The Night Language

by David Rocklin

  A man looks at everyone or no one, his father said.

  Or he looks past them all, abat, to the life waiting beyond them, and he walks right through them and claims it for his own.

  Chapter Fifteen

  5 January 1869

  In the afternoon, Simon helped Alamayou dress for his appearance before Parliament. He outfitted Alamayou in shale trousers, a long frock coat, polished boots, and a silk scarf. “For every war,” Simon told him, “there is a uniform. You’ll at least look the part of a gentleman. Is there anything else you need?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “There’s no cause to thank the service.”

  “Thank you.”

  “There have been others, you know. Sara Bonetta Forbes. The Indian. They come and go. Her Majesty’s heart is big. That’s what I thought when you and the other one washed up on our doorstep. Big heart, more dark orphans of one storm or another.” His lips tightened, as if the words had gone sour in his mouth. “I haven’t seen her like this before, though. Not with any of them. Clearly there’s something about you, lost on me though it may be.”

  “She’s afraid for me,” Alamayou said.

  “Yes, she is.”

  He used a horsehair brush to clean stray threads from Alamayou’s coat. “They may well be rough on you, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “More than a young man deserves, I’d say, though it’s not my place. Just go speak to them as she’s asked of you, and don’t make a mess of it. I may have my differences with you both, but you’re nothing compared to the bloody politicians. I’ll not tolerate you breaking that good woman’s heart, you hear?”

  “I won’t. I’ll try, Simon.”

  “Off with you, then. Don’t go and get yourself killed.”

  Outside, two carriages waited on the horseshoe drive. One took Alamayou and Philip while the other carried the Imperial State Crown, the Cap of Maintenance, and the Sword of State. They were traditional symbols which the queen would use to open the Parliamentary session.

  A third extravagant coach carried the royal family.

  The sun set as their caravan passed through the quiet city on the way to Westminster. The last golden light shone across the Thames onto the Middlesex Bank. Soon the towers rose above London’s skyline. The Royal Standard flew between their torchières.

  They pulled up to a crowd waiting at Westminster’s gates. A group of men gathered behind the bars near the Sovereign’s Entrance. Ambassador Naismith stood among them.

  The royal coachman handed out the queen, followed by Princess Louise and Prince Leopold, who leaned heavily upon his cane. Another bout of weakness was upon him.

  “Welcome, Your Majesty,” the Lord Speaker said, bowing deeply with the other members of Parliament. “You grace us.”

  “We would not have missed this opportunity to bear witness,” the queen said.

  The MPs led the queen and her entourage through a lush garden to the entrance beneath the King’s Tower. A burst of magnificent chimes drew Alamayou’s eyes to a grand clock soaring to the clouds, its architecture in stately, perfect rhythm with the music it made. Its pinnacles were decorated with statues of saints. The clock face itself was shaped like a rose, with petals fringed in gold and windows lined above and around it to the slate roof and a spire made up of a crown, flowers, a cross, and an iron pyramid. When it chimed, the clock tower sent its bells across London and her canopying sky.

  Naismith walked alongside Alamayou and Philip. Alamayou knew he was being observed closely.

  “Nothing like it anywhere,” Naismith commented. “I’ve always thought of it as no different than England herself.” He picked up his pace and walked ahead to the entrance. “Fire almost destroyed her nearly four decades ago. It’s a horror, what fire can do. Don’t you agree, Alamayou?”

  “A building,” Alamayou said. “You can build again. People are different. Once they’re gone—”

  As she paused to admire the lovingly manicured Speakers’ garden and attendant path, the queen glanced in his direction and nodded encouragingly. She held a gloved hand up ever so slightly. Say no more.

  “I don’t expect you to understand how important permanence is to our culture,” Naismith said, “but to us, it’s a tragic loss when something as old and important as this building is damaged, for any reason let alone because it rots from within.”

  He placed his hand on the surface of the tower wall. “Anstone. It was quarried in South Yorkshire and Mansfield, Woodhouse and Nottinghamshire. Those names are the stuff of legend. It was brought across the Chesterfield Canal and the North Sea, the Trent and the Thames. Our history is in this great clock tower.”

  “My father felt the same way about Meqdala,” Alamayou said. “It fell.”

  The queen passed Naismith on her way into the Sovereign’s Entrance. “We don’t dwell on weaknesses, Ambassador. We see wisdom in the stone. Wisdom brings with it the wear of the effort to acquire it, and then to bear its weight. We cannot help but observe how light and unblemished you are.”

  The princess followed her mother. She smiled at Naismith. “Are you not pleased that your queen chose Session to emerge?”

  “Endlessly, Highness.”

  He stepped into the line of Parliamentary Lords and nobles heading to the western slope of the Upper House.

  Inside the entrance, Alamayou and Philip found themselves at the foot of twenty granite steps, flanked on either side with uniformed men of the Cavalry Household Regiment, the Blues and Royals. They unsheathed their swords to form a tunnel of razors.

  Attendants ushered the queen into the Robing Room at the south end of the palace axis, where she sat in an ornate Chair of State. Behind her hung a purple tapestry stitched with the Royal Arms.

