The Children of the King (14 page)

“Oh!”
Abroad
was a bit serious, this conflict was getting out of hand. “What did Jem say?”

“It pulled him up on his rope, that’s certain. Threatening him with banishment, that’s what his mother was doing, simply because she knew it would break his heart. That’s not a boy you want to cast out as punishment — he’s the sort who might never come back. Maybe in body, but never in spirit. Rash, she was being, and sadistic.”

“For his own good though,” said Cecily. “Mother knows what’s best.”

Perhaps fearing she may have gone too far, the housekeeper said, “Oh, certainly. Mrs Lockwood was right to say it. She’s a wise woman, trying to protect her son. But the look on his face — it was tragedy. He only wants to be useful.”

“Useful?” Cook sneered. “Seems to me the nitwit wants to get himself shot to bits.”

“No, no,” insisted the housekeeper, “he only wants to help. Now girls, look at you — muddy from noggin to tush! It’s bathtime for you.”

“But what happened?” May asked quickly. “What did Mr Lockwood say?”

“Well, bless, Mr Lockwood was the hero of the moment. Who knows what would have happened if Mr Lockwood hadn’t been there? He went for the door, but he looked back just a second — looked at the lad, and said something quite touching.
I wish I had half your courage
, he said. And then he was gone, and if he never sees this house again I’m sorry his last memories will be such disagreeable ones”— Mrs Winter caught her tongue before it ran off once more, —“but of course he’ll be home in a day or two, by which time all will be forgotten. Now you two, before that dog mistakes you for something rank to roll in: the bath!”

Peregrine was gone for four days, longer than anyone had expected but not, contrary to Mrs Winter’s prediction, long enough for the unpleasantness between mother and son to be forgotten. These were very still, muffled days at Heron Hall. Cecily and May spent the time wandering the house and its grounds, Byron padding amiably behind them. The house offered endless entertainments for two girls, including the provision of a flat-bottomed skiff which they dragged from the boathouse and set sail upon the lake. The herons watched their clumsy attempts to paddle from one shore to another, taking to the air when Byron, deeming the whole adventure too fraught, waded in to rescue his charges.

Mrs Lockwood would have protested as forcibly as the dog to this boating expedition, had she been able to see it; but Heloise kept to herself during these days, holed up in her bedroom from which emerged a stream of letters addressed to her many friends. She came downstairs as usual for lunch and dinner, and was coolly polite and coolly smiling, very much her usual self: but she and Jeremy were wary of one another now, having glimpsed something of which the other was capable. Wounded and angry but also missing each other, mother and son were remindful of cats who must share a fence, a street, an entire world, and are surly about it — yet who long, too, to curl up in the warmth and security of one another, as cats and kittens yearn to do.

The girls saw Jeremy at meals and at other unscheduled moments in the day. Unaware that they knew of his humiliation in the hallway, the boy behaved toward them as he always had: standoffishly, a little patronisingly, but also with unexpected kindness. Concerned they were becoming lazy, he drew up a routine of exercises and put the children through daily paces. Troubled by the increasingly thin state of their education, he lectured them in spelling and arithmetic, and devised exams for them to sit. In the morning, when his newspaper reading was done, he accompanied them on rambles, showing them the kinds of places where artefacts and fossils could be found — in weather-exposed tree roots, in suspiciously shaped hollows, in crumbling hillsides. They found a stillborn lamb, which made Cecily cry. They viewed Snow Castle but only from a distance, as if each had secret reason for not wanting to go near. If the girls were indeed in the company of a boy who
could
kill a man if he had to,
he gave no sign of his cold-hearted potential. In fact, when they discovered a raven snared in wire Jeremy put his coat over its head and worked its trembling body free; the gardener said later they should have wrung its black neck but Jeremy replied, “That would have been cruel.”

When Peregrine returned on the fourth evening, the household already knew the dreadful news he would bring with him. For two days the radio and newspapers had been concerned with nothing else. What they had to report was terrifying, and a hush of grief had fallen over the country. London was under attack.

So long expected, so well prepared-for, so clearly visualised, the air raids were nonetheless completely other than what had been expected. The first assault, when it finally came, had taken place in broad daylight, late in the afternoon. The enemy had put into the air every warplane at its disposal: hundreds of them — almost a thousand — had blackened the sky over the city. Above streets and houses, doors had opened in the bellies of the bombers and the bombs had slipped free — tumbling, for an instant, fins first, then righting themselves so their blunt noses pointed to the ground, to the docks, the gardens, the playgrounds, the people. They fell with the weight of the inevitable, and boomed into their targets. London caught fire, and thousands rushed for shelter, and many did not find it.

Throughout the first afternoon and night the planes flew, the bombs plummeted, the city burned, and the people died. And as no one believed a single attack would satisfy their enemy, no one was surprised when, the following night, the planes had returned; and the city had burned, and people had died.

Peregrine arrived home tired and drawn, limping heavily on his bad leg. A meal was brought for him in his study, and his guests sat around him, on the edges of their chairs, watching while he ate, making frivolous comments, aware of his weariness but needing to hear the awful words that must soon be said. The household staff came to the door and gathered there, likewise desperate to hear the testimony of this eyewitness, this link to the outside world.

Finally Jeremy could hedge round the subject no more: he asked, “Is it as bad as the newspapers are saying, Uncle?”

“It’s as bad as you imagine.” Peregrine wiped his hands and set aside the plate. “It will get worse, of course. Now it’s begun — now they’ve decided they’ll take the city in pieces, if that’s the only way they can get their hands on it — they won’t stop. While we lack planes built for night fighting, they won’t stop. We expect they’ll return tonight, and tomorrow night, and the next night, and every night. They will keep bombing us either as long as they need to, or as long as they’re able.”

