Three weeks before Christmas, at ten o’clock in the morning, Precious Cloud went into labour. Chicomeztli arrived in haste at my suite to announce the news and also to ask if I would attend the birth.
‘Me?’ I said. ‘What use would I be? I’m no midwife.’
‘She wants you. She begged me to ask you to come.’
I accompanied him to the hospital, which was on a lower floor of the complex. Precious Cloud lay in a large private room, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of modern medicine – ECGs, drips, oxygen cylinders, a contour bed which was supposed to shape itself to her every movement and so provide constant back support. Extepan’s personal physician, a grey-haired Otomi called Yeipanitl, was overseeing her labour, along with three nurses and Mia, who stood at her shoulder, stroking her forehead with slender fingers. The contrast between Precious Cloud’s look of panic and Mia’s total impassiveness made me think that perhaps Precious Cloud was right and that what I had always assumed was a serenity in Mia was simply an absence of feeling.
Precious Cloud, already wide-eyed and frightened even though her contractions had only just begun, gripped me fiercely by the wrist and said, ‘Catherine, I thought you wouldn’t come!’
I took her hand in mine. ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.’
Not surprisingly, my platitudes did nothing to dispel her anxiety. I thought of the baby I had lost – a baby I scarcely knew I was carrying before it was gone for ever. This was not going to be easy for me.
‘Please,’ Precious Cloud said. ‘Ask them all to go.’
‘They can’t,’ I said soothingly. ‘Someone qualified has to be here to help you.’
‘Just for a while. I need to talk with you alone.’
I looked at Yeipanitl.
‘No problem,’ he said in English. ‘You can have a little time together – it’s early days yet. But naturally it’s important we closely monitor her throughout her labour.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
Mia showed no reaction to Precious Cloud’s request. She withdrew with the others, closing the door behind her.
‘They talk as if I’m not here,’ Precious Cloud said. ‘I think the baby is all that matters to them.’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ I assured her.
She gripped my wrist again. ‘Make her go away, Catherine. I want you here, not her.’
I knew she meant Mia.
‘I think she’s only trying to help. She doesn’t have to be here.’
‘Then send her away. She’s watching me! All the time she’s watching me. I think she’s hoping something will go wrong. I can’t bear it!’
The bed bulged outwards as she arched her back. I put my arms around her. She had begun to sob, and I waited until she was calmer.
‘It’s all right,’ I said softly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see to it.’
She cried out as another contraction came. I held both her hands, and she pushed against them. Afterwards, she slumped back and closed her eyes. For the moment, she seemed calmer. I rose and went to the door.
‘You will come back, won’t you?’ she said from the bed.
‘As soon as I can,’ I promised.
Outside, I spoke privately to Yeipanitl. ‘Is she going to be all right?’
‘All the vital signs are normal,’ he replied. ‘She’s young and fit. I don’t anticipate any problems.’
‘She’s asked me to stay with her.’
‘I think that would be a good idea, if it doesn’t inconvenience you.’
‘Not at all. Just get ready to catch me if I pass out when it gets gruesome.’
He smiled at this, then returned to Precious Cloud’s room.
I stopped Mia at the doorway from following the nurses in.
‘Can I have a word with you?’ I said in Nahuatl.
She merely blinked at me; but she allowed me to lead her a short distance along the corridor. Then she surprised me by saying, ‘She doesn’t want me there, does she?’
‘She’s very vulnerable at the moment,’ I replied.
‘Of course,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I have many other duties to attend to.’
She made to move away; I caught her by the arm.
‘Mia …’ I began, unsure what I was going to say. ‘I think perhaps she’s a little bit afraid – or rather, in awe, of you.’
I suppose I was hoping for some sort of real human reaction to this, something which would allow me to gauge her feelings. But again nothing was visible on the surface.
‘I find that hard to imagine,’ she replied in the same flat tone as before. ‘She’s a princess. I’m merely trying to serve her. What reason would she have to fear me?’
I wondered what to say. ‘I think perhaps she needs friends more than servants at the moment.’
