In Great Waters (25 page)

“Your father said you wanted to meet me,” Francis Shingleton said; his tone was matter-of-fact.

“Allard is not my father,” Henry said, with a little less aggression. The man had a point: he had said he would like to meet a surgeon.

“But you wanted to meet me?”

Henry was not about to concede it. “What were you doing to his wife? Will she live?”

“I hope so.” The reply sounded honest. “It is in the hands of God now. These cases are always difficult.”

God was a phrase associated with the nasty cross of straight-edged wood; Henry associated remarks about this distant being with a refusal to take responsibility. “You mean you do not know,” he said.

“That is right. I do not know.”

Henry nodded. The man gained some credit in his eyes for admitting his ignorance. “Sit down, Shingleton,” he said. “You will be uncomfortable like that.”

Shingleton rose to his feet and found himself a chair. “I cannot say for sure whether Mistress Allard will live,” he said. “But she is more likely to live now than before the surgery. Her broken leg would have killed her, left untreated.” Henry scrutinised the man’s hands. There was only a tiny trace of blood, just inside the rim of the thumb-nail.

“How much can you do if someone is sick?” Henry said.

“Not enough.” Shingleton’s eyes were on him, looking at his hands, his limbs, his face. The gaze was direct, but Henry didn’t feel intruded upon: he was just as curious to see a surgeon. “But we must do what we can.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Henry didn’t like this referring to persons absent. “Do you not mean
you
must?”

“I must, yes.” Shingleton nodded. “But others like me as well, my lord Henry. People should do as well as they can with the knowledge they can master.”

“When did I become your lord?” Henry said. “You called me Henry when you came in.”

“Did I?” Shingleton frowned, rubbing the backs of his hands together.

Henry sat up. His legs were folded under him and he couldn’t get up from the floor without help; seated on his chair, Shingleton towered above him. As there was no way around this, Henry braced himself more solidly, staring straight into Shingleton’s clean face. “Allard says that you are the King’s surgeon. The King would burn you if you
did not tell him I was here. And he will burn me if you do. What are you going to do?”

“Henry.” Allard started forward a little, hands gripped together.

Henry turned to look at him, but said nothing: he saw no need to defend a fair question.

Shingleton looked into his lap for a moment and sighed. “I would not send anyone to the stake,” he said. “I do not care for burnings.”

“Would you not wish to save yourself?” Henry said. Risking burning for your own ends was one thing, but risking it to save an eleven-year-old half-blood you had never met before today was too unlikely to gamble on.

“I am sworn to heal the sick,” Shingleton said. Under Henry’s black stare, he was starting to look a little sweaty. “That is my calling.”

“You do not want to get into battles,” Henry said.

Shingleton shook his head. “No, my lord.”

“But you are the King’s surgeon. The King must always risk battles.”

Shingleton looked back at him. “I never travelled with an army.”

“Do you treat children?”

Shingleton looked startled at the change of tack. “My lord?”

“You speak to me as if I were a child.”

“Excuse me, my lord.”

“I am not condemning you, I wish to know. Do you treat many children? What do you do when you do not wait on the King?”

Shingleton swallowed; the sound was loud in the closed room. “I have a hospital for idiots, my lord. But I do not think you are one.”

Henry let the man sweat another moment before giving him a smile. “No. I am not. But I hear the King’s son is. My friend John says so. Is he right?”

Shingleton drew a breath.

“Shingleton, you can say so in this room,” Henry said impatiently. “The King will not hear you.”

“Yes,” Shingleton said. “He is an idiot. Her Majesty Erzebet is not,
but she will not bear him children. Her two daughters are young. I do not wish to see blood, and I fear for the throne. That is the truth, my lord Henry.”

This was good news to hear from an outsider, a man unprompted by Allard or Claybrook. Henry nodded. “So you will not tell the King of me?”

Shingleton shook his head. “It will come to a contest for the throne. Now, or later. I thought before today the threat would come from Spain, or from France. Not from our own shores.”

“I am not a threat to anyone but the King,” Henry said. “And he is old, and his son is an idiot. If you will be good to me now I will be good to you later.”

Shingleton nodded. “Can I ask a favour, my lord?” he said.

“Yes.” Henry did not wish to be friends with this man, but he had decided to think well of him. He was not a soldier, but would be of use if he wasn’t pushed.

“May I examine you?”

“I am not sick,” Henry said. “I am never sick.”

Shingleton looked almost hopeful. “That is good news indeed, my lord. But I would like to learn. The house of Delamere—cousins have married cousins for generations.” Delamere was the King’s family name, Henry remembered. Maybe he could take it for himself later; it was better than Allard. “You are newly out of the sea, my lord, you are healthy. I would like to learn what a healthy King should be, in body.” His eyes were bright.

“If you like,” Henry said. “But do not touch me. I do not like to be touched.”

Shingleton examined Henry, studied him with care and interest. By the time he was finished, the child-idiot tone was gone from his voice. He spoke to Henry the way Allard spoke to Claybrook: with deference.

