The Night Language

by David Rocklin

  “Yes,” Princess Louise said. “I believe it’s really him. If ever I doubted him, all doubt left me when he again recalled his life in Abyssinia. I remember him as a much younger man, speaking of his father murdering that boy, and his mother beckoning him to the fire. I remember his eyes then. I saw the same eyes between the bars at the Old Bailey.”

  “So there’s hope?”

  “Only this. What my mother didn’t do the first time. A pardon.”

  “Does she know of him yet?”

  “I sent word to her.”

  “What does she say?”

  “Nothing. She’s said nothing. I’ve asked her through her service but she hasn’t yet responded to me.”

  “You haven’t seen her yourself.”

  “Don’t act surprised, Rabbi. Growing up, this is what we knew of our mother. Once every month or so, we would have an appointment with her so she could inspect us as we made the circle, or practiced a dance, or read from Tennyson. We would see her at functions. News of our education and our health came through nurses and nannies, teachers and her service. She wasn’t cruel. It’s just how these things were done. She was raised the same way, and it’s all she knew. I can still remember the woman she used to be, but she disappeared long ago, when I was still a young child. I remember one night, I had a dream that caused me to cry out. She came to me and said, ‘You’re too old for nonsense.’ That was the last time I remember her coming to me herself, and that was also the last time I let myself truly need her. I haven’t felt for her since. Not until recently, when she became so ill. Now she needs me to care for her. I’ve become the mother, it seems.

  “Death is very near to her now,” the princess said, looking at him as if he could explain how her life had gone through so odd a reversal. “I know I’ll see her soon enough, but in truth it may be too late by the time I do.”

  This is all wrong, Rabbi Ariel thought. While Alamayou sits in prison, looking at his death yet again, I’m sitting by a lake and watching the swans land, fold their wings, and settle back into their gliding passage across the surface, and a child still at the beginning of her life runs beneath the cold, bright blue sky. I’m talking calmly with the princess about a doomed man.

  He’s not just a doomed man. He’s my friend for thirty years.

  “You can’t let her die without seeing him,” he told the princess. “Once she meets him, she’ll believe him and she’ll save him.”

  Princess Louise laughed bitterly. “My mother believed the very same thing of Parliament.”

  “Then why didn’t she pardon him?”

  The little girl ran past them, waving at the princess as she chased a wayward swan from the shore to the Belvedere Tower.

  “Her solicitor explained it as a matter of legal permissibility, or some such, but that’s not truly why. Her court, her counselors, and her closest advisers all told her that the repercussions would have been too great. Even Leopold told her that he feared what would happen. And she listened.”

  “Then I beg of you, Your Highness, tell me why you called me here.”

  The girl’s head of countless curls disappeared in a thicket of lushly cultivated sunflowers.

  “I think my brother would delight in his own children,” Princess Louise said. “I think he’d pause at each mention of their names to marvel. Such a wondrous thing, to see aspects of ourselves in those we love, don’t you think?”

  “My late wife and I, we both loved the same music. The same paintings.”

  “It’s not that.”

  The child’s peeling laughter made them both turn to see the valet carrying her aloft.

  “Over the years, my mother told me of the night she and Alamayou spoke of love. ‘The bright hot star,’ as she called it.” She shook her head. “I always thought it an odd, romantic notion and completely out of character for her. Not at all like the woman I grew up with. Perhaps I felt a bit of envy, if I’m being completely truthful, that Alamayou saw glimpses of her secret self that I never saw. And I’ll never truly understand why he did. But some other part of me wanted to believe in love the way they described it to each other that night. That it finds us all at some point if we can just be patient, live our lives, and try not to drive ourselves mad with the wait. It doesn’t find us all, Rabbi. I can say that now. My husband is a decent man. He’s not cruel to me nor to others. I shall not ask for more, and I’ve learned the tender art of not looking for more. I thought I saw it once, with another. But it doesn’t matter now.”

  “Corbould.”

  “May I tell you something, about him? It’s such a silly and stupid conceit now that I look back on it from this far away in time. But then, I felt certain that I could always see into Edward. Right into him. Into his lungs and veins, into his heart and his thoughts. I would always know if he thought of me. If his love ebbed one day and surged the next. I’d know by the color of his paints or the tilt of his head. But I knew nothing at all. He was kind and patient to a young girl with whose mother he wanted to curry favor, and perhaps he did care a bit for me, but when he left court, I never heard from him again. That was an odd and uprooting thing to accept, that I could feel so strongly and yet be so wrong. In that moment I learned. My heart is quite apart from the rest of me. I don’t expect it’s so different for anyone else, including my mother and Alamayou. And so, for all this time I’ve presumed love to be fiction. A lie parents tell their children at bedtime.

  “Corbould’s gone now. He’s just another person who has passed out of life. That is where I’ve seen it, Rabbi. I’ve seen true, real love only in death. Isn’t that sad? I saw it in my mother when my father died. I saw it in her when Leopold died. Yes, I saw it when Parliament acted with Alamayou. These were losses she couldn’t stop.”

  She stood. “That’s why I’m not going to rest until she hears Alamayou herself. Let the fact of him give her the peace I never could.”

