The Children of the King

by Sonya Hartnett

  “We don’t trust strangers,” said the child.

  “Arh!” Cecily kicked out; the weedy crown, riding forgotten on her head, flopped into the grass. “I’m not talking about strangers! I’m saying, other people are being brave! You should stop making excuses and just admit that you are scared! Scaredy-cats, is what you are — you’re nothing but two little chickens!”

  From their corner the brothers stared at her in astonishment. The crown caught Cecily’s eye, and she stomped on it. It snagged on her wellington, clung to her foot; another good stomp crushed it utterly. May said something, and Cecily swung to her. “What? What?”

  “They’re only children,” said the girl.

  Stoked by frustration, Cecily puffed like a train. Byron was on his feet; she gripped his ear to calm herself. “I know that,” she grumbled. “But it’s still true.”

  The older boy spoke. He was holding his brother’s hand. “It is true,” he admitted, and his voice was like the skeleton of a leaf, his smile a cradle for all the sorrow history has known. “I am afraid. I was brought up to be bold, to know my mind, to believe I wouldn’t fail: but all I am is what you say. I’m nothing but a frightened boy.”

  Now that this truth had been admitted, Cecily should have felt better. She had scored a victory — both boys actually seemed slighter, smaller, faded — yet victory was hollow. These two were merely fancy-dressed waifs, two homeless white mice: berating them was as nasty as striking a pup. “It’s all right to be frightened,” she sighed. “I’m frightened too, sometimes.”

  The children didn’t speak for some moments, as children don’t when their hearts are beating hard and they must soothe their own feelings if they are to stay friends. Finally May said, “Some days we’ve come to Snow Castle, but you haven’t been here. Where do you go, when you’re not here?”

  “We go where we can’t be seen,” answered the child.

  Cecily would endure no more cryptic guff. “And when you’re there, what do you do?”

  “We talk. We pray.”

  “Ah,” said Cecily.

  “You don’t care for talking?”

  “You love talking,” said May.

  “It depends what I’m talking about,” said Cecily.

  “Do you pray?”

  “Mmm, when I want something.”

  May announced, “I believe in Heaven.”

  The boy’s glance flew to her. “The place of the fathers,” he said.

  Cecily moved on. “What else do you do?”

  “We tell each other stories. We walk as far as is safe. We watch the birds, the rooks, the swallows. Birds lead interesting lives.”

  Cecily refrained from rolling her eyes. “And what about when you’re hungry? How do you get food?”

  “I used to eat and eat,” blurted the younger enthusiastically.

  “Our needs are fewer now,” his brother said.

  Cecily grimaced. “Don’t you ever do what other boys do? Don’t you run and jump? Don’t you — wrestle? Don’t you — throw things around?”

  The small boy looked at his sibling, and for the first time his face was lit as a child’s should be, with all the brightness of excitement. “Can I tell them? Let me tell them.”

  “If you wish,” his brother said.

  “We have great battles!” The little one shouted it. “We each have ships, big warships with sails, and sometimes we are enemies and sometimes we are friends, and we have battles and the battles can rage for days! And sometimes I jump on his ship and stab him, and sometimes he knocks my ship to pieces, and it’s my favourite game! I have a hat!”

  He reached to his head to brandish this hat, dropped his hand on discovering it wasn’t there. His grin, however, did not falter: “Warships is my favourite game.”

  “We also play army,” prompted his brother.

  “Yes, with swords and horses! If I capture his flag, I win! Army is good, but warships is better. When I grow up, I shall be a sailor.”

  “And do you wrestle? Do you fight and yell, like other boys do?”

  “All the time!” shrieked the child joyously. “I scratch and kick! Would you like to play?”

  “No thanks,” said Cecily. “I don’t play like that.”

  “You were playing something, though.” The older boy eyed them shrewdly. “We saw you. We heard you.”

  “Sanctuary,” said May. “It’s a game we made up. Cecily was a queen hiding in sanctuary, and I was a duke trying to make her come out.”

