The Children of the King

by Sonya Hartnett

  “Breakfast,” she said.

  Heron Hall had never been a warm house, not for a single day of its long existence, and certainly wasn’t now, in summer. Cecily hopped up and down while she dressed. She listened for sounds coming from elsewhere in the house, perhaps the noise of tureen lids and cutlery, but apart from the thudding of her feet, silence reigned. That could be changed.

  Beyond her bedroom, the passage showed a row of shut doors. There was only one she’d dare to open, and she did so without knocking.

  May’s room was the same size as Cecily’s, and its wallpaper of green vines and its view over the orchard were pretty; but it couldn’t be as nice a room as Cecily’s, so she believed it was not. The bed was large — too large for such a scrap of girl, who disappeared into it as if into a quagmire. It was often easiest to locate the child by squeezing the bedding until it protested.

  “Wake up! Breakfast!”

  She prodded the bedclothes, rifled cold air beneath them, tamped them down firmly, finally threw them aside. The bed was empty, May was gone. Cecily sighed.

  It wasn’t the first time the evacuee had absconded. On their third morning at Heron Hall she’d left her room without waiting to be officially freed. The girls had had a quiet talk about it, if a talk can consist of one party talking and the other party not. Cecily had warned of the perils inherent in an old house. There were doors that might lock, staircases to fall down, statues that might topple, loaded pistols who-knew-where. “It’s best if you wait for me,” she’d told May, and although she didn’t specify the parameters of the waiting, she meant always and at all times don’t do anything without me. Cecily simply did not like the idea of May Bright, who was only a guest here, rambling about and making herself at home. It could lead to tragedy. And it wasn’t right.

  Gratifyingly, May had agreed. “All right,” she’d said. And then she had blithely continued to do exactly as she liked. Some mornings she stayed in her room, reading in bed or even sleeping in it; on others she’d been discovered chatting to the maid in the kitchen, fetching preserves from the cellar, brushing Byron on the doorstep, standing on tiptoe to inspect a tray of butterflies. On the mornings she went roaming, she could be found anywhere.

  And now here she was again, gone.

  Cecily looked about as if the room knew where the girl had got to, and would confess under a sufficiently stringent glare. Cecily had helped May unpack her suitcase, so she knew exactly what belonged to the girl and felt also that these things belonged to herself. On the dresser lay May’s hairbrush and a blue ribbon rolled up like a snail. Stacked behind these were the three novels of her library, each dated the day of the evacuation and inscribed with the words love, Mum. Beside them lay a piece of paper and a pen: Heloise had written to the child’s mother on their first day at Heron Hall, and May had soon sent a letter of her own, and evidently she’d started another. Dear Mum, Cecily read, I hope you are well. I am well. The weather here is not too warm. I miss you. I think about Dad a lot. As the epistle ended there, so did Cecily’s reading: she turned her attention to a box of barley sugar from which she prised a yellow twist. She didn’t expect to find May in the dresser, but she opened the drawers anyway. Folded in the top drawer were the girl’s stockings, knickers, handkerchiefs and slips. In the middle drawer were her petticoat and cardigan. In the bottom drawer were her gas mask and identity card. Nothing of interest. The room stood vacant and cool, its walls a tangle of vines. Cecily’s reflection wavered in the mirror, a chubby-cheeked girl with a veil of yellow curls and eyes of the most timid blue.

  She crunched up the barley sugar and raided the box for another.

  In the cupboard hung the dun dress which the evacuee had worn on the train; she had another made of summery cotton, and a third made of thick wool. This last was missing. Missing, too, was the girl’s overcoat. “She’s gone outside,” the detective deduced.

  She went downstairs and through the maze of corridors at the back of the house. Fragrances came from the kitchen, beckoning Cecily to its door. Cook was sitting alone at the table, reading the newspaper with her back to the stove. It was a perfect opportunity to order breakfast and have Cook prepare it without distraction, so the tea would be sweet, the toast without char, everything served just as Cecily liked it, pipingly hot and divine. But Cook had a nephew who was fighting abroad, and instinct warned Cecily not to interrupt a woman who was scanning a list of names for one she recognised. Besides, the longer May Bright was rambling about unchaperoned, the more necessary it became to reel her in. The longer she survived by herself, the less she needed Cecily to be with her. Breakfast must wait.