  Two servants robed her in ermine and silk. They placed the Imperial State Crown on her head. It was encrusted with precious jewels and its base was a pattern of fleur de lis and half-arches surmounted by a cross. The cap itself was bordered with snowy white fur.

  “We shall be there with you,” she said as her attendants closed the doors.

  Others brought Alamayou and Philip to the Norman Porch, where they were told to wait in the foursquare landing beneath a ceiling intricately inlaid with cross vaults, lierne ribs, plinths, and columns clustered together like a stand of ribbed oaks.

  “Philip.” Alamayou pressed his ear to a closed set of doors. He heard the thrum of voices. “So many.”

  He began to pace the stone in frantic rings as sweat broke out across his face.

  “Do what you’ve already done,” Philip reassured him. “That’s all you need to do. Pay their white faces no mind and give them no more power than they already have. You’ve got the queen on your side.”

  “To speak to them is leaving,” Alamayou said. “I feel it, Philip.”

  He slid to the floor, near the entryway. Behind him, the rising tide of men in the chamber made the door quiver.

  “Listen to me, Alamayou.” Philip sat on the cold stone next to him. “Make them understand, you’re not what they believe. You’re what she believes. You’re what I believe. We can’t be what we truly are. Maybe in our quiets. But at no other time. I know you. You’re just like me. We were children who prayed they’d wake up and be a different sort of boy, and now we’re men who know that prayers don’t get heard and they don’t get answered, and so we’ve made peace with being alone until now. Are you like me? That you can’t be at peace because of me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then this is the price. You understand what I’m saying.”

  He searched Philip’s face because the courage was draining out of him and taking his new language. A terrible cold filled the void left behind. It was a frigid, spreading sensation that infected every part of him.

  It’s what drowning in the sea would have been like, he thought. I’ll lay o
ut my life like a map for the men in the other room, and they won’t believe me. They won’t see me.

  Or they will, a voice told him, but not like the queen. Not like the princess, not like Philip. They’ll see you the way I did, lij. Gbra sadom. And they’ll hate the monster they see.

  Philip put his hand next to Alamayou’s. “Remember the rail?”

  Alamayou’s eyes widened.

  “No,” Philip said. “Not at night. The next morning. Your hand next to mine. You didn’t understand yet, but I was telling you, see, we’re alike as shadows. You’re not alone. Not while I’m here next to you.”

  “I remember. Not alone. I called it from the window of the apartment when you were leaving.”

  “After the rockets and that miserable fortress model, right? I’d been thrown out by then. I was walking, but I stopped because I thought I heard you calling to me. But now we’re here and look, there’s our hands, again. Telling our story.”

  “I see them. Every night I see that story. Know that, Philip.”

  “This is all we have, Alamayou.”

  “I know. Maybe somewhere, though. It could be different.”

  Their hands brushed each other and remained.

  “Then live,” Philip said, knowing full well where they were and who they were around. He knew his words could make the road to Alamayou’s damnation smooth and fast if someone were to hear, so he kept his voice low. But he needed to speak. He couldn’t be silent anymore.

  “Live,” he said, “and come back to me. You and me, we’ll find home. I swear we will. We’ll close the door and there’ll be no one else. Just us. Just what we want to say and do, and no one can hear us but each other. And the world will fall away and we won’t care. Our world will still be. We’ll still be standing together, but you have to live to make it there, Alamayou.”

  The double doors opened. “Parliament awaits,” a red-coated soldier announced.

  §

  They followed the guard through the Royal Gallery, past the feet of Caen stone statues under a ceiling paneled in Tudor rose and lions. Their path soon crossed with that of the queen’s, and they fell into rank behind the princess and her Honor Guard escort to the end, in the Lords Chamber.

  The chamber was cavernous. Its red benches brimmed on all three sides of the room with members. To the right were the Spirituals, the bishops and archbishops of England’s Church. To the left, the Temporals, England’s masters of the purse and the law.

  A gold Canopy and Throne stood at the south end, next to the chairs of state. The queen took her place on it while the prince and princess sat next to her. The Lord Chancellor sat on the Woolsack, an armless red cushion. The House mace hung menacingly behind him.

  There was an empty lectern awaiting Alamayou. He crossed the floor and stood behind it as the sea of white faces stared at him.

  The queen feared for him. He could see it in the rigid stone of her expression, and in the way her eyes went wide at the sight of him at the head of the Parliamentary session.

  The princess and prince, too, they feared. Leopold clutched his cane tightly enough to splinter it. Louise’s radiant beauty was hidden behind a raised kerchief. The light glimmered in her wet eyes.

  He waved at them to let them know he was ready.

  Naismith sat among the Temporals. A stack of papers was tucked neatly under the arm of his coat. He studied Alamayou intently.

  Alamayou returned his steady gaze, his father’s long-ago words in his head. A man looks at everyone, or he looks at no one.

  The Lord Chancellor raised his hand for quiet. “God save the queen!”

  The Chamber resounded with the blessing.

