The Children of the King

by Sonya Hartnett

  “Well, I think your father could explain the difference —”

  “It’s the same thing.” Jeremy turned away dismissively.

  Peregrine shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it, making no comment on the rift between mother and son. He said, “The Queen, seeing those soldiers, saw she had no choice. The child was handed over, and some say he wept and hated to leave his mama, and some say he was overjoyed to escape the confines of the Abbey and be united with his brother.”

  “Probably a bit of both,” said Cecily.

  A small voice spoke up: it belonged to May Bright. “Did they know each other, those brothers? The Prince had always lived in his castle in the south. His brother had always lived with his mother in the palace. Weren’t they strangers?”

  “An interesting point,” admitted Peregrine. “I suppose that, even if they didn’t know each other well, they knew they could be friends.”

  “Like you and me, May ! We were strangers, now we’re friends. Children like being with other children.”

  “I wonder,” mused Jeremy. “I wonder if the Prince was really happy to see him.”

  “Of course he was! Why wouldn’t he have been? I would have been happy to see you, Jem —”

  “But I wouldn’t have been happy to see you, Cecily — don’t you get it? The Prince was smart. He knew he was in a dangerous place. Now his brother was in that place too.”

  Cecily rolled her eyes. “I do get it,” she said. “But even though the Prince was smart, he was still a boy. He would have been glad to see someone his own age. Someone to talk to. Someone to play with. Wouldn’t you have been sort-of glad to see me?”

  “No,” said Jeremy.

  Cecily stuck out her tongue and turned her back to him. “Keep telling the story, Uncle Peregrine.”

  Peregrine’s gaze had fallen; the last few days had been harrowing, and he was exhausted. “They did play,” he said. “Some people claim to have seen the brothers playing together in the gardens in the days after Richard joined his brother. By now the Duke was also living in the Tower. He’d taken the Prince’s grand chamber as his own, and moved the boys deeper into the building, into the Keep. The rooms of the Keep were very fine, but they were also impossible to escape. They had been used to hold important prisoners in the past; now, they did so again. The walls of the Keep were thicker than a man is tall; and no one could see into the windows, and no one could see out. Soon sightings of the princes in the gardens grew sparse, and petered out; and soon the two children were never seen outside, in the sunshine, again.”

  Newspapers: always newspapers, with their dirty inky smell and their vague dustiness, taking up too much of the breakfast table and catching her uncle’s eye as if he were a sailor and they that singing mermaid on the rock. Jeremy was different: he could lose himself in the pages all day for all Cecily cared, although anyone could see that reading about bombs and aeroplanes wasn’t doing him any good. Her uncle, however, was another matter. Cecily felt physical pain to have Peregrine so near, and yet to be ignored. She glared across the table, psychically willing him to lower the paper and talk. The newspaper shielded him like a jealous girl obscuring the stare of a rival. “Uncle Peregrine!” she finally squawked.

  “Mmm?”

  Immediately Cecily realised she had nothing specific to say. “What’s . . . what’s happening?” she asked, though she could see for herself. LONDON HIT HARD OVERNIGHT read the headlines. It chilled her to know they were talking about her own city, where her home was, where her father was.

  “What’s happening is an outrage,” muttered Peregrine, and shook straight the sagging paper.

  Cecily glanced at May, who sat with her back to the windows. The morning sun came through the glass and spangled around the edges of the evacuee. The sky behind her was a watercolour blue. “It’s going to be a nice day,” Cecily observed.

  “We can play outside,” said May.

  “After lessons.” Cecily looked at her brother. “What will we learn today, Jem?”

  He frowned, proving he’d heard something, but his attention stayed on the newspaper. “I’m not sure. Maybe later.”

  May smiled; Cecily felt glum. She heaped raspberry jam on a slice of toast, so much that it plastered her nose with redness as it passed underneath. It took time to consume this monster, during which Jeremy made several comments on the air raids but failed to notice his sister’s indelicacy. “Uncle,” said Cecily, when she’d unstuck her teeth and could speak again, “those two princes in the Tower. Why have they disappeared?”