  He watched the princess summon the valet over. He brought the little girl so Princess Louise could brush the curls from the child’s face while he still carried her.

  “Wait to hear from me,” Princess Louise called back to Rabbi Ariel.

  He waved to the princess in acknowledgement of her request. Alamayou’s best chance, he knew, was a lonely princess who’d spent her life trying to fill the holes in two hearts. Hers, and her mother’s, even as her mother sought to fill her own heart.

  Such a wondrous thing, she’d said. To see aspects of ourselves in those we love.

  Yes, he thought while watching the princess and the little girl, two fatherless daughters cuddling each other against the cold. It is a wondrous thing to see.

  Chapter Eighteen

  8 January 1869

  In the morning, the queen called Alamayou and Philip to the Grand Reception Room, a space more than one hundred feet long and forty feet high. There, she waited with the prince, princess, and Lord Grant beneath a set of massive Gobelins French tapestries.

  Taking a seat on the other side of a marble table almost half the length of the room, Philip felt at once dwarfed and humbled by the power on display. He supposed that was the queen’s purpose, to convey her strength to them all.

  “We wish to know our options,” the queen said.

  Lord Grant was neatly dressed in a fitted gray suit. His hair was parted and oiled. A treatise lay open on the side table before him, together with a thick sheaf of papers. He consulted them frequently and spoke calmly, with great authority.

  “The moment Parliament handed down its findings,” he said, “a ship was commissioned for the voyage to Abyssinia. It’s docked at the Royal as we speak. I must tell you, their decree states that he will be brought to that ship before dawn tomorrow.”

  “We need no reminding of that fact,” the queen said. “We have time to weep in private. Now is the time for planning.”

  Alamayou felt a strange stirring to have it a
ll over with, to face it now while he had even a little strength in his body. As he stood at the window of the room listening to Lord Grant begin to recite laws, rules, and ways to fight within their bounds and outside of them, he felt his heart turn at the idea of going back. He sent himself to that ship—it looked just like the Feroze—to its decks and tiny cabins, a belly full of some other country’s broken pieces, and a rail. He sent himself across the sea to Abyssinia’s shores at Annesley. He gave himself over to the men of all the tribes who would be there to see him.

  He would give them everything if he had to go back. All the stories of his father and mother. He would give them the war and the fire, the Rassam drawing, and the whip in his hands. He would hold nothing back. Because he’d lived with every door closed, and now he saw what his life looked like when one opened to let the light in.

  He would describe everything except Philip. Philip was something other than just life. That would remain inside, only seen at night.

  He listened to the queen and her solicitor debate a future he no longer felt sure he’d see.

  “We can seek asylum,” Lord Grant continued. “We can make a formal complaint about the oppressive and malicious treatment he received in Abyssinia before and during the war, and how there exists no reasonable basis to believe that such treatment forms precedent for what should befall him if he returns. If we are to believe the accounts of the populace and their sentiments toward the late emperor, his fate is dark indeed. We might well explore whether sufficient grounds exist to assert formally that he’s a ward of England and the Crown. But that won’t, in all likelihood, change what took place yesterday in Parliament. Or why it happened, which is perhaps the more important issue.”

  He fell silent.

  “Do continue,” the queen prompted him.

  “Well, I… How does one put this delicately?”

  “One doesn’t,” the queen interjected. “We believe we have heard all there is to hear. We do doubt highly the ability of a barrister, even such as yourself, to shock us at this point. Cause time to slow, perhaps.”

  “Yes, of course. Forgive me, Your Majesty. As I was saying, I am concerned. There is the matter of the deaths of his parents in the fire, and his role in it, as alleged. Before, Alamayou’s was a credible account of that fire and how his parents came to their ends. It refuted what others sought to make of it, and served as a basis to believe that he played no part in it.”

  “But now?” Princess Louise asked. “Has something about the fact of what happened changed? Because I’m aware of no such thing.”

  “As to the facts surrounding the tragedy on Amba Geshen,” Lord Grant said, “I’m in complete agreement with you, Your Highness. What’s changed, and I stress that it’s my role to advocate our side of things, feelings notwithstanding, and then to advocate against that position to ensure that it can stand up to scrutiny. As I was saying, what’s changed is not the account, but the one who delivers it.”

  “Perhaps with time and effort,” Prince Leopold remarked, “you could achieve a greater degree of opaqueness.”

  “Yes, Your Highness. Plainly stated, Alamayou is what’s changed about all of the issues. How he’s perceived. With all that’s come out about him, I just don’t know anymore.” He cleared his throat and put his papers down. “Your Majesty, you graciously asked for my opinion and I’m humbled by your trust, of course. In my discretion, I mean.”

  “Yes. Most of all, that.”

