Lammas Night (58 page)

“There's no sense getting yourself worked into more of a state than you already are,” he told the prince.

“I wouldn't
be
in such a state if I knew a bit more what to expect,” William replied as he sat on the edge of the bed and removed his shoes. “Can't you even give me a hint?”

Trying to avoid the searching blue eyes, Graham jammed his hands in his pockets and studied the pattern in the rug.

“I'll ask Wesley to come up and brief you a little later,” he said softly “For now, you should get some sleep.”

“I don't
want
to sleep, and I don't want Wesley,” the prince said pointedly. “I want to know whether I can count on your support tonight.”

Graham turned partially away, forcing back the numb edge of despair. “I'll be present as a witness. Right now, that's all I can promise.”

“Do you think denying it will change things?”

Graham knew it would not but had no argument to answer William. When he did not reply, the prince laid back on the bed with a perplexed sigh, his eyes never leaving Graham.

“Gray, we have to go through with this,” William said. “At least tonight's part. Please don't make it harder for either of us than it already is.”

Graham allowed himself a heavy sigh. “Forgive me, William,” he whispered. “Simple
being
here is hard enough.”

He caught just a glimpse of the hurt and resentment in William's eyes before the prince rolled abruptly onto his side, away from Graham. Stung by that reproach, Graham sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. When he finally summoned enough courage to touch one tentative hand to the prince's shoulder, William flinched.

“William, I'm sorry,” he whispered.

“So am I,” came the low-voiced response.

“Will you—try to sleep?”

“Yes—for all the good it will do.”

Justly chastened, Graham bowed his head.

“William, I told you I was sorry. I can—put you to sleep if you like.”

Without warning, William rolled onto his back to stare at him.

“Yes, you can, can't you? But you can't do the one thing I really
need
you to do. Do you think you're the only one who's afraid, Gray?”

“William, I—”

But William only shook his head and closed his eyes, breathing out with a resigned sigh.

“Never mind,” he whispered. “Just go ahead and put me to sleep.”

Graham had no heart to continue a discussion that he had not wanted in the first place. When William did not look up again, Graham reluctantly brushed his finger tips over the prince's closed eyelids and eased him into kind, undreaming slumber. He wished there were time to make the same sort of escape, if only for an hour, but he feared to dream if he slept. After finishing his own physical preparations, he spent the remaining hour in solitary contemplation, searching his conscience and dreading every step he was increasingly bound to take. Both Alix and the brigadier tried to talk to him, but Graham declined their comfort. Wisely, they left him to his own anguished soul searching.

A few hours later, William sighed and sputtered a little as he gently surfaced from under his bath water and scooped water and hair out of his eyes with both hands. Steam rose all around him, pungent from the herbs the brigadier had run under the tap when he drew the bath a quarter hour ago. The aroma, sharp but not unpleasant, lent an odd air of other worldliness to the ambience of the bathroom, unlike anything William had ever smelled before. The flickering of the single candle near the tub softened the white starkness of the tile, but it also gave free rein to his already active imagination.

Not that the unfamiliar was unexpected under the circumstances. As William had learned in the past two weeks, one of the principal purposes of an initiation was to cause changes in the initiate, partially by placing him in an unfamiliar environment. Just what those changes might encompass, William was not altogether sure. He was not exactly afraid of what lay ahead tonight, but he could not help a gnawing little knot of apprehension, for all his trust of those in whose hands he had placed himself. The hot bath had at least eased a few of the physical knots and tensions.

He breathed deeply of the scented steam and let himself slip down in the warm water again until he could rest his head against the edge of the tub, closing his eyes to drift, wishing many things were different. Oddly enough, his most urgent concern for tonight was not himself at all, but Gray, who still was resisting the decision William had made and could not seem to make himself a part of it.