  It was something which had troubled her as she’d readied herself for bed the previous night, that Peregrine had ended the second instalment of the Duke’s story at the point of the brothers’ vanishing from view. It was not a settled place to park the telling, and had left her feeling frustrated. “What’s happened to them? Are they dead?”

  A victory: Peregrine actually glanced past the newspaper. “The story is more than four hundred and fifty years old. Everyone in it is dead.”

  “You know what I mean! Tell us what’s happened.”

  “Not now.”

  “Aww! Please? You might have to go away again, and not come back for days . . .”

  “Well, a story that’s waited nearly five centuries can easily wait a few days.”

  Cecily slumped. Jeremy turned a page, and Cecily’s disappointed eye fell on a photograph in a corner of the newspaper. A woman and a child stood beside a mountain of hideous rubble. From the way they were standing, the way they were staring, one could tell the rubble had been their house. Craning closer, she read the caption. Alex, aged 7, sobs and says, “I can’t find my cat!”

  “Oh!” Cecily’s eyes went swimmy. “Don’t worry little boy, you’ll find your cat! He’s got nine lives, remember?”

  After breakfast the girls did the skipping, hopping and press-ups which would keep their minds healthy and their bodies ready for action. Then they tumbled out into the day, which was not as warm as it looked, and made their daily rounds of the outbuildings. May said they might find a tramp asleep in the barn; Cecily wasn’t sure she wanted to. She was ready to run as May poked about in the hay with a pitchfork. A moth flew up, but no pronged tramp screamed. Finally, “You might as well stop,” Cecily said. “There’s nobody here.”

  “Hmm,” said May.

  Cecily changed the subject. “I’m worried about Daddy. Those horrible bombs. Are you worried about your mum?”

  May didn’t dignify the question with an answer, only hung the fork on the wall. A pigeon had come to the door of the barn and was sunning itself in a square of light. May waggled her fingers at it, and it looked back with a scarlet stare. Idly she said, “If your daddy is so important, he’ll be safe. They won’t let bombs fall on important people’s heads.”

  “Won’t they?”

  “No. It’s like what my mum says about France: all the fancy generals stay far away, only the ordinary soldiers get shot. Only ordinary people will get squished by bombs. All the important people will be safe.”

  Cecily thought on this, reasoned it was probably true. It was necessary to keep the important people safe, because otherwise important things would no longer get done. The pigeon had waddled off, flecks of hay were floating through the sunshine. “What shall we do now?” she asked.

  “Let’s play sanctuary,” said May.

  “Yeah! How do we play that?”

  “We’ll go to Snow Castle, and that can be sanctuary, and I’ll be the Duke and you can be the Queen, and you can hide, and I’ll try to make you come out.”

  “OK!” Cecily went for the door — then caught herself, turning back with a bashful face. “Do we have to play in Snow Castle? Can’t we play here? I’m a bit scared of Snow Castle,” she admitted.

  May the Fearless replied, “It’s only an old ruin. It just makes funny echoes. It can’t hurt you.”

  “What about those boys?”

  “Those boys weren’t there last time. They’ve probably gone
home. It’s been days and days.”

  “Uh,” said Cecily, convinced, yet unconvinced. “Shall we bring Byron?”

  “Yes! Then when I’m the Duke, he can be my army.”

  So they located and chivvied the Newfoundland from his place at his master’s feet, changed their shoes for wellingtons and ran out into the field, May speeding about like a fighter plane, Cecily lumbering like a bomber. “Get away from me, get away from me!” she shrilled at the evacuee, getting into character as the Queen; in reply May laughed connivingly, and tossed her glossy head. In the woods she found a good stick which would serve as a sword; naturally Cecily also required a prop, so May yanked a length of weed from around an elm’s trunk and fashioned it into a crown.

  They romped into the morning, two girls who easily forgot that the world was tearing apart at the seams. They slogged across the far field with the usual sense of being the last people alive, crossed the river with the typical dunking of feet, climbed the bank with the required muddying of knees. Snow Castle stood, devastated as ever, beautiful in the cream light. Sunlight shafted between gaps in the stone, twinkled on chips of white marble. May and Cecily stopped and stared. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Cecily couldn’t fathom how something so festery and broken could be so spectacular.

