The Children of the King (13 page)

“It just sounds funny.” Cecily snuffled.
“Parachutes.”

Jeremy looked as if a shard of metal was working its way into his heart. Stricken, furious, to drive it deeper he asked, “So she’s working in a factory, May?”

“In a factory, with other ladies.”

“That’s happening a lot now, isn’t it — ladies doing the work men used to do. Factories, mining, engineering, farming . . . They’re at the front as well. Nursing, and manning radios. Resistance fighting too, I’ve read.”

“Ladies,”
said Cecily. “Ladies, Jem. Not fourteen-year-old boys. Fourteen-year-old boys have to go to the country with their mummies.”

A lesser young man might have struck his sister for her cruelty, but Jeremy only turned his face away. He looked at the vertebra in his hand, closed his fingers around its strong white shape; released it, and placed it on top of the sheaf of drawings. “Be careful what you touch,” he said quietly. “Nothing in here belongs to you.” And walked out of the room.

Peregrine was not at the table for lunch, which wasn’t unusual as he was often busy outside the house or in his study. At the start of the meal, and again near its end, they heard the telephone ring. Footsteps went up and down the staircase, and Hobbs brought the car to the front of the house. None of this was particularly odd, but Jeremy asked, “What’s going on?”

“Is something going on?” said Heloise. “I have no idea.”

The boy stared at her as children will when they know that a parent who is capable of lying is actually doing so. But Heloise was polished in everything she did, and her son saw nothing, when he looked at her, but his own eyes staring glassily back at him.

“It’s stopped raining,” Cecily observed. “Can we play outside this afternoon?”

It wasn’t necessary to beg permission, as Heloise never minded where the children played, so long as it was out of earshot. On their way to collect their coats the girls passed Jeremy hovering in the hallway where he could scope out the great staircase and the front door. “Come outside and play,” invited May, and gave him a dose of her sparkling eyes and winning smile; and Jeremy mumbled, “No, you go, I have to . . .” and trailed off, his sights returning to the stairs. So May and Cecily put on their wellingtons and went out into the day without him: “The trouble with Jem,” his sister opined, “is that he’s like a guard dog who forgets he’s also just a dog.” And given that Cecily was like a cat whose sole desire was to curl up on somebody’s lap and sleep, May supposed her opinion an educated one.

Because the earth was soaked and the air so cool, they played in the snug shelter of the outbuildings. The stable walls were hung with old harnesses which rattled musically, and the mangers were dusted with chaff that smelt good. Inside large bins with flat metal lids were troves of grain into which the girls plunged their arms to the elbows. Hunks of wood were piled in the lumber-house, packed into every corner and stacked up to the roof, waiting their turn for the fire. The sight of the severed limbs lumped one upon the other, their very deadness and splintered silence made Cecily sigh, “Poor trees.”

They explored the knife-house and the kennels, places they’d investigated countless times already; nothing had changed. They clumped about on the cobbles, leaping heavily in their boots. They took turns hanging on the gate and being propelled through the deep arc of its swing. Byron became bored, and slouched back to the house. Finally the girls grew still.

“What shall we do?”

“We shall . . . we shall . . . we shall go to the henhouse?”

“Cook got angry last time we did that. She said we made the hens go off the lay. Besides, I don’t like those birds. They’ve got mean eyes.”

May propped her chin on the rail. “We shall . . . go to the lake? There’s frogs.”

“Urgh, frogs!”

“. . . I wish there was a pony.”

“There used to be a black Shetland called Jezebel, when I was little. She’s dead now. She bit me. Ponies aren’t as nice as you think.”

“What will we do then?”

“I don’t know.” There was nothing. There was only one thing. They both knew it must be done. May slipped from the gate.

