The sound of footsteps crunching the graveled alley floor echoed from the walls. They turned to see who approached.
“Beggin’ y’pardon,” Charles said, hat in hand, “but we ought’a be gettin’ back.” He looked askance at the way Alamayou and Philip stood so close together.
When the coachman’s eyes locked with his, Alamayou felt it. The desire to burn. To jump. To run, knowing full well there may not be any others running with him. But his arm stayed around Philip. As strong as his fear was at being seen, the fear in Philip was stronger. Alamayou felt it twitching through Philip’s shoulders and into his own body like a current of lightning.
He needs me here, Alamayou thought. Right here. It’s what we do. We try.
They followed Charles back to his trap. Under a sky of icy, distant lights, they rode back to Windsor.
§
A note sat on the desk in their apartment. It was sealed with a stamped blot of melted red wax. The queen’s seal.
Philip broke it open. “She wants to see you, Alamayou. In the portrait room.”
“Not you?”
“No.”
“Seely—”
“It says you. Just you. Be careful. Bring Seely so you understand what she says. She may ask you more questions.”
He smiled thinly as he dressed. “What more to say?” he shrugged.
§
A tray of cakes sat on a side table near the burning hearth in the portrait room alongside two cups, a steeping pot, and some silver chalices of sugar lumps and fatty milk. Next to the queen was a pewter flask that was daintily small. When she opened it a heady smell emerged.
“Tej,” Alamayou said.
“An Abyssinian beverage?” the queen asked. “This, we wager, is far superior. Claret with a hint of single malt whiskey. We feel the need for the sort of calm only good spirits provide. Especially in these strange, disquieting days.”
Seely translated, but Alamayou remained quiet. He was content to let the queen dictate the terms of their discussion. He felt exhausted from anxiety over what she’d do with him, what words she would say, and whether they would mean the end of him.
The fact that she’d asked him to come to the portrait room, of all places in Windsor, opened a sliver of hope in him. His painting still hung on the wall. It had been here ever since the night they’d told each other the simplest, most terrible truth at the heart of their different, yet similar, lives. Gone.
How, he wondered as he watched her take a delicate sip from her flask, could she summon him here only to send him away? There had been words spoken between them in the portrait room that made the distance between them smaller. That had to count for something.
“We have so few opportunities to be alone,” the queen said. “To simply be still and think of old faces and places we once saw. Pleasant things, trivial, one supposes. But what comes to us? Comfort and tranquil memories? No, only trouble and matters of great weight. We wish sometimes, to no good end.”
She offered the flask to Alamayou. He shook his head. She set it down.
Seeing her reminded Alamayou of the first night, when the monarch of the western world slipped into her private portrait room an old, tired woman. For others, she was a leader, and she wore that title as effortlessly as she did her crown. But something about the room and the memories it held made the weight upon her shoulders almost visible.
“Seely,” she said, “we remind you that what you hear is never to leave this room. Do you understand?”
Seely nodded.
“Very well. We wanted to tell you ourselves, you did very well. I understand now, the life you had. If crimes of war were committed, we do not believe you had a hand in them. Nor did you have any power or choice in what was done by or on behalf of your father. To us, it appears that you know things no one should know.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty.” Alamayou bowed gratefully.
“We lack the power to change the world, you know. Perhaps that is why your father chose his course. We know what is possible, what is not, and what is dangerous. Yet we cannot change the world that is out there, and if that world learned what you have already learned in your young life, well, the world would be a tragic, turbulent place indeed.”
He couldn’t escape the sense that something was missing from her words. She was holding something back. He could see it in the turn of her head away from him, away from the paintings on the wall. It was as if she didn’t want any eyes on her, even flat, watercolor eyes.
She gestured to the fire. It waned.
Alamayou placed a log on and surrounded it with scraps of wrapped coal. He stoked it with the iron until its heat pushed back at him.
“You must hate them for what they did to you,” she said quietly. “Your mother and father.”
“No.”
“Perhaps you should. They left you, after all. For a child, there is no worse betrayal.”
“I don’t hate them,” Alamayou said.
“They left you.”
“They died.”
“No. They left you. They chose to, but they didn’t have to. Not that way, not so soon. Do you see the difference? What they did, they did for themselves, not you. Your father chose to act rashly, to invite war and destruction. He didn’t think of how best to protect you. And your mother chose not to run away when she saw that a monster ruled her life and the life of her son. She chose to stay with a man who chained her and forced her son to beat her, or die. Perhaps you think we’re cruel to say these things to you, but this is what it means to raise children who have the strength to survive, Alamayou. Our mother brought us into the world and we were as broken as any babe. We couldn’t walk or feed ourselves. We couldn’t survive. And she did not change the world to suit our helplessness. She changed us. Me, to suit me to the world so I wouldn’t be broken or helpless, but strong. She did this by walking away from me. That is different from leaving. There’s all the difference in the world.”
She paused for a sip from her flask.