It had been the brigadier who had broached the subject of initiation to William in the first place, while a sullen and uncommunicative Gray sat silently by, contributing only when questioned directly. Though Gray never again voiced the kind of resistance he had offered that first time, in the garden—at least in William's hearing—it was clear that his heart was not in any of the preparations. William met with him privately several times after that, but Gray assiduously avoided further discussion. Not until this evening had William even dared to bring it up.

Now the part of tonight that William sometimes sensed so joyously in Gray had lost a little of its edge, for Gray refused to be drawn into William's sharing of it. William wondered whether there was any chance at all that Gray might change his mind.

A door opened and closed in the next room, and very shortly there was a discreet rap on the bathroom door. William sat up in anticipation, sloshing water, but it was the brigadier, not Gray, who slipped through the doorway with an apologetic bow, a large, snowy-white towel on his arm in stark contrast to the now-familiar black robe. William hoped his disappointment did not show too much as he put on a tentative smile for the older man.

“How do you feel?” Ellis asked, crouching near the head of the tub and balancing against the edge with one hand.

“Clean?”

Ellis smiled. “And with a sense of humor yet, I see. That's good.” He swished his free hand in the water near William's shoulder, apparently testing the temperature, then dried it on a corner of the towel.

“As it happens, ‘clean' is what this part is all about,” he continued. “The washing away of all impurities and imperfections before one is presented to the gods—psychic impurities as well as physical ones. Fortunately, water is good for doing both. Do you feel sufficiently pure?”

“I'll feel sufficiently waterlogged if I stay in here much longer,” William quipped with a ragged smile. “At least physically. Psychically, I couldn't say. You're the expert in that department.”

“You'll pass.”

“Well, that's a relief. Are you going to brief me any further? Gray—hasn't told me much.”

“I'll tell you what I may,” the old man returned, standing and holding out the towel sympathically. “Come and get dry now. I shouldn't want you to grow old and wrinkled before your time.”

The prince climbed out and wrapped himself in the towel Ellis held, accepting the older man's assistance wordlessly as he was dried and garbed in a loose-fitting white robe that wrapped across the front. As he knotted a white cord around his waist to hold it in place, he tried not to think about whether he would have the chance to grow old and wrinkled. The possibility got increasingly smaller. Toweling his hair dry, he followed Ellis into the adjoining sitting room, which was also lit only by candles. He studied Ellis furtively in the mirror while he combed his hair. Ellis seemed nonplussed by the scrutiny and only patted the divan beside him when William had finished his toilette.

“Come and sit, son,” the old man said, holding up two envelopes. “I have some mail for you: a note from the master of the house and a cable from Richard and Geoffrey. I think you know that all three of them would have been here tonight if that were possible. You've not met my granddaughter Audrey, Geoffrey's sister, but she was here Lammas night, and she also sends her respect and best wishes. She felt you might be more comfortable if tonight's gathering were kept small.”

William smoothed his robe over his knees with a restless gesture as he took the two envelopes and sat. Both had been opened, for they were addressed to Ellis on the outside. The first note was penned on the familiar, cream-colored stationery of Lord Selwyn's ship, with its crest engraved at the top in gold.

To Victor, with reverence and warm affection. You are in my thoughts and prayers. Your servant, Selwyn
.

William smiled at the “Victor” appellation and laid the note aside, unfolding the cable from Wales. The words printed on the yellow signal flimsy were more informal but also more cryptic.

TO BRIGADIER SIR WESLEY ELLIS, KCB, LAURELGROVE, EYNSFORD, KENT STOP WE WIN STOP TO THE VICTOR BELONG THE SPOILS STOP SIGNED YOUR SPOILED GRANDSONS R & G.

“To the victor belong the spoils?” William said, glancing up at Ellis.

Ellis smiled. “Since they had no way of knowing how many nosy clerks might read it, they had to be a little indirect. They're giving you their homage, William, as the sacred king.”

William read it again, a shiver of awe gradually overcoming him as the hidden sense registered.
We win. To the Victor belong the spoils
.…

He snatched up Selwyn's note and reread it then, only now seeing his “reverence” in a possibly different light.