  A quick check in the mud room confirmed the evacuee’s wellingtons were gone.

  The rear of Heron Hall let onto a cobbled yard where horses had once been hitched into carriages. Standing to one side was a stone barn, inside which were the coach-house and stalls. There were no horses at the Hall anymore, for Peregrine did not ride; the milking cow spent the winter in the barn, but it was summer now and she was out in the field. But buried within old piles of straw could be found nests of mice or chicks, and doves cooed in the rafters; in summers gone by, Cecily and Jeremy had often played in the stalls, and Cecily had introduced them to May with the air of Moses parting the sea. The girls had spent happy hours here: but a quick investigation showed the child wasn’t in the barn this morning, not unless she was buried like a rodent in the hay.

  A row of sandstone outbuildings stood further back in the yard: here were the knife-house and the grain-house, the lumber-house and the gardener’s store. Here too was the outside privy, which was a fascinating black hole to the centre of the earth. Cecily checked each of these, certain she would discover her errant charge in one or the other. May liked flowerpots and seeds, she liked bent nails and vats of corn, she liked the Hall’s grumpy gardener, she liked Hobbs the driver and the flashy long-nosed car, she probably liked knives and lumber, for all that Cecily knew. But the outbuildings were empty, and although the pitch-dark privy was the sort of place some people felt drawn to, May was not there either.

  At the end of the outbuildings stood the kennels. Generations of hounds had lived in them, but Peregrine did not hunt, and Cecily had only ever known the kennels as a collection of empty cages into which she’d once shut herself and pretended to be a dog. That was a long time ago, but she hadn’t forgotten the look on her mother’s face when she discovered her daughter baying like a beagle. “May?” she called now, nose to the wire; and only a breath of breeze answered, light-footed as a fawn.

  A low stone wall surrounded the yard, and its railed gate stood ajar. Cecily gazed at it, and through it to the meadow beyond. Cecily liked being in the country, but she was no great fan of the actual countryside. Contact with the land inevitably resulted in feelings of damp, cold, and weariness. But in the past ten days she had learned that, rather than avoid such feelings, May Bright seemed to like them. Staring at the unhooked gate, Cecily knew, with a sinking heart, that this morning the evacuee had struck out alone into the wild.

  She climbed the gate’s railings most cautiously, and surveyed the fields.

  The morning sun wasn’t strong enough to take the chill from the air. The breeze carried the clean odour of soil and trees. The countryside around Heron Hall always seemed contrary and undecided — it was rocky and boggy, flat and hilly, flowery and thorny, balding and overgrown, purple, yellow, green, grey, brown, and sometimes it was all these things within the space of a few footsteps. It was rough country, scratchy with heather, crunchy with stone, whispery with running water and gusting leaves. In winter it snowed here, but the land stayed wet even through the brief summer, and patches of mud lay in wait for Cecily’s boots.

  She shielded her eyes and looked into the distance, over the fields to where hills rose half-heartedly and fell away. Jeremy had once found a ring in the shadow of those hills: Peregrine said it was a gentleman’s ring dating from Tudor times, and had let Jeremy keep it though it was too big for him.
Since they’d arrived at the Hall, Jeremy had spent most of the days roaming the estate, a mackintosh over his shoulders and a little earth-pick in hand. In the mornings he read the newspapers and in the evenings he listened to war reports on the radio, frowning past the spitfire of static. As company he was useless, preoccupied by unshared thoughts, preferring, if he could not be with his uncle or with Hobbs, to be alone: while he seemed to like the evacuee, it was unlikely that wherever Jeremy was, May was too. Yet anything was possible, and Cecily knew herself not to be canny. She didn’t always notice everything, even things which were plainly before her, and she’d come to expect the world to surprise. Usually, the surprises were good. Maybe that would change. Maybe Jeremy and the girl had gone off together, this cool morning, to dig up the mouldy skeleton of a medieval monk. Everyone would make a fuss and forget completely about Cecily.

