The Children of the King (5 page)

Peregrine looked at his guests. “I hope it’s not too early to eat? Mrs Winter thought you’d like an early dinner after your long day. It’s lamb, Cook tells me. The last lamb the butcher’s apprentice slaughtered before he signed up, apparently.”

Jeremy said “Huh,” in an exhaling way; Cecily thought that anything which stopped the lambs being slaughtered couldn’t be a completely bad thing. Heloise rose, plucking at wisps of dog hair. Jeremy slipped across the room to open the door for her. Cecily kissed Byron’s brow and unfolded her dependable legs. In the doorway she paused: “Aren’t you coming, Uncle?”

“No,” he said, and added, “I hope you’ll be happy here, May.”

And May, although it was grossly impolite, didn’t reply. Mr Lockwood had stepped away from the fire and it was only now that she saw her host walked with a limp. She smiled daftly and was yanked into the passage by Cecily, who hissed hotly in her ear.

“Don’t speak! Don’t say anything. He had polio when he was a boy. Do you know what polio is? It’s a disease that makes people crippled. Don’t mention it to him, that’s very bad manners. But you can’t catch polio, so you mustn’t be afraid.”

The consistency of her courage had been much questioned over the course of this endless day. Yet again May vowed, “I’m not afraid.”

“This is a good house, you’ll like it here —”

“I know.”

“So you mustn’t act shy and silly, not ever. Shy people are just irritating. And you mustn’t be scared of Uncle Peregrine. I know he’s not what you’re used to, but —”

“I like him,” said May.

“Good! But don’t bow to him again, all right?
That
was peculiar. You looked like a little drinking bird.”

“Hmm,” said May.

“Now let’s dash, or we’ll be late for dinner. Cook doesn’t like lateness. Timeliness is the rule!”

“Let’s go then,” said May. “I’m fast like a whippet.”

Cecily stepped back, cocking her head. This evacuee she’d chosen was certainly bizarre, but at some unrecognised moment she had decided to keep her. “What are you smiling about?” she asked; and suddenly snuffles of laughter were swelling in her nose and plumped out her cheeks. “You’re going to bow again one day, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.” May shrugged. “If I’m in the mood.”

Cecily giggled so much she had to cover her mouth. It had all been precarious and could have gone badly, but now things promised to be fine.

Dawn came early in those short weeks of summer. The sun rose limpid over the hills, pale and tired despite its youth. Its heatless light reached over miles of marsh, crept across streams and slunk over rocks, cast thin shadows from robins and shone dimly off dew, and finally crawled, with a daddy-longlegs’s fragility, up the walls of Heron Hall to Cecily’s window, there to stare through the glass like a starved cat. Morning was here.

Cecily stretched beneath her rose-coloured quilt, her mind a pleasant field of emptiness. Heloise had done nothing about sending the children to school, and ten days of idleness had wiped Cecily’s brain almost clean of thought. She lived each hour as if she were a corked bottle adrift on the sea, with no demands upon her except to present herself three times daily to the table. There was, of course, the matter of the evacuee, who was prone to bouts of independence and required supervision; but Cecily had taken to the role of instructor with ease, and found it hardly any bother to be constantly criticising and instructing.

“Breakfast,” she said.

Heron Hall had never been a warm house, not for a single day of its long existence, and certainly wasn’t now, in summer. Cecily hopped up and down while she dressed. She listened for sounds coming from elsewhere in the house, perhaps the noise of tureen lids and cutlery, but apart from the thudding of her feet, silence reigned. That could be changed.

Beyond her bedroom, the passage showed a row of shut doors. There was only one she’d dare to open, and she did so without knocking.

May’s room was the same size as Cecily’s, and its wallpaper of green vines and its view over the orchard were pretty; but it couldn’t be as nice a room as Cecily’s, so she believed it was not. The bed was large — too large for such a scrap of girl, who disappeared into it as if into a quagmire. It was often easiest to locate the child by squeezing the bedding until it protested.

