The Children of the King

by Sonya Hartnett

  “Haw! What job could your mum do, to help win the war? She couldn’t do something proper, like Daddy does.”

  The frown grew deeper. “She was going to work in a factory where they make aeroplanes, or be a bus conductor or an ambulance driver, something like that.”

  “A bus conductor!” It was killingly funny. “As if conducting a bus could win the war!”

  “It’s better than doing nothing,” said the evacuee.

  If anyone thought of Heloise lounging upstairs in her bed with a long day of nothingness stretching before her, nobody mentioned it. Jeremy looked to the window, sunk in heavy silence. The carving of Peregrine’s breakfast seemed to require concentration. “Read it to yourself, May, in your room,” he said. “Be quiet and eat your breakfast, Cecily.”

  Cecily shuffled like a pony that’s being prevented from charging off where it will; she consoled herself by observing, “It’s a very flat envelope. I don’t think there’s a present inside.” And that at least was something to be satisfied about.

  The sunshine of the previous day had gone and the sky was low and sour, the same dire colour as the newspapers that shouldered for space between the plates. Cecily said, “Tell us more about the Duke, Uncle Peregrine,” but her uncle said, “No. The Duke’s story is for telling in the night.” When the evacuee, having finished her breakfast, asked for permission to leave the table, Cecily jack-in-a-boxed out of her chair. But, “Sit down,” said Peregrine, in such a tone that a whole herd of Cecilys would have resumed their seats. “May, you may leave the table. Cecily, stay. I have a matter to discuss with you.”

  “But —”

  He pointed a talon at her chair; his niece plumped down into it. Glumly she watched May disappear out the door; turning to her captor she asked wearily, “What is it, Uncle?”

  “It’s rats.”

  “Rats?” Cecily blanched. If she knew anything, she knew she didn’t like rats.

  “Cook believes there are rats in the larder. If not rats, mice. If not mice, weevils. If not weevils, children.”

  “Hmm,” said Cecily.

  “To say children is unfair. One child. One rack of biscuits, and one child.”

  Jeremy, reading the newspaper but listening, shook his head in disgust.

  “Maybe it was a rat?” suggested Cecily.

  Her uncle wouldn’t be swayed. “A female child with blond ringlets and a pot belly, who shares in common with the rat only that creature’s legendary sneakiness.”

  Cecily always knew when she was beaten. She had no belief in going down fighting, but surrendered the moment it seemed her youth would be the best defence. “They were so delicious,” she said, and let the memory of the biscuits play upon her face to prove how helpless she had been before them. “What’s my punishment?”

  Peregrine looked at Jeremy, who folded back the newspaper and turned it to his sister. “The crossword.”

  Cecily screamed. “That’s not fair!”

  “The crossword it is!” Peregrine passed sentence: “Miss Cecily Lockwood cannot leave this room until the crossword is done. What’s the first clue, Jem?”

  “The queenly state of Australia. Eight letters.”

  Cecily clutched her head.

  With the help of her brother and uncle the puzzle was complete in an hour, but the process sapped Cecily’s joy in being alive. She left the breakfast room feeling dazed, plodded up the stairs. She’d forgotten about May, but the fact of the evacuee’s existence returned to her on the landing. She found the girl in her bedroom, curled up on her pillows and reading a book. Cecily reeled in, slumped against the bedpost, puddled to the floor. “Are you hurt?” May asked.

  “My brain is.”

  May tucked the book under a pillow. “Look at the rain,” she said, and Cecily hoisted her head high enough to see across the quilt and out the window to where rain was falling in workmanlike fashion, as if obliged to do so; perhaps it was.

  “. . . Did you read your mother’s letter?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Did she send you anything besides the letter? A postcard or a ribbon, something like that?”

  “No,” said May, “just a letter.”

  “Ah.” Cecily found she had lost much interest in Mrs Bright’s epistle. “Is she well?”

  “Yes, she’s well.”

  “I hope my daddy is well.”

  Again the girls looked to the weeping sky. The ruts in the land would be filling up and overflowing. “I wonder about those two boys,” murmured Cecily.

