In a moment, the Lord Steward approached the children and admonished them to keep their clothes tidy. Simon had aged considerably and was all but bald. The skin on his head was a spectacle of sunspots and scabbing wounds.
It was time.
Grabbing hold of the bars, he began to climb. Those closest to him screamed.
“Stop!” Rabbi Ariel yelled. “What are you doing? Get down before they see you acting like a madman. They’ll arrest you!”
He pulled himself to the top and paused there. He only had moments, but this was once the view from the castle that, however brief in his life, belonged to him.
Up so high, the cold wind stunned him. Past the surging soldiers and the staff of the Middle Ward, and the men in the crowd below him trying to pull him down, Windsor lay out for him to see. Its towers, spires, parks, and the palace, its paths and its people. The sun struggled to burn patchy holes through a wintry fog, opening a glimpse at the wing he once lived in, the spinal span of the Norman Gate, masts of smoke as fragile and spindly in the wind as the smallest whorls on his finger. Below him was the chaos and rage he’d started by doing what he was doing, but up high the world felt eerily quiet and it was easy to imagine that there were many roads available to him, not just the one he was about to take.
Somewhere beyond sight, the one he thought of in all the moments of his days and the hot hours of his nights saw him. Right now, he saw everything, even if no one else could. A ridiculous, childish hope. But the heart had more rooms than Windsor. There was no end to what it could hold.
He let himself fall to the ground on the other side of the gate, in the ward. Soldiers surrounded him and ordered him to put his hands up.
The rabbi screamed his name, but he was intent on the distant open window of the Blue Room. “Your Majesty,” he shouted, “I must speak to you!”
“Get on your knees!” the yeoman of the queen’s body guard ordered, pointing a halberd at his chest. The soldier was no more than a meter away. The other yeomen stood around him in a semicircle, leveling their own blades at him.
“Your Majesty,” he screamed again, “please! Let me speak to you. Someone let me see her!”
One of the yeomen pushed him to the ground, then placed a knee against his neck. Dirt and frost filled his mouth.
“Please don’t hurt him,” he heard Rabbi Ariel plead from across the ward. “He’s sick. He’s not himself—”
The yeomen pulled him to his feet. They bound his hands at the wrists.
Princess Louise stood in the chapel doorway, watching him. He saw her fear and that made sense. A madman, a Negro, invading her sacred home and screaming for the queen.
But he saw something else in the princess. The way she stared at him. At his hands. She knew who he was.
She didn’t turn away fast enough to hide it from him.
Rabbi Ariel pressed himself against the bars of the gate, begging for his friend’s life while the yeomen held their blades to his throat. The stunned crowd, Simon, the now-silent children on the motte, the princess, they all watched him and whispered to each other.
He held his bound hands high. His right palm. Princess Louise gasped.
The Blue Room curtains blew gently apart.
“Please tell them you’re sorry,” Rabbi Ariel called to him. “They’ll throw you in a cell or worse. Tell them, Philip—”
“I’m not Philip!”
It was as if the world stopped. He felt an overwhelming need to turn away from the rabbi’s pale, shocked expression, from his eyes that the distance made black and full of pity and anger.
He’ll hate me, starting right now. The both of us, friends and yet worlds apart, and the moment finds us thinking the same thing about me. That’s not the man I’ve known all these years.
A razor-sharp and merciless feeling settled in him. I said it too soon. I’m not ready. I want the words back. The years. I can’t come back from this. I can’t beg or lie my way back from this and I’d give anything to run.
You said once, we could run. I’d give it all to have listened to you, Philip.
“I’m not Philip,” he said, his voice cracking. “I need to see the queen. Please, she can’t die without at least seeing me. I’m begging you. At least tell her, there’s no reason to punish herself any longer. She didn’t kill me.”
“Who are you?” Princess Louise shouted at him from a safe distance.
“I’m Alamayou,” he said, loud enough for all of them to hear.
