“I’m sure you have some ideas, Uncle Ben,” said Hal. “You always do.”
“Naturally; I have always been noted for them. I shall resume my proper persona as an eccentric old general and tell everyone the truth, which is that I am come to see the truth of the return of Jack Greenwing after Loe. I shall stay here as a guest of Sir Hamish’s, who has painted me and most of my family, and—” He grinned, even more disquietingly than Hal. “And we shall see what my stirring the muck brings up,”
“Someone is willing to murder,” Master Dart said quietly, his voice a little troubled.
“In the past,” I said, not convincing anybody.
Master Dart moved his shoulders in what was not really a shrug. “Given what has been happening to young Mr. Greenwing, I fear whoever it is is still here in Ragnor Bella. He—or she, or they—will be only the more determined to keep their secrets after seven years of success.”
Mr. Dart smiled at his brother. “And that is where you come in, Tor. Doing the official researches in the constabulary’s records and making sure it is widely known that you are doing so, and that you support Mr. Greenwing in his efforts to clear his father’s name, and rejoice in the General’s presence.”
The image of the White Cross as I had last seen it flashed into my mind: the pale stone, wreathed in mist in the pre-dawn, tall and stern and uncompromising in its various roles as waystone, ley-anchor, linchpin, and marker of dark deeds punished by law.
An owl had hooted, the cock down the lane had crowed, and—
And that was it.
Except for all the many ways in which it wasn’t.
MASTER DART, SIR HAMISH, and General Ben went to church in the morning in order to begin performing their tasks. I could have begun mine the same ways, but that would have meant missing the opportunity to burgle my ancestral home. Mr. Dart and Hal were determined to come with my father and me, of course.
“Four is a lot for a mission,” Jack said, surveying us.
“I’d thought scouting parties were usually sent out in groups of five?” Mr. Dart replied.
Jack smiled suddenly. “Never lost your love of history, eh?”
“No, sir.”
“Nor of adventures, I reckon.”
“I’m quieter than Jemis in the woods.”
“Better at Poacher?”
“Not with cards!”
“You make me feel old,” Jack murmured, but I could see it was a false complaint. He was moving more lightly this morning, his eye brighter and more eager; and he made no further objection.
“We’ll go—” He stopped, looked speculatively at me. “You’ve been running all round the barony, you said. What do you reckon’s the quietest path between here and the manor, Jemis?”
Was that the first time he had called me by name? It might have been. I coughed against a reflux of emotion.
“Unless Mr. Dart knows a better, I’d say the old sunken lane that starts in the bluebell wood.”
Mr. Dart nodded. “Yes, and to get there we should go along the nuttery. That’ll be new to you, sir, it’s where my mother’s old glasshouse and gardens were.”
“Right enough. Everyone dressed for dust? I don’t want us to be fighting, not in my brother’s house, no matter what we might suspect him of. No weapons past a belt-knife, please.”
His voice was crisp, easily commanding, easily obeyed. I had no problems whatsoever falling in behind him and Mr. Dart as they led the way past the stables and into the nuttery. Hal came along behind me, murmuring softly to himself what turned out to be the botanical names of the plants he’d been out in the gardens at dawn that morning to look at.
What Mr. Dart had failed to mention about the nuttery was that it was his ducks’ favourite haunt. I say ‘haunt’ advisedly, for while there was a plentitude of circumstantial indication for their presence, there was no actual proof.
Half-listening to Hal’s muttering, half-watching my father, altogether trying not to sneeze, I stepped down a slight incline and skidded on something that didn’t bear closer inspection. I windmilled—unlike the last such experience, did not fall into a moat—and pitched upright against a not-very-stable shrub. I used my handkerchief, since it was already to hand, to flick at a bit of wet grey-green matter I did not wish to enquire too far into.
Pale buff down danced in the air like mayflies, catching the bright air and making the air feel sparklingly cool. I followed the progress of one piece of fluff down to where it landed softly next to a significantly larger fawn-coloured feather.