  “Maybe they’ve gone home.”

  “Do you think so? To which home? Back to where they were billeted? Or home to London?”

  “I don’t know.” May watched the rain. “It was hard to understand those boys.”

  “I didn’t like those boys, but I felt sorry for them. Didn’t you?”

  “Sort of,” said May.

  “I felt — strange about them. Like they were our dreadful enemies, but also that they couldn’t hurt us. They were scary, but I wasn’t frightened of them. They made me cross, but I also felt sad for them. I didn’t want to talk to them, but I just couldn’t stop talking . . .”

  Cecily halted, pressed her face into the quilt. She hadn’t known she’d had these entangled feelings about the boys. It made her feel peculiar, as if her mind had gone off somewhere without her. She vowed not to think about them anymore. The shock of the crossword was wearing away and she felt revived enough to say, “We can’t go outside in this weather. Shall we play hide-and-seek?”

  “Yes,” said May.

  They complicated the traditional rules of the game by bringing Byron into it: for much of the morning the girls and the dog played an indoor version of fox-hunting, the hiding child being the fox, the seeking child and the Newfoundland playing the huntress and her hound. Through the cavernous rooms of Heron Hall the fox scurried, burying herself within cupboards, behind curtains, inside mighty chests. With methodical determination the hound and huntress followed, snuffling under tables, investigating stairwells, peering behind doors. The third floor of the house, where the staff had their rooms, was off-limits, as were the private rooms of Heloise and Peregrine; still there remained countless nooks in which a child-fox could hide. Nonetheless it was a surprisingly nerve-racking game for the fox, who dodged and weaved and doubled-back yet was gradually but relentlessly cornered by the hound. When May, the huntress, hauled aside a basket of bones to unearth her quarry from beneath a table in the library, she found Cecily rolled into a chunky ball with tears coursing down her face. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I miss my daddy!”

  May was accustomed to Cecily’s daddy appearing in conversation at the slightest of invitations, but this time his arrival surprised even her. “Why? Are you scared?”

  “No, it’s only — you know how you always go to museums with your dad? Well, I always play hide-and-seek with my dad. It would make you cry if you went to a museum without your dad, wouldn’t it? Well, hide-and-seek is making me cry . . .”

  May blinked several times. “My dad —” she began, and stopped. She said, “We won’t play if you don’t want to.”

  Cecily unrolled from below the table, grabbed Byron and wiped her face on him. “I’m not really crying,” she sighed. “I just miss Daddy. I worry about him. He has a very serious job. He must get tired. He’s alone. Do you think he’ll be all right?”

  “Probably. I think so.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “Well . . . he sounds like the kind of person who is always all right.”

  “Is he? I suppose he is.” Cecily mopped her eyes and smiled. “Shall we keep playing?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  But they didn’t keep playing; the library was a fascinating place, with shelves stacked with tomes of all hues and heft laddering up to a domed ceiling where a skylight let in a shaft of the muffled day. The girls moved like moths from shelf to shelf, alighting here and there to draw a book from between its
fellows. Many of the books were old, and puffed out clouds of elderly breath when they were opened. The odour, waved away, revealed words written on rice-paper, in foreign languages, in words understandable yet incomprehensible, occasionally no words at all. Some books had pictures, many painted straight onto the page. There were mountains, exotic birds, literary villains. “Ugh,” May grimaced, and Cecily hurried to see: a book full of drawings of naked men and naked women in graceful poses. The girls stared, turned the pages in silence. The various lumps and bumps seemed nothing to do with them; but, aware they were making landmark discoveries, their cheeks reddened, they flinched in dismay. “Put it away,” Cecily whispered, and May shelved the book promptly, as if it were poison; only then did they giggle delightedly. They ran to the window and refreshed themselves looking out onto flowerbeds and tumbling rain. “I love this house!” said May, the declaration bursting free.

  “Yargh!” trumpeted Cecily, who could summon no other means to describe her satisfaction. “It’s not like your house, is it?”

