The Children of the King

by Sonya Hartnett

  “But the Duke is not without a few friends still, and one of them got wind of the uprising. The Duke readied to fight, but for once he didn’t have to. As the Tudor prepared to invade, a gale blew, battering the rebel forces to pieces. The Tudor popped back into his hidey-hole before the Duke could grab him; but others were grabbed, and heads rolled. The uprising was hobbled, though not obliterated, as we shall see; and now the Duke knew his peril. He tried, over the next while, to earn back the respect of his subjects, passing sensible laws, caring for the poor, being well-behaved, generous and holy. But no matter what good thing he did, no one would forgive him, and nobody would love him.”

  “Serves him right,” Cecily snarled again.

  The maid came to the door. “More tea, Mr Lockwood?”

  “Please. Any news?”

  “Nothing, Mr Lockwood. Sorry.”

  Cecily sighed. She looked out the window, into the world where her brother had gone. “At least it’s not raining,” she observed. Jeremy would probably be quite content tramping the roads in the sunshine, kicking stones, drinking from brooks.

  When fresh tea had been brought and steam was whiffling from the cups, the storyteller resumed. “And now something happened which marked the beginning of the end for the Duke. His seven-year-old son, his only child, a boy he loved dearly, suddenly died. Fingers pointed: the boy’s death was clearly divine vengeance for the murder of the princes, and maybe even the pious Duke saw things this way. Personally I would rather not believe in a God who would claim the life of a child in retaliation for the death of two others, but these were superstitious, vengeful times. Before a year had passed, the Duke’s wife also sickened and died; yet the Duke, in his grief, received little sympathy. In fact, a rumour was loosed claiming he’d poisoned his wife. Almost everywhere he looked now, among high people and low, the Duke found only contempt. Power, which had once appeared so handsome to him, had warped into something barren and foul. Maybe that is what power always does. Maybe that is the nature of the thing.

  “The Tudor, meanwhile, had been crouched in his hole, spinning his web of treachery. He’d regrouped his forces and repaired his gale-wrecked ships. When he finally made his move, arriving unannounced on the Duke’s shore, the Duke reacted in a surprising way. History says he greeted the news with happiness. Presumably he was pleased that the chance to finish off the pretender had arrived. But perhaps he was happy because —”

  “Because he’d given up,” said May.

  “Because nothing had turned out the way he’d hoped,” Peregrine agreed. “Because everything he’d done had been wrong. Because nothing he’d gained had proved worth having. Because he’d lost what he most desired to keep. And now came this conflict, which would be pure and purifying. The Duke knew how to fight and win; but he would also have known he could be defeated, and he was still willing. Here was the chance to finish everything, one way or the other.

  “He summoned his army and marched south to meet the Tudor. Arriving at the edge of a field beyond which the enemy was massing, he set up camp and tried to rest. It rained that night, and the Duke slept badly, troubled by nightmares. In the morning he was pale, but he was ready.

  “By the end of the battle, which was mercifully brief, the Duke lay dead on the field. He had fought valiantly, as does a true warrior prince. Many of his supporters had deserted him during the clash, swapping sides when it appeared that the Tudor would win. The Duke had survived long enough to see this — to know he’d been abandoned by the last of those he trusted, and now had nothing left to lose but his life. So he charged forward alone, and cut down the enemy’s flag, and then was cut down himself, hacked at by a dozen swords.”

  “Oww,” said Cecily.

  Peregrine smiled faintly. “He had been king for a whisker over two years; two years haunted by the presence, and absence, of two boys. His body was treated as were the corpses of criminals: he was stripped and kicked, and displayed in rags to the crowd. He was buried without ceremony in a pauper’s grave, and years later his bones were dug up and thrown into the river, and that was the very last of him, although his reputation lived on, becoming more and more deformed with time until he came to be seen as a monster. His rival, the Tudor, was crowned the new king, and the people flocked to him, and his twig of the royal tree would grow strongly to this day, so that our King in Buckingham Palace, the one who just missed being flattened by the bomb, might be selling flowers on a street corner if the Duke hadn’t died on that field. And the Duke would not have died on the field if he’d been able to prove the princes were alive, for if the princes lived, the Tudor could never have claimed the crown. But that is how life works — something is done, and it is never undone. Everything that changes, changes everything forever. If the Duke hadn’t died, this war might not have been declared —”

  “And Jem would not have run away.”

