The Children of the King (2 page)

“It’s best, son.”

“No it isn’t. Why is it?”

“You know very well . . .”

The boy sat up straighter. “Other people are staying.”

“It’s decided, Jeremy.”

“What about school? I can’t leave school —”

“Jeremy,” said their mother, “please don’t fuss. I don’t want you here, where it’s dangerous.”

Their father spoke. “I’ve already kept you with me for longer than I should have. My colleagues sent their families away weeks ago. But I’ve been reluctant: I don’t want to be without you. I’ve been hoping events would unfold in such a way that you could stay. Unfortunately, the situation has worsened. The threat we’re under is very real, children. I can’t allow my selfishness to put you in danger. I couldn’t live with myself if I became the cause of your suffering.”

Jeremy and Cecily knew that the beloved voice, warm and mellow as pelt, masked a will of iron: the discussion was over and Jeremy knew it, yet he would not surrender. “What about you, Mother? If it’s dangerous for us here, it’s dangerous for you.”

“I will be coming with you.”

“And what about Fa?”

“Your father is staying in London.”

Jeremy’s blond head swung to his father. “Let me stay too. I’m not afraid.”

“It isn’t a matter of being afraid,” his father replied. “I know you’re brave. But it isn’t safe, and I want you to be safe.”

The boy stared. “I’m not a child.”

“Please don’t fuss,” sighed Heloise.

“You’re
my
child,” said Humphrey Lockwood. “A most important child.”

Jeremy kicked the chair. “But I want to stay! I want to help! I
can
help, Fa, I’m smart, I’m strong —”

“We’re leaving tomorrow on the nine o’clock train —”

“Tomorrow!”

“— so go upstairs and decide what you want to bring. We might be away for some time —”

“How long? For the entire war?”

“Please stop shouting, Jeremy. Sometimes I believe you’re worse than your sister.”

Jeremy snapped his mouth shut. His eyes, which were a handsome deep-brown like his mother’s, skimmed the shadowy spaces of the room. When he spoke, Cecily heard bitterness swilling through him. “It’s not fair, Fa. You’re
our
father, a most important father. Shouldn’t you be safe too?”

“It’s my duty to stay.”

“But not mine?”

“You’re fourteen years old, Jeremy. Your duty is to live to grow older.”

Jeremy looked away. In the fireplace a burning log broke, showering the hearth with sparks. Cecily asked quietly, “Where are we going, Daddy?”

Her father turned from the son who was like those brilliant sparks of the fire, to the daughter who was as unremarkable as a daisy. Gratefully he told her, “You’re going to Heron Hall.”

Cecily sat with her forehead on the window, her eyes scrolled down so she could see the embankment rushing past as an endless grey smear. She tried to force her gaze deeper, to see the train’s wheels and polished side and maybe the words painted there:
First Class.
But her eyeballs would swivel only so far and no further, depriving her of class and undercarriage; she sat back in the seat. She had some paper dolls and pencils for colouring them, as well as a book of puzzles, but nothing held her interest. Nothing could cage the bird-like flitter of her mind.

She remembered saying goodbye to her father, her arms around his neck. Though it had taken place only that morning, the parting was already a careworn memory. Cecily recalled cryng, tears slithering down her cheeks . . . yet something had been strange. Inside herself, she hadn’t wanted to cry. To leave her father alone in the imperilled city was such a desolate thing that tears felt oddly mocking. She’d longed to tell him the vital secret which would protect him through the lightless nights, but she didn’t know the secret, so she had cried instead. Her father had had to jolly her, as if she were a baby. Cecily enjoyed being babied . . . but those tears had been shaming. Daddy had been left behind, and nobody knew when they’d see him again nor what trials he would endure before then: and through it all he would remember Cecily as a blubbering simpleton, never knowing that, inside, she’d wanted to be so much better.

“Stop,” said Jeremy.

