Prince Leopold looked up at Simon’s announcement. He gestured for Alamayou and Philip to enter.
“Don’t forget to bow,” Simon remarked as they passed.
“I’m not his valet.”
“Kaffir to a kaffir is what I see and what you are.”
“Is there a problem?”
They snapped to attention at Prince Leopold’s voice. It was angry and agitated. The princess placed a hand on his arm, calming him.
Alamayou bowed first, followed by Philip. He looked at the prince with concern. Leopold’s skin was pale and glistening with sweat. He seemed unsteady on his feet.
“Leave us,” Princess Louise told Simon. “Close the doors. Alamayou, Philip, come to us.”
She wore a broadly fanned gown of muted grey. The henna wisps in her hair shone in the light, but there was none of the warmth or the assuredness they’d grown accustomed to. She stood uneasily next to her brother, who glowered at them.
“We’re experiencing difficulties,” she began, “and in rather odd places. It may be related to Alamayou.”
“There’s no question who it’s related to,” Prince Leopold interrupted. “How much does he understand?”
“He’s better every day,” Philip said. “He’s trying his best, Your Highness, and just yesterday he spoke a new phrase.”
“It’s not enough,” the prince snapped.
“Please, brother. You exert yourself.”
“Our monarchy,” Prince Leopold said, ignoring his sister’s plea, “exists because the people believe it should. They see us as the best of England. We stand for what they wish all of England to stand for. We may have the occasional difference of opinion with Parliament or our subjects, but we cannot be questioned on the wisdom of our decisions or our moral standing to make them. Our mother cannot be questioned as to the fitness of her ability to rule. That’s especially true of an act of charity. Of all things.”
He put a hand on the table to steady himself. At first Philip thought he was selecting one of the documents, but then he saw the prince sway in place. He shot a confused look to the princess.
She’d seen it, too, but her brother’s anger cowed her into keeping quiet.
“We asked for a translator,” the prince continued. “Surely someone from the Second could speak a few words of Amharic, at least. We thought it would be a benefit to him and an easy enough request for Parliament to approve. We were proven quite wrong.”
They were all staring at Alamayou. Their eyes were upon him, the lovely one and the angry, sick one. Only Philip didn’t look at him. Alamayou didn’t know what was being said, but he knew it was about him, and if Philip wouldn’t look at him, it was bad. Because if it were something good, as it had been when he’d said their words to the old queen, Philip would turn to him and smile, be the man he’d seen at the fire. He’d be safe.
“They delayed, and then they refused.” Prince Leopold felt behind him for a chair. “Inquiries were made and we have now learned that concerns have been raised to Ambassador Naismith and to Parliament, in secret. Now we are in a most awkward position. Because of you.”
The prince pointed at Alamayou.
“Your Highness,” Philip said, “he doesn’t understand.”
“Make him understand, Layard. Or else what in God’s name are you good for? What further purpose do you serve us, being here?”
“Appreciate our position,” Princess Louise said as she guided her brother to the chair. He sat, his gaze fixed on Alamayou. “The translator’s but one part, and on that we’re looking at other options. But we’ve now learned there’s to be a banquet here at Windsor in a week’s time. It’s for the living veterans of foreign wars. Crimea, Sepoy, and yours. There will be members of Parliament here. Soldiers from the campaign in Abyssinia. The Abyssinian ambassador. They’ll all be here, in these halls, with some sort of secret that causes them to oppose us on the matter of Alamayou. We don’t know what’s happening. The queen, who relies on us, doesn’t know. This castle will be filled with men we honor for bravery in a war fought against Alamayou and his father. Do you see the difficulty?”
“What we need to know,” Prince Leopold said, “is simple. What is the truth of Alamayou?” His breathing was heavy and hoarse. The color rapidly faded from his cheeks.
“Leo,” the princess said urgently, “what’s happening? You’re ill.”
“Leave me alone. I’m fine…”
The prince slid off his chair and crumpled to the floor. His arms wrapped around his leg as if trying to hold it together.
