He prepared himself for the queen’s words.
“We have made arrangements,” she began, “for Alamayou to go before Parliament tomorrow and tell them everything.”
Her decree passed over all of them. Philip wept quietly, shaking with relief. The prince stared at his mother, dumbfounded. The princess smiled so slightly that it could have been mistaken for thought, or for nothing at all. But Alamayou saw it flicker across her face as she glanced at the far window that looked out onto the grounds.
“Everything?” Lord Grant asked hesitantly. “Your Majesty, please forgive me my impudence. But what we heard, death and…and the other. There will be names put to it. War crimes. Deviance, the nameless offense. Against all of that, you’d place the prestige of your crown. Are you certain?”
“I’m glad,” Princess Louise said.
“Glad?” Prince Leopold exclaimed. “I don’t want anything to happen to Alamayou. Understand that. Nor do I want to see anything happen to the monarchy or to my family.”
“And so?” The queen directed her question to the prince. “What would you suggest to us?”
“I’ll paint you a darker portrait than our solicitor, mother.” The prince took a kerchief to his damp brow. “Your rule is called into question in the Telegraph. Soldiers come to our gate. Now the country will hear of this. You’ll be heard on this. On him. I know his is a sympathetic story if we concentrate on what was taken from him and not on, as Grant puts it, the other. And I know it’s that loss that tugs at you. So, too, you have lost. We all have. But you aren’t seen in public by your people in a generation and they tire of your mourning—”
“You speak to us as if you know anything about us,” she said coldly.
The prince’s face reddened. “He was my father, too.”
“You sad, selfish boy.” The queen rose from her chair. “You say they tire of my mourning? He was my husband. There shall be no other. Ever. Do you understand that? A life of no further love. That is my life. That is what England expects of me. I do not have the luxury of life, or art, or all the things you pine for. I never have. I am watched and measured and parceled out to those who would see me according to their expectations. I do not exist but for what they make of me. And I endure it so that you don’t. You’ll go to Oxford and they’ll not know of your illness. Your sister will marry well. Your children and their children will have envious lives. And it will all be upon my back. Do you see this?”
“Yes,” the prince said meekly.
“All I have, all that is left to me, is the weight of my word given in the name of what I believe. I have listened to him, and, having done so, I believe him. So, too, will Parliament. So, too, will you. Because I say so. Now, I wish to be alone. I’ve said quite enough.”
They got up and left the queen to her thoughts. As soon as the door to the Blue Room closed behind them, the prince and Lord Grant broke off from the others and walked to the ward, speaking in hushed, urgent tones.
“He’s afraid for his mother and himself.” The princess walked away from Alamayou and Philip to a window in the corridor. “He well knows that those who oppose us might use every means necessary to undermine us, including revealing his secret. If word of his condition became common knowledge, he’d not be allowed into Oxford. He couldn’t marry for fear that he’d pass down the flaw in his blood. He’d be shunned. He’s royalty, true enough, but it’s easy to forget that he’s young.”
“As are you,” Philip said. “And yet, you agree with the queen.”
“Any dutiful daughter would do the same.”
She was distracted by something outside. Her words were as far off as her gaze, so Philip left her to her reverie. It was enough that the queen had given Alamayou a chance to fight on, terrifying though it was to imagine going before Parliament and saying what Alamayou had to say.
Alamayou lingered a moment longer beside the princess. He glanced out the window to see what she watched so intently.
There on the snow-covered grounds, Corbould sat before his easel and painted the Round Tower.
“Artist like you,” he told the princess. “He paints it for you.”
“I know.”
She turned to him, and he was sorry that he’d stayed. The first hint of crumbling was in her eyes, along with the struggle to hold the tears off until she could be alone.
“He’s a commoner,” the princess told him. “He has no title. No subjects. Which means he has choices. Don’t be misled by my mother, Alamayou. What she goes through, we all go through. We are what the world makes of us, not what we make of ourselves.” She returned to the window. Her breath steamed the glass. “He’s nothing like me,” she said.
§
Inside the apartment, Alamayou went to a covered easel. Removing the oil cloth, he stood aside so that it could be seen.
“When did you do this?” Philip asked him.
“One night when you slept.”
“It’s extraordinary.”
In faintly hued oils, Alamayou had painted his father’s fortress at Meqdala as it had been before the war. The field was as lush as Windsor’s grounds. No bodies lay atop it.
Alamayou had portrayed himself in that painting, in a dreamlike dusk, standing before the fortress’s gate. Next to him was another figure, black like him.
Their painted selves stood together in an Abyssinia untouched by war. Their hands were clasped.
“It’s yours,” Alamayou said.
“I can’t accept this.”
“Why?”
“You made one for Seely. It meant goodbye.”
“This,” Alamayou told him, “is like the one for the queen. Not goodbye. Something to see every day.”
“Something for the both of us to see. Only on that condition will I take this and hang it somewhere. Not here, mind you.” He brushed Alamayou’s arm and smiled. “Thank you. For this, and everything else.”
“For what?”
“For every night. What you did for me. Making a demand on the bloody queen that I stay here, as if you were the emperor of Africa.”