Although the puddles were wider and the land soaked, the long walk across the woods and fields to the ruins did not seem, to Cecily, as arduous as it had the day before, when they’d taken the breakfast leftovers to the castle. Part of Cecily hesitated to return, remembering the horridness of the boys and her own horridness in reply, as well as the painful conversation with May which had followed. But Cecily was not the type to dwell, and all this already seemed the happenings of long ago, the painful edges dulled. She was buoyed by a sense of ownership, compelled by the need to be included, and driven by curiosity: she could not believe the brothers would still be lurking about the miserable ruins, but if they were — well, that was endurance worth witnessing first-hand.

The rain had made the river faster but hardly deeper, and the girls gripped each other’s wrists and helped one another cross. They flinched to feel the water against their wellies, chortled when their boots slithered on the slick embankment and felled them to their hands and knees. But as they approached the ruins they grew subdued, and stepping through the cold still air Cecily had the thought that no one had ever laughed in this place — that throughout the long unspooling of the centuries the stones and their surrounding trees had never heard such a thing. Snow Castle had been built in silence to hold silence, and silently it had dropped in pieces to the ground. “I wish we’d brought Byron,” she whispered, and her words came out in fog that floated, as if captured and pondered, and then, as if dismissed, disappeared.

May looked around at the remains of the castle. The jagged walls dripped water and oozed slime. Moss grew between the stones, and grey mould smudged them. Spiderwebs, lit by raindrops, sagged in every angle. Grass grew up the walls, long threads reaching for the sunlight; over the toppled stone it grovelled messily, without aim. As she walked into the ghostly core of the ruins, water smattered her to the elbows. “Hello?” she called.

Hello,
the castle replied.

A flock of birds took flight somewhere; Cecily did not see and hardly heard them, but she felt it, their urgent flying away. The castle towered above the children, so little of itself remaining, yet so completely
present
— as if it had never needed ceilings and roofs and floors, this tattered wreckage being sufficient and even what it preferred. Cecily found herself scanning the highest reaches, where the raw edges of stone met the meek sky, not knowing what she expected to see up there but knowing she wouldn’t be surprised to see it, either — a watching eye, a reaching arm, a body encased in stone for centuries yet still faintly alive. With a shiver she bumped her gaze to earth, to the shelf where May had left the breakfast plate. The plate was gone, presumably returned to the kitchen by Jeremy; but the ground beneath the shelf showed a scattering of crumbs. Not the crumbs left by children or even by fairytale children, but crumbs thrown about by the investigations of birds.

“Hello?” May called, louder this time.

The castle growled back,
Hello.

“Is anybody here?”

The castle wondered,
Here? Anybody?

“They’re not here.” Cecily’s heart was making its presence felt, knocking as if it wanted to tell her something.

“Hello, are you here? You two boys?”

Two boys here, two boys?

They waited while the echo had its amusement, gambolling from wall to wall like a nasty clown. May placed a hand on a shoulder of stone, then snatched it back as though the marble burned. “They must have gone.”

“The rain drove them off,” Cecily agreed — quietly, so the castle wouldn’t hear. And both girls thought of rain not as being wet and cold and to be avoided whenever possible, but rather as being talismanic, as if rain were related to garlic, and this was a place of vampires. May looked at the remains, the stumps of beams, the deep fireplaces, the arching gaps through which someone must have once surveyed the land. The ground around the walls had been dented into bowls by centuries of dripping water. In corners of stone hung clouds of fog like watchful forest animals, wary but also willing to attack. “I’m glad,” Cecily whispered. “I’m glad they’ve gone.” And it wasn’t the horridness of the brothers that made her glad, but because she didn’t wish to know anyone who could find these lonesome ruins a satisfactory place to be.

May frowned. She was not quite ready to walk away. “Hello!” she hollered. “Is somebody here?”

You will never leave this place,
replied Snow Castle.

At least that was what it seemed to say; Cecily whimpered, “May, let’s go. I’m cold. I don’t feel well. There’s no one here.”

“All right,” conceded May. But as they walked away she kept glancing back, unconvinced.

