The Children of the King (12 page)

The next morning brought something marvellous: a letter for May. So excited was Cecily by the advent of the envelope that her hand actually reached out to grab it, managing to restrain itself only at the last instant and clonking like dead wood to the table. May gazed at her name written above the address of Heron Hall. “It’s from my mother,” she said.

“You see!” said Cecily. “I told you she wouldn’t have forgotten you. Open it!”

“She might not want to open it.”

“Why not? I want to know what it says —”

“Maybe she would rather not tell you what it says,” Jeremy sighed. “A letter is a private thing, Cecily.”

May looked from the siblings to their uncle. He met her eye for just a moment before returning his attention to his plate. “I think,” he said, “a letter should always be read in private before being inflicted on an audience, lest it be boring — or too exciting for the listeners’ own good.”

“I don’t think May’s mum would write anything
exciting,
” Cecily scoffed. “She isn’t a
spy
or something. She’s just a housewife. There’s nothing exciting about bringing in the washing.”

“She was going to get a job,” said May. “That’s why she had to send me here.”

“That’s not true! She sent you here in case of an air raid. She didn’t want a bomb dropping on your head.”

A frown came to May’s small face. “It
is
true. She isn’t afraid of bombs. She was getting a job to help us win the war.”

“Haw! What job could your mum do, to help win the war? She couldn’t do something proper, like Daddy does.”

The frown grew deeper. “She was going to work in a factory where they make aeroplanes, or be a bus conductor or an ambulance driver, something like that.”

“A bus conductor!” It was killingly funny. “As if conducting a bus could win the war!”

“It’s better than doing
nothing,
” said the evacuee.

If anyone thought of Heloise lounging upstairs in her bed with a long day of nothingness stretching before her, nobody mentioned it. Jeremy looked to the window, sunk in heavy silence. The carving of Peregrine’s breakfast seemed to require concentration. “Read it to yourself, May, in your room,” he said. “Be quiet and eat your breakfast, Cecily.”

Cecily shuffled like a pony that’s being prevented from charging off where it will; she consoled herself by observing, “It’s a very flat envelope. I don’t think there’s a present inside.” And that at least was something to be satisfied about.

The sunshine of the previous day had gone and the sky was low and sour, the same dire colour as the newspapers that shouldered for space between the plates. Cecily said, “Tell us more about the Duke, Uncle Peregrine,” but her uncle said, “No. The Duke’s story is for telling in the night.” When the evacuee, having finished her breakfast, asked for permission to leave the table, Cecily jack-in-a-boxed out of her chair. But, “Sit down,” said Peregrine, in such a tone that a whole herd of Cecilys would have resumed their seats. “May, you may leave the table. Cecily, stay. I have a matter to discuss with you.”

“But —”

He pointed a talon at her chair; his niece plumped down into it. Glumly she watched May disappear out the door; turning to her captor she asked wearily, “What is it, Uncle?”

“It’s rats.”

“Rats?” Cecily blanched. If she knew anything, she knew she didn’t like rats.

“Cook believes there are rats in the larder. If not rats, mice. If not mice, weevils. If not weevils, children.”

“Hmm,” said Cecily.

“To say
children
is unfair. One child. One rack of biscuits, and one child.”

Jeremy, reading the newspaper but listening, shook his head in disgust.

“Maybe it was a rat?” suggested Cecily.

Her uncle wouldn’t be swayed. “A female child with blond ringlets and a pot belly, who shares in common with the rat only that creature’s legendary sneakiness.”

Cecily always knew when she was beaten. She had no belief in going down fighting, but surrendered the moment it seemed her youth would be the best defence. “They were so delicious,” she said, and let the memory of the biscuits play upon her face to prove how helpless she had been before them. “What’s my punishment?”

Peregrine looked at Jeremy, who folded back the newspaper and turned it to his sister. “The crossword.”

Cecily screamed. “That’s not fair!”

“The crossword it is!” Peregrine passed sentence: “Miss Cecily Lockwood cannot leave this room until the crossword is done. What’s the first clue, Jem?”

“The queenly state of Australia. Eight letters.”

Cecily clutched her head.