  The child gave a rollicking laugh. “My house is just a matchbox!”

  “With only one match left inside!”

  “Huh?” said May.

  “You’re gone, and your dad is gone, and only your mum is left! I hope she doesn’t get burned!”

  It was supposed to be light-hearted but, as usual with Cecily, something went askew and it came out rather wrong. “She won’t,” the poor girl added.

  May only smiled, and pushed away from the window. The library’s fireplace was enclosed in carved black marble. On the mantelpiece, in a silver frame, was a photograph of a woman. She was a pretty lady in a long dress, sitting on a low wall with a hat hanging loose in her hands. She was smiling in a way that suggested she couldn’t blame the camera for wanting to take a picture of her. “That’s her.” Cecily was reverent. “Uncle Peregrine’s wife. She died when she had a baby. Then the baby died. They both died. So sad.”

  May, chin tipped, studied the photograph. “Do you think he remembers her?”

  “Of course he does! He loved her. You don’t forget people you love. Maybe you forget their faces, but you don’t forget the love.” This sounded grand but was in fact entirely speculation; no one Cecily loved had ever died; she hustled May’s attention away. Confettied on the hearth were leftovers of papers which had been fed to the fire, and the girls picked up the remnants carefully and put them into the grate. On some of the scraps could be seen handwriting, ragged words which made no sense: never we —, the governm —, most urgen —, I once mor —. Beside the fireplace stood a trim table with legs like fine flutes; on its surface were spread antique drawings of skeletons both animal and human. May wiped her hands on her cardigan before she touched the pages. “What a lot of bones a snake has.”

  Cecily looked. “Like a fallen-down sock.”

  The flensed creature stared through white holes where its eyes would have been. It seemed to be asking something. It seemed to want something from them. A promise to do a thing it could no longer do itself.

  “I don’t think you should play in here.” Jeremy spoke from the doorway, startling the girls. “You’ll destroy something. Everything is precious.”

  “We’re not playing, we’re looking.”

  The boy’s gaze shifted to the basket of bones. “Watch Byron doesn’t eat those. Some of them might be dinosaur bones.”

  Cecily rolled her eyes. “By-By wouldn’t eat a stinky old dinosaur.”

  “These drawings are beautiful,” said May.

  Jeremy accepted the compliment as if he’d done the illustrations himself. He came into the room, picked through the bones, and showed the girls how a real horse vertebra compared with the pen-and-ink image of one; both were like the pieces of a clunky puzzle. “I want to be an archaeologist when I’m older,” he told May. “I’ll need to know about anatomy and geology. Mother and Fa don’t approve, but it’s what I want to do.”

  “If it’s what you want to do, you should do it.”

  The boy smiled ruefully. “That’s easy to say. It’s not that simple. Sometimes I think I have no right to live inside my skin.” He ran a meditative hand over Byron’s head, said, “I bet your father wouldn’t mind if you wanted to become an archaeologist, would he?”

  “I don’t think so,” said May.

  “No. He’d be proud that you wanted to do something interesting, not just do what he has done . . . Any news of him in your mother’s letter?”

  May shook her head. “No.”

  “And has your mum found work?”

  “A letter is a private thing, Jem!”

  “She has a job sewing parachutes,” said May.

  “Parachutes?” Cecily gagged. “Parachutes! How silly!”

  Her brother wheeled, fixing on his sister a glare that would have crippled a more sensitive soul. “You’re so ignorant, Cecily! What’s silly about it? If your plane was shot down and you had to bail out, you wouldn’t think it was silly. If you were falling towards the ground at a hundred miles an hour, you wouldn’t think it was silly. You’d think May’s mother was the cleverest person who’d ever lived! There’d be only one person who mattered in the whole world, and that would be May’s mum!”

  “It just sounds funny.” Cecily snuffled. “Parachutes.”

  Jeremy looked as if a shard of metal was working its way into his heart. Stricken, furious, to drive it deeper he asked, “So she’s working in a factory, May?”

  “In a factory, with other ladies.”