  “Exactly. Jeremy would not have run away.”

  Cecily let out a sigh. “That was a funny story. Even though the Duke was bad, it was quite sad.”

  “It’s not finished, though.” May spoke up anxiously. “You’ve forgotten something, Mr Lockwood.”

  “Have I?”

  “You’ve forgotten Snow Castle.”

  Peregrine smiled again, and they knew he’d done no such thing. “Ah, Snow Castle.” He rapped his fingers on the table, leaned back into the sunlight. “Everything I’ve told you of this story so far has been fact — you can read it in any history book, see paintings of the Duke, the Queen, the Tudor in galleries, see artefacts from their lives in museums. But Snow Castle takes us into the realm of wishes and imaginings. No one knows what the castle looked like when it was new and strong. No one knows the exact truth about its past. Snow Castle stands not in the real world, but in the land of what-could-be.”

  “That’s all right,” said Cecily. “I like that land of what-could-be.”

  “Well, I promised I would tell you the legend of the castle, and I will. Would you be so kind as to pour the tea, Cecily; thank you.” He took up the cup, sat back in the sun, vanished in its sparkly light, reappearing again. “When your mother sent you out of London, May, and when your father sent you, Cecily, here to Heron Hall, they sent you north — into the corner of the country where the Duke had felt most secure. He owned houses and land throughout this region, including the house he considered home. His wife and son lived here, and he had friends here even to the end. What peace he found, he found here, in the north. He knew this country like the back of his hand.”

  Both girls glanced at Peregrine’s hands as if there could be seen an engraved map of the Duke’s territory.

  “Ever since the princes disappeared, there have been those who say the dog-man was sent not to murder the princes that night, but rather to spirit them away to a secret place where they would cause no trouble and never be found. These people argue that, since the princes had been declared not royal, they were no threat to the Duke — certainly not a threat to warrant committing a horrendous crime. They’ve pointed out that the Duke was not without goodness, and that he was, above all, a man who feared his God — a God who, we can be certain, wouldn’t take kindly to the snuffing of innocents. These people ignore the fact that no one believed the princes weren’t royal. They overlook the Duke’s unease around the time the brothers disappeared. They brush over his history of removal of his rivals, and the fact that the princes disappeared while they were in his care. Most of all, they forget that, even when rumours were hounding him, when the Tudor was scheming against him, when pulling a prince from his sleeve could have changed things in an instant, the Duke never so much as reached for a cuff.

  “Those who believe the princes didn’t die that night point to the fact that many important children were held in safe houses at that time, usually deep in the country in the custody of wealthy nobles. Here they were cared for and educated, as well as kept out of the way. Clarence’s son lived in such a place; the Queen’s daughters were also held, at one time, in a safe ho
use. It was a pleasant enough way to live, and certainly a child must live somewhere . . . but it was, undeniably, a form of imprisonment. Safe house children were not free.

  “So it’s said by some that the dog-man carried the blanket-wrapped brothers not to a dank corner where their bones would rot away, but out of the dreadful Tower, out of the sleeping city, out into the countryside riding north, always north, into the land where the Duke felt at home, where he was trusted, where he could claim the friendship of secret-keeping men. Rumour has it that here, in the secluded north, the princes were stashed, left in the care of the dog-man and his helpers, taught, fed, tended, but never allowed to step beyond the walls of the castle. Left to amuse themselves, to remember their mother and father, perhaps to plot boyishly of escaping to London and triumphantly claiming the crown. Left to grow shy, and suspicious of strangers, who’d never shown them much kindness. Left, in the hope that they would fade from memory in this wild, lonely place.”

  “In Snow Castle.”