  “It’s strange. Most of the castle has gone, but — it feels like it’s here, doesn’t it?”

  Cecily believed she knew what May meant. Although most of Snow Castle’s walls and all of its roof were missing, their very absence told of things that had been. It was impossible to look at the ruin and not envisage the turrets, the countless rooms, the sweeping stairways, the massive arched doors. And all these seemed here rather more than they weren’t here. . . . It was odd. It was as if the destructions and disappearances of time had caused the castle no real inconvenience at all.

  With a wave of her hand May gestured that the Queen should seek the safety of sanctuary. “Go in where I can’t reach you.”

  Cecily took four or five steps forward, and stalled. Even this short distance into the depths of the ruin made her feel enveloped by stone, and alone. She looked back. “Is this far enough?”

  “That’s good, just stand there. Now you are the Queen in sanctuary. Come out, you hag!”

  May yelled these last words, startling Cecily. Then, grinning, the Queen howled back, “Never, you beast! I don’t trust you as far as I can spit! A pox on you, wicked Duke!”

  May danced about. “A pox?”

  “That’s what I said, a pox!”

  “What’s a pox?”

  “I don’t know! It’s a kind of cage —”

  “That’s a box!”

  “Oh, I don’t care, a pox and a box!”

  “Listen to me, Queeny!” May shook her sword. “You have to come out. You’re embarrassing me. You’re making me look bad.”

  “You are bad! It serves you right if you’re embarrassed. I’m never coming out. I like it here in sanctuary. It’s very snug.”

  “I can make it not snug . . .”

  “No you can’t, you can’t touch me, not while I’m in sanctuary!” The Queen actually thumbed her nose, an act unbecoming of royalty. “You’re a sneaky man, and you’ve kidnapped my son. If my husband the King were here, he’d wring your neck!”

  “But the King’s not here!” shouted the Duke, who felt the Queen was running off with the show. “He’s as dead as a dodo —”

  “Ha ha!” The Queen pounced. “The dodo isn’t dead yet, dummy!”

  The girls stared at each other, stunned by this uncharacteristic brilliance on Cecily’s part. “Well, the King isn’t here,” said May lamely, “and now I’m going to — to — send in the bear!” She waved the sword at Byron. “Fetch her, loyal bear! Grab the hag by the hair!”

  But Byron was sniffing an arena of grass where fox cubs had tussled during the night, and did not answer the call of duty beyond a noncommittal wave of his tail. “Go!” said May, slashing her sword; the magnificent tail waved. “Oh bear!” cried May, feeling her material growing thin. “What can you smell? Is it the blood of my poor brother Clarence?”

  “I hope so,” cackled the Queen. “I’m glad he’s dead dead dead!”

  “I’m not,” said May, and there was something in her voice that Cecily might have noticed, a quaver, a pulled thread, as if she had sympathy for all those who pay a heavy price for rash decisions — had not Byron, at that instant, flung up his head and barked. His hair went electric, his white fangs showed, he transformed into a creature more ferocious than any bear. Cecily and May sprang away, but even as they leapt it was clear the dog wasn’t barking at them. His blazing eyes were fixed on something which hovered somewhere behind Cecily, in the core of the ruin.

  It was May who gathered her wits first, and hastened to scoop her arms around the dog’s neck. “Shh, By-By! It’s only that boy!”

  It was the younger one, watching them resentfully as if they were the intruders, not he. Cecily glared, hardly believing her eyes. “You!” she said.

  “Me,” the child replied.

  May hugged Byron. “You gave us a fright!”

  “That dog did,” the child corrected. “I don’t care for that dog.”

  “The dog doesn’t care for you,” said Cecily. There was an arrogance about this boy that brought out a remorselessness in her, and she felt no guilt in allowing it free rein, but rather a primitive satisfaction. Some instinct, much older than her twelve years, warned her that she must not let the boy, these boys, lull her. “Where’s your brother?” she asked.

