Pendragon's Heir (16 page)

She searched in vain for some lighthearted joke to dispel the blunt force of his words. But nothing came, and she rather awkwardly said, “Tell us what you have planned for your birthday, Kitty.”

L
ATER
,
IN THE DRAWING
-
ROOM
, B
LANCHE SAT
alone with her cup of tea. Emmeline was at the piano, playing country airs, and Perceval stood with his head inside the instrument, asking questions and keeping Kitty in giggles. Under the music, the hum of voices, and the laughter, Mr Corbin came over to sit on the stool by Blanche’s feet.

“Let me have your reproaches,” he said to her in English. “You will not find me unrepentant.”

Blanche tried to determine whether he was joking or not, but failed, as usual, to read his expression. “It was very wrong of you.”

“Poor lad,” he said, smiling. There was a moment’s silence, and he went on, “He is not from the Wales we know, is he?”

Even if she had wanted to lie, Blanche’s face would have given her away. “No.”

“Perhaps I am jealous of them,” said Mr Corbin, under the piano’s melody, so low that she had to lean forward to hear. “Those half-savage warlords and unwashed illiterates who would take you away from us.”

“I—” Blanche’s protest died away.

“Your guardian told us you had gone on holiday,” Mr Corbin probed. “I didn’t believe it. You went
there
.”

She gave him a look of mute appeal.

“Remember,” he said, “they can’t force you to live there. It’s your choice.”

He was going to try to prevent her going to Logres if he could. She supposed she should be grateful for his help. But a sudden unease gripped her, a feeling like a bad conscience.

“I used to dream,” she said, and swallowed. “I dreamed I was there, in a meadow with the sun shining on banners and armour. And it wasn’t like what you say. It was beautiful.” She remembered the night in the slough in Gore, when in cutting wind she had determined to die uncomplaining, with her face to the free hills, and tried to put the splendour of that moment into words. “Now that I know such a place exists, I can’t help wondering…
what if it is true?
”

“Blanche, no.”

“What if they need me?”

“
Need
you? Blanche, who has been worrying you?”

“No-one,” she said, bewildered.

“Don’t make the best of a bad bargain, my dear.”

He was still fighting for her. She felt a quick rush of gratitude, and dropped her voice. “I can’t think of any way to avoid it. Besides—”

And she caught herself.

“Besides?”

“It’s nothing.”

“You said, ‘What if they need me’. They can’t need you to destroy yourself by flinging yourself into their brutal world.”

“But what if they do?” He looked puzzled. She tried again. “If my sacrifice can preserve them—”

“Someone else will do it.”

“They said—” This time, although she caught herself, she permitted herself to go on. She glanced at Perceval and dropped her voice a little lower. “They said they need me.”

“Nonsense. They’ll make do with someone else. Besides, to them, you’re only a woman. How important can it be?”

“I’m to guard the Holy Grail.”

Mr Corbin’s lips pressed together and turned white. “So,” he said at last, “not content with spiriting you away to primitivism, they’re making you the high priestess of their bogus cult.”

“I—”

“Blanche, look at me and tell me that if there was a way to stay, you wouldn’t take it.”

“I—”

“I can find a way. Tell me you aren’t interested, and you need never see me again.”

“It would depend on the way,” she whispered at last.

“Then promise me you won’t go before you’ve seen me again,” he said.

12

It’s I will keep me a maiden still,

Let the elfin knight do what he will.

Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight

T
HE DAYS STRETCHED OUT WITH NO
sign of Sir Ector and Nerys. Kitty was busy on her party business, and Mr Corbin did not call again. There was little to do that week except to amuse Perceval, but he took a great deal of amusing. Hitherto Blanche had been glad to muddle through life doing a little reading, a little handiwork, and a little visiting, but Perceval could not read, visit, or tat, and quickly grew restless without work to do. For most of the day he occupied himself working with the horses. Sir Ector had ridden Malaventure to Logres, but Perceval spent hours riding in circles on Rufus and Florence, training them to respond to the lightest pressure of rein or heel and gaining balance and rhythm for himself. Then he rigged up a makeshift quintain for ring jousting, and pounded white-painted wooden pegs into the ground which, approaching at a gallop, he aimed to spear and carry away.