  May barely spoke it. Peregrine hardly nodded. “There were many castles around, some of them hidden and difficult to reach, as is often the nature of castles. Many of them would have been suitable for housing princes. But Snow Castle, with its walls of white marble, must have been a special place — a place of incredible richness completely hidden from the rest of the world. Certainly it seems the kind of place where a grand crime could be committed against history, against truth. Why else would such a glorious building be so ruined now, so rejected, so . . .”

  “Disgraced,” said May.

  He looked at her intently, his eyes black flints. “Disgraced. That is the word.” His gaze travelled the room, over the table and the sideboard and the dog sleeping on the floor, and glided back to his listeners. “It is only a legend,” he said. “Strange things can happen, but usually they don’t. Usually, what happens is the most ordinary thing. That doesn’t mean that life is drear. It simply means you can trust it never to fall below expectation; and sometimes, very occasionally, to soar into the realm of the incredible.”

  He did something, then, that May would never forget: he winked at her as a conjurer on a stage might wink to a child in his audience, as though nobody existed but they two. Then he got to his feet and, followed by his dog, limped from the room, a man who lived, who would live forever, in a house which stood around him like a fortress and a friend, who’d lost his wife and infant so long ago that no one spoke to him about them anymore, who lived a life of quiet mystery surrounded by what pieces of it remained.

  The evacuee waited only a moment before jumping from her chair and hurrying from the room. Cecily — yet again as if impelled by some strong string — followed in the child’s nimble wake. Again, she knew where May’s rush was carrying her. “I don’t think we should go there,” she fretted. “It’s horrible, May.” But the girl didn’t answer; Cecily might as well not have been there. They reached the mud room and May pulled off her shoes. Her wellingtons were a drab brown colour, not the interesting maroon of Cecily’s; she slipped her stockinged feet into them while Cecily watched from the doorway, wringing her fingers. When she was ready May stood up, and looked at Cecily as at a black spider who’d been scurrying in her wake. “Stay here and play with your dolls,” she said. “I don’t need you to come.”

  “Oh May, are you cross with me?”

  May ducked past, and Cecily, struggling on the string, pursued her. They went out into the courtyard, startling a trio of hens. The day was cooler than it promised, the sun weaker than it had seemed from the breakfast room. May opened the gate and went into the field, and Cecily slogged after her. A flock of birds came up from the grass like arrows shot by Indians; Cecily squeaked in surprise. May only marched on. “You should go back,” she stated woodenly. “You haven’t got your boots.”

  Cecily was moving too fast to risk looking at her feet. “Aw well —”

  “Go back. Your mother is already angry. You’ll get into trouble, and then everything will be worse. Everything is already bad enough without your mother being angry about wet boots!”

  “May!” Cecily cowered: she had never heard her friend shout. “Don’t be cross at me.”

  “You blame me for Jeremy running away!”

  “Not now I don’t, not anymore —”

  “You said I was showing off about my dad being a soldier, and that’s why Jem ran away ! And I never did that, I never —”

  “Ug!” Cecily had little air to spare for gasping in dismay. Nonetheless she managed a sound that conveyed repentance and shame, as well as a little impatience. “I said I was sorry, you know I didn’t mean it, I say lots of things I don’t mean!”

  May stopped, so Cecily on her suddenly-slackened string almost bowled over. “You can’t say something, and hurt someone’s feelings, and then say you didn’t mean it and think that makes it better. It doesn’t. Go back, Cecily. I don’t need you with me. I’m going to find those boys —”

  “No, don’t!”

  “— and I’m going to ask for their help. So I don’t need yours.”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “You’re only sorry because I’m angry. Otherwise you wouldn’t care. You’re mean and selfish, and I don’t want to be your friend. You made me want to go home, and I can’t go home.”

  “May, I’m truly sorry —”

  “You might be worried about Jem, but you’re not the only one worried, Cecily. You’re not the only one who’s lost somebody.”

  Cecily had never felt so crushed and vile. She actually thought she might be sick. She scrambled to keep up as the girl marched away. “I know it’s not your fault that Jem’s gone.”

  “It’s too late,” said May.