  “Would you rather talk to him?”

  “Not particularly. I’m just wondering where he is.”

  The child smiled, leaned his head against a wall. He was wearing his florid outfit of velvet and linen, and his long fawn hair hung in groomed ringlets. “People always want to talk to my brother. Never to me.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Sometimes I’d like to be the special one.”

  Cecily, second-born and, she frequently suspected, second-best, was taken aback. “I know how you feel,” she had to admit.

  “Do you?” He looked up. “Why do you?”

  “I’ve got an older brother too. You’re not the only one.”

  The child thought this over. “Does he talk of things you don’t care about? Does he sometimes say, Go away, I must think?”

  “All the time,” said Cecily.

  “We are friends then!” chirruped the child: and the smile he gave Cecily was so endearing, so vibrant and full of willingness and invitation to play, that the wary instinct inside her seemed misguided, like the good dog in the tale of the hobgoblins. Indeed, in the boy’s smile Cecily remembered things she had forgotten: toys long lost, cuddles from her mother, the taste of biscuits she’d chewed as a baby. It was very odd, yet it made her want to be his friend.

  The good dog who stood beside her, however, was not so easily won over. Byron continued to growl at the boy. The child hardly glanced at the animal, but May saw that he kept the dog in the corner of his eye. “Where is your brother?” she asked. “Are you alone?”

  He smiled again — secretive and knowing, this time — and looked over his shoulder. “They can’t see you,” he said, and his brother was suddenly there, beside his sibling; and both girls had the confusing sense that he’d always been there, in the shadows, but that somehow they’d been unable to notice him.

  Like the child, the older boy was wearing an elegant outfit of navy velvet. His long hair shone cleanly, and his face, porcelain-pale, was blushed with pink life. Together, the brothers made Cecily think of pretty dolls which never had left a glass cabinet; which were, perhaps, locked in the cabinet, in a locked attic, high up in the roof space of a boarded-up and forgotten house. The older boy stared dubiously at the Newfoundland: “Brother,” he muttered, “come away.”

  “Sit down, Byron! That’s enough!” With the big dog quietened, Cecily said to the pair, “Why are you still here? Weren’t you escaping fr
om your hosts and running back to your mother?”

  “We still wish to go home. But it’s only a dream.”

  Cecily snorted. “You could at least try. You haven’t tried very hard, have you? All this time and you haven’t taken one step closer to home.”

  The boy dropped his gaze. “I should do better,” he admitted. “But we are watched, as I told you. The roads are watched. If we are caught, we will be punished.”

  “Who will punish you? Your host family? We’ve heard that some people are treating their evacuees poorly, making them work on the farm and clean floors — is that what your hosts have been doing? Have they whipped you? Are they starving you? Have they beat you with a stick?”

  “Silence!” The younger child jabbed a sudden finger at Cecily. “You said your father would save us!”

  “I meant he will save us in the war, you goose. He can’t save you from scrubbing the floors, he’s too . . .” Cecily stopped short of using the word important. She should have been proud, yet she hesitated. “He’s busy with big things, like battles. Not small things, like children.”

  The taller boy’s curls tumbled as he shook his head. “It no longer matters,” he said. “It’s too late for us now. I had hopes, but I have given up hoping. Everything is lost.”

  “No, no, all is not lost!” The child clutched his brother’s shoulder as if to prevent him from sliding irretrievably away. “All isn’t lost! You still have me!”

  “Yes, I have you.” The boy smiled faintly at Cecily and May. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t. If it were just myself here, I would not fear. They could do with me as they please —”

  “Don’t say this! Oh, don’t lose heart!”

  “— but I must protect my brother. That is my single duty now. And it is dangerous to leave this place. Dangerous to go home; yet dangerous to stay.”

  Cecily pawed the grass. Inside her boiled a perplexing brew of feelings for these two. They infuriated and fascinated her, made her feel strong but also ignorant. “Home is dangerous because of the bombs? Of course it’s dangerous! But my daddy is in London, and May’s mum is there, and thousands of other people are there —”