The Children of the King (24 page)

It was perhaps the most logical thing May had ever heard her say, so she ignored it as an exception to the rule. “Why don’t you go back to the house,” she said, not completely unkindly. “Go back and sit with your mother. She’s worried.”

Fatigued in body, wounded in spirit, willing to do anything — even commune with ghosts — rather than sit with her mother, Cecily replied, “I think I should come with you. I don’t think you should go alone.”

May snorted. “Those boys won’t hurt anyone. They especially won’t hurt me.”

Cecily didn’t ask why; she just followed. Satiny birds flew about, silver grass glistened. The earth blew wet bubbles under the pressure of the children’s footsteps. They reached the river and Cecily, arms windmilling, groaned as water sloshed into her shoes. May, of course, crossed easily and without incident, as if she’d been born to ford streams.

And then Snow Castle was before them, the river humming behind them, the gigantic sky above. The walls of the castle, decorated by weeds and smirched by the mossy hands of years, folded around each other like a stony house of cards stilled in mid-collapse. Fleetingly, Cecily thought the ruins beautiful, not for what they had been, but for what they were. Eerily beautiful, like gossamer. Grandly tragic, like a mausoleum. Then the ruins became ruined again, and the sky was empty of birds, and the only sound came from a sullen drip that had been dripping for years.

And in the midst of it sat the brothers, close to each other, cross-legged on the ground, their faces turned only slightly as if they’d seen and heard the girls coming but were pretending they had not. They looked as real as life, as real as blood and time. “Hello,” said May.

The boys dipped their heads; the youngster smirked. They seemed to be holding small things in their hands, pebbles or chips of marble. Their long hair blew about their white throats.

“Hello?” May shifted her feet. “Can you see us?”

The child, unable to contain himself, gave a giggle, and shushed it. “Don’t look,” the girls heard him whisper hotly to himself.

They were surely real, for only real boys could be so aggravating. “We can see you,” said Cecily. “Don’t act silly.”

The child harrumphed and twisted, flinging open his hands. Tiny black stones flew through the air, disappearing as soon as they touched the ground. “Why do you always come here?” he asked, rude as ever.

“We want to see you,” said May.

“No one is supposed to see us. I’ve told you this before.” The older brother turned his head. He still looked ill, but not iller. A fussy boy, his velvet clothes were as prim as always. “Anyway, just because you
want
to see us doesn’t give you the right to do so. We decide whom we shall and shan’t see.”

Cecily said blandly, “Well we can see you.”

“We need your help,” said May.

The boy gazed at the girls. Seated in the dirt, his cloak rucked around him, he looked like an exquisite puppet who’d been dropped onto the floor. Surprising them, he said, “There is grief between you — you, and you. You have been hurting each other.”

“No we haven’t,” said Cecily.

“It’s all right now,” said May. “We’ve stopped.”

“Good. You have been sent here together, as we have. Forgive. Forget.”

“We
have,
” Cecily assured him.

“We’ve come because we need your help,” May said again.

“Mine?” The boy’s lip curled. “I can’t help you. I am no help to anyone. In everything I’ve tried, I have failed.”

“You’ve looked after your brother all this time,” Cecily pointed out, adding, “Better than I’ve looked after mine.”

“Cecily’s brother has run away,” May explained. “We think he’s gone to London.”

The boy glanced at his sibling who had risen to his knees, watchful as a blackbird. “What has this to do with us? It has nothing to do with us.”

“Everything is connected.” May whispered the words like an incantation which would unlock an unseen door; and indeed the brothers twitched as if she’d trodden on their toes. “We are here because you are here.”

Cecily hesitated, then edged a step closer, hands clasped under her chin. She really didn’t know what to believe about these boys. Though their voices were clear and their clothing elaborate and their curls and pink skin soapily clean and alive, there came from them a feeling of thinness, as if they existed under a cold blue light and could not step away from its beam. There came from them a nothingness that was like the air in a cave. She couldn’t believe, but she could believe. She drew a breath and said, “It does have something to do with you. You’re children, just like us — just like all children, ever. You’re frightened and brave, but other children are frightened and brave too. May is. The children in London, they are. You’ve never been the only ones to feel this way.”