  The queen raised notes of her own. “We come to you not only to open Parliament, but pray to open Parliament’s heart. We thank you for convening so that you may hear from a young man. A stranger, brought to England to find the peace so absent from his turbulent life. We ask that you listen and see in him what we see. Someone who deserves a home with us.”

  She set down her paper and nodded at Alamayou.

  “Alamayou,” Naismith shouted. “Are you ready to answer the charges awaiting you in Abyssinia?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “And you’re comfortable speaking our language. You understand fully?”

  “I do.”

  “Then the floor is yours.”

  A deep breath. “Yes,” Alamayou said to them all.

  And then they began, the words of his true life.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Chamber was silent when he finished. Several uncomfortable moments of stillness ticked by. Parliamentary members stared at each other as the queen’s eyes roamed the room, searching for signs of their intent.

  Naismith finally broke the quiet. “We will discuss all that we’ve heard today, and then we will render our judgment. There are, to be sure, serious allegations before this Chamber. They must be addressed in the appropriate manner and in due course. It, therefore, remains an open record.”

  The queen stood, dragging the rest of the Chamber up with her. She removed her crown and left it on the throne. “You have your answers. He remains under our care and we will keep him safe while you see your way clear to the right and only outcome. Free him of these unjust accusations. We expect nothing less, gentlemen.”

  “Is there anything else you wish to add to your account, Alamayou?” Naismith asked.

  “No.”

  “I have something, for your auspicious record.”

  The Parliamentary members turned to see Prince Leopold leaning unsteadily on his cane as he stood. “When he came to us, he was a stranger. We took him in. We listened to him. Some of us, closer than others. But now there can be no doubt. All of you have heard him. I have heard him.”

  He smiled at Alamayou. “He’s not a stranger any longer.”

  §

  Parliament’s decision came shortly after midnight.

  It arrived in the hands of a courier who delivered it to the castle in a simple, sealed envelope. Simon accepted it and brought it to the prince and princess first.

  “I ask for your guidance,” Simon explained apologetically. “If it’s bad news, I don’t know how Her Majesty will react. I’m just a butler, in the end.”

  “It’s for us to do,” Princess Louise said.

  She sent word through the lady-in-waiting asking for an audience with her mother. By the time she and the prince closed the door to the Blue Room behind them, word had spread through the castle. Parliament’s decision on Alamayou’s fate had come down.

  §

  “‘For the crimes of war, and for the crime of deviance, it is the decision of this body that the prince Alamayou be remitted immediately to Annesley Bay, Abyssinia, by ship which shall be requisitioned for the purpose of transmittal in a day’s time at the Royal Victorian docks. In Abyssinia, Alamayou shall be held in custody until the conclusion of a trial under Abyssinian law.’”

  The queen put down the letter. She took off her glasses and set them on the table next to her, then picked up her teacup. Her hand shook, spilling some tea onto her black dress.

  “Damn it all!” She hurled the cup against the wall, shattering it.

  Princess Louise knelt to pick up the shards of porcelain.

  “To hell with that,” the queen said, regaining her poise. “Summon Grant. We need to discuss our options now that Parliament has utterly betrayed us.”

  “Mother,” Prince Leopold said tentatively, “forgive me. I’m as heartsick as you about what’s happened, but this was to be expected. I don’t know how we can fight for him. He is what he is.”

  “He’ll die.” The princess picked up the last of the broken cup and placed it on the tray. “Let’s be plain. There won’t be a trial in Abyssinia. Or if there is, it will be a farce. What law? Who is even in charge there? Our governor?
He’s a figurehead. Alamayou is heir to the bloodline of a despot who was hated by every man, woman, and child in that godforsaken country. For that alone they’ll hang him. We can’t pretend we send him to anything but his death.”

  “Be quiet,” the queen said. “Both of you.”

  The knell. The bells were hushed, that the queen and her children heard ringing. Not the majestic peels of St. George, but rather the slight ones of the tiny church outside Windsor.

  They listened to the frail bells. In the moment of their ringing, the lands around Windsor felt empty. The tops of the clouds outside the portrait room window held all the light within them, and the earth below gathered beneath the graying bellies of them and grew dimmer.

  “In our life,” the queen said, “we have opened our heart a precious few times, and it always comes round to punishment. Always. There comes the moment when our heart is turned away. Our own people think us cruel. But we opened our home and our heart to him. And now, we’ll fight until we can’t any longer. We must try, or else everything that’s said of us is proved true. Whatever is thought of us, we would do the same were it one of our children. We would walk to hell and home again.”

  “He’s not one of your children,” Prince Leopold said.

  “No, he’s not. But he’s no longer an orphan or a stranger, as you yourself said.”

  She went to the door. “We owe it to him that he hear this from us.”

  §

  The queen posted Simon to the corridor outside their apartment, under instruction not to open it or allow anyone near.

  “This is how you will refer to him,” she told Simon. “Should anyone come to their apartment and inquire, all is calm. He’s ill and is not to be disturbed. If we receive any further communications from Parliament or Ambassador Naismith, we will hear of it immediately and no one else.”