“Ras,” Alamayou said.
“I don’t know anyone else who would have done that.”
“But now?”
“Yes. I know a brave, good man who would do just that. As would I. I hope you know that, Alamayou.”
“You would do the same for me?”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“I want to be sure.”
“Be sure, Alamayou.”
“I am, Philip. You speak English well.”
§
Crossing the grounds under a vast net of cold, brilliant stars, Alamayou passed the spot where, in the daylight, he’d seen Corbould painting. It was late now and everyone was asleep, but he’d been restless and had come out in hopes that a walk would calm him. The frigid air didn’t ease his mind; if anything, his thoughts raced faster. It was as dizzying as the sensation he’d had at the Beshilo, at the Feroze’s rail. This time, it was the new language pulling at him, teasing him with the thought of falling. All the words.
Choices. Tell them everything. Deviant. I’m nothing like him.
He thought of the expression on the princess’s face at the window earlier, as she had watched Corbould paint. He’d seen such an expression before. The memory came to him in Amharic, a relic of the dead past. It had been in his father’s eyes. His mother had been the one to cause it. What must it be like, his father had asked him, to be loved?
He’d seen it in his mother’s eyes, as well. It was while she watched the white dream come. And now this princess, her eyes full of the same astonishment.
Love comes for all the weak and wanting hearts. Royal, commoner, orphan. It didn’t matter.
It was late when he reached his apartment door. Philip had been asleep when he’d left for his walk, so he meant to creep in as
quietly as he could. Their ward was far more isolated than the others, by design so that no visitors strolling through Windsor’s halls in search of royal life might instead run into two Negroes setting up house in an apartment of their own. As a result, only their own sounds filled the ward at night. The music of the service—a bucket’s squeaking wheels, the slap of spilled water upon hard flooring—were silent by the time the sun went down.
He opened his door and paused, overcome by the need to remain awake, to take this new life in as if he’d never see it again.
Across the room from where he stood, he could see the sighing trees through the apartment window. Their shapes slowly shifted with the winds. The moon shone clear against the pale stone of the castle. Beautiful, and cold. To the right of the window was just a hint of the boundary wall and the ribbons of streams cut into the earth by recent torrents of rain.
Someone strode unsteadily across the frost-crisped grass. He could see them from the doorway, through the window pane. The figure turned once to look back at a closing door in the East Wing. Its interior light extinguished. It had only been a faint glow of gold, as if cast by a single candle. A secret sort of light.
He went to the window, careful not to wake Philip.
The small wavering circle of a lit splint brought the figure out of the dark. It was the queen, he was sure of it. The night and the moon’s impressionistic light played a trick, making her shape appear as long as a sexton.
The queen hastily crossed the frigid grounds. He caught a last glimpse of her when she snuffed her splint, her face lunar in the rising cloud of smoke and the eye of a red coal from the tip of her match. Then she was gone at the spur of the main path, and the castle grounds fell into a wintry stillness.
He heard the creak of the entry door to the ward and saw her slip inside. He went to the open apartment door and listened, certain of where the queen was going. After a while, he heard footsteps and the sweep of her long coat against the bare marble floor of the hall. A door opened far down the corridor. When he heard it close again, its soft latch popping the ward’s cocoon of quiet, he went down the hall to the portrait room.
A light ignited under the closed portrait room door. Firelight.
He softly rapped on the wood, then entered.
The queen was in her chair, her silhouette trembling before the new fire.
“No sleep for you either,” she said, seemingly unsurprised at his presence. “Tomorrow you’ll stand before Parliament. You should rest while you can.”
“No sleep. Too many thoughts.”
“Yes, we know that state of mind well. Come. Sit awhile.”
He pulled up a chair to the orange glow of the hearth. Servants had prepared the room for her presence. A pot and a cup sat next to her, untouched. The steam seeped from the teapot lid and curled on the air.
“What have we done to you?” she said, almost to herself. “We wonder. To make you lay your life out before them. It’s a difficult decision that we reached, Alamayou.”
“You give me a chance. You listen to me, believe me. A stranger. You took me in.”
“And yet those are only words.”
“All of life is only words. Then you give words to another, the words belong to you and someone else. Your life is known.”
“The words we gave to our son earlier were not kind. We regret the words, but not their meaning.”
She turned her chair to face Alamayou. To see him.
“We are aware,” she said, then shook her head. “I am aware that my children think I’m cruel. I see more than they think I do. I see them walking on their own power into a world far larger than Windsor or England. That world makes way for them because of what I have made of them. It acknowledges their strength. It does not choose precipitously against them. Me, my coldness, that’s what’s responsible for this. I know well what it is that I’ve set into motion. It began before me and will go on after I’m gone. I place them above everything else, even their love of me. Listen to me on this, Alamayou, because I know this more than I know anything. Survival depends not on love spoken in plain sight. It depends on love spoken silently, deep in the night, when no one is there to witness your heart come apart. Only at night do you become the secret that you truly are. And yet, this bitter truth is one I’m asking you to violate tomorrow, in front of the most powerful body of men in the world. And I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do or not. The price of my failure is you.”