“I think,” said the boy, “we have been more frightened, and had to be braver, than most.”

May bit her lip, peering over the stony distance that could not be crossed. “Jeremy wants to be as brave as you. That’s why he ran away.”

“He is good and gentle,” said Cecily.

“He wants to do something noble —”

“A worthy ambition.”

“— but it makes me worry we won’t see him again. It’s what happens sometimes. Sometimes, the noble thing is the last thing. And after that you never see the person again.”

A breeze went around the ruins, tousled the brothers’ long locks. The child shuffled close to whisper in his sibling’s ear. The boy nodded, smiled sadly at the evacuee. “Is it Jeremy you wish returned,” he asked, “or somebody else?”

“Him!” said Cecily. “Who else is there?”

May’s heart was beating hard. She took a step forward, the earth clinging to her feet and trying to hold her back, not wanting its little girl to go. “You could find him, couldn’t you? You could speak to him.”

The child looked owlishly at his brother. The boy did nothing for a moment. Then he stated, “We can’t leave here.”

“Have you tried?”

“Don’t ask me if I’ve tried! I tried my best every day of my life. We were sent here. We had no choice. We are watched. We cannot leave. We are imprisoned!”

The girls shied from his temper. The earth bubbled and wheezed. May said, “Where’s your prison? I don’t see it. All I see are fallen-down stones and weeds. There’s no lock. There aren’t any chains. You see something that doesn’t exist.”

“No one but us knows you’re here,” said Cecily. “No one is watching you except birds.”

“You’re not prisoners,” May told them. “That’s all finished. If you want to, you can just walk away.”

The brothers stared. In the sunlight they wavered, grew milky, were solid again. The child squeezed the older boy’s hand. “I would like to see Mama,” he said.

His brother ignored him, muttered, “You speak as if it would be simple.”

“It would be! Wouldn’t it?”

“We are accustomed to this place. We are part of it now.”

“But this is a sad forgotten place —”

“Is that how you want to be?” asked Cecily. “Sad and forgotten?”

“Please, brother,” pleaded the younger one. “Let’s escape! Let’s adventure! I would rather a terrible adventure than to stay here for ever and ever.”

The older boy smiled morosely, and turned away. If the wind blew cool through his linen shirt, he did not shiver. He looked back, and his grey eyes were tired and angry. “And if we did as you say and left this place, and if, in our travels, we were to see this boy Jeremy, what are we to do with him?”

“Send him home!” yelped Cecily.

“Protect him,” said May.

The boys glanced at each other. “I want to see Mama,” the smaller said again.

The elder winced with indecision. “If we leave here, we must go far, far,” he said. “It might be dangerous. And I am duty-bound to keep my brother safe.”

“You do keep him safe,” said Cecily. “Look at him, he’s well. He’s almost too well. You’ll always know how to keep him safe. You’re the big brother.”

The boy’s shoulders fell; he reluctantly smiled. He looked into his sibling’s eager face, reached out and closed his hand around the child’s paw. “If we leave this place,” he said, “it will mean accepting there is nothing for us here, and that we must say goodbye. But we are only children. I don’t mind for myself, but — my brother is a little child. He should have been allowed to stay, and grow up, and grow old, as others have done. It isn’t fair. It isn’t the way it’s promised to be.”

He wiped his hand across his face, a hand which was ghostly in its delicacy, a face like that of a grieving angel. May and Cecily watched with paining hearts. The decrepit drip of water dripped — paused — dripped — paused again. The child hung his head in a silence deeper than a sea.

It was May who spoke. “Isn’t it better to say goodbye and go, than to stay as prisoners forever? Isn’t it better to leave a place where you don’t belong?”