“And—Selwyn, too?” he finally murmured, hardly daring to ask it.

As the brigadier nodded, not saying anything, it was all William could do to blink back the tears. He stared at the two messages, seeing the faces of the three who had sent them superimposed over the two very different sorts of paper, then gently folded the cable form around the stiffness of ship's stationery and closed them between his hands, overcome. It was not until he had recovered enough to slip them into the pocket of his robe that he realized he had unconsciously clasped even the written pledges as he would have clasped the hands themselves. He started shaking as he patted the papers in place inside the pocket, and he forced himself to take a deep breath.

“What can I say?” he whispered after he had slumped bonelessly into the softenss of the divan, wishing there had been a fourth name added to the three.

“You don't have to say anything if you don't want to. Are you nervous?”

“What do you think?”

“That's fine. A little anxiety is normal and healthy. There's supposed to be
some
anticipation. I did want to reassure you, however, that nothing terrible is going to happen to you tonight. Even though you've offered yourself in a very worthy cause, we all still hope that won't be necessary.”

“I'm not sure I understand what you're saying,” William said.

Ellis smiled and produced his pipe and pouch from a hidden pocket, beginning the little ritual of scooping tobacco and tamping it into the bowl.

“I suppose what I'm trying to say is that no one is going to slip in a surprise sacrifice tonight to spare you the anticipation and the worry later on,” he said slowly. “What you'll experience out there—and in here”—he touched the side of William's head lightly with a finger tip—“is your's by right of birth, even if it weren't for the other. Granted that in ordinary circumstances it might have been safer for all of us if you never knew about any of this—but none of us, knowing you as we do now, would have denied you its joy, had you come to us in normal times.”

“Not even Gray?” William murmured, the words a little bitter despite his best intentions.

“William, try to understand,” the brigadier replied. “Gray, of all people, would like nothing better than to share the joy which should go with what you'll experience tonight. It isn't your reception into the old ways which grieves him; it's what seems destined to come after that, and the duty which draws him, out of love.”

William glanced down at his hands, at the fingers twined tightly together, and unclasped them with a deliberate motion, laying them flat on his thighs. He supposed it was a kind of love, though the term seemed most inadequate to describe the bond that had bound the two of them across at least nine centuries, and God alone knew how many lives.

“I know that,” he said quietly. “Perhaps it wasn't even fair to ask him. I'm not sure I had a choice, though. Has he talked with you about it?”

“Not in so many words. But when you've known a man as long as I've known Gray, he doesn't have to tell you, and you don't have to ask.”

“I suppose not.” William sighed. “I've laid a terrible burden on him, haven't I? I did have to ask him, though. You understand that, don't you?”

“I understand better than you can possibly imagine, my prince,” Ellis said softly.

William glanced up at that, surprised by the tenderness of the tone, but the brigadier was toying distractedly with something on a silver chain around his neck, his pipe momentarily forgotten in his other hand and his eyes fixed on some other time. William longed to ask what he meant, but something stayed the query on his lips. When the brigadier looked up at him again, there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary in his expression.

“Well, I did intend to brief you, didn't I?” Ellis said briskly, dropping whatever was on the chain-inside his robe. “I can't give you too many details, of course, since that would detract from the impact of the initiation, but you can expect first of all to be challenged at swordpoint before entering the circle, much as you undoubtedly were for your Masonic initiation. Then you'll be bound and blindfolded. You'll be presented to the ancient ones and consecrated to their service, your measure will be taken with a scarlet cord which will be marked with a drop of your blood, and you'll be asked to take an oath of fidelity to the old ones, though that does not involve renunciation of any other beliefs you may hold. At this point, you are officially acknowledged as one of us and given a new name. After that, we'll proceed to anoint and crown you as the sacred king. What happens after that, at least ultimately, is up to you.”