Sounds of movement came from outside. The cumbersome turn of wheels across ice and gravel, the wheezing of horses and the straining squeals of an overburdened cart. Deliveries, Alamayou thought. Food, firewood, supplies, anything was possible in the endless stream of commerce that entered Windsor every day at all hours, like animals coming to a watering hole.
The queen gazed up at the family portrait. “I lost my husband in a winter month. Why is that a harder thing, I wonder? He’d been ill for a long time. I loved him, and when he got sick it was as if the country finally realized I could feel anything at all. It took the worst sort of hell to convince them that he mattered. That I mattered.”
She reached for her teacup. He took it and filled it for her.
“I remember girls picking armfuls of white lilies just to tie them together in garlands and bring them to the castle gates while the bonfires burned all night in fear of the plague. I was separated from him, you see. I couldn’t see him or be near him in his final days. The court physicians said I could catch it, so I was kept away from him. He was alone in the room where you visited me. The Blue Room. All I knew of him was the closed door and his voice from inside. His last breath was a sound I didn’t hear. He died by himself.”
She set down her cup. “Do you see now, why I decided that you should do this?”
She watched the flames. They found a new green shoot in the kindling and spattered.
“Prove to them that I matter,” Alamayou said. “The way you prove to them. The way I prove to you.”
“Yes,” she said, “and I am so very sorry. Your life is in play now, and for what? I don’t know.”
“Love.”
“I sit here, Alamayou, and I don’t know if one such as you can understand love. Maybe you do know, or maybe you know nothing of it. You find someone, and you’ll give anything for their love returned to you. You’ll live when they touch your hand. In their eyes, you’ll see a bright hot star and you’ll know, it’s yours. And if they leave before you, you’ll die. You’ll wish you could, but the heart is a stubborn machine that doesn’t let you give up so easily. You’ll wish you could know that bright hot star once more. Just once. And yet, you’ll wish you never knew it.”
The firelight slowly died, but Alamayou couldn’t get up to rekindle it. She was facing him now, her gaze ferocious. She meant every word to burrow under his skin, take root, and grow. Her face slipped slowly into shadow in time to the waning hearth, and it was if that light pulled away from her.
She looked so dark. She looked like Philip, so much so that he sat back from her, startled. It was the gloom, the embers, and it was her plaintive gaze, her open and unadorned need to know that what she’d lost, someone else had found.
“Is that him?” she asked. “Is that what you see?”
“Yes. You say ‘star.’ I say ‘home.’ Both the same. Something no one believes we have, or should have. We don’t say it in words. We just live, and that makes it true.”
She fell quiet. His eyes adjusted to the gloom and found the painting he’d done, its shape and small figures, the white dream rising behind them.
“I’m afraid,” the queen whispered. “I don’t want to fail you, Alamayou. I don’t want to be the reason you get hurt. If Parliament doesn’t accept what you say, they’ll send you back. We’ll fight, but if we can’t, we’ll lose you. It will be as if I did it. My hand.”
“No.” His hand touched hers and she clas
ped it gratefully. “This. This is all your hand does for me.”
He saw her crying, and he wanted to take all the pain out of her. But he wanted it to go on as well, to grow louder and more violent, to rise up and take him like the fire and sea meant to do.
She sees me, Alamayou thought, and she cries for the day I’m gone.
“And so.” She rose, unsteady on her feet. He took her arm and helped her to the door. “It’s settled,” she said. “Neither of us will fail the other. You will speak to Parliament tomorrow evening, and they’ll see. You’ll make them see, Alamayou. I know you. Make them see you as I do.”
He opened the door and stepped back for her. She walked past, down the darkened hall to its end. “Get some sleep,” she called before turning the corner. “Your queen commands you.”
§
After she was gone, Alamayou went out to the spur of the Long Walk. It was almost morning, and the first signs of the sunrise tinted the sky in burnt red and sienna, resting like a stilled ripple of sea along the horizon line where the cartmen’s traps kicked up dust clouds as they filed in.
He turned and walked back to the ward. Counting windows up and across, he found their apartment and the Blue Room. The queen’s silhouette kept watch over Windsor.
It struck him that he needed no light, no moon, to find the way back to where he lived. I know this place, he thought, and it knows me.
The queen was right. He ought to sleep while he could, even if it was only a few hours. The day would bring with it a test unlike any he’d ever faced. Nothing in Abyssinia could have prepared him for the sort of war he had to wage, and win. He’d never been further from the man his father wanted him to be. A soldier, a killer of other men.
And because of that, he’d never been closer to becoming the sort of man he wanted to be.
I’m lij, he thought. At least for one more day. A prince of Abyssinia, fighting for a life where I’ll no longer be lij. Just a man, allowed to live like anyone else.
He couldn’t bring himself to go back to the apartment. He wanted to wait for the sun to crest the horizon and see for himself its red rounded dome pushing up into the sky as it turned bright and hot. When it did, he would be under it. Then Philip would wake, come to the window and see him here. Yes, he thought, the world has to listen to what I want from it, just this once. Philip will see. The prince and princess, the queen, too. He wanted them to see him standing unafraid at the precipice of the day they’d all helped him reach.
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