The Children of the King (18 page)

“Hmm,” repeated May.

Cecily’s hand floated from tree to tree. “May?”

“What?”

“Do you think we should tell someone about those boys?”

“. . . Tell who?”

“Well. We could tell my mother.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But maybe it would help them? Mama could talk to their hosts, tell them that they’re supposed to treat children kindly . . .”

May kept her eyes on Byron, who ambled ahead. The dog was pleased to leave the ruins. He did not sniff about, but made a beeline for Heron Hall, glancing back frequently to check his charges weren’t dallying. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Cecily stuck out her lip, said nothing.

“Remember when the grocer told us some evacuees were running away?”

“Yes.”

“Your mother didn’t feel sorry for them.”

“I remember.” Cecily sighed.

But May wasn’t finished. “She’ll be cross about those boys trespassing on Mr Lockwood’s land. She might call the police.”

“The police!”

“She might start to wish she’d never had anything to do with children like me.”

“Like you?”

“Evacuees.”

Cecily didn’t like the sound of this. It sounded like truth. She clumped past the trees, looking ahead to where the woods ceased and the field began. Soon they would step into that golden-green light. “We won’t tell Mama. But we could tell Jeremy and Uncle Peregrine?”

“What if we told them, and they went to the ruins, and the boys weren’t there?”

“. . . Jeremy would laugh at me.”

“Better to be safe than sorry,” said May.

Sunshine reached out for them, the shade of the forest fell away. Cecily imagined losing May forever and said, “I think you’re right.”

The papers, next day, brought outrageous news. An enemy aeroplane, swooping through the dark like a sheenless creature of the night, had dropped its fearsome cargo upon Buckingham Palace. Fortunately the bomb had landed in the quadrangle and not on a royal head, so the King and the Queen, although shaken, were still whole: but the intention was clear. All around the country, people gathered to be appalled. “It’s a disgrace,” said Mrs Winter. “What did the King and Queen do to deserve that?”

“No more than anyone else,” said Peregrine.

“Will you look at the damage. A dirty great mess. What if the King had been standing right there? He’d be mince meat.” The housekeeper made a chunky fist. “I tell you, if they harm that poor mutt of a man, I’ll strap on a parachute and drop in for a word with Mr Hitler myself.”

“A parachute made by May’s mum!” said Cecily. She whipped about to May. “You said bombs wouldn’t fall on important people’s heads, but look — one fell on the King and the Queen!”

“On their quadrangle,” replied May. “Not on their heads.”

“Our house doesn’t
have
a quadrangle. Poor Daddy!”

“It’s ridiculous,” Heloise opined from the sofa. “It’s insane for the King and Queen to risk their lives this way. They should leave the city and go somewhere safe. What do they think they’re proving by staying in London?”

Jeremy turned a white face to her. In the six days since their quarrel, relations between mother and son had not improved. Their feud had lasted so long that Cecily had almost forgotten they’d ever lived any way but uneasily. He said, “They’re proving they are no better than everyone else.”

Lest there was someone less intelligent than herself in the room, Cecily explained, “If ordinary people — normal people — poor people — are getting bombed, the King and the Queen want to be where they can get bombed too. So it’s fair.”

Heloise said, “But they
are
better than everyone else, aren’t they? They’re the King and Queen. And as such, they’re targets. Worse, they’re making targets of everyone around them. That’s not fair at all.”

Mrs Winter, who wasn’t afraid of Mrs Lockwood, said, “Oh, I think it’s a great thing that they’ve stayed in London. When a person sees the King and Queen suffering just the same as they’re suffering, sharing the selfsame peril every day and night, it’s going to make a difference. It’s going to give a person strength.”

“It’s going to give a person a hernia,” said Heloise. “This country has enough to worry about. They would be doing everyone a favour if they took themselves off to the Highlands somewhere, out of harm’s way.”

“You’re not brave, are you, Mother.” Jeremy spoke as if from a height. “All you care about is being safe.”