  The brothers shifted in the shadows; in their dark velvet they melded into the gloom so well that, for an instant, they vanished completely. “That sounds,” said the boy, “like a serious game. Not one I should very much care to play.”

  “It was only a game,” said May. “Not real.”

  The child pointed a sullen finger. “She doesn’t look like a queen.”

  “I’m dressed for rambling!” Cecily squeaked. “The wind’s been blowing my hair!”

  “He’s teasing you,” said May.

  “I’m not. She doesn’t.”

  “Hurgh!” Cecily could suddenly no longer be bothered. “I don’t look like a queen because I’m not a queen, just like you don’t look like a sailor because you’re only a fat little pig.” And, as her internal clock was striking gongs, she added, “Come on, May, let’s go home. It’s lunchtime.”

  Byron followed his mistress willingly; May paused. She might have asked any other pair of strays if they needed money or the materials to write a letter or if she should bring them some more food: but she didn’t ask such things of these two. There were countless questions she would have liked to ask, a symphony of strange queries which, given answers, might have made her sleep more soundly . . . but Cecily was yelling, “Come on, May! Timeliness is the rule, remember?” and she let her questions go like leaf-boats on a river, never to be seen again. “We’ll come back another day,” she promised, and ran away through the grass. When she looked back, the brothers had vanished. A raven stood at the highest peak of the ruins, leaning into the wind.

  For some time Cecily said nothing. The girls and the dog forded the river and climbed the bank. A slug stuck to May’s palm, and they giggled and cringed about this. In the woods, where the artwork of branches gave them privacy, Cecily ventured to say, “They’re very clean, those boys. For boys living outdoors, they’re very clean.”

  “Hmm,” said May.

  “I don’t think boys who live outside could manage to stay that clean. I think they could only be that clean if they were staying somewhere out of the weather. Maybe a barn. Maybe an empty house.”

  “I don’t know,” said May.

  “They have to be. They can’t live in the ruins. Nobody could do that.”

  “Hmm,” repeated May.

  Cecily’s hand floated from tree to tree. “May?”

  “What?”

  “Do you think we should tell someone about those boys?”

  “. . . Tell who?”

  “Well. We could tell my mother.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But maybe it would help them? Mama could talk to their hosts, tell them that they’re supposed to treat children kindly . . .”

  May kept her eyes on Byron, who ambled ahead. The dog was pleased to leave the ruins. He did not sniff about, but made a beeline for Heron Hall, glancing back frequently to check his charges weren’t dallying. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  Cecily stuck out her lip, said nothing.

  “Remember when the grocer told us some evacuees were running away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother didn’t feel sorry for them.”

  “I remember.” Cecily sighed.

  But May wasn’t finished. “She’ll be cross about those boys trespassing on Mr Lockwood’s land. She might call the police.”

  “The police!”

  “She might start to wish she’d never had anything to do with children like me.”

  “Like you?”

/>   “Evacuees.”

  Cecily didn’t like the sound of this. It sounded like truth. She clumped past the trees, looking ahead to where the woods ceased and the field began. Soon they would step into that golden-green light. “We won’t tell Mama. But we could tell Jeremy and Uncle Peregrine?”

  “What if we told them, and they went to the ruins, and the boys weren’t there?”

  “. . . Jeremy would laugh at me.”

  “Better to be safe than sorry,” said May.

  Sunshine reached out for them, the shade of the forest fell away. Cecily imagined losing May forever and said, “I think you’re right.”

  The papers, next day, brought outrageous news. An enemy aeroplane, swooping through the dark like a sheenless creature of the night, had dropped its fearsome cargo upon Buckingham Palace. Fortunately the bomb had landed in the quadrangle and not on a royal head, so the King and the Queen, although shaken, were still whole: but the intention was clear. All around the country, people gathered to be appalled. “It’s a disgrace,” said Mrs Winter. “What did the King and Queen do to deserve that?”

  “No more than anyone else,” said Peregrine.