“What are these? The feathers of the proverbial golden goose?”
“Was it golden, or merely its eggs?” asked Hal. “What variety of hazel are these? What’s your frequency of coppicing?”
“Nine years, Eraclian Cob, and these are my ducks.”
I made a great show of looking around. The shrubs spread on either side of us in a diamond-patterned grid, rough-edged leaves mostly on the ground but a few brave remnants flying like banners on the ends of the long straight rods the coppiced shrubs had created. I couldn’t see any cobnuts; and, despite all the feathers and down and grey-green matter, no ducks, either. “Are they invisible?” I enquired. “They’re so well-discussed I had thought them likely to be much more prominent.”
“They’re down in the drainage ditch,” Mr. Dart responded haughtily, and strode off.
My father said, “Each to his beloved,” and I, reminded, took Hal by the arm so that he would actually come along with us.
THE OLD SUNKEN ROAD was as ancient as the Greenway leading to the Green Dragon, although as it did not lead anywhere but between Dark Hall and Arguty manor, it was much less travelled. Even Mr. Dart’s ducks did not appear to have penetrated past the edge of the coppiced hazel; the new quince and medlar plantation, where we nearly lost Hal, showed no sign of them.
In our childhoods, Mr. Dart and I had spent a great deal of time along the old sunken lane. It was secluded enough to be appealing and near enough were rarely late home for meals. In its time it had been haunt of unicorns and highwaymen and fairy princesses and dragons: for in those days none of them were at all likely to appear but between the pages of storybooks.
Hal managed to discover three new species of fern in the first ten yards.
“It could be worse,” I said to Mr. Dart. “It could be high summer.”
“How did you ever manage to get anywhere this spring? You can’t have gone many miles a day.”
I laughed. “We didn’t. We walked ten or twelve—then I would go for a run while Marcan chatted up the cooks and Hal begged names and seed off all the gardeners. Come along, Hal, it’ll be easier to collect when next you visit.”
“Next time I’ll be encumbered with a wife,” he muttered.
“It will be ‘encumbered’ if you go into marriage with that attitude.”
He abandoned that line of thought, although not the ferns, whose spores he was carefully shaking into a paper envelope. “If it were a bookstore with a good Classical Shaian section you’d be just as long.”
“I spend a sufficient amount of time at the local bookstore, thank you.”
“Jemis, you live in the local bookstore. Bookish folk the province over would swoon at the thought.”
“Perhaps we might continue in the hopes we will be able to complete our errand before the good folk return from church?”
We jumped a little guilty, but my father (my father!) was smiling. His expression was faintly puzzled, faintly wistful, more than faintly amused. Friendly bickering could not have been much of a part of his recent life, I thought, and remembered with brutal clarity the vision of the pirate galley. My answering smile faded. His turned more puzzled, more wistful, more ... sad.
I took a breath, wrongly, for Hal had stood up and brushed against a branch liberally festooned with musty-mildewy honeysuckle. I backed hastily away to seek out a second handkerchief. Hal ignored me apart from a blithe benediction, attention moving from stowing away the envelope of fern seed to
my father. “You will have gathered, major, that I am a botanist, whereas Jemis took a slightly circuitous route to tortuously symbolic poetry in Old Shaian.”
“The mind boggles,” Mr. Dart added with a mock shudder.
“I have already been impressed by my son’s knowledge of antique symbolism.”
My son!
“Mind you,” Mr. Dart continued, “I admit Mr. Greenwing’s insights into the Gainsgooding conspirators’ poetry were fascinating and very different from the historians’ accounts.”
“Where did you go, Perry? I’ve heard already that Jemis and his gr—”
“—Hal.”
“—Hal went to Morrowlea. I apologize that I have yet to ask Tor or Hamish about you, though clearly you did exceptionally well.”
“Oh, I didn’t do so well as Jemis in the Entrance Examinations. I went to Stoneybridge.”
“You came seventh,” I said, not liking this.