  “May!” she hollered, and the breeze snatched the word and whisked it away. She rubbed her face, groaning. It was possible the girl had gone to the henhouse or to the lake where the herons prowled. She might have skirted the Hall and gone down to the road and along it to the village, although there was no good reason for anyone to go there. The shops wouldn’t open for another hour. If she’d gone to the road, it would be for a reason other than shopping.

  Cecily wobbled on the gate, wishing her father were here. He would cut through this confusion and speak sense. Cecil-doll, he might say, it’s no good worrying about other people. You’ve got to look after yourself.

  She took his advice and climbed down from the gate — just as a shadow romped from the darkness of a distant copse of trees. It romped, and it barked — it was Byron. The dog’s blurred shape was followed by another, small and swathed. Cecily watched the girl pick her way over the changeable earth; and as Byron, sighting her, ambled up sloppy-tongued and sodden of paw, and as it became clear that the child had merely been out for a walk, Cecily’s anxiety hardened into crossness. “I was worried about you!” she shouted, when May was close enough to hear.

  “Why?” the girl shouted back.

  “I thought you’d drowned in the lake!”

  “Why?” May replied.

  Cecily clamped her mouth shut: she wouldn’t enter a thankless conversation. She watched the girl toil over the unpredictable terrain, her hands held out for balance. It was not in Cecily to hope somebody would slip and break a leg, but the evacuee deserved at least a reprimand. “You’re not allowed to leave the house before breakfast,” she told her.

  The breeze had reddened May’s white cheeks, and whitened her red lips. Her black hair shone blue, her blue eyes sparkled like sapphires. Her hands were smirched from touching trees, and her wellingtons were stuck with leaves. “Why?” she asked.

  “Cook doesn’t like it, that’s why. Cook gets angry. Look at you, you’re filthy, you’ll have to wash, and change your clothes. Where have you been?”

  “I went for a walk —”

  “Well you’re not allowed to —”

  “Why?”

  “Stop saying why! Uncle Peregrine wouldn’t want it, that’s why!”

  May wiped her nose. “I don’t think Mr Lockwood would care if I went for a walk,” she said.

  “He wouldn’t!” snapped Cecily, who wasn’t skilled at fibbing. Honesty was, for her, not merely the best policy, but the only one she could reliably manage. “I was worried,” she said again.

  May answered, not unkindly, “You don’t have to be. I’m used to looking after myself.”

  “In the city, not — here!” Cecily waved a hand at the landscape as if there resided dragons. “Where did you go?”

  “I followed Byron. We found a big stream.”

  “You mean the river? That’s far.”

  “How can it be a river? It only came up to my ankles.”

  “I don’t think there’s a law to say how deep a river should be,” Cecily said archly.

  May chose not to argue. “We crossed the river, and we found some old ruins.”

  “Those ruins! It’s dangerous there. You could have been lost or killed. Probably killed.”

  “Killed how?”

  “A stone could have fallen and smashed your brains, ninny!”

  “Huh.” May was impressed.

  They had followed Byron into the courtyard, May’s boots leaving prints on the cobbles. While Cecily’s back had been turned to the house, the curtains had been opened in the drawing room and Cook had put out a saucer of milk for the cats. Cecily registered this as a good sign: Cook would not be feeding cats if she’d found her nephew’s name in the newspaper. The world had righted itself, all was as it should be. “What are those ruins?” May asked.

  “Just some ruins. They were once a castle, maybe for — a knight? Ask Uncle Peregrine, he knows. He knows things about — history.”

  “Is he a historian?”

  “No . . .” There was a problem, Cecily didn’t know exactly what a historian was, or if her uncle was one; and if he wasn’t a historian, she didn’t know what he was. “He reads a lot of books. He knows all sorts of things. I know he sends telegrams to Daddy, and Daddy sends telegrams to him. Something to do with the war, I expect. Everything’s to do with the war. It’s no use asking me, I don’t know anything, and what I do know — I forget.”