“Take me to my apartment,” he said through gritted teeth.
“You need a doctor—”
“No!” He pushed his sister away as Alamayou and Philip reached his side. “The court doctors owe everything to her, nothing to me. They’ll tell her and then I’ll be confined to my bed. Again. I’ll go mad. No. Say nothing, do you hear me?”
The first thing Alamayou noticed was the smell. Rot, copper, warm and bitter. He gently rolled Prince Leopold to one side and found blood freely flowing down his leg.
“Oh my god, he’ll die.” Princess Louise twisted his pant leg tightly, trying to make a tourniquet of the material and staunch the flow of blood.
“Do as I tell you,” Leopold said between gritted teeth. “Lift me up and get me away from here before Simon and the others come.”
After checking the corridor, Alamayou and Philip carried the bleeding prince to his apartment in the Middle Ward. There they gently lay him on a couch.
The apartment’s receiving room resembled a cottage interior, with a narrow wood-paneled entry and a thread of shelves below spaced candelabras on mounts. Some figurines more appropriate for a child than a prince populated the shelves, along with enough books for a student of the world.
Princess Louise took a seat in a high-backed rosewood chair. There were tears in her eyes as she watched her brother roll his pant leg up. His face was so pale. Purpling spots appeared on the surface of his skin.
Leopold lay back and took deep gulps of air. “You all stare at me.”
“What happened to you, Leo?”
“I fell.”
“My god, Leo, why didn’t you tell anyone? We have to stop the blood.”
“I said no doctors.”
“I’ll do it,” Philip said.
“You?” The prince raised himself up from the couch. “Someone like you touching a prince, Layard?”
“I apprenticed to a doctor,” Philip said. “I know what I’m doing, and I know what I’m seeing.”
“And just what is it you think you see?” Prince Leopold asked him.
“Hemophilia, Your Highness. If we don’t stop that bleeding, you’ll die.”
“You need to understand,” the princess said, “no one outside of court knows. This could destroy us if our own subjects in their usual rashness conclude that the royal bloodline is afflicted with disease.”
More secrets, Philip thought. “What instruments do you have? Something to cauterize, something for the pain? We need those at least.”
“You’ll not touch me!”
“Let him, Leo. For God’s sake, what choice is there?”
She took her brother’s hand and laid him back on the couch. “Do it,” she told Philip.
The prince’s breath came in time to the pulse of blood leaving a small cut on his ankle. It was like watching the beat of a heart, Alamayou thought. That regular rhythmic bleeding.
The prince had a medical kit in the apartment. Inside the bag there was cotton, a flat iron, and a sealed ampule of chloral. Philip asked the princess to put the iron to the hearth. Alamayou lit kindle, and soon the metal grew red.
Philip doused the cotton with chloral and pressed it to the prince’s nose and mouth.
“Deeply now,” Louise told her brother.
The prince di
d as he was told. In a moment his breathing slowed. His eyes rolled over white. Philip gently closed them.
The sight of his eyes was too much for Alamayou to bear. “No. No mamot,” he said. “No mamot!”
They didn’t understand. None of them understood him, and Alamayou wanted to tear down every last wall cutting him off from everyone else, all the time. Grabbing one of the prince’s figurines from the shelf, he set it next to the fire and the flatiron reddening against the wood. “Abat, anat, mamot.” He held the figurines closer. See me, Philip. Like you did before.
Philip didn’t understand what Alamayou was doing, and he didn’t have time to puzzle it out. The prince was bleeding inexorably to death. Even taking the effects of the chloral into account, he had little time. The prince’s veins were emptying. That was the worst of it, the awful grace of being near when a man died. That ancient, leaving light that you didn’t realize was there until it went out.
He placed his secret with us, Philip thought as he wrapped the pant leg tighter. I don’t know what it means, but it won’t add up to a damn thing if he dies. If he dies it’ll be because I failed to help him. They’ll say I killed him. A bloody prince. My black hands killed him.