  “Will you look at the damage. A dirty great mess. What if the King had been standing right there? He’d be mince meat.” The housekeeper made a chunky fist. “I tell you, if they harm that poor mutt of a man, I’ll strap on a parachute and drop in for a word with Mr Hitler myself.”

  “A parachute made by May’s mum!” said Cecily. She whipped about to May. “You said bombs wouldn’t fall on important people’s heads, but look — one fell on the King and the Queen!”

  “On their quadrangle,” replied May. “Not on their heads.”

  “Our house doesn’t have a quadrangle. Poor Daddy!”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Heloise opined from the sofa. “It’s insane for the King and Queen to risk their lives this way. They should leave the city and go somewhere safe. What do they think they’re proving by staying in London?”

  Jeremy turned a white face to her. In the six days since their quarrel, relations between mother and son had not improved. Their feud had lasted so long that Cecily had almost forgotten they’d ever lived any way but uneasily. He said, “They’re proving they are no better than everyone else.”

  Lest there was someone less intelligent than herself in the room, Cecily explained, “If ordinary people — normal people — poor people — are getting bombed, the King and the Queen want to be where they can get bombed too. So it’s fair.”

  Heloise said, “But they are better than everyone else, aren’t they? They’re the King and Queen. And as such, they’re targets. Worse, they’re making targets of everyone around them. That’s not fair at all.”

  Mrs Winter, who wasn’t afraid of Mrs Lockwood, said, “Oh, I think it’s a great thing that they’ve stayed in London. When a person sees the King and Queen suffering just the same as they’re suffering, sharing the selfsame peril every day and night, it’s going to make a difference. It’s going to give a person strength.”

  “It’s going to give a person a hernia,” said Heloise. “This country has enough to worry about. They would be doing everyone a favour if they took themselves off to the Highlands somewhere, out of harm’s way.”

  “You’re not brave, are you, Mother.” Jeremy spoke as if from a height. “All you care about is being safe.”

  “Is there something wrong with wishing to be safe?”

  “There is, when it’s other people who are dying so you can be kept that way.”

  Heloise’s mouth became the razor-line that Cecily dreaded. “Do you suggest I — oh, I don’t know, commandeer a tank and storm the Reichstag?”

  “No. But you could admit it’s brave of the King and Queen to stay with the people who don’t have the luxury of escaping to the countryside.”

  Heloise’s fingers skimmed the fine upholstery of the sofa: May, watching, thought of spiders and webs and elegant spider-legs. “I’m worried about your education, Jeremy.” Heloise’s voice was the spider’s silk, gossamer but deadly. “Time is slipping by. We must get you back into a classroom before your mind turns to porridge. Already you’re forgetting your manners. A boarding school would be best, I think. I shall write to your father this afternoon. I’m sure he’ll agree, once I tell him my concerns, that you should be sent off immediately to somewhere very safe, very far away.”

  Jeremy did not protest or ask forgiveness: his majestic pride, learned at his mother’s knee, would not let him, and perhaps he was not sorry. But when the gathering broke up and the family went its separate ways, Cecily, running upstairs to fetch her coloured pencils, found her brother on the first-floor landing, his hands across his face. “Jem?” she said, surprised to see him there, thin and still as a second hand fallen from a clock. “Go away,” he said from behind his fingers, and his sister caught her breath: “Oh Jem, are you crying?”

  In common with most siblings, Jeremy and Cecily Lockwood had a thousand grievances against one another. But, again in common, for one to realise the other was hurt roused a lion-like concern and sympathy. “Go away!” Jeremy said again, but Cecily would never leave him there, waylaid so wretchedly in this lonely place, the first-floor landing. “What’s the matter?” she had to know.

  Despair had overtaken him so thoroughly that he couldn’t make the traditional denial of anything being wrong. He wiped his face but the tears kept dropping as they will when a heart has received a deep wound. He stormed in a circle, trying but unable to make himself disappear, then stood still, bent with defeat. “Mother doesn’t have to threaten me,” he croaked. “She doesn’t have to — send me away. I’m just trying to — understand things.”

