The Fatal Child (37 page)

Ambrose made a sudden, angry gesture. ‘You’ve never understood her! You don’t
want
to understand her, Aun! What do you think it’s like, living with nightmares like that? Nightmares? That hardly begins to—’

‘I remember being woken, up here in the castle, by
screaming from below the walls,’ said Padry. ‘I lay wondering who it was that was torturing an animal. In the morning I found that it had come from the convent, and that it had been her.’

‘I used to be able to go to her,’ Ambrose said sombrely. ‘I could stand beside her and tell her to turn and face the one she feared. I’m still sure that was right. If she could only face it and speak to it, she could begin to control it. But then I brought her here, became King for her, and we made her do that act of submission. I made myself a part of the thing that is her enemy. Aun, it was I who suggested that she seek the Angels and the shrines. If I can’t be a comfort to her any more, I pray that at least they can. And now I must go to her, because she is waiting in the meadows for me. I hope she never learns that I tricked her this morning in order to talk with Melissa, because that will only make it worse still—’ He turned for the door.

‘Stop,’ said Aun. ‘I haven’t finished yet.’

The King halted.

‘Maybe she
is
doing what you told her,’ said Aun. ‘Had you thought of that?’

Ambrose glared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that you had better sit down and think damned hard about this. The one thing I couldn’t work out was why she would dally with Gueronius of all people. When I fear someone, I run from them. Or I work to destroy them. But that’s not what you told her to do.
You
told her to take control of him. That’s what she’s up to – believe it. The second thing is, a husband can choose to shut his eyes to what his wife is doing. A king
can’t. Too many of us depend on you. And if Gueronius is in it, then it’s not just cuckoldry, it’s treason.
And
he’s still building those cannon-things of his—’

‘Aun. Let me tell you I
don’t
believe it.’

‘Don’t you? Others do. Whispers are already starting. How do you think I heard about it?’

Ambrose took a long breath. ‘Padry?’ he said.

‘Your Majesty, I had not heard it before now,’ sighed Padry. ‘But – if there are rumours, then yes, we must consider it carefully.’

And objectively. And how were any of them to do that?

‘I don’t believe it,’ muttered Ambrose.

‘Then you must find out,’ said Aun.

‘I just have!’ Ambrose waved his hand at the door through which Melissa had disappeared.

‘Have you? Bring the girl back and put her on the rack and then see what she—’

‘No!’

‘No, I wouldn’t want to do that either. Not to her. But any of the Queen’s other attendants—’

‘No!’

‘All right then,’ said the baron grimly. ‘You’ll shut your eyes to what she’s done. You’ll give her one more chance – and that girl has let you do it. But from now on you must watch to see what your Queen does next. Watch with both eyes open. Put a spy in her—’

‘No, Aun!’

The two men glared at each other.

‘She’s my wife,’ said Ambrose. ‘I will not have a spy set on her.’

‘She’s your wife,’ said Aun. ‘It is your right to know what she does.’

‘I’m going to trust her. That’s my right, too. It’s not my fault that you don’t. You talk to me about what’s in her head. What about yours? Why can’t you trust, ever?’

‘Trust, is it?’ growled Aun. ‘I know how this bit of the talk goes. In a moment it’ll be about forgiving, too. I always know I’ve got you in a corner when you talk to me about forgiving.’

‘I hadn’t been going to,’ said Ambrose coldly. ‘But perhaps it’s not a bad idea. And that reminds me. Padry, I think we need a marshal in the south. To watch over the southern frontiers, and organize an armed force if the wild men ever raid in strength. Why not the son of our baron here? What do you say?’

Aun scowled.

‘Your Majesty will know that I do not love the man myself,’ said Padry carefully. ‘Although I admit that he has discharged such offices as you have already granted him with reasonable purpose and honesty …’

‘Draft me a letter to him, laying out the necessary rights and duties. Baron, your son will be a great man. You should be proud …’

‘I will do as you wish, Your Majesty,’ said Padry.
‘But
’
-
and he fixed the King with his eye – ‘but I believe we stray from the matter in hand.’

The King looked from one adviser to the other. He turned away. He paced slowly to the hearth and faced them again. His back was to the dead fire.

‘I have the right to love her,’ he said. ‘King or not, I love her. That is my first law. Everything else can follow in its place. I will believe in her, even if all the world doubts her.’

They looked at him and he looked back. The wind moaned in the chimney.

A year ago, thought Padry, he would have spoken three words and settled it. Not now. His confidence had been eaten away. There was a frailty in his defiance that invited contradiction. Did he know? Did he understand what had happened to him? Perhaps he did. Perhaps he knew that he was blinding himself. But he was still doing it. Still the young man would lean on his love and tell himself that she was true.

And it was Thomas Padry who must play the corrupter.

‘Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘You may believe if the world doubts. But can you save if the world is betrayed?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The world we know depends upon you. Some good it has already had from you. But for the most part it still waits. What of the children in the furrows? We were to have the Church take up their schooling, but on that we have hardly begun. What of the poor? What of Outland? If we believe, and our belief is misplaced, your rule will fall. Your people will wait in vain. More, they will suffer with us. Do we have a right to condemn them?’

‘I am not condemning anybody – of treason, or anything else.’

‘We are not advising you to condemn. We are saying
only that you should find out the truth. And that if you do
not
find out the truth – then yes, the Kingdom may indeed be condemned with you.’

The King looked at him.

‘What case can be made for blindness?’ Padry coaxed. ‘Only look for the truth. After, if you will, you may love her as she is. Not as you wish her to be.’

(Oh, honeyed words, Thomas Padry! If treason were proved, what would be left to love? But that thought must not be spoken – not yet. A wrong word would tip the balance irrevocably.)