I meant to suggest that she herself might try to show a warmer side to Precious Cloud, but she took it quite differently.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I don’t wish to do anything to make her uncomfortable. Perhaps you could inform me when the child is born.’
Again she made to move away. I hastily decided that indiscretion was the better part of valour.
‘Mia, did Extepan ever ask you to marry him?’
She closed her eyes in a slow blink, as if wishing me vanished. Very reluctantly, she said, ‘That would not have been appropriate.’
‘Do you wish he had?’
She turned her head away from me without moving any other part of her body. Obviously she did not want to talk about it, but at the same time she was too dutiful to refuse to answer.
‘It’s always been my role to serve him in whatever way he wishes. I’ve never expected anything more than this.’
‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘As Your Highness wishes. I do not feel it’s correct that we
should be discussing this when his wife is soon to give birth to his child.’
‘You’re not his slave. You must have needs and desires of your own.’
She looked through me. ‘My duties have always been honourable ones. They have accorded my family high status.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. But that can’t be the whole of your life, existing merely to attend Extepan. This is the twentieth century. I can’t believe that anyone would willingly devote themselves utterly to another person’s life without thought or feeling for their own.’
Again the slow blink, like that of a teacher who could not credit a child’s stupidity. Of course I was overstating the case, in the hope of breaching the wall of her reserve.
‘Your Highness will excuse the impertinence,’ she said, ‘but possibly that shows how little you understand us.’
Precious Cloud gave birth to a son at two thirty in the afternoon, Yeipanitl having decided to cut short her labour and perform a Caesarean after drugs failed to blunt her agitation. The baby promptly emptied his bladder in the lap of one of the nurses, to the amusement of everyone present. He weighed eight and a half pounds, and looked strong and healthy.
Precious Cloud woke from her drug-induced sleep soon afterwards. The baby, swathed in white linen, was immediately placed in the crook of her arm. She began talking to him in Dakota, and he promptly fell asleep.
Precious Cloud looked exhausted but delighted. I smiled and said, ‘I think it was worth it in the end, don’t you? He’s marvellous. ’
She nodded. ‘I wonder when Extepan will see him.’
Both Extepan and Maxixca had been dispatched to the Russian front soon after the disaster at Tsaritsyn, Maxixca as Extepan’s second-in-command. A total news black-out on the war had prevailed since the disaster, and we had received no word of him.
‘I’m sure they’ll make it a priority to see he gets to hear about it,’ I said. ‘What are you going to call him?’
She drew the child closer to her. ‘Extepan wants Cuauhtemoc.’
It was a popular royal name which meant ‘Descending Eagle’.
The first Cuauhtemoc, a
tlatoani
in the sixteenth century, had been greatly instrumental in establishing the basis of a modern state by defeating the last of the conquistador armies while at the same time giving freedom of entry to missionaries so that his people could profit from European knowledge. The empire owed as much to the civilizing effects of Spanish culture as it did to Aztec prowess at war.
Precious Cloud began to stroke the baby’s cheek with her forefinger.
‘I’m going to give him a name too,’ she said. ‘A secret name, for myself and him alone.’
She was peering rapturously at the baby now, and it seemed as if she wanted to exclude everyone else from their closeness.
Yeipanitl came to my side and said, ‘I think perhaps we should leave them both to sleep.’
I nodded.
‘I have to go,’ I said to Precious Cloud.
She was intent on the baby and did not reply.
I withdrew, and found Chicomeztli waiting for me outside the door.
‘Word has come from Extepan,’ he announced.
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘How is he?’
‘There was no personal news of him. The message was relayed through military channels. He has asked that we evacuate the complex and leave London. In case of enemy attack.’
Each morning the frost-rimed grass looked like peppermint icing as I rode Archimedes or Adamant around the grounds of the estate. Sometimes I was accompanied by Richard and Xochinenen, who stayed with us for a few days before they left to spend Christmas at Balmoral, where Xochinenen was hoping for a festive fall of snow.
