by JL Merrow
“Hang on,” Jory interrupted. “You’re talking about the story about the V sign coming from English longbowmen holding up two fingers—their drawing fingers—to the French to show what they were going to kill them with? You’re saying that’s not true?”
“Uh, sorry, mate, but for a start, have you ever drawn a medieval longbow? A hundred pounds of pressure, that is. Two fingers aren’t going to cut it. They used three—index, middle, and ring. And that’s what’s mentioned in Wavrin’s contemporary account, which was basically supposed to be the English king’s pep talk to his troops: Don’t get captured, lads, or they’ll cut off your three middle fingers. Not two. Three.” Sam held up his own fingers in illustration.
Jory sighed. “Gawen loves that story.”
“If I could remind you, Dr. Ferreira, that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence?” There was something about Jennifer’s stance that made Sam think of a British bulldog. Or terrier, maybe. Sam could just imagine her sinking her teeth into him and giving him a good shake to break his neck.
Thank God she had a twinkle in her eye that told him physical violence was probably off the agenda.
Jory was looking alarmed, though. “Can we save the battle reenactments for when the tourists are here?”
Jennifer smiled at him. “Oh, if ever I were tempted to make a rude gesture . . . Don’t mind us, Jory. We’re historians. If we ever actually agreed on anything, the universe would implode.”
“Explode,” Sam corrected mildly, and laughed at her mock-outraged expression.
He reckoned he was going to like it here.
Bran was beginning to loathe it here. He was, quite literally, sick and tired of being in hospital. He hated the indignities of illness, and hospital life with its lack of privacy and, worse, autonomy. The painkillers—which didn’t so much kill the pain as blunt it very slightly—made him slow and stupid, the antibiotics upset his stomach, and the nurses insisted he stay propped up at all times, making it almost impossible to sleep deeply. He’d never imagined he’d be so desperate to lie flat. Worse, he couldn’t seem to concentrate long enough to even attempt a crossword, and he constantly lost the thread of any book he tried to read.
It was as though the wretched illness had invaded his brain as well as his lungs.
Thank God he’d ended the thing with Craig. Without his phone he’d have had no way to cancel their weekly meetings, and Craig didn’t react well to being stood up without notice. He didn’t react well to it even with notice, which was one of the reasons Bran had broken with him. He couldn’t abide drama.
Then again, if he stayed here much longer, he was half convinced the boredom would kill him.
Even Bea seemed too busy to visit him often. It was almost as though she were avoiding him.
Twenty-Six Years Ago
Bran was painfully aware, returning to school after an Easter break spent alone at home with a father he hardly saw, that Bea’s baby was due any day now. She’d gone away to Scotland with Mother for the last few months of the pregnancy. Bran hadn’t seen her since the Christmas holidays.
Childbirth was supposed to hurt horribly, wasn’t it? Bran couldn’t imagine it. The process seemed awful when they showed it on television, with the woman screaming and the man panicking, rushing to get her to hospital on time.
But the mothers always smiled when they saw their child.
The more Bran thought about it, the less it seemed right, to simply give away their own flesh and blood like a bundle of unwanted clothing.
Maybe Bea would change her mind, once her baby was born? Decide to keep it after all? Bran had thought he wouldn’t want that, but now he wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t it be something, to have a niece or a nephew? Although he wouldn’t be able to call it that, of course. Mother and Father could say they’d adopted a child from abroad, so its skin colour wouldn’t matter. Lots of people did that nowadays. Bea could still go to school—they’d hire a nanny—and nobody would look down on them for charity to an orphan.
He’d hated having a baby in the house when Jory was born, but it would be different this time. Bran and Bea had been children themselves then. They were older now.
Of course, if it looked too much like that man . . . But to be honest, after nine months Bran couldn’t even remember his face particularly well, for all that the pain and humiliation were as sharp as ever.