The following week, Shingleton visited again to check on Margaret
Allard, who was beginning to recover. He also came to see Henry. When he appeared before Henry, he did something no one had done before: hingeing his straight landsman’s back and legs, he lowered his head and bowed. The sweep of it brought his head almost level with Henry’s.

W
HILE HE KNEW
that they would need soldiers, for a time Henry was happy playing with John. As they grew older, though, his friend was called away to court more often. These absences, which could last months, left Henry bored and angry, difficult to please and, in the privacy of his own mind, sad. There were too many adults towering over him, and all of them put demands on him. No one was any fun.

Thomas Markeley, his old arms instructor, took John’s place as a sparring partner during the lonely weeks when John was away. Henry liked Markeley well enough: a man of few words who tended to handle Henry much as he handled a horse, with brief instructions, pointing him in the right direction and giving him the occasional pat. Markeley was easy to understand. He had also been a soldier, and Henry studied him, trying to learn what he needed to know about such creatures.

John said that most people—”the people” was the phrase he used, an awkward concept to understand, as unlike the concept of a tribe, “the people” did not seem to include all the people in England—were more like Markeley than like anyone else Henry knew, but that most were not soldiers. They grew things, dug the earth and planted seeds (John having planted some in a patch of earth to prove to Henry that this was how plants came about, a little patch of greenery Henry sometimes visited when there was no one to play with). They kept animals
captive and slaughtered them when it was time to eat. They made things. From this, Henry had formed an impression of the people of England as hungry and frightened. They kept their prey close to them where it couldn’t escape, but if the prey took sick and died, they couldn’t swim across the miles to find more. They stayed on little patches of ground, facing starvation if the ground didn’t yield food. They were forbidden to gather what they needed: it was called stealing and ended with a rope choking the life out of them. The king led them and told them what to do, but they couldn’t see or hear him. He was out of their reach, experienced only by report—but they must all know that he was old, that he had no good sons. Somehow he managed to keep away kings from other tribes, but Henry was certain of something, even though Markeley always changed the subject back to weapons when asked directly: the people needed their king to be strong, and he wasn’t. They would be frightened of other kings, and, more importantly, they would be ashamed.

This could be used to his advantage, Henry thought. People would want a strong king. If he managed it properly, offered them what they lacked, they ought to be pleased about it.

He would have liked to share the thought with John, but John was away.

Boredom was not something Henry had ever had to deal with in the sea. Every moment was a hunt, shoals of silver food bristling before him, dolphins crackling their threats across the leagues of water, avoiding the pinching fingers of the other children, questing across blue, empty deserts to find the currents that would take the tribe to its next destination. He had been active, frightened, alert, every waking moment. Taken into Allard’s house, he had remained frightened. But the years had passed and no one threatened him; the soldiers he heard so much about remained distant, unseen. He had learned, studied—at least with weapons—because he hadn’t known any other kind of life. John had introduced him to the idea of company. Left alone, he found the practice a little wearisome. He persevered, hefting his axe day after
day, because there was nothing else to do. Sometimes, when the weather was too hot, he kept to his room, staring out of the window, one hand idly turning the crown Allard had given him when he was small.

The occasions John returned, Henry was too happy to see him to complain about his absence. He knew that John had to go to the court to learn about it. When he was sixteen, though, and beginning to chafe at this round of coming and going, training and promises with no sign of progress, another absence was called for, one that was neither welcome nor expected.

“John should go,” was the first Henry heard about it. Claybrook was already discussing the topic with Allard and John when Henry, who had heard rapid hoofbeats from across the estate and ridden back from his explorations to meet them, made an awkward entrance into the room.

Allard looked even more nervous than usual; Henry could hear his breath scraping in his throat. “Will you not go too?” he said.

“Yes, I must.” Claybrook gave an impatient wave. “But separately. I will have to join his Majesty’s party. And I will have to return to court afterwards. Philip takes more and more care, and her Majesty is less and less willing to help. I could not ride back to tell you about it. John will be free to return. He can go on his own: he would be in the way if I was caring for Philip. It would be natural enough to send him home after such a sight anyway.”

“What is to happen?” Henry broke in. John was sitting in a corner, looking smaller than usual. The sight made Henry angry and anxious.

“Henry.” Allard turned to him, reached out a hand and then thought better of it. “There is news from court. There may be no need for us to be alarmed, but it is most serious.”

“What?” Henry didn’t want preamble; in the time it took Allard to talk about the news, he could simply have said it and spared Henry some frightened seconds.

“It may not be—”

“John, what has happened?” Henry gave up on Allard, who after eleven years still would not learn that he should give straight answers.

John shrugged unhappily. “They say someone has found a bastard, and they are going to burn him.” Henry froze. “Not you, we think. In Cornwall, far south of here. They say he is young, only four years old or so. And they have caught him. But it will stir the country up. People are talking about whether they will really burn the child or kill him first, give him an easier death. But we do not think they will. Princess Erzebet is looking very fierce about it.”

Henry shook his head, urgency swamping him. “Do we have soldiers now? We could stop them, could we not?”

“Henry, we cannot.” Allard sounded almost as unhappy as John.