“Wake up! Breakfast!”

She prodded the bedclothes, rifled cold air beneath them, tamped them down firmly, finally threw them aside. The bed was empty, May was gone. Cecily sighed.

It wasn’t the first time the evacuee had absconded. On their third morning at Heron Hall she’d left her room without waiting to be officially freed. The girls had had a quiet talk about it, if a talk can consist of one party talking and the other party not. Cecily had warned of the perils inherent in an old house. There were doors that might lock, staircases to fall down, statues that might topple, loaded pistols who-knew-where. “It’s best if you wait for me,” she’d told May, and although she didn’t specify the parameters of the waiting, she meant
always and at all times don’t do anything without me
. Cecily simply did not like the idea of May Bright, who was only a guest here, rambling about and making herself at home. It could lead to tragedy. And it wasn’t right.

Gratifyingly, May had agreed. “All right,” she’d said. And then she had blithely continued to do exactly as she liked. Some mornings she stayed in her room, reading in bed or even sleeping in it; on others she’d been discovered chatting to the maid in the kitchen, fetching preserves from the cellar, brushing Byron on the doorstep, standing on tiptoe to inspect a tray of butterflies. On the mornings she went roaming, she could be found anywhere.

And now here she was again, gone.

Cecily looked about as if the room knew where the girl had got to, and would confess under a sufficiently stringent glare. Cecily had helped May unpack her suitcase, so she knew exactly what belonged to the girl and felt also that these things belonged to herself. On the dresser lay May’s hairbrush and a blue ribbon rolled up like a snail. Stacked behind these were the three novels of her library, each dated the day of the evacuation and inscribed with the words
love, Mum.
Beside them lay a piece of paper and a pen: Heloise had written to the child’s mother on their first day at Heron Hall, and May had soon sent a letter of her own, and evidently she’d started another.
Dear Mum,
Cecily read,
I hope you are well. I am well. The weather here is not too warm. I miss you. I think about Dad a lot.
As the epistle ended there, so did Cecily’s reading: she turned her attention to a box of barley sugar from which she prised a yellow twist. She didn’t expect to find May in the dresser, but she opened the drawers anyway. Folded in the top drawer were the girl’s stockings, knickers, handkerchiefs and slips. In the middle drawer were her petticoat and cardigan. In the bottom drawer were her gas mask and identity card. Nothing of interest. The room stood vacant and cool, its walls a tangle of vines. Cecily’s reflection wavered in the mirror, a chubby-cheeked girl with a veil of yellow curls and eyes of the most timid blue.

She crunched up the barley sugar and raided the box for another.

In the cupboard hung the dun dress which the evacuee had worn on the train; she had another made of summery cotton, and a third made of thick wool. This last was missing. Missing, too, was the girl’s overcoat. “She’s gone outside,” the detective deduced.

She went downstairs and through the maze of corridors at the back of the house. Fragrances came from the kitchen, beckoning Cecily to its door. Cook was sitting alone at the table, reading the newspaper with her back to the stove. It was a perfect opportunity to order breakfast and have Cook prepare it without distraction, so the tea would be sweet, the toast without char, everything served just as Cecily liked it, pipingly hot and divine. But Cook had a nephew who was fighting abroad, and instinct warned Cecily not to interrupt a woman who was scanning a list of names for one she recognised. Besides, the longer May Bright was rambling about unchaperoned, the more necessary it became to reel her in. The longer she survived by herself, the less she needed Cecily to be with her. Breakfast must wait.

A quick check in the mud room confirmed the evacuee’s wellingtons were gone.

The rear of Heron Hall let onto a cobbled yard where horses had once been hitched into carriages. Standing to one side was a stone barn, inside which were the coach-house and stalls. There were no horses at the Hall anymore, for Peregrine did not ride; the milking cow spent the winter in the barn, but it was summer now and she was out in the field. But buried within old piles of straw could be found nests of mice or chicks, and doves cooed in the rafters; in summers gone by, Cecily and Jeremy had often played in the stalls, and Cecily had introduced them to May with the air of Moses parting the sea. The girls had spent happy hours here: but a quick investigation showed the child wasn’t in the barn this morning, not unless she was buried like a rodent in the hay.