  May smiled. She wasn’t a particularly smiley child, indeed she wore a serious expression almost always; but she smiled at Cecily like somebody who could read a person’s thoughts. It was a worrying revelation, and also a relief. But then she said, “Look at the stripy kitten — oh Byron, don’t chase him!” and Cecily decided she’d smiled because of the quaint animals, and was both disappointed and reassured.

  May appeared at the table with clean clothes and face, the dewdrops brushed from her hair, her nose no longer blanched. No one would have guessed she’d spent the first hours of the day fording rivers under the gaze of ravens.

  Peregrine Lockwood was already at breakfast, as were his niece and nephew. Heloise had breakfast brought to her bed, an indulgence for which the at-table diners had a low opinion. But her absence meant they ate without formality, forgoing the fine dining room for a small round table in a room that seemed to have no purpose except to catch the morning sunshine with its windows, and beam warmth and light onto its occupants. It was a lovely room, a sleepy room, a room which smelt of hot bread.

  May slipped into her chair opposite the master of the house. He was perusing a newspaper and didn’t look up. He said, “You stole my dog.”

  “I didn’t . . .”

  “He claims you did, extremely early this morning. He says he was on guard as usual outside my door, but that you lured him away with hypnotism.”

  May smiled. “He wanted to come with me.”

  Peregrine turned a page of the newspaper. With his wild hair and white shirt turned back at the cuffs, he looked a lot like a pirate. “It’s his word against yours. I’d believe a dog before a child.”

  “You went out this morning?” asked Jeremy.

  “What’s her punishment, Uncle Peregrine?”

  The pirate glanced sideways. “Only criminal minds turn to punishment, Cecily.”

  “But she stole Byron! She should be punished.”

  “Perhaps her punishment could be to watch you eat a soft-boiled egg.”

  Cecily was baffled. Her uncle knew she hated soft-boiled eggs. “You should keep quiet,” her brother advised. “Where did you go, May?”

  “Only to the river.”

  “You thought it was a stream! She thought it was a stream.”

  The maid brought in a rack of toast and fresh tea, and asked the evacuee what she would like. “A soft-boiled egg!” yipped Cecily. And May, who hadn’t yet fully embraced the luxury of ordering whatever she chose, shrank in her chair and mumbled, “A soft-boiled egg, please.”

  They shared the toast and passed the marmalade. Sunshine purred around the room, sprinkling stars of light on the silver pots and cutlery. Through the tall windows the breakfasters could see
chaffinches and starlings hopping on the lawn. The room faced the front of the house: out there was the gate, the road, the town, eventually London followed by the world. Peregrine folded the paper and passed it to his nephew. “Debacle,” he remarked.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Debacle. A noun from the French, meaning utter collapse, a point at which we haven’t quite yet arrived, but very soon might. Cecily, your ignorance is repellent. Don’t they teach you anything at school?”

  “They try, but it doesn’t stick.”

  “Perhaps because you’re never there. Why aren’t you? There’s a school in the village.”

  Cecily shrugged. “Mama hasn’t sent us.”

  “I won’t go.” Jeremy sliced his toast savagely. “What’s the point? A poky little village school won’t teach me anything I don’t already know.”

  May’s boiled egg arrived, accompanied by toast; Cecily grunted, “Ugh!” when decapitation revealed the yellow syrup inside. Sunlight sparkled on Jeremy’s hair as he scanned the front page of the newspaper. Reports of the war barked across it in sooty print. “Debacle,” he agreed.

  “If it’s just going to be a debacle,” opined his sister, “we shouldn’t fight it. We should stop before it all gets silly.”

  Peregrine looked sharp at her. “Absolutely and without question we have to fight. We had to fight, and we have to keep fighting.”

  “But if it’s a debacle, and soldiers are being killed…”

  “The consequences of not fighting would be worse. May’s father knew that; it’s why he volunteered.” Peregrine chose a pear from the bowl, halved it with the glide of a knife. “Soldiers have died and many more will die, there’s no doubt about that. But there are times when men’s lives can’t matter as much as what they must be used for.”