“I am surrounded by the overly intelligent,” Hal said, and threw up his hands. Unfortunately he was striding forward at the same moment and did not see the large rut his foot was just about to land in.
“These boots!” he cried, which was not what I thought when I saw his face.
I grasped him by the shoulders and moved him bodily onto the bank and out of the mud so we could have a look at his ankle. “Hal ...”
“Let me, Jemis,” my father instructed. He knelt down heedless of the mud and moved to the boot. “How badly does it hurt, your grace?”
“Neither graceful nor gracious at the moment,” Hal said breathlessly. “Ah, major, I think I’d prefer to leave the boot on for now. As Jemis can tell you, I am at present limited with respect to my boots, my coachman having most inconsiderately driven me and all my belongings into the Otterburn, and since I prefer my boots to fit more than I care for their polish, I decided to wait until my return home for their replacement.”
“If it’s broken ...”
“Hardly that!”
Jack looked at him. “Do you say that because you don’t wish it to be so, or because you don’t feel it to be so?”
“I do like your distinctions between wishing and feeling, major. I broke my ankle once, in a fall at polo. This isn’t nearly so bad.”
My father seemed to consider this a suitable sentiment (or reason?), for he sat back on his heels and contemplated Hal’s face. “I think you should sit with your foot elevated and cool for a bit, rather than come in with us. The secret passages are narrow at times, as well as dark, and we may need to exit quickly.”
“I do apologize for the delays, major.”
“You will listen?”
Hal flashed him a brilliant smile. “Major, I may be a duke, but I am not entirely a fool. This is your party; and I have been raised in the admiration of your skills as a soldier and leader of men.”
My father (my father!) nodded. “Very well. It’s warm enough out down here out of the wind ... you can sit on my coat.”
He began to remove the garment. I said, the protest jumbling incoherent emotions together, “No, here, he can have mine.”
Jack stopped and looked at me for a long moment. “Jemis, I have spent most of the last seven years on a pirate galley on the North Seas. I am, if anything, overheating.”
Once again the dream filled my vision. The ragged breechclouts, the scarred and bleeding—and above all, bare—backs. I stepped back, unable to express in words how much I admired his dignity, his sense of humour, his ability to smile; and how angry I was that he should be subject to even so minor an indignity (and for so excellent a reason!) as laying his coat down for Hal to sit on.
And I felt very unworthily aware of the fact that I had already lost one of my two coats that autumn, and that I needed to acquire a winter one ... and so would he (for this one, even now being laid on the mossy bank for Hal to inch himself back on and arrange himself with his foot higher than the rest of him and, as he said, several new ferns and an exquisite example of something-or-other close to hand, was thin and obviously second-hand) ... and that it was one thing to dress according to one’s wealth when one was sliding down the social scale in the public estimation, and another thing entirely to do so when everyone seemed deeply committed to forcing one to behave like the heir to an imperial marquisate. The Empire didn’t even exist any more.
We settled Hal in his patch of sunlight with his ferns and his notebook and a newfangled reservoir fountain pen Mr. Dart had in his pocket, and set off again along the sunken lane towards the bright circle ahead of us where the woods became garden.
Jack said, “So, Stoneybridge and Morrowlea, and you said Roald Ragnor went to Tara, didn’t you? You’re all so much smarter than we were.”
“Well, Roald and I did have to pay,” Mr. Dart said self-deprecatingly. “Jemis was the one who went on merits.”
I wanted to shout that I might have gone to Morrowlea on merits, but Mr. Dart was the one being offered fellowships to Tara.
But I said nothing, because there was naked pride on my father’s face.
The last thirty yards of the sunken lane were muddy and rutted. Mindful of Hal’s mishap, I kept my eyes down at the road below me, pretending I had not run this way four times in the past week and did not know exactly which tufts of grass or lumps of leaves were the safe ones to step on. There was not going to be a pit trap on this path; or if there was, I had already fallen into it.