The horses were unsettled by the move from London, and Archimedes was still recovering from a swollen tendon, so I rode him gently. We were staying at Ambarrow Cottages on the edge of the Wellington College estate in Berkshire. The ‘cottages’ were actually nothing of the sort, but rather a large rambling modern building, equipped with its own generator and indoor swimming pool. Its design showed obvious Aztec influences in its square-pillared entrance and balconies. It had been built immediately after the invasion as a summer residence for Nauhyotl, the New Lake at its rear created so that the governor could indulge his fondness for tropical fish. Until his assassination, the waters had been constantly heated to a blood-warm temperature; now it was host only to hardy goldfish, dormant under its frozen surface.
I had only agreed to occupy the house because it was urgent we leave London – not only for our own safety but also to give Precious Cloud the chance to recuperate. I wanted to be reasonably close to London in case of emergency but far enough away so that Precious Cloud could benefit from a little rural tranquillity. I visited her every day in her room which looked out over the college, now an Aztec barracks, as was Sandhurst to the south. She was still confined to bed, and the peacefulness of our new surroundings did not seem to help her condition. She
continued to be distracted, and there was a haunted look in her eyes. Our conversations grew increasingly strained and strange.
A week after the birth I arrived to find her sitting cross-legged at the centre of her bed with the sheets and pillows arranged in a nest at her side. Cuauhtemoc was asleep in his cot, and Precious Cloud was arranging his soother and fluffy rattlesnake inside her pillows. She did not look up as I entered.
I approached the bed. She continued with her arrangement, swapping objects, then swapping them back again, adjusting and readjusting their positions constantly.
After a while I said softly, ‘What are you doing?’
Only now did she look up. Her eyes were as black as pools of tar.
‘They were wrong,’ she informed me. And then she resumed her ordering of the toys, head bowed, shoulders hunched, as if it were the most important and vital task in the world.
‘Wrong about what?’ I asked.
‘They thought they’d emptied me out. They thought I was hollow.’
Cautiously I drew closer.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The baby, of course!’ she responded sharply. ‘The baby!’
I glanced across at Cuauhtemoc, who was still sleeping soundly. She had not looked at him once since my arrival.
‘What about the baby?’
‘I’m making a cot for her, can’t you see?’
I hesitated before saying, ‘But hasn’t he already got one?’
‘Not him!’ she said, waving an arm in Cuauhtemoc’s direction. ‘This is for the other one.’
‘Other one?’
‘My daughter, of course! The one they didn’t know about. The one that’s still inside me. She’s going to be born soon.’
I swallowed. Casually I asked, ‘Has Yeipanitl seen you?’
‘I sent him away! I sent them all away. This time I’m going to do it myself, on my own.’
The room was a mess, splatters of food on the bedlinen and carpets, clothes spilling out of her wardrobe, the curtains tied in knots at their ends. Precious Cloud looked like a castaway, shipwrecked in a sea of sheets.
‘I haven’t been eating,’ she announced. ‘Mia’s trying to poison my food.’
‘Mia isn’t here,’ I said, as calmly as I was able. ‘She’s gone home to visit her family.’
This had been at my suggestion, Mia departing for Tenochtitlan on the same day we left the complex. But Precious Cloud took no notice of my words.
‘Catherine, do you sleep?’
Now she was picking at her fingernails. Before I could reply, she went on, ‘It would be good to sleep, just for a little while. But the baby has to come first, doesn’t it? We always have to look after the baby.’
I retreated hurriedly to the adjoining room, where a nurse was stationed at a monitor screen. She was middle-aged, English. She rose, bobbed.
‘Where’s Yeipanitl?’ I demanded. ‘Why isn’t someone attending Precious Cloud?’
‘She doesn’t want us in there,’ the nurse replied. ‘But we’re watching her all the time.’
She indicated the screen. Precious Cloud was framed at its centre, looking more a prisoner than the object of everyone’s concern.
‘Can’t you see what a state she’s in?’ I said.
‘We’re aware of her condition, Your Highness. We need to give her a powerful tranquillizer as part of her treatment, to help her sleep. There’ve been problems with supplies, because of the war in Russia. Yeipanitl went to London yesterday evening to fetch them himself.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘He’s due any time now.’