Maybe, though, it would all come flooding back again when he saw the baby. If he saw the baby? They wouldn’t just get rid of it without telling him, would they? No, surely they’d tell him when it was born, and he’d be able to go and see Bea. And he could suggest keeping the child, in case they hadn’t thought of it. If it looked too much like . . . like him, then Bran could just keep quiet. Yes. That was a good plan. All he had to do was wait until one of his parents, or Bea herself, let him know she’d gone into labour and he should come and join them.
Bran waited, but no news came. In the end, when it was nearly two weeks after he’d thought she was due, he rang home.
“Yes?”
Bran swallowed. His father’s sharp tones always made him forget all his carefully composed lines. “I, um, I just wondered if Bea had . . . if things had started.”
Father gave an exasperated huff. “Your sister is over the worst of her illness and is recovering in Scotland with her mother.”
Over her illness. So the baby had been born. And must be gone already. There was a sharp ache in Bran’s chest at the thought. He hadn’t had a chance to see it, to say anything at all. “But she’s okay?”
“Didn’t I just say so?”
“And the, uh, the—”
“You know full well what was planned. The matter is no longer of any concern to this family and will therefore not be spoken of. Do I make myself clear?”
There was an odd, painful lump in Bran’s throat. He wanted to ask again about the child, but his nerve broke. “Yes.”
“Good. Was there anything else?”
“N-no.”
“Then you should get back to your studies. You have exams coming up. Don’t you disappoint me.”
The next time Bran saw Bea was when he went home from school for the summer holidays. He’d been hoping, the last couple of months, that they’d be able to put it all behind them, and go back to how things used to be. But she seemed more remote than ever.
He heard her crying in the night, sometimes, but her door was always locked so he couldn’t go and comfort her. And she always denied it in the morning.
Present Day
Jory didn’t come to visit him until the weekend, although he brought Gawen with him when he finally turned up, which made amends somewhat for the neglect.
“How are you doing with Gormenghast?” Bran asked, his room seeming suddenly brighter for the presence of one gawky teenager and his mop of blond hair.
Gawen bit his lip, glanced up at his father, then bent his head to stare at his trainers.
Jory grimaced. “Kirsty had to confiscate it at 2 a.m. the other night.”
“Gawen,” Bran said reprovingly. But not too sternly. “What did I tell you? Did you get it back?”
“Yes. But it wasn’t fair. I couldn’t sleep anyway because Mum and Euan were being too loud.”
That was unsettling. “He stayed the night at your house?”
“No. He went home after Mum took my book. At least, I heard the front door shut and they weren’t talking any more after that. Thank God.”
“Language,” Jory said.
Gawen rolled his eyes. “Everyone says it.”
Bran was just relieved to find it had only been loud voices Gawen had objected to, not the noise from . . . other activities. “I hope you explained that to your mother.”
“Sort of.” Gawen’s shoulders slumped, and he examined Bran’s hospital blanket a lot more closely than it warranted.
Bran took that to mean he’d merely thrown a strop and hadn’t explained it at all. Gawen could be surprisingly inarticulate when in the grips of strong emotion.
Never mind. He’d have a word with Kirsty himself. “And your schoolwork? How did the French test go?”
Gawen’s face turned sunny once more. “I came top!”
“That’s my boy,” Bran said, pleased. Jory, fetching a chair from the other side of the room, looked momentarily disgruntled.
“I still don’t see why we have to learn it,” Gawen went on. “I wish the French were still our enemies like when the Black Prince was fighting them. I bet nobody had to do French lessons then. If we’ve got to learn a language, Japanese would be much more fun. And more useful.”
Jory scoffed. “For reading manga in the original, he means. It’s the new burning ambition.”
“I like manga.” Gawen dug around in his school bag until he found a surprisingly pristine copy of what was clearly a comic book, with a stylised, spiky-haired character grinning manically on the cover. “You can borrow this one, Uncle Bran. I’ve finished it. But please be careful not to crease the spine.”