The King was still looking at him. There was something desperate in the young man’s eye. Something there was begging him to speak again – to postpone the choice that must be made.

Padry closed his mouth and waited. The King looked down at his feet.

‘All right,’ he groaned at last. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Find out!’ said Aun, surging into the breach that Padry had made. ‘Next month, when she goes to Luckingham.’

‘No spies,’ said Ambrose. ‘I believe she’s innocent, and an innocent woman has a right to her privacy.’

‘Even from her husband?’

‘Well, if I go with her …’ said Ambrose, grinning mirthlessly.

‘No, don’t do that. But if that’s the way you want it, you could watch her on the night in question. Just have one of your princes show her to you—’

‘No!’

‘Why not? You’re always telling me that their witchcraft is no more evil than many of the things we do.’

‘I said no spies,’ said Ambrose thickly. ‘The fact that a spy is a prince doesn’t mean that he isn’t a spy. If I had the Cup it would be different, but—’

‘We could get it for you.’

‘Mother would not let us have it.’

‘How do you know that? It was you who gave it to her. I was there by the pool on the day that Paigan died. Do you think I’ve forgotten?’

Ambrose looked helplessly at Padry. ‘Thomas?’

Padry, too, felt helpless. Every way seemed closed. He could not see the Path.

‘I would counsel any course other than witchcraft,’ he said slowly. ‘Every time we resort to it, we risk a scandal as bad as or worse than any cuckoldry. But scandal is not treason. If we fear treason, we
must
find out whether or not it is true. Therefore, if Your Majesty will not consent to other means … I think we will have to do as the baron suggests.’

‘Very well,’ Ambrose sighed. ‘If you bring it to me, I will look. But I will look alone.’

emini was a trading town, set on an island in a long river lake a dozen leagues downstream from Tuscolo. The island was joined to the lakeside by a causeway part natural and part man-made, and in the pool below the causeway were many rivercraft. Padry could see their masts as the barge he travelled in approached the town from the southern, upstream side. It was the sight everyone spoke of when they first came to Pemini: the ‘leafless wood’ clinging to the side of the island, with all the hulls out of view behind the causeway so that the masts looked like trees indeed. And you could tell the fortune of Pemini, they said, by how far the wood spread around the shore.

Padry, born a Pemini man, felt a strange mix of emotions as the boat neared the town. He wanted to swallow, even to wipe his eye, as the familiar shapes of the roofs and steeples rose from his memory. No doubt all men who had made good felt such things when they came back to the squalid places of their childhood, he thought, but it was curious all the same.
Yes, curious. There was a definite lump in his throat. And the ‘wood’ had spread indeed – there must have been sixty, maybe even a hundred masts in the pool. It looked, too, as though they were rebuilding the old Church of the Martyrs, which had stood ruined since the city was sacked twenty years before. And wasn’t that new bronze on the roof of the guildhall? The town was enjoying good times. And so it should, after all their King and his chancellor had done for traders these past few years!

The barge passed the squat light-tower at the downstream tip of the island, and changed course to work its way back up into the pool. Now they were out of the river current and the going was slower. But the crewmen were nearing their pay and a night in port, and they sang as they pulled on the long oars.

‘South wind, sweeping the waters,’
they bellowed in a mix of voices.
‘Shaking the sails above…

‘South wind, sweeping the waters
,

Take me back to my love
.’

And singing, they brought their cargo home.

He climbed onto the wharf and looked about him. All along the harbour front the houses of merchants showed new paint and new friezes, even busts and carvings on new porches. There was a new customs house, almost filling the eastern end of the wharf. In the crowds around it Padry glimpsed a number of men in Outland costume. Snatches of Outland talk came to his ear. A long Outland vessel lay in the harbour, with men stripped to the waist stowing bundles of skins under oiled canvas. They worked
unselfconsciously, as if they already belonged there, and the down-to-earth, profit-minded Pemini folk hurried past and gave them barely a second look, for they were used to Outlanders now. Behind the harbour front the narrow alleys ran gently uphill, reeking of slop and tumbledown dwellings and ringing with the sound of raucous children. Some things had not changed at all.

In a street near the southern wharf stood the new almshouses, which the merchants of Pemini had raised by public subscription. Here Padry came with the half-dozen young squires who had escorted him from Tuscolo. He knocked at the porter’s door, in the archway to the street, but there was no answer. The door was not fast, so they entered and looked around at the low houses, which were arranged in a small square with a garden of paved walkways and a circular pool in the middle. There were a few people in the doorways: the poor and infirm of Pemini who were allowed to live here. Padry caught one, an elderly woman, as she hobbled past.

‘The porter who works here,’ he said, ‘where is he?’

The woman stared at him: a wrinkled, toothless face that was frightened because it would always be frightened. He had to repeat his question.

‘Porter? ’S him,’ she mumbled, pointing a skinny finger across the square.

There was a man there, dressed in rough brown. He was on his hands and knees, teasing weeds from between the paving stones with his fingers. He did not look up as Padry approached. His shoulders were
broad and the back of his head and neck seemed very broad, too. Padry could see the yellow flesh gathered in folds between his skull and spine. The head was hairless and very smooth. It gleamed in the late sun. But there was nothing now to suggest that the man before him was anything other than a man.

Padry crouched down beside him and said in a low voice, ‘Highness?’

The man stopped weeding and looked at him. He frowned. ‘I remember you,’ he said. His voice was low and hoarse, but still a man’s. ‘I do not recall your name.’

‘Thomas Padry, the chancellor, Your Highness. We last met in Tuscolo.’

The frown deepened. ‘So. But let us not use titles. You are Thomas, I am Rolfe. You have come from – from my great-nephew, I suppose.’