  “Oh!” Cecily said, and didn’t know what more to say to a boy who was being punished so vengefully for the crime of growing up. “She probably didn’t mean it, Jem — you know what Mama’s like. She gets cross and says things she doesn’t mean. She says things like that to me all the time! I’m having your hair cut short, Cecily. No more cake for you ever, Cecily. She’ll forget all about it tomorrow, you’ll see. And if she still wants to send someone away then, well — she can send me. I won’t mind.”

  In fact to be sent off to boarding school was the most ghastly fate Cecily could imagine, but her brother didn’t notice the sacrifice. He wiped and wiped at the tears that would not stop flowing, turned his face to the wall because his legs were too leaden to carry him somewhere he could be alone. The black pool of suffering inside him soaked his voice and words.

  “It’s not that. I don’t care about that. She can say what she likes about sending me away — she can do it, for all I care. I might as well be somewhere else. I’m useless here. All I can do here is — watch, and — I’m so worried —”

  “Don’t be worried.” Cecily brushed her brother’s sleeve. “You don’t need to worry —”

  “I do! We all do! They’re bombing Buckingham Palace, Cecily! In a few weeks they’ll be walking London’s streets!”

  “No . . .”

  “Yes! Read the papers! We’re losing this war! We don’t have enough soldiers, we don’t have good aeroplanes, they’re not afraid of us! We need to fight, but we aren’t fighting! We’re not going to win! And when we lose, it will be bad. This isn’t a game between kids. Everything will change. Our whole lives will change. Everything good will disappear and never come back. They hate us. And they’re going to win.”

  Agony radiated off him — the agony of being insignificant, the agony of a child’s fears. He was terrified, and his mother had turned against him, and the warm future he had been taught to expect was melting away like snow. Desperate to comfort him, Cecily said, “We won’t lose, Jem. Remember what Uncle Peregrine said: They can only beat us when we let them. And we’re not going to let them. Daddy is not going to let them —”

  “Daddy!” Her brother, slumped against a wall, gave a sickly laugh. “You have so much faith in Daddy.”

  “He always does what he says he w
ill, that’s why.”

  “He can’t do everything. He’s only a man.”

  “But that’s what they are too, isn’t it? Those soldiers in the newspapers. They’re just men. Not better or stronger or cleverer men. Not braver than Daddy. Not braver than you.”

  “Brave!” Jeremy hit the wall with a fist, startling his sister. “Who knows if I’m brave? How brave have I ever been allowed to be?”

  “I know you’re brave!” she hastened. “I know you’re very brave! You read all those books and study those hard subjects — that’s brave. You learned the piano — that was brave. You play chess with Daddy, and that’s brave. And you know what else you do that’s brave?”

  Her brother stared grimly at nothing. “I don’t mean that. You don’t understand. Go away and play, Cecily.”

  She persisted. “You know what’s the bravest thing that you do?”

  “What?”

  “You answer back to Mama.”

  He smiled reluctantly. “Mama,” he said. “Mama thinks I’m ridiculous. That’s what she called me, in front of Uncle Peregrine: infantile. That means ridiculous.”

  Cecily lifted her shoulders, let them drop. Momentarily she wished her mother were here, to see the sad thing that she’d done. “You’re not ridiculous, Jem,” she said. “Mama only said that because she’s worried about the war.”

  “Mother’s worried about the war, so she has to be cruel to me?”

  “Sometimes she’s like that.”

  The siblings thought on it, a mother whose angry fear landed, wasplike, on the most convenient surface. “She doesn’t think you’re ridiculous.” Cecily came cautiously nearer. “But you know what? She’s scared of you.”

  “Scared of me? Why?”

  “Because . . .” Cecily didn’t quite know how to put it. “Because you’re not going to be the person she wants you to be.”

  If her words had been diamonds, her brother could not have considered them more closely. He said, “I hope I am going to be a good person. I would like to be a good person. Not famous, or remarkable, but . . . true. Loyal. Brave.”