A row of sandstone outbuildings stood further back in the yard: here were the knife-house and the grain-house, the lumber-house and the gardener’s store. Here too was the outside privy, which was a fascinating black hole to the centre of the earth. Cecily checked each of these, certain she would discover her errant charge in one or the other. May liked flowerpots and seeds, she liked bent nails and vats of corn, she liked the Hall’s grumpy gardener, she liked Hobbs the driver and the flashy long-nosed car, she probably liked knives and lumber, for all that Cecily knew. But the outbuildings were empty, and although the pitch-dark privy was the sort of place some people felt drawn to, May was not there either.

At the end of the outbuildings stood the kennels. Generations of hounds had lived in them, but Peregrine did not hunt, and Cecily had only ever known the kennels as a collection of empty cages into which she’d once shut herself and pretended to be a dog. That was a long time ago, but she hadn’t forgotten the look on her mother’s face when she discovered her daughter baying like a beagle. “May?” she called now, nose to the wire; and only a breath of breeze answered, light-footed as a fawn.

A low stone wall surrounded the yard, and its railed gate stood ajar. Cecily gazed at it, and through it to the meadow beyond. Cecily liked being in the country, but she was no great fan of the actual
countryside.
Contact with the land inevitably resulted in feelings of damp, cold, and weariness. But in the past ten days she had learned that, rather than avoid such feelings, May Bright seemed to like them. Staring at the unhooked gate, Cecily knew, with a sinking heart, that this morning the evacuee had struck out alone into the wild.

She climbed the gate’s railings most cautiously, and surveyed the fields.

The morning sun wasn’t strong enough to take the chill from the air. The breeze carried the clean odour of soil and trees. The countryside around Heron Hall always seemed contrary and undecided — it was rocky and boggy, flat and hilly, flowery and thorny, balding and overgrown, purple, yellow, green, grey, brown, and sometimes it was all these things within the space of a few footsteps. It was rough country, scratchy with heather, crunchy with stone, whispery with running water and gusting leaves. In winter it snowed here, but the land stayed wet even through the brief summer, and patches of mud lay in wait for Cecily’s boots.

She shielded her eyes and looked into the distance, over the fields to where hills rose half-heartedly and fell away. Jeremy had once found a ring in the shadow of those hills: Peregrine said it was a gentleman’s ring dating from Tudor times, and had let Jeremy keep it though it was too big for him. Since they’d arrived at the Hall, Jeremy had spent most of the days roaming the estate, a mackintosh over his shoulders and a little earth-pick in hand. In the mornings he read the newspapers and in the evenings he listened to war reports on the radio, frowning past the spitfire of static. As company he was useless, preoccupied by unshared thoughts, preferring, if he could not be with his uncle or with Hobbs, to be alone: while he seemed to like the evacuee, it was unlikely that wherever Jeremy was, May was too. Yet anything was possible, and Cecily knew herself not to be canny. She didn’t always notice everything, even things which were plainly before her, and she’d come to expect the world to surprise. Usually, the surprises were good. Maybe that would change. Maybe Jeremy and the girl had gone off together, this cool morning, to dig up the mouldy skeleton of a medieval monk. Everyone would make a fuss and forget completely about Cecily.

“May!” she hollered, and the breeze snatched the word and whisked it away. She rubbed her face, groaning. It was possible the girl had gone to the henhouse or to the lake where the herons prowled. She might have skirted the Hall and gone down to the road and along it to the village, although there was no good reason for anyone to go there. The shops wouldn’t open for another hour. If she’d gone to the road, it would be for a reason other than shopping.

Cecily wobbled on the gate, wishing her father were here. He would cut through this confusion and speak sense.
Cecil-doll,
he might say,
it’s no good worrying about other people. You’ve got to look after yourself.