Reaching around Alamayou, he took hold of the flatiron with a bundled corner of his shirt and pulled it out of the fire.
“Philip, see.”
“I can’t, Alamayou.”
But he did. He met Alamayou’s eyes. The fire burned in the hearth behind him. Alamayou’s head and shoulders glowed against it. It made a shadow of him, except his eyes. One hand held the figurine. A soldier, it looked like. Alamayou raised it over the fire. His other hand, his ruined hand, reached for Philip.
For just a moment, Philip felt the wind and smelled the sulphuric cloud of rockets and war, and they were back in front of the burning cottage on Amba Geshen, with Alamayou straddling the space between life with Philip and death with his parents.
My parents. Anat, abat. Mamot. Mamot, Philip.
Die.
His fist knocked the figurine over. “Mamot. Abat, Albert—”
“Die,” Philip said. “He means die. Mamot.”
“Die,” Alamayou repeated. He pointed to the prince. “No die.”
“No, no die.”
Philip took a stethescope from the prince’s medical satchel and laid its circle upon the prince’s chest atop his heart. He showed Alamayou how to slip the buds into his ears, then set Alamayou’s hand just above the prince’s mouth to feel his breath, soft as silk.
Alamayou listened to the steady pulse of the prince’s blood.
“Life,” Philip told him. “No death. No mamot. Not him, or you, or me. His heart wants life, not death.”
Philip pressed the iron to the prince’s wound, cauterizing it. It was all that could be done for him and would be ungodly painful when he woke.
A royal, Philip thought, scalded by a Negro. It might be funny if it wasn’t me.
Outside, the light dipped and the grounds crackled with kindled gas lamps. Night, at last.
He and Alamayou sewed and cleansed together, saying not a word. It was more blood than Alamayou had seen since Abyssinia.
When he finally woke, Philip gave the prince laudanum and he descended back into a drugged sleep. His burn leaked from beneath fresh linen and iodine swab. Philip changed his dressing, letting Alamayou help.
“Will he be all right?” Princess Louise asked.
“The bleeding’s stopped and the wound ought to stay shut. I hope he can be more careful, Your Highness, or this could happen again.”
Princess Louise closed her brother’s medical bag and gave it to Philip. “It will happen again. He’s right about this much: anyone who finds out how dangerous his situation is will tell the queen. He has dreams of going to Oxford, courting a girl, marrying. I know the chance he’ll live long enough to see any of it is near none. He knows it as well, what’s worse. We don’t talk about it. That’s what he needs. Not to talk about it. Just live.”
“We’ll hold our tongues,” Philip said. He tried to hand the medical bag back to the princess, but she gently pushed it to him again.
“In case he has need of someone,” she said, “let it be you.”
“What about his clothes? The bloody sheets?”
“We can’t let the service see them, or my mother will hear of another bout on him so soon and she’ll confine him. He’ll be miserable. We must dispose of them.”
“We’ll do it,” Philip said, and looked around for a sack to put the prince’s blood-soaked clothes into. While he searched, the princess left her brother a note.
Your secret remains safe with me, and it’s safe with them. For this, we must thank them with our belief, our support, and someone to help Alamayou be heard.
§
At Windsor, Alamayou and Philip crossed the grounds alone in a strong cool wind that felt bracing. To their right were the black rectangles of the windows. One burned with curtained light and when the wind found it, the curtains fluttered mightily.
In a patch of soft ground behind the Lower Ward where no light found them, they dug deep and buried the prince’s clothes. When they were done, Alamayou put a hand on the patted earth. He said words from his faraway country, too softly to be heard by anyone.
The sound of wagon wheels rolling atop the Long Walk broke the stillness. Servants, coming to the castle for their duties, or leaving for a visit home. The comings and goings of lives beyond the gates.
They continued to the apartment, and to silence again.