The boy shook his head hopelessly. His brother shuffled near until their knees touched. When the boy lifted his face, his eyes were filled with tears. Cecily had the strange thought that the tears were like diamonds, ancient and cold. “We are afraid to leave,” he confessed. “
I
am afraid. Life was one way, and suddenly it was another. There was light, and then there was not. Nothing can be trusted. It has made me afraid.”

May said, “I don’t think you need to be afraid. I think you’ll be safe. I think you’ll be much happier when you’ve left this lonely place. You’ve stayed here too long, and it’s made you too sad. But if you are scared about going, I can ask my dad to look after you.”

The boy smiled, pressed a tear away. “There are countless souls in need of comfort,” he said. “History is lined with the likes of them. How would he find us amid so many?”

“I don’t know how,” May replied, “but he would do it. He always found
me
in a crowded place. He never let me get lost.”

The child jiggled his brother’s hand. “Let’s go,” he pleaded, “let’s go. Let’s go see Mama. Let’s go adventuring. I want to sail the ocean. I want to run and run.”

But instead the boy looked around at the ruins, and Cecily wondered what he saw: the walls and doors and carpets and ceilings of a prison built five centuries ago, or the welcoming blue sky that had been there since the earth was born out of darkness. “Is it truly all right to leave?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“The weather seems fine. Cool, but the sun shines.”

“A good day for travelling,” said Cecily.

“If we go, it will be because we want to. Not because you say we should.”

“That’s all right. We know that.”

“No one may tell us what to do!” remembered the bumptious child.

“Not anymore,” agreed May.

“We shall think on it,” said the boy: yet already the brothers had risen like smoke to their feet as if the mere thought of leaving was taking them away, leaving without further lingering as if they’d waited such a long time to be told their time had passed, and they were free. “If you see my dad,” May rushed to say, “tell him I miss him. Tell him I won’t forget him —” but they might not have heard, for they were already gone in spirit and perhaps could not hear. And although their backs were to her, May did the singular thing that Cecily would never forget: she bowed.

Three days later, Jeremy was home. His father — more precisely, a man who did as Jeremy’s father commanded, for Humphrey Lockwood was occupied with war business at that particular junction in time — put him on the train and sent him back to Heron Hall. He was met at the village station by Hobbs, who gave him a small stone figurine which was the trophy of his dirt-stained collection.

If anyone expected Jeremy to be ashamed of his behaviour, they were disappointed. Indeed, any criticism of the boy was silenced at the sight of him. Apart from some scuffing of his hands, his escapade hadn’t harmed him: but in his thin face and dark eyes was a new look, a fine look, a proud and peaceful look. If anyone had said anything sharp to him, the look on his face suggested he would smile and agree, because agreement would make the speaker happy; but that the speaker, smiled-upon and agreed-with in this easy way, would be left feeling narrow-minded and petty. The household came to stare at him, this boy who had run off as a naughty child and returned with the air of a prophet.

The train journey had not tired him, for, though he seemed like somebody else now, Jeremy was still fourteen, with energy to spare. He ate supper in Peregrine’s den under the curious gaze of his family. Heloise could not take her eyes from this stranger who was her son. He would grow up to become what she hoped he’d be, a most respected and honoured man, a lawyer and, eventually, a judge; yet he did this not for her but for himself, because he returned to Heron Hall wanting to make a worthy difference to the world. In running away, he had lost the dreams of childhood and found some of the truths that make a man. He would always keep that stone figurine close to him, on a shelf where he could see it.

When he’d left Heron Hall five days earlier, it had been in the darkest hours; by the time Cecily found his note and empty bed, Jeremy had been miles away. “You must have known I’d be worried,” said Heloise, and Jeremy replied, “Well, Mother, I left you the note saying you shouldn’t be.” And the tone of his voice, so sedate and reasonable, forced Heloise to admit that yes, he had left such a note saying just such a thing, and she really should have paid it more attention. The boy who sat before them was clearly capable of looking after himself. She’d always seen him as a flailing child, and he wasn’t like that at all.