  Cecily felt sicker, but pressed on. “It was Jem who said we should take an evacuee, did you know? That day at the town hall. He probably would have run off sooner, if you hadn’t been here.”

  May said nothing to these words like pretty baubles on a burnt Christmas tree. Cecily, her heart sunk as low as it could go, bumbled on.

  “If Jem hadn’t said we should take you, then we wouldn’t be here in the meadow. Isn’t that funny, May? It’s exactly what Uncle Peregrine said: one change, changes everything.”

  A frown swooped onto May’s brow and hovered there, vulture-like; it did not fly away. The field delivered the pair into the shadows of the woods: birds scattered, although not the one with its wings spread across May’s face. Cecily cast furtive glances at her. The girl might have been thinking anything. Unable to compose other ways of apologising, Cecily fell silent, moving hangdog between the trees.

  They could see the sun nosing at the brackeny fringe of the woods when May finally spoke. “One change,” she said, “changes everything.”

  “Uh,” said Cecily.

  May looked at her. “Mr Lockwood said that if the princes hadn’t died in the Tower, Jeremy might not have run away.”

  “But they did. Die in the Tower.”

  “But maybe they didn’t. Maybe they got taken to Snow Castle. And died there, instead.”

  The woods, whispery, shady, close, released the children into the green light of the far field. To be speaking of ghosts under such sunlight felt absurd, like building a dungeon into a doll’s house. Cecily didn’t say that her uncle was given to fanciful ideas, which Heloise always advised her daughter to ignore. She said, “But even if they did go to Snow Castle, it would still mean Jeremy would run away — wouldn’t it? Whatever happened back then still ends with Jeremy running away.”

  It was perhaps the most logical thing May had ever heard her say, so she ignored it as an exception to the rule. “Why don’t you go back to the house,” she said, not completely unkindly. “Go back and sit with your mother. She’s worried.”

  Fatigued in body, wounded in spirit, willing to do anything — even commune with ghosts — rather than sit with her mother, Cecily replied, “I think I should come with you. I don’t think you should go alone.”

  May snorted. “Those
boys won’t hurt anyone. They especially won’t hurt me.”

  Cecily didn’t ask why; she just followed. Satiny birds flew about, silver grass glistened. The earth blew wet bubbles under the pressure of the children’s footsteps. They reached the river and Cecily, arms windmilling, groaned as water sloshed into her shoes. May, of course, crossed easily and without incident, as if she’d been born to ford streams.

  And then Snow Castle was before them, the river humming behind them, the gigantic sky above. The walls of the castle, decorated by weeds and smirched by the mossy hands of years, folded around each other like a stony house of cards stilled in mid-collapse. Fleetingly, Cecily thought the ruins beautiful, not for what they had been, but for what they were. Eerily beautiful, like gossamer. Grandly tragic, like a mausoleum. Then the ruins became ruined again, and the sky was empty of birds, and the only sound came from a sullen drip that had been dripping for years.

  And in the midst of it sat the brothers, close to each other, cross-legged on the ground, their faces turned only slightly as if they’d seen and heard the girls coming but were pretending they had not. They looked as real as life, as real as blood and time. “Hello,” said May.

  The boys dipped their heads; the youngster smirked. They seemed to be holding small things in their hands, pebbles or chips of marble. Their long hair blew about their white throats.

  “Hello?” May shifted her feet. “Can you see us?”

  The child, unable to contain himself, gave a giggle, and shushed it. “Don’t look,” the girls heard him whisper hotly to himself.

  They were surely real, for only real boys could be so aggravating. “We can see you,” said Cecily. “Don’t act silly.”

  The child harrumphed and twisted, flinging open his hands. Tiny black stones flew through the air, disappearing as soon as they touched the ground. “Why do you always come here?” he asked, rude as ever.

  “We want to see you,” said May.

  “No one is supposed to see us. I’ve told you this before.” The older brother turned his head. He still looked ill, but not iller. A fussy boy, his velvet clothes were as prim as always. “Anyway, just because you want to see us doesn’t give you the right to do so. We decide whom we shall and shan’t see.”