“They will stop.” Jeremy was stony. “We’ll fight them out of the air. Somehow we’ll do it. We’ll make them sorry.”

Cecily spoke from where she had hidden behind Byron. “What was it like, Uncle Peregrine?”

“Frightening,” the man said simply. “It stops your heart to watch a squadron cut across the sky, so tidy, so efficient, so dutiful, a sight which would make you proud if you didn’t know that inside those planes are men whose task it is to pound you into bits. It stops your breath to know that no place is more secure than another — a cathedral no safer than a tenement — and that it’s only dumb luck if you’re standing where the bomb doesn’t land, or standing where it does. Your existence is stripped down to nothing but chance. Everything you’ve ever hoped, believed, achieved — all of it is less meaningful than dust, it can’t help you, it won’t spare you, if your feet have you standing in precisely the wrong place.”

His audience watched in silence as the speaker reached for his glass and took a drink.

“The noise freezes your blood,” he continued. “The fighter planes make a thrumming noise, like very furious bees; the bombers make a heavier roar which sounds louder in your head than in actuality, a noise that cavemen might have recognised. That first afternoon, the shadows of the planes flicked along the ground fast, like racing demons, crossing roads and leaping walls. When each shadow passed, you could breathe for a moment, then wait for the next one to come. Finally the sun went out and the shadows disappeared, and it was a mercy, really. To be rid of those spectral messengers.”

Heloise’s sights drifted without mooring. “God help us,” she whispered.

Peregrine took a cigarette out of its case and held it to the flame Jeremy hastened to light. “Bombs make, so I’m told, a soft howl as they fall, but I never heard that. I only heard what comes after the howl: the boom as a building explodes. And shouting and screaming in the streets. The honking of horns, the thud of running feet. And the wail of sirens — air-raid sirens, ambulance sirens, fire-engine sirens, police sirens — yowling on and on without cease, telling everyone what we already knew.”

“And the damage? What did you see?”

Peregrine paused, smoke curling from his fingers. “It’s funny, you know — I’ve never seen a bomb site, yet what I saw tallied exactly with what I pictured in my head — exactly, no doubt, as you picture in yours. What’s a building when it’s destroyed? They are made of brick and timber, as we are muscle and bone. Plain things, but alive and working together, as they’re designed to, they have elegance, they have — soul. And maybe there’s nothing so lifeless, so finished, as something that has had its soul torn away. The rubble is ugly. It’s made of chunks of brick, a trillion chips of glass, smashed and splintered timber. All this sprawls over the roads, into the gutters, heaps against its neighbours. Caught in the mess is furniture, carpet, birdcages, pots and pans, chests of drawers filled with clothes. Stinking dust floats everywhere, and the dirt ripped up by the impact is thrown over everything. And where the building once stood there’s an odd empty space, and light touches what it never touched before, and sparrows hop along towel rails, and dogs walk on roofs.”

“Oh,” breathed Cecily.

Peregrine ashed and smoked his cigarette. “We can expect them to bomb hospitals, libraries, churches, museums, important places like that. They’ll try to break our spirit by taking away what we need and care about.”

“Oh,” said Cecily again. She imagined the stuffed animals from the museum blowing sky-high, zebras and gnus and sloths and anteaters soaring to the clouds amid a glittering shower of glass.

“And the people?” It was Mrs Winter, the housekeeper. “I don’t mind about the buildings — what about the people?”

Peregrine said, “Hundreds died, that first afternoon and night — maybe five hundred or more. A countless number were injured. The next night, fewer were lost; we were better prepared. But while the raids continue, many people will die. There’s no doubting that.”

“But what about the shelters? What about the windows being blacked out?”

“The shelters will save people. The blackout will save people. Every small defence will help.”

Cecily remembered the window in her London bedroom, its crisscross of tape and shrouding of curtain. She remembered her father standing at the window and looking through a gap in the drapes. With a sense of helpless falling she realised how flimsy a defence against a bomb was the curtain of a girl’s bedroom. “Is my Daddy safe?” she asked.

“Humphrey is safe. Your house is safe. And May . . .” Peregrine looked to the child who crouched by the couch saying nothing, fiercely focused on every word, “your home is safe too.”

“Today,” mused Mrs Winter. “We are safe for today.”

The many occupants of the room and doorway gazed dully into space, as if the conversation had delivered to each of them a stunning blow to the head. Heloise was the first to speak. “So,” she sighed, “what now? What dreadful thing must happen next?”

Peregrine smoked his cigarette and smoke drifted around him, between his elegant fingers and through his mane of hair. He shrugged and smiled. “We’ll fight, as Jeremy says. Now this battle has begun, we can start winning it. People will get up in the morning, go to work as usual, feed their families, walk in the park. No one will panic or lose hope. They will only beat us when we let them.”

“Yes.” Mrs Winter approved. “Business as usual. Carry on.” And began doing so immediately, shuffling the staff away from the door and back to their evening tasks.

Left alone in the study, the family found there wasn’t anything to say. The subject of the air raids could have continued all night, but there was nothing that, added now, could vitally improve on what had been said. Heloise, who liked silence, nevertheless felt compelled to break this one: “You must be tired, Peregrine.”

“A little,” her brother-in-law admitted.

“I’m angry,” said Jeremy. “I’m so angry.” His fists were closed, his lovely eyes hard, but he was ignored. Everyone was angry; no one assumed he was angrier than most.

Cecily raised her head above the parapet of Byron’s ears. “Will you tell us more about the Duke, Uncle?”

“Oh no,” tisked her mother, “no disagreeable stories tonight . . .”

Peregrine seemed about to agree with her; then said, “Why not? History repeats itself: the battle for power is fought over and over again. We
should
hear from our Duke tonight. We might learn something from him.”