  “That’s happening a lot now, isn’t it — ladies doing the work men used to do. Factories, mining, engineering, farming . . . They’re at the front as well. Nursing, and manning radios. Resistance fighting too, I’ve read.”

  “Ladies,” said Cecily. “Ladies, Jem. Not fourteen-year-old boys. Fourteen-year-old boys have to go to the country with their mummies.”

  A lesser young man might have struck his sister for her cruelty, but Jeremy only turned his face away. He looked at the vertebra in his hand, closed his fingers around its strong white shape; released it, and placed it on top of the sheaf of drawings. “Be careful what you touch,” he said quietly. “Nothing in here belongs to you.” And walked out of the room.

  Peregrine was not at the table for lunch, which wasn’t unusual as he was often busy outside the house or in his study. At the start of the meal, and again near its end, they heard the telephone ring. Footsteps went up and down the staircase, and Hobbs brought the car to the front of the house. None of this was particularly odd, but Jeremy asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Is something going on?” said Heloise. “I have no idea.”

  The boy stared at her as children will when they know that a parent who is capable of lying is actually doing so. But Heloise was polished in everything she did, and her son saw nothing, when he looked at her, but his own eyes staring glassily back at him.

  “It’s stopped raining,” Cecily observed. “Can we play outside this afternoon?”

  It wasn’t necessary to beg permission, as Heloise never minded where the children played, so long as it was out of earshot. On their way to collect their coats the girls passed Jeremy hovering in the hallway where he could scope out the great staircase and the front door. “Come outside and play,” invited May, and gave him a dose of her sparkling eyes and winning smile; and Jeremy mumbled, “No, you go, I have to . . .” and trailed off, his sights returning to the stairs. So May and Cecily put on their wellingtons and went out into the day without him: “The trouble with Jem,” his sister opined, “is that he’s like a guard dog who forgets he’s also just a dog.” And given that Cecily was like a cat whose sole desire was to curl up on somebody’s lap and sleep, May supposed her opinion an educated one.

  Because the earth was soaked and the air so cool, they played in the snug shelter of the outbuildings. The stable walls were hung with old harnesses which rattled musically, and the mangers were dusted with chaff that smelt good. Inside large bins with flat metal lids were tr
oves of grain into which the girls plunged their arms to the elbows. Hunks of wood were piled in the lumber-house, packed into every corner and stacked up to the roof, waiting their turn for the fire. The sight of the severed limbs lumped one upon the other, their very deadness and splintered silence made Cecily sigh, “Poor trees.”

  They explored the knife-house and the kennels, places they’d investigated countless times already; nothing had changed. They clumped about on the cobbles, leaping heavily in their boots. They took turns hanging on the gate and being propelled through the deep arc of its swing. Byron became bored, and slouched back to the house. Finally the girls grew still.

  “What shall we do?”

  “We shall . . . we shall . . . we shall go to the henhouse?”

  “Cook got angry last time we did that. She said we made the hens go off the lay. Besides, I don’t like those birds. They’ve got mean eyes.”

  May propped her chin on the rail. “We shall . . . go to the lake? There’s frogs.”

  “Urgh, frogs!”

  “. . . I wish there was a pony.”

  “There used to be a black Shetland called Jezebel, when I was little. She’s dead now. She bit me. Ponies aren’t as nice as you think.”

  “What will we do then?”

  “I don’t know.” There was nothing. There was only one thing. They both knew it must be done. May slipped from the gate.

  Although the puddles were wider and the land soaked, the long walk across the woods and fields to the ruins did not seem, to Cecily, as arduous as it had the day before, when they’d taken the breakfast leftovers to the castle. Part of Cecily hesitated to return, remembering the horridness of the boys and her own horridness in reply, as well as the painful conversation with May which had followed. But Cecily was not the type to dwell, and all this already seemed the happenings of long ago, the painful edges dulled. She was buoyed by a sense of ownership, compelled by the need to be included, and driven by curiosity: she could not believe the brothers would still be lurking about the miserable ruins, but if they were — well, that was endurance worth witnessing first-hand.