  “Yes. Of course. As I observe your personal secretary isn’t here with us, we can be assured that nothing we speak of will survive beyond this day. Let me speak plainly, then. The allowances for you and your children must be considered. Parliament approves them, at times causing the expenditure of much political capital and no small amount of quite public displays of resentment. We know this. Depending on the makeup of those factions in either chamber who are prone to downplaying the importance of monarchy, or the sentiments of a public at varying degrees of comfort or poverty, monies flowing into the monarchy’s chests are either understood or railed against. There’s the matter of your legacy, which is no small thing. Your place as the people see and understand it. They’ll hear of this, of course, and sooner than we think. It exists at present as rumor, the stuff of editorials. That won’t last long. Already we’ve seen the good men of our military gathered at your gate in protest of the young man’s presence here in Windsor. That will undoubtedly worsen a hundredfold when word of this escapes. And then? You place yourself, your children, and the monarchy at risk for such a young man as him. Is it wise? This is the question I can’t answer.”

  “We hear clearly your own wisdom on this question,” she said.

  “You do, Your Majesty. I’m sorry if I offend. I am first your servant and think only in your interest. But I am a Christian.”

  “We too are Christian, sir.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty. I mean no offense.”

  “Everything you tell us, we don’t doubt the wisdom. But we’re aware of the reasons why we will surely fail and bring ruin to our good name. From you, we wish to know how to fight and win.”

  Lord Grant swallowed some water, grimacing as it went down.

  “A fight you can have, Your Majesty. I just don’t see a path to victory.”

  “Just say something,” Princess Louise blurted. “Nothing in the law is clear and sure, you’ve said so yourself on more than one occasion. Why now? Is this the law, or your sense of morality at play?”

  “Her Highness gives me much to consider,” Lord Grant said.

  “We don’t have the luxury of the time it will take for you to consider it,” Princess Louise said curtly.

  “Very well. It’s not clear, one way or the other, whether a royal pardon could work, were you to even consider so drastic and public a step. A pardon essentially cancels the stated will of Parliament. The ill will that would engender alone must, I would argue, call for very sober contemplation indeed.

  Abyssinia isn’t a colony, for one thing. For another, Alamayou has not yet been convicted of anything.”

  “The hell he hasn’t,” Philip said.

  “Philip’s right about that,” Princess Louise argued. “Can there be any doubt of the outcome of a trial in Abyssinia? They’d execute him on the spot.”

  “Are you suggesting we colonize Abyssinia to secure a fair trial?” Prince Leopold asked.

  “Don’t be so foolish, brother. What I am suggesting, though, is that we hide Alamayou away where Parliament won’t find him. Ever.”

  “Are we back to this, then?”

  “Yes, we’re back to it. Because we’re up against it.”

  The princess placed a tightly rolled document on the table. It was tied with ribbon and bore marks of having been folded, then opened and smoothed, over and over.

  “Dear God,” Lord Grant said as the princess untied it and spread it across the table.

  “If we’re going to talk about everything,” she said, “then let us be smart about it.”

  It was a map of London. Its every landmark, its waterways and streets, the ways around its heart. The ways to get in and get out of it.

  The first drops of rain spattered against the window. The princess rose as the wind picked up, rattling the glass. She opened it ever so slightly and listened to it howl through the trees. The room filled with the smell of storms, clean and cold, coming to wash the trodden snow away and then freeze the ground beneath a sheen of new ice.

  The air curled the map up, ruffling it before dying down.

  I saw a map like that once, Philip thought. Full of pins. All the dead clustered like constellations.

  “I want us to take this moment,” the princess said, “and truly think about what it is we’re considering. Listen to us. We’ve closed the doors and locked them. We’ve sent the secretary away and will not write any of this down. We speak to each other with one eye o
n deceiving Parliament and one on the door to make sure no one’s listening. We’re conspirators. I’m a princess and I’m suggesting smuggling a man out of Windsor. And yet, that’s the least of the sins being whispered about in here. We’re speaking about knowingly sending a human being to his death. Must I say what that makes us? All of us? In light of that, and in view of the fact that our words die here the moment those doors open again, I suggest we gather a list together of places where he can find refuge, and then a list of those people we can count on to keep him safe and in secret.”

  “Such a list,” the queen said, “can be prepared.”

  “Good,” Philip exclaimed. “I know the streets better than anyone you’ll find and better than a map can ever show you. Leave it to me.”

  “They’ll hunt him down,” Prince Leopold said. “What do we think will take place when Alamayou is to report to a ship bound for Abyssinia, with guards there to document the execution of Parliament’s resolution, and he never shows up? They’ll send soldiers in arms through the streets of London looking for him. I want to save him as badly as any of you, but it will be a damned invasion of our own people. Or are we going to smuggle him across our borders and set off an international scandal?”

  “They wouldn’t dare,” Princess Louise said as her face paled.

  The prince slammed his cane against the table. “He’s a war criminal in their eyes! What would you expect them to do?”

  “He’s not—”

  “I know what he is and what he isn’t,” the prince cut her off. “We had our chance to convince them of what we know, and we failed. Do you hear? We failed.”

  “Then we fix what we failed at some other way. Philip, can you promise to get him away safely?”

  “I can or die trying.”

  “Take a good long look at that map,” the prince said. “Imagine every street and alleyway filled with soldiers. Our loyal men, all searching for the two of you.”

  “Or we can stay here,” Philip said, “where they already have found him.”