In the evenings, Blanche found him a knife and knots of wood to whittle while she read aloud, mostly in Latin, and they had far-ranging conversations as knotted bowls or dragon-handled spoons took shape under Perceval’s hands.

“How much longer do you think Sir Ector will be?” Blanche asked one evening in the drawing-room.

Perceval kept all his attention on the wood in his hands, a block of dark walnut. “Time flows differently here than in Logres. But I know it will take them a week of that time to travel from Nimue’s gate to Camelot and return.”

“So if time moves more slowly here, which it seemed to do while I was at Carbonek, we may look for them in a little under a week from now.” Blanche stared into the fire and wondered if she would get the chance to speak to Mr Corbin again before she left.

She said, “Do you think Mr Corbin was right, about the necessities of war?”

“No,” Perceval said, frowning at the walnut. His knife scraped against the wood three times before he asked it, the question she’d been hoping to avoid. “What did you talk to him about, the other night?”

“He doesn’t want me to leave,” she said at last.

“Why should he have a say in it?”

Blanche laughed. “You really don’t like him, do you?” she baited.

Perceval didn’t take the hook. “He bested me in argument,” he admitted. “But he was wrong.”

“He made me promise to see him again before I leave.” Blanche was probing in earnest now, wondering what Perceval’s reaction to this would be. But once more he spoke calmly:

“He will be at the damsel Kitty’s dance three days from now, surely. There’s no reason you should not speak to him then, if the Lady tarries.”

Blanche wondered if Perceval really was not suspicious of Mr Corbin’s intentions. But she let it lie, and because Kitty’s party was to be a fancy-dress affair, she began mentally searching her wardrobe for a costume.

K
ITTY
’
S
R
OEDEAN FRIENDS CAME DOWN FROM
London for the occasion, and Blanche, entering the ballroom on Perceval’s arm, felt Kitty had done due honour to the splendour of the occasion. The place was blazing with light reflected from silverware and crystal, decorated with tinsel and silk roses.

“It’s marvellous, isn’t it?” Kitty asked. She was dressed as a fairy princess, with gossamer wings and a glittering crown. “Mamma let me do what I liked. We had Madame de Lorraine come down to decorate. Ooh, Percy, what a wonderful costume! Where did you get it?” she added in Welsh.

“My aunt Lynet made the surcoat,” Perceval said, which was perfectly true. “Many Happy Returns.”

“And who are you, Blanche?”

“Marie-Antoinette.”

“Is that why there’s an hourglass around your neck?” Kitty screamed. “Oh, how horrid! And you must be Sir Lancelot, Percy.”

Perceval glanced down at his glittering mail and red-and-gold surcoat. “Must I?”

Kitty clapped her hands. “Oh, excellent! ‘Must I’! Did you hear, Simon?”

“Most amusing,” said Mr Corbin, who had just come in, and showed his white teeth in tribute to the joke. He gave Kitty his best wishes, and then moved on to Blanche and bowed.

“Good evening,” she said, giving him her hand. “And whom do you represent, Mr Corbin? The Duke of Wellington?”

“His nemesis, I’m afraid.”

“Napoleon Bonaparte!” Blanche withdrew her hand with a laugh. “I don’t know if I can shake hands with you, sir.”

“Simon, ask her for that ghastly hourglass as a keepsake,” Kitty, who had been welcoming other guests, interjected.

Mr Corbin looked at the pendant and smiled his secretive smile. “I shall ask her for a good deal more than that tonight.”

Blanche glanced at Perceval, a little guiltily. But of course he had not heard: the thing was said in English.

“To begin with,” Mr Corbin went on, “this waltz.”

Blanche said, “Excuse me,” to Perceval and allowed Mr Corbin to lead her onto the floor.

“I am not a good dancer,” he said, a smile crossing his melancholy face—Blanche murmured a polite disagreement—“But I know that when one has an assignation at a ball, one puts pleasure before business.”

They moved into the flow of couples. Mr Corbin had been quite correct. The pleasure would be all his: of the two of them, he had the better partner. Blanche relaxed and let him guide her where he wished. There would be more opportunities for dancing later.