I fell back behind Mr. Dart at a convenient narrowing of the way. No. I was not going to retreat again. As I had in the pit trap, before I was sure of Jack and Ben’s benignity, I must analyze the situation and decide how to extricate myself. Mrs. Etaris and I had had a number of oblique conversations about emotions, on a few rainy days at the bookstore when Hal worked away above us with comforting thumps and scrapes and snatches of song, and she and I sorted and arranged and talked about books and through them, life.
What had my father called her? A sensible and intelligent woman? Yes, and one who had read both widely and deep, and who watched the movements of the people in the town with an attitude I had hitherto only understood insofar as it related to literature or history. (Or botany.) She said very simple things, did Mrs. Etaris, but a nonchalant proverb or an absently-placed book were counterpoints to her courtesy. On first meeting her I had laughingly thought she might write the ‘Etiquette Questions Answered’ column in the New Salon; after a month’s acquaintance I now thought that if she did (and I did not yet discount the possibility), she was probably also running a country-wide espionage ring at the same time.
I was pretty sure someone was.
—And all that was seductively interesting, and not very relevant to my uncle’s sordid misdeeds, and every time I brought up even a hint of the topic, Mrs. Etaris would find that somehow we had miss-shelved The Undercurrents of Thought: the History of the Understanding of the Self or The Eternal Metaphysical Quandary of the Mind and Body or—and this one had hurt—The Correspondence of Love and the Soul. This last was renowned for being the most piercing effort to understand one’s own heart ever to be written in modern Shaian. Some said the Correspondence was written by Fitzroy Angursell after his mysterious disappearance; others that it was a work out of the Emperor Artorin’s court; still others that it was no one anyone else had ever heard of. I had read its ninety-nine perfectly constructed sonnets and wished for a small box to go hide myself in that I might find within its impenetrable darkness the inexhaustible centre of light the anonymous poet had.
I could not write an ode, let alone a sonnet, but I could at least, look at the mud below my feet and know that the hollow hungry feeling in me was not only, or perhaps even chiefly, left over from the addiction to wireweed.
It was blindingly obvious to me that it was precisely his esteem I craved. The problem was that it felt as dangerous a joy to acknowledge it as it was to sit down at table seeking the thrill of risk that came with the bets and the cards and the efforts of wit and skill pitted against chance.
It had seeme
d so safe a gauge of my behaviour and accomplishments, that imagined benediction or disdain. What better standard to judge my actions than to ask myself what my father, Jakory Greenwing, winner of the Heart of Glory, might have thought of them?
To have him right there looking at me was—was—it was too much, that was what it was.
I stepped with exaggerated care over a fallen tree. Someone caught my arm; I looked up and was dazzled by sudden bright light. We had come to the edge of the woods.
“Right,” said my father, letting go as if I’d burned him. “Here’s the plan.”
Chapter Eighteen: The Burglars
My uncle had twice invited me to dinner since Hal’s revelation that father was very definitely not the traitor of Loe, but since the invitations had also come after subsequent reflections—also on Hal’s intimation, as it happened—that I therefore stood between my uncle and his current estate, I had so far declined.
“We’ll go in through the Beacon door and head by way of the Third Closet to the Wardrobe passage,” my father said.
He might as well have been speaking another language.
He was evidently surprised at my blank stare. “Didn’t someone tell you the names?”
“I haven’t been inside the house since I was ten,” I replied.
His turn to stare blankly, brows slowly furrowing. How lucky he had been not to lose the eye with a whiplash like that, to direct blow or subsequent infection.
“You haven’t been inside since ...” He trailed off.
I leaned against the sturdy tree next to me, tired already despite the relatively early hour. I could not clearly recall the night’s dreams, but my sleep had been unsettled, and I knew there had been some recurrences of the ancient nightmares. My eyes and nose felt dry and sandy, my throat scratchy, my lungs starting to be depressingly congested.
“The last time I was inside was for Uncle Rinald’s funeral. On our way out Lady Flora told us it was inappropriate for us to come into the family portions of the house any longer.”
“Vor—”
“My uncle said that of course he would see that we did not starve.”
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