TWO
Chapter Seven
29 December 1900
Rabbi Ariel sat on an uncomfortable, rickety stool alongside Lord Grant. The deafening cries of Newgate’s prisoners echoed through the dank corridors. Many of the jailed men he’d passed on his way inside the prison were hard at menial labor, weaving, mopping, picking akum apart and separating the strands to make new rope as the tar covered their trembling arms.
The men who objected, Lord Grant explained, or who talked, or in any way acted out, were dragged into a separate wing and beaten nearly to death.
“That’s what you’re hearing,” Lord Grant told Rabbi Ariel. “The lullaby of the Old Bailey.”
The cells themselves wept mold and stank of unwashed, miserable men. Their doors were fastened by rusted slip bolts to stones of two- and three-tons’ weight. A cold and unforgiving wind swept through the prison’s halls, bitter and hard. It rattled anything loose.
“I tried to bring you a blanket from the flat,” Rabbi Ariel said through the cell bars, “but the guards confiscated it from me.”
“I appreciate it, rebbe. You didn’t have to do that. You could’ve gotten into trouble.”
“I don’t know what to call you anymore.” The rabbi began to weep.
“Stop it,” Lord Grant admonished him. “Don’t draw attention or they’ll put us out. The fact we’re seeing him at all is a minor miracle and a testament to my influence, if you want to know the truth. In any event, it’s one visit we may never get again, so control yourself.”
“Call me by my name, rebbe.”
Alamayou sat on his cot a few feet from the rabbi. He was separated from his friend by thick iron bars. A tin of soupy porridge lay on the stone floor inside his cell, untouched by all but the rats.
“We have very little time,” Lord Grant said. “Nor will your retainer last forever. What you face, whoever you are, is both serious and unprecedented in my years. If you’re truly the Abyssinian, those charges brought against you thirty years ago were beyond anything I’ve ever argued at bar. War crimes. Deviancy.”
“Deviancy?” Rabbi Ariel snapped.
“Let him finish, rebbe. Can these charges still be brought against me after all this time?”
“I’ll have to research the applicable statute of limitations, but that will matter only as far as your being formally accused of a violation of law from the past. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that you violated the law not a week ago, leaping the gate onto Her Majesty’s grounds.”
“I don’t understand any of this.” Angry, the rabbi wrapped his woolen coat tightly about himself and shivered miserably.
“He means, rebbe, that they don’t need to charge me to do what they meant to do the first time. Send me back to Abyssinia.”
“If you’re Alamayou,” Lord Grant continued, “you are correct. The punishment will no doubt hearken back to Parliament’s original decree. If you’re the other one? Philip Layard? In that case, you’re no better off. The charges are trespassing, endangering the health and welfare of the royal family, and fraud. You’ll never see the outside of these walls again just on those bases, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll die in here or in Abyssinia, is what you’re saying. So be it. Just find me a way to get word to the queen and I’ll die with my name. I’m Alamayou.”
The rabbi stood abruptly. “I can’t listen to this.”
“Listen to me, then, Ariel.”
Staring balefully at Alamayou, the rabbi returned to his seat.
“There aren’t many left who know me,” Alamayou said, “or knew me. Prince Leopold is gone. The queen is gravely ill and I don’t expect her to get into a landau and come to Newgate Prison to see me no matter what she believes. Princess Louise is the only choice I have to get word to the queen. If I can get to her.”
He handed Lord Grant a letter. “Last night, I wrote this in hopes that it might reach the princess.”
Immediately, a guard came and took the letter away. After several minutes, he returned to Alamayou’s cell and handed it back without a word. Lord Grant took it and read it over.
“They didn’t cut it to pieces,” the rabbi said.
“Consider yourself fortunate indeed.” Lord Grant gave it to the rabbi.