“We make a pretty picture, I’m sure,” she said. “The last of the
ancien regime
and the first of the new.”

“Thesis and antithesis,” Mr Corbin said. “What comes next is synthesis.”

They threaded a narrow passage between two other couples and drifted on up the room. Blanche said: “I have heard of this before. The thesis is received doctrine. The antithesis is some new and revolutionary idea. And the synthesis—”

“Is what happens when thesis and antithesis marry.”

“And I thought philosophy was unromantic,” said Blanche, smiling.

The music ended. Mr Corbin snatched a pair of champagne
coupes
and offered his arm to Blanche. “Now for the business. Shall we step outside, onto the terrace?”

It was a clear, cold night, and Blanche, folding her arms, hoped the discussion would not take long. “How cold it is!” she said, glancing at the moon.

“Winter is trying her teeth,” Mr Corbin said. “But tonight she is only a pup: when she is old, ware her bite.”

Blanche turned to him with an inquiring shiver. “I promised not to go away without seeing you.”

“And I promised to find you a way to stay in this world, if you chose to take it.”

“Tell me.”

He said with more than his usual solemnity, “I hope you do choose to take it, Blanche. I don’t wish to lose you.”

He should not have been using her Christian name, Blanche thought. But another shiver of excitement and cold danced down her spine, and she thought she knew what was coming.

“Blanche Pendragon, will you join me in my life’s work? Will you forsake your guardians and homeland, and join your purpose with mine? In a word, will you marry me, and free yourself to claim a new heritage, a new world bright with the hope of reason and brotherhood?”

He spoke with gleaming eyes, and lips that curved in a smile as the words rolled from them. It was what Blanche had expected—but not quite what she had expected, and a faint cloud of disappointment fell over her. She had dreamed of being addressed in an enraptured whisper, not in measured apostrophes like the lines in a play.

Still, perhaps the tender passion struck some men differently.

“I hardly know what to say,” she said. “Dare I?”

“As my wife, you would be answerable only to me—and that only if you wished,” said Mr Corbin. “You would be protected not only from the will of your guardians but also from the diplomatic marriage they no doubt intend for you.”

Blanche paled. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Blanche,” he was saying, “do you hear me? I am offering you a sure way to defy your fate. And my entire regard and affection into the bargain.”

Blanche stood motionless, speechless, as though suddenly deprived of will.
Did
she want to marry Simon Corbin? Three months ago, she would have thought she did; she would not have cared that it would break Sir Ector’s heart.
Did
she want to escape the burden of Logres? A week ago, she had—before Perceval had come, and unmasked her for a selfish coward.

The consent was trembling on her lips. But when she spoke, in a suddenly choked voice, she surprised herself as well as Mr Corbin.

“I can’t.”

“Can’t what?” he cried. “Cannot defy the selfishly-imposed will of a family you’ve never seen? Cannot free yourself from the superstitions of barbarism?”

Blanche put her hands to her head. “I despise myself, but not for that. When I thought I had no choice, I bemoaned my lot with the satisfaction that I would be forced to do the right thing in the end. Now you present me with an alternative, and I say…I say that I thank you, Simon, and beg your forgiveness. I have trifled with you. I have allowed you to make this declaration, when I should have known that I could never accept it.”

She fidgeted with the hourglass around her neck and looked at him timidly, sure that he would be hurt and offended. But his face had not changed. Only his voice became challenging. “Why not?”

She would have had to fight to abandon Logres. Now her indecision had guaranteed that she would have to fight to go there, and she knew she had only herself to thank. “I should have known that I could never grieve my guardian so,” she said, lifting her chin. “Then…we are not suited to each other. Our difference of outlook would keep us from agreeing, and besides, there is the question of my duty to Logres.”

“None of these things need bind you,” he said. “If you will not marry me, let me spirit you away to some place where they will not find you.”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” she said with a strained smile. “You have put a choice before me, my friend. And I am grateful. But I choose to be bound. I will go to Logres, and do what is asked of me.”

“So be it,” he said gloomily. “We shall lose you, and Blanche Pendragon will be known no more among her friends and cavaliers.”

Blanche remembered the pendant around her neck. She tugged the ribbon loose and held it out to him.