“Is there something wrong with wishing to be safe?”

“There is, when it’s other people who are dying so you can be kept that way.”

Heloise’s mouth became the razor-line that Cecily dreaded. “Do you suggest I — oh, I don’t know, commandeer a tank and storm the Reichstag?”

“No. But you could admit it’s brave of the King and Queen to stay with the people who don’t have the luxury of escaping to the countryside.”

Heloise’s fingers skimmed the fine upholstery of the sofa: May, watching, thought of spiders and webs and elegant spider-legs. “I’m worried about your education, Jeremy.” Heloise’s voice was the spider’s silk, gossamer but deadly. “Time is slipping by. We must get you back into a classroom before your mind turns to porridge. Already you’re forgetting your manners. A boarding school would be best, I think. I shall write to your father this afternoon. I’m sure he’ll agree, once I tell him my concerns, that you should be sent off immediately to somewhere
very
safe,
very
far away.”

Jeremy did not protest or ask forgiveness: his majestic pride, learned at his mother’s knee, would not let him, and perhaps he was not sorry. But when the gathering broke up and the family went its separate ways, Cecily, running upstairs to fetch her coloured pencils, found her brother on the first-floor landing, his hands across his face. “Jem?” she said, surprised to see him there, thin and still as a second hand fallen from a clock. “Go away,” he said from behind his fingers, and his sister caught her breath: “Oh Jem, are you crying?”

In common with most siblings, Jeremy and Cecily Lockwood had a thousand grievances against one another. But, again in common, for one to realise the other was hurt roused a lion-like concern and sympathy. “Go away!” Jeremy said again, but Cecily would never leave him there, waylaid so wretchedly in this lonely place, the first-floor landing. “What’s the matter?” she had to know.

Despair had overtaken him so thoroughly that he couldn’t make the traditional denial of anything being wrong. He wiped his face but the tears kept dropping as they will when a heart has received a deep wound. He stormed in a circle, trying but unable to make himself disappear, then stood still, bent with defeat. “Mother doesn’t have to
threaten
me,” he croaked. “She doesn’t have to — send me away. I’m just trying to —
understand
things.”

“Oh!” Cecily said, and didn’t know what more to say to a boy who was being punished so vengefully for the crime of growing up. “She probably didn’t mean it, Jem — you know what Mama’s like. She gets cross and says things she doesn’t mean. She says things like that to me all the time!
I’m having your hair cut short, Cecily. No more cake for you ever, Cecily.
She’ll forget all about it tomorrow, you’ll see. And if she still wants to send someone away then, well — she can send me. I won’t mind.”

In fact to be sent off to boarding school was the most ghastly fate Cecily could imagine, but her brother didn’t notice the sacrifice. He wiped and wiped at the tears that would not stop flowing, turned his face to the wall because his legs were too leaden to carry him somewhere he could be alone. The black pool of suffering inside him soaked his voice and words.

“It’s not that. I don’t care about that. She can say what she likes about sending me away — she can
do it,
for all I care. I might as well be somewhere else. I’m useless here. All I can do here is — watch, and — I’m so worried —”

“Don’t be worried.” Cecily brushed her brother’s sleeve. “You don’t need to worry —”

“I do! We all do! They’re bombing Buckingham Palace, Cecily! In a few weeks they’ll be walking London’s streets!”

“No . . .”

“Yes! Read the papers! We’re losing this war! We don’t have enough soldiers, we don’t have good aeroplanes, they’re not
afraid
of us! We need to
fight,
but we aren’t fighting! We’re not going to win! And when we lose, it will be bad. This isn’t a game between kids. Everything will change. Our whole lives will change. Everything good will disappear and never come back. They hate us. And they’re going to win.”

Agony radiated off him — the agony of being insignificant, the agony of a child’s fears. He was terrified, and his mother had turned against him, and the warm future he had been taught to expect was melting away like snow. Desperate to comfort him, Cecily said, “We won’t lose, Jem. Remember what Uncle Peregrine said:
They can only beat us when we let them.
And we’re not going to let them. Daddy is not going to let them —”

“Daddy!” Her brother, slumped against a wall, gave a sickly laugh. “You have so much faith in
Daddy
.”