She was obviously embarrassed by my angry tone, and there was no point in badgering her. Returning to Precious Cloud’s room, I sat with her. My presence seemed to do her little good because she remained obsessed with the phantom child in her womb and the evil intentions of Mia towards her; but at least she tolerated me. I tried to get her to relax and sleep, but this was impossible. When Cuauhtemoc woke and began crying for his feed, she continued to ignore him, and this was a final confirmation to me that her condition was critical. The wet-nurse was
summoned, and, under my instructions, she took Cuauhtemoc into another room. Precious Cloud did not appear to notice.
I remained as calm as I could, though I felt both desperately anxious and helpless. Then, to my great relief, Yeipanitl arrived. He had succeeded in obtaining sufficient supplies of the tranquillizer to proceed with a course of treatment. Unfortunately, the drug had to be administered intravenously, and when Yeipanitl produced the hypodermic, Precious Cloud began shrieking in terror and refused to let him near her. Nothing I could do would calm her, and eventually I was ushered from the room on the arrival of several nurses whom I knew would have forcibly to hold her down. Her screams followed me along the corridor as I fled in shame.
For two days, no one but the doctor and his staff was allowed to see her. Early on the morning of the third day, Chicomeztli arrived and said that Precious Cloud had asked for me.
I arrived to find her not only out of bed but dressed in black jeans and a suede waistcoat over a denim shirt. She looked much brighter, her hair washed and plaited, her face made up. The wet-nurse sat in one corner, Cuauhtemoc asleep in her arms. Yeipanitl was also in attendance.
Precious Cloud greeted me with a gentle hug and a kiss on the cheek.
‘You look more rested,’ I observed.
‘I’ve been sleeping at nights,’ she replied with a smile. ‘It was something I thought I’d forgotten how to do.’
‘I’m so glad.’
‘Catherine, can we go riding together this morning?’
I looked at Yeipanitl. It was plain from his face that he did not approve of the idea.
‘Perhaps it would be better to wait a few more days.’
‘Please, Catherine! I’ve been so cooped up. Just for half an hour, just you and me.’
I deliberated, unsure what was best. I could see that Chicomeztli didn’t like the idea either.
‘We don’t have to race the horses. Just a trot. I need to get out.’
‘A walk would be better at this stage,’ Yeipanitl said.
She ignored him. ‘Please, Catherine.’
I smiled at her. ‘All right.’
I went off to see that the horses were readied. Yeipanitl joined me in the stable.
‘I don’t think this is wise.’
‘I’ll take care of her,’ I assured him.
‘She’s still quite weak and far from fully recovered.’
‘I’m aware of that. I’ll keep a close eye on her.’
‘It’s vital she doesn’t do anything too strenuous at this stage.’
‘She needs to be allowed to do something
she
wants to. I think it’s important we let her.’
It was another cold morning, and Precious Cloud was bundled up in a sheepskin coat and fur hat when we went outside. She mounted Adamant quite effortlessly, as ever disdaining the stirrups. Chicomeztli fussed around as his own mount was made ready. Although Precious Cloud had wanted to ride with me alone, we had agreed a compromise by which he would accompany us.
Precious Cloud tweaked Adamant’s reins, and he trotted off. I spurred Archimedes until we were abreast of her, while Chicomeztli kept pace a few yards behind.
It was a clear, windless morning, the sun casting stark tree shadows on the edges of the grass, smoke rising from a distant field where the last of the autumn leaves was being burned. I could hear Precious Cloud inhaling deeply the sharp air. I assumed she wanted to talk privately with me, but we rode in silence for a while, following the path of the railway line towards Crowthorne station. I watched a hawk hovering high above the embankment.
‘It’s so good to be outside,’ she said at last. ‘I thought I’d never escape.’
Cautiously I said, ‘Escape from what?’
She shrugged. ‘From the attentions of others. Before I came here, I used to ride nearly every day, alone. Sailing the seas of grass, my father used to call it. He always preferred to drive the freeways in his Cadillacs.’
