abroad was a bit serious, this conflict was getting out of hand. “What did Jem say?”

  “It pulled him up on his rope, that’s certain. Threatening him with banishment, that’s what his mother was doing, simply because she knew it would break his heart. That’s not a boy you want to cast out as punishment — he’s the sort who might never come back. Maybe in body, but never in spirit. Rash, she was being, and sadistic.”

  “For his own good though,” said Cecily. “Mother knows what’s best.”

  Perhaps fearing she may have gone too far, the housekeeper said, “Oh, certainly. Mrs Lockwood was right to say it. She’s a wise woman, trying to protect her son. But the look on his face — it was tragedy. He only wants to be useful.”

  “Useful?” Cook sneered. “Seems to me the nitwit wants to get himself shot to bits.”

  “No, no,” insisted the housekeeper, “he only wants to help. Now girls, look at you — muddy from noggin to tush! It’s bathtime for you.”

  “But what happened?” May asked quickly. “What did Mr Lockwood say?”

  “Well, bless, Mr Lockwood was the hero of the moment. Who knows what would have happened if Mr Lockwood hadn’t been there? He went for the door, but he looked back just a second — looked at the lad, and said something quite touching. I wish I had half your courage, he said. And then he was gone, and if he never sees this house again I’m sorry his last memories will be such disagreeable ones”— Mrs Winter caught her tongue before it ran off once more, —“but of course he’ll be home in a day or two, by which time all will be forgotten. Now you two, before that dog mistakes you for something rank to roll in: the bath!”

  Peregrine was gone for four days, longer than anyone had expected but not, contrary to Mrs Winter’s prediction, long enough for the unpleasantness between mother and son to be forgotten. These were very still, muffled days at Heron Hall. Cecily and May spent the time wandering the house and its grounds, Byron padding amiably behind them. The house offered endless entertainments for two girls, including the provision of a flat-bottomed skiff which they dragged from the boathouse and set sail upon the lake. The herons watched their clumsy attempts to paddle from one shore to another, taking to the air when Byron, deeming the whole adventure too fraught, waded in to rescue his charges.

  Mrs Lockwood would have protested as forcibly as the dog to this boating expedition, had she been able to see it; but Heloise kept to herself during these days, holed up in her bedroom from which emerged a stream of letters addressed to her many friends. She came downstairs as usual for lunch and dinner, and was coolly polite and coolly smiling, very much her usual self: but she and Jeremy were wary of one another now, having glimpsed something of which the other was capable. Wounded and angry but also missing each other, mother and son were remindful of cats who must share a fence, a street, an entire world, and are surly about it — yet who long, too, to curl up in the warmth and security of one another, as cats and kittens yearn to do.

  The girls saw Jeremy at meals and at other unscheduled moments in the day. Unaware that they knew of his humiliation in the hallway, the boy behaved toward them as he always had: standoffishly, a little patronisingly, but also with unexpected kindness. Concerned they were becoming lazy, he drew up a routine of exercises and put the children through daily paces. Troubled by the increasingly thin state of their education, he lectured them in spelling and arithmetic, and devised exams for them to sit. In the morning, when his newspaper reading was done, he accompanied them on rambles, showing them the kinds of places where artefacts and fossils could be found — in weather-exposed tree roots, in suspiciously shaped hollows, in crumbling hillsides. They found a stillborn lamb, which made Cecily cry. They viewed Snow Castle but only from a distance, as if each had secret reason for not wanting to go near. If the girls were indeed in the company of a boy who could kill a man if he had to, he gave no sign of his cold-hearted potential. In fact, when they discovered a raven snared in wire Jeremy put his coat over its head and worked its trembling body free; the gardener said later they should have wrung its black neck but Jeremy replied, “That would have been cruel.”

  When Peregrine returned on the fourth evening, the household already knew the dreadful news he would bring with him. For two days the radio and newspapers had been concerned with nothing else. What they had to report was terrifying, and a hush of grief had fallen over the country. London was under attack.

  So long expected, so well prepared-for, so clearly visualised, the air raids were nonetheless completely other than what had been expected. The first assault, when it finally came, had taken place in broad daylight, late in the afternoon. The enemy had put into the air every warplane at its disposal: hundreds of them — almost a thousand — had blackened the sky over the city. Above streets and houses, doors had opened in the bellies of the bombers and the bombs had slipped free — tumbling, for an instant, fins first, then righting themselves so their blunt noses pointed to the ground, to the docks, the gardens, the playgrounds, the people. They fell with the weight of the inevitable, and boomed into their targets. London caught fire, and thousands rushed for shelter, and many did not find it.