“He always does what he says he will, that’s why.”

“He can’t do everything. He’s only a man.”

“But that’s what they are too, isn’t it? Those soldiers in the newspapers. They’re just men. Not better or stronger or cleverer men. Not braver than Daddy. Not braver than you.”

“Brave!” Jeremy hit the wall with a fist, startling his sister. “Who knows if I’m brave? How brave have I ever been allowed to be?”

“
I
know you’re brave!” she hastened. “I know you’re very brave! You read all those books and study those hard subjects — that’s brave. You learned the piano — that was brave. You play chess with Daddy, and that’s brave. And you know what else you do that’s brave?”

Her brother stared grimly at nothing. “I don’t mean that. You don’t understand. Go away and play, Cecily.”

She persisted. “You know what’s the bravest thing that you do?”

“What?”

“You answer back to Mama.”

He smiled reluctantly. “Mama,” he said. “Mama thinks I’m ridiculous. That’s what she called me, in front of Uncle Peregrine:
infantile
. That means ridiculous.”

Cecily lifted her shoulders, let them drop. Momentarily she wished her mother were here, to see the sad thing that she’d done. “You’re not ridiculous, Jem,” she said. “Mama only said that because she’s worried about the war.”

“Mother’s worried about the war, so she has to be cruel to me?”

“Sometimes she’s like that.”

The siblings thought on it, a mother whose angry fear landed, wasplike, on the most convenient surface. “She doesn’t think you’re ridiculous.” Cecily came cautiously nearer. “But you know what? She’s scared of you.”

“
Scared
of me? Why?”

“Because . . .” Cecily didn’t quite know how to put it. “Because you’re not going to be the person she wants you to be.”

If her words had been diamonds, her brother could not have considered them more closely. He said, “I hope I am going to be a good person. I would like to be a good person. Not famous, or remarkable, but . . . true. Loyal. Brave.”

“You
are
brave. Brave enough to kill a man!”

Jeremy’s fine face, already drained, paled further on being reminded of these words. “I wouldn’t want to do that,” he said scratchily, “but I would, if I had to. That’s what life is, I think: doing what you have to do. Isn’t it?”

Cecily looked at him, her fierce tormented brother who urged ruthlessness but couldn’t harm a butterfly. She, Cecily Lockwood, believed herself capable of almost anything — if she had to, she would throw a grenade, man a machine gun, strangle an enemy with her bare hands. But Jeremy was different. He was burdened by his decency. Nonetheless she said, “I think so.”

He looked away, his eyes wet but the tears stopped, as fragile as one recovering from a depleting illness. The silent Hall stood around them, the staircase with its wide polished treads, the ivory-white passage with its doors and paintings, the intricately patterned powder-pink tiles at their feet. Nothing moved but for a rose in a vase, past its best, which dropped a lank petal. The closeness they’d shared in the last minutes passed like a smile, and awkwardness filled its place. It is a dreadful thing for a boy to be seen weeping by his baby sister. Jeremy tried to pretend it had never happened. He asked, “What are you and May doing today?”

“Nothing. Drawing and colouring. You can do some too, if you like.”

It was a wrong, embarrassing thing to say to a young man with a tear-stained face; it made him bad-tempered with her. “Don’t be late for lunch,” he said nonsensically, for Cecily had never been guilty of that crime; and pushed off from the wall and strode away.

Cecily collected her pencils from her room and on her way back through the house made a detour to the library, where Peregrine was working at his desk. He looked up briefly, said, “May I help you?”

She gripped the pencil-tin for security — the library was an intimidating place when its owner was in residence. The books and bones seemed aloof, the woman in the silver frame unfriendly. “Uncle Peregrine,” Cecily said shyly, “if you are staying home today, would you tell us some of the Duke’s story after lunch?”