“I don’t think I ever knew kindness until I met Albert.” She shrugged, a casual, strangely human thing to do, and it caught Alamayou so unawares that he could hardly breathe. She’d turned as she did it, toward the painting of her family, as if to apologize for her words.
“Are you afraid?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
“Of going back? Of dying?”
“Of dying alone.”
“Yes. That’s worse, of that we can be certain. One tries to maintain the connections in their life, if one is lucky enough to have some. And then a cross word, a foolish choice, a terrible twist of fate, and we find ourselves alone.”
“If I have to go back,” Alamayou said, “if I have to be alone, at least I’ll see the white dream again, one last time. At least I’ll have that.”
“We want to show you something. Come.”
He and Seely followed her out of the castle and through the Middle Ward to an amphitheater atop the mound, and then up one hundred stone steps.
“Do we shock you,” she asked breathlessly as they climbed, “that we can keep pace with ones so young? In our own home we are forever young. Don’t forget it.”
At the pinnacle, an immense quarter of cannon nested against the stone floor. More pieces were mounted around the rock curtain.
“This is called the Round Tower,” she said.
Alamayou joined her at the parapet.
“From here we see, on clear days, Middlesex, Essex, Hertfordshire, Surrey, Kent, Sussex. Names of no meaning to you. These are the tribes. We see their houses, their churches. We hear their bells and we know they exist even if we can’t see them when the fog covers everything. We come up here, above the fog and all that lies beneath, and we watch our people face the future. Maybe in Meqdala, your father did that, or believed he did. Look now, the fog comes.”
&
nbsp; Alamayou gazed out over a beautiful vista. Softly rounded hills threaded paths that from the height and distance looked to be more liquid than earth. They stretched as far as Alamayou could see, to the horizon line where the fog came in like a pale carpet.
“Is it like your white dream?”
“It is.”
“Perhaps you’d like to paint it from up here,” she said. “We shall see to it. Be sure to include that small chapel there. It’s nothing important, but it’s peaceful. I love to come here just to look at it in different lights.”
“I’ll paint it for you.”
“Why did you tell me what you did, Alamayou?”
There it is, he thought. The thing she’d been holding back. Her question didn’t ring with revulsion or contempt, and he was grateful for
at least that much. Had she thrown her question at his feet like something dead and rotted, no one would have blamed her.
But there was a quality of anger in her voice. Why did you have to make me know this about you? How can I look at you now?
It was a silent world they surveyed from so high above Windsor. Nothing but the land rolling out to places he’d never been, and flocks of roused birds too far away to hear, and the trees bending in a soft, cold wind that grew stronger.
“You asked,” he said simply.
“Don’t play us for a fool. You understand very well what we want to know.”
Alamayou waved Seely away. She retreated to the opposite end of the Round Tower. There, in the furthest curve away from them, she looked out at a country that he knew must seem strange and forbidding to her.
It gets easier, he wanted to tell her. A bit more each day. How much, that depends on how much time they allow you to have.
He didn’t want Seely saying the words for him. They were his. They belonged to him because he’d earned them over his entire life.
“First thing anyone said to me here, ‘Don’t be you, Alamayou. Be what they want. Be them, other. Be you at night. Only then.’ All my life is that. My abat, anat, finally they see me. What happens? They die. Better than seeing me. They choose death, not me.
“I came to London, to you. Now you all see. What will you do? Live? See more of me? I don’t know. But there’s one, he doesn’t run from me. He stays. Abat, anat, think I’m a monster. He tells me, no, not a monster. A man. Don’t go. Stay and live. Find home. He says he knows me. I give him reason to dream. Me.”
“Find home?” the queen said.
“Somewhere.”
“You put yourself at great risk for Philip with that letter you delivered to my door. You understand that, don’t you? It makes me want to ask, would Philip have done the same for you? Does he feel the same?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation.
“How do you know? How can you be so sure?”
She was studying him. She was wise, old, so tired, but in her eyes the ancient thing he’d seen leaving the dead was there, very much alive. It was life itself, awakened by the words he shared with her. She wasn’t asking because she didn’t know. She did know. She wanted to see that ancient thing alive in someone else. It was the way the old looked at a newborn, or a young couple so wrapped up in each other that they take no notice of the world around them. Wistfully, a little envious, grateful for having been there to see.
She wanted to see life give to another what it had once given her.
“I know,” he said, “because he didn’t let me burn. He didn’t let me jump. He would fight even you to keep me here.”
It grew bitterly cold. The queen’s Woman of the Bedchamber brought a wrap. “We wish for tea and a book by the hearth fire,” the queen said. “Our evening concludes. Do this for us now. Get some rest. There’s much for both of us to consider.”
“Yes.”
She left him there, up so high. Not since Abyssinia had he been alone in a high place, where so much of the world he lived in could be seen.