With the help of her brother and uncle the puzzle was complete in an hour, but the process sapped Cecily’s joy in being alive. She left the breakfast room feeling dazed, plodded up the stairs. She’d forgotten about May, but the fact of the evacuee’s existence returned to her on the landing. She found the girl in her bedroom, curled up on her pillows and reading a book. Cecily reeled in, slumped against the bedpost, puddled to the floor. “Are you hurt?” May asked.

“My brain is.”

May tucked the book under a pillow. “Look at the rain,” she said, and Cecily hoisted her head high enough to see across the quilt and out the window to where rain was falling in workmanlike fashion, as if obliged to do so; perhaps it was.

“. . . Did you read your mother’s letter?”

“Mmm.”

“Did she send you anything besides the letter? A postcard or a ribbon, something like that?”

“No,” said May, “just a letter.”

“Ah.” Cecily found she had lost much interest in Mrs Bright’s epistle. “Is she well?”

“Yes, she’s well.”

“I hope my daddy is well.”

Again the girls looked to the weeping sky. The ruts in the land would be filling up and overflowing. “I wonder about those two boys,” murmured Cecily.

“Maybe they’ve gone home.”

“Do you think so? To which home? Back to where they were billeted? Or home to London?”

“I don’t know.” May watched the rain. “It was hard to understand those boys.”

“I didn’t like those boys, but I felt sorry for them. Didn’t you?”

“Sort of,” said May.

“I felt —
strange
about them. Like they were our dreadful enemies, but also that they couldn’t hurt us. They were scary, but I wasn’t frightened of them. They made me cross, but I also felt sad for them. I didn’t want to talk to them, but I just couldn’t stop talking . . .”

Cecily halted, pressed her face into the quilt. She hadn’t known she’d had these entangled feelings about the boys. It made her feel peculiar, as if her mind had gone off somewhere without her. She vowed not to think about them anymore. The shock of the crossword was wearing away and she felt revived enough to say, “We can’t go outside in this weather. Shall we play hide-and-seek?”

“Yes,” said May.

They complicated the traditional rules of the game by bringing Byron into it: for much of the morning the girls and the dog played an indoor version of fox-hunting, the hiding child being the fox, the seeking child and the Newfoundland playing the huntress and her hound. Through the cavernous rooms of Heron Hall the fox scurried, burying herself within cupboards, behind curtains, inside mighty chests. With methodical determination the hound and huntress followed, snuffling under tables, investigating stairwells, peering behind doors. The third floor of the house, where the staff had their rooms, was off-limits, as were the private rooms of Heloise and Peregrine; still there remained countless nooks in which a child-fox could hide. Nonetheless it was a surprisingly nerve-racking game for the fox, who dodged and weaved and doubled-back yet was gradually but relentlessly cornered by the hound. When May, the huntress, hauled aside a basket of bones to unearth her quarry from beneath a table in the library, she found Cecily rolled into a chunky ball with tears coursing down her face. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I miss my daddy!”

May was accustomed to Cecily’s daddy appearing in conversation at the slightest of invitations, but this time his arrival surprised even her. “Why? Are you scared?”

“No, it’s only — you know how you always go to museums with your dad? Well, I always play hide-and-seek with
my
dad. It would make you cry if you went to a museum without your dad, wouldn’t it? Well, hide-and-seek is making
me
cry . . .”

May blinked several times. “My dad —” she began, and stopped. She said, “We won’t play if you don’t want to.”

Cecily unrolled from below the table, grabbed Byron and wiped her face on him. “I’m not really crying,” she sighed. “I just miss Daddy. I worry about him. He has a very serious job. He must get tired. He’s alone. Do you think he’ll be all right?”

“Probably. I think so.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Well . . . he sounds like the kind of person who is always all right.”

“Is he? I suppose he is.” Cecily mopped her eyes and smiled. “Shall we keep playing?”

“I don’t mind.”

But they didn’t keep playing; the library was a fascinating place, with shelves stacked with tomes of all hues and heft laddering up to a domed ceiling where a skylight let in a shaft of the muffled day. The girls moved like moths from shelf to shelf, alighting here and there to draw a book from between its fellows. Many of the books were old, and puffed out clouds of elderly breath when they were opened. The odour, waved away, revealed words written on rice-paper, in foreign languages, in words understandable yet incomprehensible, occasionally no words at all. Some books had pictures, many painted straight onto the page. There were mountains, exotic birds, literary villains. “Ugh,” May grimaced, and Cecily hurried to see: a book full of drawings of naked men and naked women in graceful poses. The girls stared, turned the pages in silence. The various lumps and bumps seemed nothing to do with them; but, aware they were making landmark discoveries, their cheeks reddened, they flinched in dismay. “Put it away,” Cecily whispered, and May shelved the book promptly, as if it were poison; only then did they giggle delightedly. They ran to the window and refreshed themselves looking out onto flowerbeds and tumbling rain. “I love this house!” said May, the declaration bursting free.