Cecily looked up. Her brother sat opposite, his hair a blond halo against the green seat. He was staring at the scenery and for an instant Cecily wondered if he was talking to the fields or the sun:
stop shining!
But he was talking to her. “Don’t chew your nails. It’s sickening.”

Cecily shoved her hand under her thigh. She glanced at her mother, expecting flanking rebuke; but Heloise sat with her eyes closed, her face the marble Madonna’s.
Dead,
thought Cecily. And hastened to add,
Please don’t be dead.
She wished Jeremy had a habit she could likewise brand with that fierce word
sickening,
but her brother was not the type to forage in his nose or release ungentlemanly sounds, to do anything that risked lowering his towering dignity. Maybe that was her brother’s failing, Cecily mused. He hardly ever remembered what their father, last night, had had to remind him: that he was just a boy.

She looked out the window. Green fields fringed with hedgerow, clouds casting odd-shaped shadows. Her thumbnail, incompletely chewed, was singing a siren’s song. Knowing Jeremy was watchful, she thought of other things.

They’d taken a taxi to the station, a luggage van following like an elephant behind a black beetle. The station, when they’d arrived, had been startling. The cavernous building was always busy, but this morning it had been so crowded that Heloise had made the viper noise she usually reserved for Christmas. The crowd was of a kind such as Cecily had never seen. It was a crowd of
children,
all heights and ages, some dressed in good clothes, scrubbed boots and brushed hats, others in greasy rags. Some were chatting like parrots, casting grins here and there; others were sobbing into handkerchiefs knotted in their palms. Some held the hands of siblings, most carried gas masks, many of the younger ones clutched goggling toys. The children bumped against one another, touched their fingers to the sleek side of the train. Each gripped the handle of a satchel or small suitcase. On many of these cases the owner’s name was written, and Cecily imagined a mother carefully printing out the words. Her own suitcase was too fine to write on; it had a leather tag.

Which brought her to what Cecily decided was the oddest aspect of this herd of children. Pinned to the lapel of every child’s coat had been a cardboard tag exactly like a luggage tag or a price tag. Cecily was not so daft as to assume the children were for sale. She knew what they were. They were evacuees, some of the many thousands of the city’s children being spirited beyond reach of the war into the countryside, just as she and Jeremy were being spirited. Unlike the Lockwood siblings, however, these children were not travelling in the company of their mothers to a place they knew and were fond of. There were several ladies among the crowd but they had the look of teachers, orderly, strict, aware — not the kind of ladies, Cecily sensed, who could be relied upon for a comforting word. These luggage-tagged children had been placed by their parents into the care of strict strangers to be hustled away into the unknown; and although it was for the children’s own good, many of them looked as if their tiny hearts had broken.

Cecily bent her head. Heron Hall was far away, well past the lime-green fields and white villages that looked like something you could fit into your pocket. Their journey would not end for several hours. She thought about the children packed into the carriages behind her, the great weight of their bodies burdening the train. She wondered if they were sitting quietly or running about like wild dogs. How good it would feel, to run like a wild dog. Those no-nonsense ladies would doubtlessly demand best-behaviour, and only the baddest child would disobey. She wondered if the crying ones still wept.

There was a knock on the door and a porter looked in. “Mrs Lockwood, may I get you anything? A magazine?”

“Thank you,” said Heloise, “there’s nothing,” but rewarded him anyway with her watery smile. The porter nodded, the door slid shut. Cecily put her chin on the windowsill. The train continued to chuff its way north. Jeremy continued to stare out the window as if he’d rip the scenery to pieces. Cecily knew he liked the countryside — liked pacing about in wellingtons, liked wobbling an unsteady fence, liked discussing crops and animals as if he knew what he was talking about. It was evidence of the depth of his outrage, that he should stare at the friendly landscape as if he and it were mortal enemies.

Cecily could not help herself. She hated him to be cross. “Lambs.” She pointed. “There’s lambs.” If there were lambs in these fields, there would be lambs at Heron Hall, full of bounce and silliness. Jeremy usually took a farmer’s interest in them — how many had been born, how many were rams, which ones must be hand-reared, what price they would fetch. Now he said nothing; he seethed.