28 December 1900
Your Highness,
I’ve held too many secrets for far too long. Rest assured, I’ve paid a high price for that. But I can’t make a secret of myself any longer. Not after the day at the Exposition in Paris when I heard the queen cry my name. I know what it is to carry such a burden as hers. I beg you now, let me give her the peace she deserves, before it’s too late. As one who knows what it is to bear responsibility for a death, it’s not something you can let her take to her grave. Let me end it.
Alamayou
“And now I see why they didn’t destroy this,” Lord Grant said. “It reads like a confession of a crime.”
“Like the Talmud says.” He smiled at the rabbi but received a turned back. “Will you see to it that the princess gets this?”
Lord Grant shook his head. “I’m not comfortable with this. As a solicitor who has advised the family, the queen herself, it’s not appropriate—”
“I’ll do it.”
Rabbi Ariel stood. He took the paper from Lord Grant’s outstretched hand. “I’ll do what I can in the name of the friendship I had up until a week ago. But I need to speak to you privately. Lord Grant, will you give us a moment?”
Somewhere down one of the prison’s many arteries, a man cried out for God while his fellow inmates screamed at him to be quiet. One told him to kill himself.
“Don’t be long,” Lord Grant said, the unease plain on his face, “or I’ll leave you here with the lot of them.”
“Is it true?” Rabbi Ariel asked Alamayou when Lord Grant was a safe distance away.
“Yes.”
“Then why do what you’ve done? You were safe. You had a life in Paris. You had a friend.”
“Do I still?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s dying, rebbe. She’s old and ill, and she’s lost like we’ve all lost if we live long enough. But when I saw her collapse at that Human Zoo, when I heard her cry my name, I knew one of the things killing her, killing her all these years, was living with what she thought she did to me. She thinks she sent me away to die. I can’t let her die now, still believing that.”
“And Philip?” the rabbi asked. “What of him? Or should I say, you?”
“Philip can’t help me now. But I miss him every day.”
“Damn you. I don’t understand anything that’s happened to my life this past week. It’s like you’ve torn it open.”
“Devorah, rebbe.”
“My wife? Why are you bringing her up? What right do you have? She has nothing to do with this. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
“I heard you cry her name at night for years. I heard how much it hurt you. You miss her. You ache with it, still.”
“Yes.”
“Then you do understand what I’m telling you.”
Rabbi Ariel held Alamayou’s letter to the princess in his hand. “I never opened the other one. The old one you gave me at the gate. I won’t, not ever. Is it from him?”
“Yes.”
“God Almighty.”
“Do this one last thing for me, rebbe. Deliver what I wrote to Princess Louise. I don’t know if you can reach her, but try. And then you can be done with me. I hope you’ll forgive me, in time. You’re my only friend and I’ve never needed another. You’re the best man I know.”
“You’re lying again. There was another.”
“Yes.”
“Who you loved,” the rabbi said.
“Yes.”
The rabbi touched the fringe of his tallit and began to whisper the prayer for the dead. “Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba…”
Alamayou sat back on his cot with his head resting against the hard stone wall. He was so terribly tired. It was his ordeal, but, too, the sheer gathering of the past pressing down on him.
The rabbi’s hands trembled, and Alamayou saw that he held both letters. His to the princess, and Philip’s to him.
“Rebbe—”
“I’ll go now, to the castle. I’ll do what I can, and I’ll think on all of this. There’s nothing left to say tonight. A life that I didn’t really know the way I thought, and now a prayer to carry it away from here. Let it all leave with me.”
Rabbi Ariel came close to the bars. In the gloom of the prison corridor, Alamayou thought he could be taken for young.
The rabbi’s hand slipped through the bars. Before the guard saw, Alamayou came over and let the rabbi touch his cheek. “I see it now,” the rabbi said. “In that photograph.”
“What?”
“Your story.”
Alamayou watched him cross the corridor and disappear around a corner.
After a while, the prison settled in on itself. The sounds of breathing men deep in sleep rose and fell like a church hymn.