In time he walked back to the ward with Seely trailing behind. He felt the full weight of his life now out in the open. All of them, the queen, Philip, he, were so skilled at veiling themselves, and yet each had peeled back a corner for each other.
He decided that he would go to the apartment and Philip with no thought of how any of it should be. Only that they’d talked of hard things without help, through silences, hands, and, finally, words. Whatever came next, he at least knew they were all sure of each other.
Chapter Fourteen
4 January 1869
Alamayou woke the next morning to snow falling silently past the window, building a soft mound atop the hedgerow on the other side of the glass.
On the nightstand next to him, there was a silver tray and another note. Someone had put it there deep in the night, he marveled, and I never heard them.
He unfolded it and recognized Seely’s handwriting at its bottom, translating to Amharic the queen’s words above.
We thank you for yesterday. It gives us much to think about, and helped make some matters clear. Among them, this: you no longer need anyone to speak for you. It’s time you stand on your own.
We know you will.
The apartment was empty. It was early by the look of the light outside, silvery and low. He was alone.
He dressed and went to the window as a petal of worry opened in his thoughts. At the Spur of the Walk, he saw a barouche-landau. Servants packed it with small suitcases while others gathered near the driver. Among them, the princess, standing with Philip.
He ran.
§
“Don’t fear,” the princess said as Alamayou reached the Walk, breathless. “A new life awaits you.”
Seely stared uncertainly as valets put the last of her new things into the landau. She’d come to Windsor with so little, and now left with simple, clean clothes, perfumes from Paris, a journal, and a letter of recommendation from the queen pronouncing her well suited for positions as nanny or teacher.
“Why?” Alamayou asked.
“There are some loyal Parliament members who keep us advised of things,” Princess Louise said. “Things we need to know. Ambassador Naismith was spreading rumors about the girl, that we bought her from a slaver for you.”
He understood, though it pained him to see Seely go so soon. The queen wanted him to stand on his own for his sake, and for hers. There would be others he’d have to talk to, like Naismith and his colleagues, and if she decided to fight for him, he couldn’t subject himself to the judgment of such men by relying on a former slave as a translator.
The worry he’d felt gave way to a hint of hope. Maybe Seely’s departure meant that the queen had made up her mind in his favor.
“Will you be all right?” he asked Seely in English.
Seely smiled, one of the few he’d ever seen from her. “I live this way. Not knowing what the next day will bring. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Will you keep saying hard things for the queen?”
“He will,” Philip told her. “I know he will. He’s far bolder than I.”
Alamayou recognized the word. “Bolder.”
“You, Alamayou. Brave. More than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“He is,” Seely said.
“When does she go?” Alamayou asked.
“Soon. There’s a ship waiting.”
“I ask, some time? Fast, I promise.”
“I suppose that would be all right,” the princess said. “But not long, now.”
“Come with me.” Alamayou took Seely’s hand and led her back into their ward.
He entered their apartment ahead of her, feeling oddly lighter. Come what may, he thought, we can claim a bit of Windsor for ourselves. Thanks to her, I have memories that live in London, the impossible city.
“I owe you so much,” he said in Amharic. “No one could understand
me. I didn’t know what was happening around me, what people were saying. How they felt about me. I learned through you. I can speak for myself now. I can understand how people see me. None of that would have happened without you. I want to do something for you, to take with you.”
It didn’t take long. It was crude, not something studied or cared for. It began with a circle and after creating that shape that would become Seely’s face, Alamayou stared at it for a little while before continuing past it, adding color, adding contours of oils and a bit of chalk to make the green elms of the Walk behind her.
She was standing about five feet away, dressed not in the seaworn rags she’d come in on, but in a lace dress that a seamstress somewhere in the bowels of Windsor had crafted from nothing, from the spinnings of caterpillars. Whoever that seamstress was, she couldn’t have dreamed her work would fall onto the bony shoulders of a former slave, being made into a thing of permanence and delicate beauty.
He shaded her cheeks to make them sharper and shaped her eyes into the almonds that he supposed Seely wished she had in life. Now you’ll never age, he thought. You’ll always be here. Young, rescued from your once-life, and delivered however briefly to something you couldn’t have imagined.
May it continue for you, he thought as he finished. I hope one day we’ll see each other again, and we’ll smile at our impossible fortune.
Alamayou finished and gave it to her. She began to cry upon seeing it. “I’ve never seen myself as pretty before, but now I feel beautiful. Wherever my life takes me, this will be with me, hanging on a wall. Thank you for that. It’s something others have, not me.”
“I’ll never forget you. You gave his voice to me. I think a life waits for me after all. Maybe a home somewhere. That’s something others have, not me.”
Her eyes darkened. “I gave you all their voices, not just his. I hope you find happiness, Alamayou, and I know you’re a prince. You’re above me. But it’s wrong, what you feel. I won’t say what your parents said. You’re the bravest, strongest man I have ever met, to say those things out loud. I wish you hadn’t. I hope you change. I hope you find a better way to live.”
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