Cecily studied the ceiling, touched her nose with her tongue, twirled a lock of hair around a finger until the finger threatened to pop. She glanced at her brother. “Jem.” Then, louder, “Jem?”

He heard twice, but looked up once.

“What do you think Daddy is doing?”

He gave her a glare that could have pickled onions. “Be quiet.”

“Something serious.”

“Be quiet!”

“Shh,” said their mother.

“Well what was the point of the question?”

“Hush,” said Heloise. “Leave her be.”

Jeremy’s gaze darted like a cat around the compartment. Only fourteen, he was not yet stern enough to smother into silence the storms which rose inside him. “I wish you’d let me stay home, Mother! What am I going to do at Heron Hall? What about school? You can’t send me to the village school. If I stayed in London I could stay at school. Or I could do something — something —”

“Something what?” asked Cecily.

“Something worth doing!” her brother shouted. “There’s a war, if you didn’t know! Instead I’m being sent off to hide in the country like — like — a snivelling child!”

Cecily was of an easygoing nature, and rarely called anyone to account; but her brother’s words rose a maternal hackle in her. “Don’t say that!” she cried. “Those children aren’t snivelling, they’re frightened! You’d be frightened too, if you’d been sent away and you didn’t know where you were going or what would happen to you!”

Jeremy was at a delicate age and in a tumultuous state of mind, but he was not naturally an unkind boy and he turned his face to the window, his cheeks dark with misery. Cecily looked at her mother, who had followed the conversation the way a beach-goer observes a squabble between gulls. “What
will
happen to those children?” Cecily asked her.

“People will take them in. Don’t fret.”

But now that she was thinking about it, Cecily did feel inclined to fret. How tiny those evacuees must feel, how helpless! It seemed peculiar that the war, which was huge and serious and complicated, should bother to disrupt even the littlest life — like a tiger so bad-tempered it would crush a ladybird.

She looked at her brother. He was staring out the window. Quickly and stubbornly, she hacked off the last of her thumbnail. Jeremy continued to glare at the scenery as if his sister didn’t exist. Cecily swallowed the nail, then retired to digest, tucking up her feet and closing her eyes. While she pitied the evacuees, part of her wished they had been on a different train so she wouldn’t have had to see them and be weighed down by their plight. She had troubles of her own. She would miss her father, whom she adored. She would worry about him every moment of every day. She would miss Mrs Pope, who organised the house, and Mr Pope, who opened the door to invited guests and closed it in the face of all others. She would miss their good cook, Mrs Potter, and she’d miss her father’s secretary, Mr Mills, who knew limericks. She wouldn’t miss school, but she might miss her school friends. Most of them had been evacuated already, and not just to the countryside but to far away — to Australia and Canada, which were places Cecily had had to search the globe in her father’s study to find.

She crinkled her nose. She was glad she wasn’t going to Australia. She was glad to be going to Heron Hall.

Because that was one thing Cecily couldn’t admit, not when everything was so dire, not with Jeremy being so tortured and Mama turned to marble, not when Daddy had been left behind and men were fighting and dying, not when poor France had fallen and London was too frightened even to turn on a light . . . no, under such circumstances it was wisest not to confess that she was delighted to be going to Heron Hall. Cecily loved Heron Hall. If the war lasted years and years, she wouldn’t mind: not if it meant she must stay at Heron Hall.

She folded her hands and tried to sleep. The afternoon sun threw flares into the blackness of her closed eyes. Heloise turned a book’s pages, Jeremy scratched the varnish on the windowsill. The train made a heavy rushing sound like a bull charging through shoulder-height grass. It hauled the children north, away from the menace of bombs, across squarely fenced countryside with its tidy woods and glossy fields and into a soundless place beyond it, where a white sky hung greatly over a silver land.