  Throughout the first afternoon and night the planes flew, the bombs plummeted, the city burned, and the people died. And as no one believed a single attack would satisfy their enemy, no one was surprised when, the following night, the planes had returned; and the city had burned, and people had died.

  Peregrine arrived home tired and drawn, limping heavily on his bad leg. A meal was brought for him in his study, and his guests sat around him, on the edges of their chairs, watching while he ate, making frivolous comments, aware of his weariness but needing to hear the awful words that must soon be said. The household staff came to the door and gathered there, likewise desperate to hear the testimony of this eyewitness, this link to the outside world.

  Finally Jeremy could hedge round the subject no more: he asked, “Is it as bad as the newspapers are saying, Uncle?”

  “It’s as bad as you imagine.” Peregrine wiped his hands and set aside the plate. “It will get worse, of course. Now it’s begun — now they’ve decided they’ll take the city in pieces, if that’s the only way they can get their hands on it — they won’t stop. While we lack planes built for night fighting, they won’t stop. We expect they’ll return tonight, and tomorrow night, and the next night, and every night. They will keep bombing us either as long as they need to, or as long as they’re able.”

  “They will stop.” Jeremy was stony. “We’ll fight them out of the air. Somehow we’ll do it. We’ll make them sorry.”

  Cecily spoke from where she had hidden behind Byron. “What was it like, Uncle Peregrine?”

  “Frightening,” the man said simply. “It stops your heart to watch a squadron cut across the sky, so tidy, so efficient, so dutiful, a sight which would make you proud if you didn’t know that inside those planes are men whose task it is to pound you into bits. It stops your breath to know that no place is more secure than another — a cathedral no safer than a tenement — and that it’s only dumb luck if you’re standing where the bomb doesn’t land, or standing where it does. Your existence is stripped down to nothing but chance. Everything you’ve ever hoped, believed, achieved — all of it is less meaningful than dust, it can’t help you, it won’t spare you, if your feet have you standing in precisely the wrong place.”

  His audience watched in silence as the speaker reached for his glass and took a drink.

  “The noise freezes your blood,” he continued. “The fighter planes make a thrumming noise, like very furious bees; the bombers make a heavier roar which sounds louder in your head than in actuality, a noise that cavemen might have recognised. That first afternoon, the shadows of the planes flicked along the ground fast, like racing dem
ons, crossing roads and leaping walls. When each shadow passed, you could breathe for a moment, then wait for the next one to come. Finally the sun went out and the shadows disappeared, and it was a mercy, really. To be rid of those spectral messengers.”

  Heloise’s sights drifted without mooring. “God help us,” she whispered.

  Peregrine took a cigarette out of its case and held it to the flame Jeremy hastened to light. “Bombs make, so I’m told, a soft howl as they fall, but I never heard that. I only heard what comes after the howl: the boom as a building explodes. And shouting and screaming in the streets. The honking of horns, the thud of running feet. And the wail of sirens — air-raid sirens, ambulance sirens, fire-engine sirens, police sirens — yowling on and on without cease, telling everyone what we already knew.”

  “And the damage? What did you see?”

  Peregrine paused, smoke curling from his fingers. “It’s funny, you know — I’ve never seen a bomb site, yet what I saw tallied exactly with what I pictured in my head — exactly, no doubt, as you picture in yours. What’s a building when it’s destroyed? They are made of brick and timber, as we are muscle and bone. Plain things, but alive and working together, as they’re designed to, they have elegance, they have — soul. And maybe there’s nothing so lifeless, so finished, as something that has had its soul torn away. The rubble is ugly. It’s made of chunks of brick, a trillion chips of glass, smashed and splintered timber. All this sprawls over the roads, into the gutters, heaps against its neighbours. Caught in the mess is furniture, carpet, birdcages, pots and pans, chests of drawers filled with clothes. Stinking dust floats everywhere, and the dirt ripped up by the impact is thrown over everything. And where the building once stood there’s an odd empty space, and light touches what it never touched before, and sparrows hop along towel rails, and dogs walk on roofs.”

  “Oh,” breathed Cecily.