Returning to Heron Hall, the girls discovered they had missed a scene: Heloise was in her bedroom nursing upset feelings, Jeremy was in his own room fuming, and the household was stepping on tiptoe, leery of disturbing either of them. The housekeeper, Mrs Winter, was having tea in the kitchen with Cook; Cecily and May sidled into fuggy gaps around the stove, accepted tea and sultana biscuits, and prised from these two stone-faced women a little blood-warming gossip. While the girls had been playing in the outbuildings, oblivious to the whole world, Peregrine had come down with his overnight case, dealing commands to his staff as he went, clearly intending to depart the Hall and to do so in some hurry — Hobbs had the car running, the front door was already open. It was at the door that Peregrine had met Jeremy, the boy “spiky as the Labrador who ate the hedgehog,” according to Mrs Winter. “Not a clue what was happening, but still he wanted a piece of it. Mr Lockwood could have been off to keep an appointment with a Turkish firing-squad for all the lad knew, but still he wants to follow him about like a mutt.”

Cecily paused in the work of shovelling biscuit into her mouth to explain, “He wants to be where the action is.”

“Action! Your mother gave him action.
Jeremy !
she says.
I’ve just about had it with you!
”

“Ooh.” It was rare for Heloise to lose her temper with her favourite: Cecily was thrilled. “Mama was there too?”

“She came into the hall at the same time as Mr Lockwood came downstairs, just in time to hear your brother plead
Uncle, take me with you.
As if he’s a setter and Mr Lockwood’s going duck-shooting. Mr Lockwood looks at him and says
Jem, you know I can’t.
And Mrs Lockwood says
Jeremy, how many times must you be told? Until I am blue in the face? London is not safe! You are staying here, and you are not leaving!
The lad starts whining, but your mother talks over him.
I won’t have you arguing and resisting every moment of every day! Don’t you think I have enough worries? I’m amazed you can be so selfish!
”

Cecily was enjoying everything about this: the warmth of the stove, the sweetness of the tea, the meatiness of the gossip and, especially, the housekeeper’s impersonation of her mother. She reached for another biscuit, the very largest; tractored it in.

“To which the lad starts dancing up and down in a devil of a fuss.
Mother !
he screams — really screams, like a wounded rabbit.
I’ll be safe with Uncle Peregrine, I’ll be safe with Father! Why can’t I go?
And Mrs Lockwood shrieks
Because you’re a child! You’re a hindrance, not a help! Do you think this is a game, Jeremy? That your father and uncle can leave aside the small matter of the war to attend the needs of a child?
”

Several crumbs popped out of Cecily: “Ho ho! Jem doesn’t like it when people call him a child.”

“Apparently!” said Mrs Winter. “He didn’t care for it at all.
I’m not a child!
he bellows.
If I had to, I could kill a man!
”

Cecily hooted; Cook shook her head. “Can you imagine!” The housekeeper couldn’t help grinning. “He’s springing about like a flea-bit yorkie, howling about killing people. You can guess how it went down with Mrs Lockwood — I thought she was going to be the lad’s first victim. Just roll over dead with her arms and legs in the air.”

Cecily rocked in her chair at the picture, hands clamped to her face; but Cook said dourly, “You can laugh, little lady, but it’s a terrible thing. A sweet boy talking about killing people. Quite ready to step up and kill people. That’s what this war’s done.”

“Jem couldn’t kill a butterfly!”

“But that’s the thing, see? A boy who can’t kill a butterfly wants to kill a man. Where’s the good in that? Where’s the victory in that?”

Cecily didn’t even try to understand what the woman was talking about, but reached instead for a biscuit. Mrs Winter slid the plate across the stove. “No more, pet, you’ll spoil your dinner.”

“What was Mr Lockwood doing?” asked May.

“Well, staring at mother and son in amazement! Probably wondering why he let such wild beasts take up residence in his house.
You think I’m weak and stupid !
says the lad, and his mother, who’s like a hissing cat, says
What I think you are is infantile, and I’ve had enough of it! I’m fed up with the moroseness, the martyrdom. If you don’t improve your behaviour, I shall send you abroad.
”