He said the rabbi’s prayer. Grant me light. I know I’m speaking to empty air. I’m not a believer, never have been. Not in his god or anyone else’s.
It’s just that I don’t want to die in here. Not yet.
I miss you.
§
Upon his arrival at Lord Grant’s home, Rabbi Ariel was ushered into a well-appointed study by a silent young maid. The residence featured warm woods and bookshelves that spoke to Lord Grant’s interest in the origins of law, his refined taste in literature, and his passion for religious thought and scholarship.
“Perhaps we have some common interests,” the rabbi said, then thought better of it given the expression on the solicitor’s face.
“Quite the opposite,” Lord Grant said curtly. “I was this very moment musing on what’s become of me. Representing a renegade Negro at bar, and now a man in my home, quite visibly a Jew.”
“We live in interesting times, do we not?”
“Indeed we do.”
Lord Grant’s wife entered the study ahead of the maid who carried a delicate pot, cups and saucers, and a plate of shortbreads. She set them down and poured the tea.
Rabbi Ariel nodded in gratitude to the maid. He saw the surprise briefly register on her face at being acknowledged.
Such a place, he thought.
“You knew him before?” he asked Lord Grant.
“No. I have been fortunate to be considered a trustworthy solicitor to Her Majesty over the years. On the matter of the Abyssinian, I was asked by her to offer my opinion.”
“Which was?”
“That he presented great risk. That’s what I remember of him. Of the other, I don’t remember anything at all, other than a cheeky, angry colored who had great difficulty keeping to his place.”
“Philip. His name is Philip Layard.”
“Is. Was. No matter now, eh?”
Rabbi Ariel set down his cup. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Nor can I help you decide. I will defend this man despite my trepidation because, candidly, I’ve been paid. The moment that his case in any way conflicts with the interests of Her Majesty or the royal
family, I will withdraw and return his retainer. To you, I imagine. Money can’t help him where he is, or may go.”
“He gave me a note to deliver to the princess somehow. Do you agree that’s what’s left to do? Is it even wise?”
“None of this is wise, Rabbi. We’re far from wise remaining at the Negro’s side. For what it may be worth to you, I do recall the princess being sympathetic to the Abyssinian’s cause. As was the queen.”
“Then why did she send him away?”
Lord Grant turned to his wife. “Give us privacy, my dear.”
“I’ll be near, should you require anything.” She rose and left them alone in the study, sparing the rabbi a disapproving shake of her head.
“She suspects me of something?”
“It’s not that. Your appearance, I suppose. You’re quite foreign. But we speak of Alamayou now. In the end, the queen didn’t send him away. She fought for him until she could no longer. She reached the only decision left to her and her monarchy. Don’t fight for him anymore. Don’t stake the prestige and the political capitol of the Crown on such as the Abyssinian. I give you the same advice, Rabbi. If he is whom he says, he is the son of a murderous tyrant who caused a war. He may be a deviant man. I ask you as a man of God, is he worth saving?”
“As a man of God, that’s not my decision to make, nor is it anyone’s.”
“So be it.” Lord Grant stood. “I’ll see you out.”
They walked to the door under the watchful eye of Lord Grant’s wife. “There was a servant in the castle,” Lord Grant said quietly. “The Lord Steward, Simon. Get the letter to him. Beg if you have to. I don’t know of any other way to reach the princess. I will reach out as well. That’s all I can do until we are before legal argument.”
“Thank you.”
“I cannot say I understand your concern for a man such as him,” Lord Grant said before he closed the door, “but I suppose any man’s last words are worth something.”
§
After paying the hansom driver, Rabbi Ariel walked to Windsor’s gate and peered in. The grounds were empty of all but the occasional servant, bundled against the biting cold as they crossed from ward to ward in the lengthening shadow of the Round Tower. Above him was the spot where Philip had climbed over, setting everything into motion.
The Night Language Page 11