Philip found a place under the bed’s long, loose covers to hide the medical satchel. Before retiring, he wrote a note to the queen.
The prince Alamayou delivers Your Royal Highness his regards and affections, and begs to ask, if it is not too presumptuous a question: what does the orange with cinnamon cloves stand for?
Most humbly, Philip Layard
After a few moments spent wandering the corrider, he found a startled Simon, who grudgingly agreed to deliver the note to the Blue Room if Philip would simply remove himself from sight.
He returned to the apartment. “Alamayou, the mystery of the cinnamon cloves’ll soon be solved—”
Alamayou had fallen asleep with the stethescope to his chest, where he had located the beat of his heart.
Chapter Nine
5 November 1868
As Windsor prepared for the banquet honoring England’s soldiers, a winter storm swept whirlwinds of snow across London. The light took on a shimmering and enduring quality, turning the castle woods into watercolors. Hennas and golds that had burst in the elms disappeared, leaving bare branches and dangling icicles. Beneath the chandeliered trees, gardeners crossed Windsor’s grounds with mufflers across their faces to collect holly and ivy, which the castle service used to decorate every balcony, staircase, and fixture. Soon the halls resembled a forest. The castle filled with the delicious smells of cooking meats, browning pastries, and fermenting jams.
On the morning of the banquet, an editorial appeared in the Telegraph. It openly questioned the Crown’s involvement with the heir to Abyssinia’s tyrant. By that afternoon, soldiers appeared at Windsor’s gates. Only a few, crippled by injury or sickness from the arduous voyage back after the war. They silently protested Alamayou’s presence while onlookers gathered in support.
Most of the castle service saw them through Windsor’s many windows. So many had sons who went to one campaign or another. They turned from Alamayou in disgust when he passed them by.
As the afternoon light faded, carriages pulled up to Windsor. Others queued up on the Long Walk. Veterans who’d lived through the empire’s many wars climbed out and walked into a castle they’d never seen the inside of. By eight, Windsor’s constellation of ballrooms teemed with veterans freely mingling with Parliament members and the royals. Only the queen was absent.
<
br /> At the princess’s request, Alamayou and Philip remained in their apartment, resigned to having their dinner alone, with only the faint sounds of the chamber orchestra reminding them of the feast they weren’t invited to.
Near nine o’clock, there was a swift knocking at the apartment door. Alamayou opened it and found Simon waiting impatiently, dressed in the uniform of a Crimean veteran. “Your presence is required in the State Dining Room.”
He sent in valets to redress them both in black waistcoats, shawl collars, false cuffs, and woolen trousers. Then he led them the back way, through the servants’ kitchen and scullery to a room gilded in gold and lit by a vaulted lantern. The banquet was in full swing two rooms over.
Beneath the flickering lights, the princess sat with Prince Leopold and the Abyssinian ambassador at a long table of freshly stained oak.
“We have been assured this won’t take long,” Princess Louise said. “As you can plainly see, we have guests. This entire evening is for them, Ambassador. Not for this, whatever this may be.”
“An excellent segue,” Prince Leopold said. “What exactly is this?”
“As ambassador,” Naismith began, “it’s my responsibility to provide updates and assurances to the governing council of Abyssinia on the well-being and status of their prince. In my correspondences, though, I’m hearing rumors. Allegations. There’s growing concern in Abyssinia, and I’m afraid it’s been conveyed here.”
“So we’ve seen,” Prince Leopold said. “We too appear to be on notice of growing concerns, though no one’s seen fit to do us the courtesy of corresponding with us in the normal course. No, we get our news through declination of a request for assistance, and then in an editorial. A strange way to communicate concerns, would you agree?”
“I wasn’t involved.”
“These concerns have been conveyed in the refusal of a translator to assist the one who, we assume, you have concerns about.”
“Your Highness, if you’ll permit me to ask some questions, I’m optimistic we can clear matters up straightaway. That was my intent for tonight. Nothing more.”
The Night Language Page 13