“Yargh!” trumpeted Cecily, who could summon no other means to describe her satisfaction. “It’s not like your house, is it?”

The child gave a rollicking laugh. “My house is just a matchbox!”

“With only one match left inside!”

“Huh?” said May.

“
You’re
gone, and your
dad
is gone, and only your
mum
is left! I hope she doesn’t get burned!”

It was supposed to be light-hearted but, as usual with Cecily, something went askew and it came out rather wrong. “She won’t,” the poor girl added.

May only smiled, and pushed away from the window. The library’s fireplace was enclosed in carved black marble. On the mantelpiece, in a silver frame, was a photograph of a woman. She was a pretty lady in a long dress, sitting on a low wall with a hat hanging loose in her hands. She was smiling in a way that suggested she couldn’t blame the camera for wanting to take a picture of her. “That’s her.” Cecily was reverent. “Uncle Peregrine’s wife. She died when she had a baby. Then the baby died. They both died. So sad.”

May, chin tipped, studied the photograph. “Do you think he remembers her?”

“Of course he does! He loved her. You don’t forget people you love. Maybe you forget their faces, but you don’t forget the love.” This sounded grand but was in fact entirely speculation; no one Cecily loved had ever died; she hustled May’s attention away. Confettied on the hearth were leftovers of papers which had been fed to the fire, and the girls picked up the remnants carefully and put them into the grate. On some of the scraps could be seen handwriting, ragged words which made no sense:
never we —, the governm —, most urgen —, I once mor —.
Beside the fireplace stood a trim table with legs like fine flutes; on its surface were spread antique drawings of skeletons both animal and human. May wiped her hands on her cardigan before she touched the pages. “What a lot of bones a snake has.”

Cecily looked. “Like a fallen-down sock.”

The flensed creature stared through white holes where its eyes would have been. It seemed to be asking something. It seemed to want something from them. A promise to do a thing it could no longer do itself.

“I don’t think you should play in here.” Jeremy spoke from the doorway, startling the girls. “You’ll destroy something. Everything is precious.”

“We’re not playing, we’re looking.”

The boy’s gaze shifted to the basket of bones. “Watch Byron doesn’t eat those. Some of them might be dinosaur bones.”

Cecily rolled her eyes. “By-By wouldn’t eat a stinky old
dinosaur.
”

“These drawings are beautiful,” said May.

Jeremy accepted the compliment as if he’d done the illustrations himself. He came into the room, picked through the bones, and showed the girls how a real horse vertebra compared with the pen-and-ink image of one; both were like the pieces of a clunky puzzle. “I want to be an archaeologist when I’m older,” he told May. “I’ll need to know about anatomy and geology. Mother and Fa don’t approve, but it’s what I want to do.”

“If it’s what you want to do, you should do it.”

The boy smiled ruefully. “That’s easy to say. It’s not that simple. Sometimes I think I have no right to live inside my skin.” He ran a meditative hand over Byron’s head, said, “I bet
your
father wouldn’t mind if you wanted to become an archaeologist, would he?”

“I don’t think so,” said May.

“No. He’d be proud that you wanted to do something interesting, not just do what he has done . . . Any news of him in your mother’s letter?”

May shook her head. “No.”

“And has your mum found work?”

“
A letter is a
private thing,
Jem!”

“She has a job sewing parachutes,” said May.

“Parachutes?” Cecily gagged. “Parachutes! How silly!”

Her brother wheeled, fixing on his sister a glare that would have crippled a more sensitive soul. “You’re so ignorant, Cecily! What’s silly about it? If your plane was shot down and you had to bail out, you wouldn’t think it was silly. If you were falling towards the ground at a hundred miles an hour, you wouldn’t think it was silly. You’d think May’s mother was the cleverest person who’d ever lived! There’d be only one person who mattered in the whole world, and that would be May’s mum!”