The Eyes of a King (21 page)

“What about the little girl?” said Raymond.

“Anneline,” said the butler. “I could never find a single fault with her, even now. She was nine years old when I arrived, and very timid, but she changed. That was the one good thing that came out of this mission, perhaps—that I taught her.”

Raymond shifted in his chair, his eyes still on the butler. “It is important that I tell you all this, sir,” Field said suddenly. “Even now, I am trying to work out what went wrong. You do not think that I am wasting your time in explaining this to you?”

“Of course not. Go on telling me. I want to hear.”

The butler nodded. “Well, I did try hard to be a worthy tutor to them. I did not think it was fair that their education should suffer because I was an impostor. Anneline was an attentive pupil, easy to teach even when I was struggling with some fact that I had got out of a book the day before. But Lucien did not concentrate. He was clever, but he would not work. And the parents encouraged it. They thought he was a natural genius, born to be a great man.”

It was almost completely dark in the room. Raymond sat motionless, listening, the last firelight glinting on his glasses. “Things started to go wrong early on,” said Aldebaran. “I should have pulled out. Instead, I got too involved. I was starting to think I was a real tutor. I taught Anneline to sing the national anthem. That was my first mistake. I was not thinking. I was just astonished that she did not know it, and I did not think it would be
outside the role of a real tutor to teach it to her. She had a lovely singing voice. She was a very accomplished pianist too. She used to play for her parents’ guests when they gave parties.

“Anyway, at one of these parties I heard her picking out some of the tunes I had taught her, adding the chords herself. She could improvise like that even at nine years old. And then she started the national anthem, and suddenly all the voices stopped together. A moment later Celine was shouting. I heard Anneline mumble something, and I knew it would only make things worse if I went in and explained, so I thought it best to retreat upstairs.

“I heard Mr. Kalitz come running up the stairs not long after, a glass of spirits still in his hand. He was shouting like a madman. ‘You have been indoctrinating my children! You have been corrupting them with your royalist values! You know how I feel about the monarchy!’ And so on. He grabbed hold of my shirt and threw me against the door.”

“What did you do?” said Raymond.

“Well, I could have done anything,” said Aldebaran slowly. Then he shook his head. “I just let him grab hold of me. I was a servant there, not a great one. I kept saying, ‘Yes, sir; sorry, sir,’ trying to calm him down. He threw the glass at the wall and went on shouting. And then some of the guests were coming out to see what the commotion was, and he had to quiet down. ‘Never ever let me hear report of this again,’ he told me. ‘You teach them the real history of Malonia, the real geography, the real literature. Is that clear?’

“I just said, ‘Yes, sir,’ again to that, and he let me go. ‘I am disappointed in you, Field, more than I can say,’ he told me. And then he turned and marched back down the stairs. I nearly felt guilty about that, to tell you the truth. He was so passionately
antiroyalist. Although his feelings were not justified—not really—I felt sorry for him because of the sheer fervor of them. And I was supposed to be inconspicuous here. I had gone against my duty to the secret service in teaching Anneline that song, and caused her all kinds of trouble from her family. From then on I tried to teach the children in a way that would not cause any more problems.”

Raymond reached out his hand to turn on the lamp, then drew it back. He would not break the stillness of the room. “How long did you stay there?” he said.

It was a while before Aldebaran replied. “The days just passed,” he said eventually. “I don’t know how. Three years were gone before I had even noticed being there one. I had barely communicated with Talitha. I panicked then, when I realized how long I had been there. I tried to contact her.”

“How?” said Raymond. “By telephone? Wouldn’t the family be watching your every move?”

“Telephones do not exist in Malonia,” said Aldebaran.

“Telephones exist everywhere,” said Raymond. “Surely, Field—”

“My country is not like England,” said the butler. “No, I used my willpower. I wrote in a book, and used my willpower to transfer the words into another book as I wrote them, a book in Talitha’s possession. That was my own idea. It was difficult, but it worked. I thought that communication by magic was the safest. I was worried, because somehow I had been there for so long, and I had tricked even myself into believing that I was a tutor. I had stopped reading the newspapers. For all I knew, revolution could be imminent and I might never have known it. So I did not want to waste time with letters.”

“Why did you forget to contact Talitha?” said Raymond.
“What about being on your guard? I thought you were supposed to be a very famous spy, Field.”

“There was something strange about that house. A kind of stupefying atmosphere that made me stop being careful. That alarmed me, when I realized it. I am always on my guard. It must have been magic. That is all I can think now.” Aldebaran shook his head. “I should have realized.”

He paused, then went on. “Talitha only replied when I suggested in desperation that I come to the city. She wrote briefly that all was under control, and that on no account should I move from the house. So I tightened my watch on the family, and began to practice my skills again. I had begun to forget how to use my willpower.

“That was when I started to suspect that someone was watching me, because no matter how hard I tried, I could not seem to see any more than an ordinary person; someone was blocking everything I did. I wondered if I was losing my powers. That has been known to happen. Sometimes the great ones grow out of their powers. And then, one night, a vision came to me.”

“Vision? How do you mean, a vision?”

“I dreamed, and I wrote a prophecy. So I knew that I had not lost my powers. I began to suspect that the rebels were stronger than I had thought, and that someone knew who I was and was controlling what I did.”

“What did you do?” said Raymond.

“Continued teaching Anneline. There was nothing else to do. Lucien was taught solely by his father now, and I could see enough to understand that there was some large plan in their minds. But above that I could tell nothing. It could have been a party, for all I knew of it. We were allies more than ever in those years, Anneline
and I. She was almost completely ignored by her family, and I was uneasy and had too little to do even as a tutor. I went on teaching her, and she used to come to me for advice also. She began to talk about leaving when she was still young. She hated that house. She wanted to go to the mainland.