Bran opened the book, only to have it taken from him and gently replaced in his hands with the back page open. “You have to start at the back,” Gawen said patiently. “And read the frames right to left.”
“Thank you.” Bran supposed he should be grateful the book was in English. For a given value of English, at any rate. “So where did this interest come from? Apart from Japan, obviously.”
Gawen went red. “Ruby. She’s new at school. She’s really into manga and anime.”
And quite clearly, Gawen was into her. Bran and Jory exchanged looks. “She seems like a nice girl,” Jory offered.
Bran hoped it wouldn’t end in tears. Meanwhile, that comment about the Black Prince had jogged his memory—and Bran was fairly sure Gawen would be glad if he changed the subject. He turned to Jory. “What’s happening about the exhibition? Is anything happening about the exhibition?”
Jory startled. “Oh, no need to worry about that. I’ve got it all in hand. You just concentrate on getting well. You made the local paper, you know—did you see?”
“What?” Bran would definitely have preferred to be consulted about that.
“I’ll see if I can dig you out a copy for next time. Although ours might have gone for recycling already. Or the bottom of the rats’ cage.”
“What did they write about me?” If it was anything implying he was at death’s door, he’d have to jump on it firmly. The last thing he needed was potential business partners thinking he was a bad risk.
“Not a lot. Local businessman in unprovoked attack, I think was the headline.”
“Was there anything in there about the exhibition?”
“No, but they did mention you’d been lobbying for increased CCTV coverage of the town for over a year.”
That was good, at any rate. “Maybe they’ll actually do something about that now.”
Gawen broke in at that point. “What does ‘lobbying’ mean, really? I’ve heard it on the news, but how do you actually do it?”
Jory laughed. “It’s really just persuading the people in power to do what you want.”
“Yes, but how? Do you have to pay them?”
This time Bran laughed, and he didn’t even mind the soreness in his chest it cost him. “More often than the people in power would like you to think, yes. But that sort of thing is generally frowned upon. Although on a national level, you’ll often find that people and corporations who’ve made substantial donations to particular political parties tend to do rather well once that party comes to power.”
“So how do you do it, Uncle Bran?”
By the time he’d finished a lengthy explanation—surely Gawen should have had a better idea of the structure of local government at his age; what on earth was Jory teaching him?—Bran was exhausted. Jory and Gawen left shortly afterwards.
It was only when he was lying—reclining, at any rate—in bed and trying to sleep that Bran remembered he’d never got a straight answer from Jory as to what was happening with the exhibition.
Sam’s first day at work wasn’t quite what he’d been expecting. Okay, so Jory had promised him there wouldn’t be an interview, but he’d been prepared for a representative of the Woodstock Trust, who were funding the exhibition, to turn up and ask him some pretty searching questions under the guise of “getting to know” their new curator. He’d seen the budget for this exhibition, and it’d nearly given him a panic attack. They were seriously trusting him with a project this big? Okay, so most of the money had gone into building the exhibition centre and he wasn’t in charge of anything to do with that, but still. If he fitted it out with a load of crap exhibits no one wanted to see, they’d never recoup that investment.
If it’d been his money, he’d have made damn sure he knew who was going to be spending it.
What actually happened was that Sam was shown to a Portakabin parked up next to the castle’s visitor centre and left to get on with it.
At least his predecessor had been the methodical sort. Sam had been amazed, when he’d started postgrad work, how disorganised some historians could be. Dr. Banerjee had left files full of notes on paper, and when Sam switched on the computer, it was easy to work his way through the folders and see the progression of the plans. He’d been half-afraid the work would be seriously behind schedule, leaving him no chance to catch up before the official opening date, but actually, it looked like things were well in hand.
A number of artefacts had been begged, borrowed, or otherwise liberated from various museums or private owners. Pride of place would deservedly be going to the Black Prince’s Funerary Achievements—his helm, surcoat, shield, and gauntlets—normally displayed above his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral. Sam whistled. For an untried exhibition centre, securing that loan was a serious coup—and they’d be keeping them for the whole of the summer.