‘He’s not dead, you know. You can still go and visit him.’
‘Sometimes I’d be gone for hours, half a day or more. Prairie or cornfields, it didn’t matter to me – I’d just ride. Often the
farmers complained to my father that I was ruining their crops, but he never did anything. I enjoyed being on my own.’
‘It’s very difficult to be alone here,’ I said, with some sympathy.
‘Oh, no. It’s very easy, Catherine. Solitude is what’s difficult.’
She spurred Adamant to a faster trot. He looked frisky, nostrils twitching in the crisp air. We were approaching the railway station when Precious Cloud wheeled him around.
‘Race you back to the house!’ she said suddenly, and with a whack of the reins, galloped off before I could reply.
I turned Archimedes and we hurried off in pursuit, Chicomeztli also following. Precious Cloud was already fifty yards ahead of me, and the gap began to lengthen as she kicked hard against Adamant’s flanks, frost flurries erupting from his hoofs as he raced across the frozen ground.
I could feel Archimedes labouring on his bandaged leg, and I knew we had no chance of catching her. Chicomeztli, on a horse that was little more than a pony, was even further back. I saw Precious Cloud gallop through the gates of the house before she was lost to sight behind its walls.
I was certain she would be quite safe now, but I did not tarry. As fast as I was able, I galloped to the gates.
The stables were in sight, but there was no sign of her there. Then I saw her, still riding hard, disappearing around the rear of the house.
It could only have been a matter of minutes, but by the time I caught sight of Adamant again he was riderless, standing beside the New Lake, twitching his head. And in the lake itself, there was a jagged dark hole in the ice.
If only I had known that we could have saved her even then. But both Chicomeztli and I leapt to the obvious conclusion – as she must have wanted us to – that she had thrown herself into the lake. And so we wasted a precious hour summoning help and smashing the ice and trawling the shallow waters until we realized she was not there at all. Only then did we notice that Adamant’s reins were gone, only then did one of the maids-in-waiting stumble upon the lambskin coat cast off near the edge of the woods beyond the lake.
It was one of the soldiers from the barracks who found her,
hanging naked from the bough of a tree, the reins forming a crude noose which had broken her neck when she jumped off. In her waistcoat we found a note, addressed to me, which said, ‘Tell Extepan to forgive me. Please look after my son.’ And that was all.
The next day Bevan arrived from London with the news that there had been a spate of arson attacks on military installations in London and a botched attempt to assassinate Iztacaxayauh by a woman variously described as mad, a feminist anarchist and a member of the New Crusade, a fundamentalist Protestant sect.
I was hardly interested in this, despite having asked Bevan to come so that he could bring me up to date with recent developments. By then I had already reached a decision.
‘Extepan must receive the news personally,’ I told Chicomeztli. ‘I’m going to the front.’
He immediately protested that this was quite impossible, there were no civilian flights to the war zone,
any
flight at all would be highly dangerous, and he could not possibly allow me to risk it. I refused to brook any objections. He tried to compromise by suggesting that someone else be sent in my stead, but I insisted on going myself.
Finally he could see that I would not be moved. He raised both palms as if surrendering.
‘It would have to be done unofficially. I could never get authorization at the highest level.’
‘I don’t care how you manage it, as long as you do.’
‘It’s madness.’
I merely stared at him. Finally he turned and went out.
Throughout our verbal tussle, I was aware of Bevan watching me dispassionately.
‘I feel responsible,’ I said to him. ‘I took her riding against her doctor’s advice. It’s partly my fault.’
‘You were a friend to her. Without you, she’d have probably done it sooner.’
‘That may be true. But it still doesn’t alter the fact that she managed to kill herself while I was supposed to be looking after her.’
‘So you’re going off to the enemy front line.’
‘I
have
to, Bevan. It’s a question of honour, duty.’
He smiled, looking unconvinced. ‘Curious, are you? To see what it’s like?’
‘In my position, you often have to do things you might not wish to do.’
He gave this the scorn it deserved. ‘Even when everyone with a bit of sense advises against it?’