“So the first young man who proposed to her, she almost accepted. She was only thirteen when the sons of nobles and rich traders started asking for her hand in marriage. Her parents said that she should wait, and I agreed with them. I did not realize what they meant—not wait unconditionally, but wait for something. They wanted her to marry the young king. The two met at a ball when she was fourteen and he was sixteen, and it was barely six months before he proposed to her too. Marcus and Celine had known that would happen.”

Aldebaran frowned at his hands clasped on his knees. “I am not pretending that Anneline did not love Cassius,” he continued. “She did; I knew her well enough to see it. And Marcus and Celine pretended to disapprove of their daughter’s marriage. But they had been trying to engineer meetings between the two for months—even I could see it. The thing was, Marcus and Celine were antiroyalist, but they were deviously antiroyalist. They were ruled by reason. Lucien—he was passionately antiroyalist. The day she announced her engagement was the last day that he spoke a word to her. Hatred of the Donahue family flowed in his very blood. He left the house while Anneline prepared for her wedding. He refused to step back through the door until she had gone.

“The evening before she left, just after her fifteenth birthday, I was in the empty schoolroom with her, helping her to pack her last belongings. We were sad to part; she had almost become a daughter to me. I said as much to her then. ‘If it were not for you, I would
have gone mad in this house, Aldebaran,’ she said. What was strange was that she used my taken name so pointedly. I had given the name Arthur Field in that house, as I gave to you, my name before I was trained in magic. That was how she knew me.”

I stopped there and rested the book against my knees. The clock in the square was chiming the quarter. “This is Lucien’s story as well,” said Stirling.

“Yes. I never knew that Aldebaran was his tutor when he was a boy.”

“They don’t teach us this at school,” said Stirling.

I laughed at that. “No. This would be Highly Restricted if it was a real book.”

Stirling looked worried. “It’s all right,” I said. “I haven’t told anyone about it, except for you. And anyway, I am not to blame. I do not write these words.”

“Who does?” said Stirling. “It’s strange. Do you think it’s someone with powers trying to communicate by magic, the same way Aldebaran was trying to communicate with Talitha?”

“I thought about that,” I said. “But why would a great one write this? Some of it is important, but some of it only means anything to you and me.”

“Maybe …,” said Stirling, “maybe it’s someone trying to communicate with us.”

I was startled by that. “Who?” I said eventually. “Aldebaran himself?”

I had been joking, but Stirling did not notice. “It could be!” he said. “If he is still alive. Read on. There might be a clue. Read on, Leo.”

A
cross the lake, a church bell was chiming. The butler glanced toward the sound, as though it had brought him back from his thoughts. “What did you say when she addressed you as Aldebaran?” asked Raymond.

The butler laughed. “I don’t think I said anything at all; I was too startled. I just stared at her, and she said, ‘I know you are the lord Aldebaran; I have known it for a year or more.’ She began to laugh then; it must have been the way I was staring.

“ ‘How do you know?’ I said eventually.

“ ‘I guessed,’ she said. ‘I guessed, and I think my mother and father know too—but they did not guess it; someone told them. But Lucien does not know. If he did, he would have killed you.’

“She was only half joking. We were all of us slightly afraid of Lucien—even I was, to tell the truth.

“She was glancing edgily at the door, and she stepped closer to me. ‘There is something I want to talk to you about before I leave,’ she said. ‘I am afraid that my family are developing some sort of underhanded plan. I hear things, though they would never tell me.’

“I asked her what kind of plan, but she could not say. ‘It is just that Father, when he goes out with Lucien, does not drive out on the estate as he says,’ she told me, whispering now. ‘I do not know where they go, but I have seen them leaving on the road. And you know how long they stay away for. Days and weeks sometimes.’

“It was true that they were developing some plan. Of course they were; that was why I had been sent there to begin with, because they were suspected of plotting revolution. ‘I think the same,’ I told her. ‘But what do you want me to do?’

“She took my hand and said, ‘Escape far from here. Go tonight, when I leave.’

“Again, I was too startled to reply. ‘I think that there are very powerful men and women involved in this,’ she said, ‘and perhaps they will try to kill you. And if Lucien finds out who you really are, he will strangle you with his bare hands while you sleep. You know him. He has a mad streak. Truly.’

“ ‘Are you frightened of him?’ I asked her. She was looking up at me as if I was her own father.

“ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I am frightened of him.’

“ ‘You are good,’ I told her. ‘He cannot harm you. The good are protected.’

“That is what I would have told her if she had been my own daughter. It was not true, and she knew it. She always saw through me when I struggled with some point of science or history in one of our lessons; she had a way of lowering her eyes, though she was too polite to say anything. She was looking like that now. ‘I think you should leave,’ she said again. ‘I am not going to change my mind. I think you should leave.’

“I was still not convinced. But she caught hold of my hand and went on begging me to escape. ‘You are valuable to our country, and you must protect your life at all costs. You have great powers. You are a very important man.’ She went on. And then she looked at my hand in hers and let go of it, as though she did not have the right to do that now she knew who I was. ‘Sir, you must leave,’ she said.

“It was strange to hear her call me ‘sir’ like that, and I started to tell her not to, but she was already impatient to say something else. ‘Take this with you,’ she said, and put something in my hand.

“ ‘What is it?’ I asked. But even before I had finished asking, I realized.”

“What was it?” Raymond demanded, leaning forward in the darkness of the room. “Field, you keep pausing at the most important points.”