At least, they would be so long as Sam did his job properly and made sure the cathedral’s conservators didn’t find anything to object to about the proposed display arrangement when they came to inspect the centre in . . . Sam winced. Three weeks. And they could object to all kinds of things—humidity levels, light levels, security, even the design and installation of the display case itself. Problems with any of those things could lead to the loan being reduced to as little as a day—or cancelled altogether.
Yeah, he was going to have to make sure he worked very closely with the contractor on that one. Thank God a lot of the other work had already been done. Local actors had been engaged to provide short “oral history” videos as a range of characters—medieval technology unfortunately not having run to voice recording—costumes had been sourced, and a film crew had been booked for the middle of June. There were digital mock-ups of planned displays and information boards, together with interactive exhibits for visitors of all ages. And okay, he could see straight away the text panels were going to need a bit of trimming, but that shouldn’t be a major issue. There was to be a dressing-up corner, and a range with the chance to try out replica longbows, plus some more modern bows that the average visitor might actually stand a chance of drawing and shooting with. And expert replicas of the prince’s armour had been commissioned, both to show the brilliant red, gold, and blue colours the prince had worn into battle—the medieval textiles having sadly faded—and to replace the originals altogether when the loan ended.
Sam frowned. Why on earth had Dr. Banerjee resigned? She’d already done most of the work.
But the more Sam saw, the more his misgivings built. There was a definite bias becoming apparent, so much so that it amounted to censorship of anything that disagreed with the general thrust. The initials BR kept showing up, vetoing anything that painted the Black Prince in a less-than-positive light. And yes, maybe Edward of Woodstock had been unfairly vilified over the centuries, with far too many people assuming the sobriquet Black meant he was a vicious evil bastard, but this was revisionism gone postal. The blatant cherry-picking of evidence went against all of Sam’s instincts as a historian.
This wasn’t an exhibitio
n. It was a hagiography.
And Sam wasn’t willing to compromise his professional integrity. He’d sworn he’d never do that again. If it came down to it he’d . . . Christ. What would he do? He needed this job.
Okay. Time to stop panicking and find out if those bridges actually needed crossing. Sam made his way to Jennifer’s office in the castle’s visitor centre, hoping she might be able to give him some hint of why this was all so one-sided.
“Found your feet, then?” she said by way of greeting.
“Yeah, I think so. The lady who was here before me—Dr. Banerjee—she was pretty good. Seems to have all the bases covered.”
“Oh, she was certainly efficient,” Jennifer said archly.
“It looks like she had some, uh, pretty strong views about Edward of Woodstock, though.” He watched her closely.
Jennifer snorted. “It does seem that way, doesn’t it? I should just follow your own judgement, if I were you. You seem like a young man who’s able to stand up for his principles.”
And didn’t that hit him right in the conscience? “Okay, but reading between the lines here, am I gonna need to stand up for them? Like, is this bias actually down to Dr. Banerjee, or have the sponsors got their own agenda?” And did she really leave due to ill health? he wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to come over all paranoid.
“I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Sandwich?” She opened her desk drawer and took out a bulky greaseproof paper package. The sandwiches inside were made from proper baker’s bread and thick-cut ham with pickle. Sam accepted one gratefully, his stomach already rumbling—he’d been too keyed up to grab lunch before he came over. He half expected her to pull out a bottle of home-made ginger beer to go with them, but apparently they weren’t totally back in the 1950s. “Now, I’m particularly interested to see what you’ll have on the role of common people during the many years of conflict. And I hope you’ll be focussing on the experience of women. Too many curators seem to think it’s all about the menfolk marching off to war, and completely forget about the women left at home to hold society together. These women were running businesses, raising families, dealing with the constant fear of widowhood—and stumping up the taxes that paid for those wars.”