Pendragon's Heir (2 page)

“Blanche, I…there’s something I’ve been putting off telling you. About your parents.”

Her parents.

She’d never known them. She didn’t even know their names. It was years now since she’d been curious.

Why had he waited until now?

Something hot fell onto her hand and Blanche looked down to see the tea in her cup rippling. She took a deep breath, replaced the cup on its saucer, and wiped her fingers before asking, “Is it very bad? The truth, I mean?”

“No, no.” Sir Ector’s voice died away. At last he looked at her under bushy brows, almost shyly, as if in fear of some rejection. “You may find it difficult to believe.”

A quick, warm affection rose in her throat for him. “Tell me and see.”

Sir Ector looked into the fire, fidgeting with something in his pocket.

“I have something for you,” he said at last. “It was your mother’s.” And he drew out the thing in his pocket and held it up to her.

The ring Blanche took from him was antique silver, cabochon-set with a glimmering moonstone. Her mother’s ring! Blanche folded it into her hand and held tightly to the only thing her parents had left her. There had never been anything else, not even a faded photograph or some old letters.

“I don’t even know her name.”

“Look inside.”

There was a lamp on the mantelpiece and Blanche held the ring up to its pearly glow. Spidery engraved letters ran all round the inside of the band. “ ‘
Guinevera casta vera
.’ Guinevera?”

“Your mother.”

Blanche twisted the ring onto her finger, thinking what a sentimental old-fashioned couple they must have been, rather like her guardian with his old gallantries and his Old French. She couldn’t resist a chuckle. “What was my father’s name? ‘Arthur, King of the Britons’?”

Before the words crossed her lips, Blanche knew they were a mistake. Sir Ector dropped his head, and the shadows hid his face. When he rose, that shyly eager air was gone and he thrust his hands into his pockets with feigned briskness. “Well,” he said, “that reminds me. I must work on my address to the Newport Antiquities Society.”

Over in the corner, Nerys rustled to her feet.

“No, forgive me,” Blanche begged, feeling inarticulately guilty, as if she had killed something small and helpless by accident. “I shouldn’t have joked like that. Won’t you tell me some more about them?”

Sir Ector smiled wistfully and kissed her forehead. “Soon, Blanche. When you’re ready to hear. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” She went to the door and held it open for Nerys, who had the tea-tray. The lady’s-companion passed and went down the hall, but Blanche lingered, looking back from the threshold. “Still—my father. Can’t you tell me his name? Please? Now that I know Mother’s?”

Sir Ector, riffling through the papers on his desk, stopped at the sound of her voice and leaned his hands on the oil-smooth wood. He didn’t look up; only his shoulders lifted, then sank in a long slow sigh.

“No,” he said, and to Blanche’s ears, there was a bald honesty in his voice that allowed only one interpretation.

“Well, goodnight.” Blanche, trying not to let mortification seep into her voice, closed the door, and went slowly down the dark corridor to the stairs. In her unlit room she looked again at the ring clenched in her hand, but now it was only a glint in the starlight. So it
was
very bad. A sense of revulsion gripped her stomach, contempt both for herself and for her mother.
Casta vera!

She tossed the ring onto her dressing-table and began to undress. She was sitting at the table in her nightgown and peignoir, unpinning her hair, when a knock came on the door and Nerys entered.

Blanche glanced up and forced a smile. Nerys, without a word, picked up the hairbrush and began to work on Blanche’s hair. It was no part of her duties, but Nerys was as patient with knots as with everything else, and Blanche leaned back with a little sigh. She stared at the two heads in the mirror, her own flame-haired, day-eyed; Nerys’s moon-skinned, night-haired. After a moment she put her hands up to her throat and took off the little black hourglass.

She wondered why, since they so obviously distrusted Simon Corbin, Sir Ector and Nerys couldn’t state their suspicions plainly. Was it because he was a Freethinker? At least, she thought with a twinge, a Freethinker would think no less of her for being ill-born.

She put the hourglass on the table next to the moonstone ring and said, “I like Mr Corbin, and I hoped you would like him too.”

Nerys looked through the mirror at her with a glimmer of surprise, but then dropped her eyes back to Blanche’s tawny-red hair.

Blanche spoke as patiently as she knew how. “What’s the matter? Why do you not approve of him?”

Nerys shook her head. “I hardly know him well enough to approve or disapprove. I’ve only spoken to him once.”

“I know he isn’t conventional,” Blanche said. “But he always speaks his mind and he doesn’t let other people shame him into thinking differently.”

“I think…” said Nerys.

She so rarely put the shifting transparency of her moods into words. “Go on,” said Blanche, when the silence threatened to lengthen.

“I think it will take you a long time to know such a man. I cannot read him at all.” She lifted worried eyes to Blanche.

“He is so full of news and events,” Blanche said. “I like to hear about such things without getting tangled up in Roman cavalry tactics.”

Nerys smiled before she could stop herself, and then tried to look disapproving. Blanche laughed at her. Nerys moved further up Blanche’s hair, changing the subject.

“Are you going on errands with Emmeline tomorrow?”

“I did all my visiting today.”

“Really? You went to see Mrs Jones, and the bricklayer’s family?”

“No.” Blanche picked up her mother’s ring and fidgeted. “We met Kitty when we stopped in the street, and then we ran out of time to chatter Welsh with the parishioners.”

It was, of course, unfair to say
we
, because it was no one’s fault but hers that the time had run away, and no vicar’s daughter could be more conscientious than Emmeline.

“Oh, Blanche. You know what Sir Ector says.”

“I know.” Blanche quoted. “ ‘A wise princess will not only feel sorrow when she sees people in affliction, but roll up her sleeves and help them as much as she can.’ It’s from that medieval book he gave me for my last birthday. I had to translate the whole thing from Middle French.”

“You will be grateful for it one day,” said Nerys, in a gentle tone that robbed the words of any possible sting.

Blanche grimaced. “I sometimes think that Sir Ector sees himself as some medieval lord, and me as a medieval princess. What will he ask me to do next? Intercede with him for the peasantry, as Christine de Pisan recommends, or learn siege warfare so that I can defend the house while he’s away?”

“Both a good use of your time,” said Nerys, with no hint of laughter. “When do you mean to visit Mrs Jones?”

“Christine said to send alms by a servant, and anonymously, ‘by the example of monseigneur Saint Nicholas’.” She shot an impudent grin at Nerys, and then admitted, “Emmeline will be busy tomorrow with the Infants’ Bible Study. We have agreed to go the day after, so you need not worry. In the meantime I shall be as medieval as I know how, and languish about like Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose.”

T
HAT NIGHT SHE DREAMED ABOUT THE
King again.

She stood in a riverside meadow between greenwood and castle. Overhead the sun shone gilt in a sky like powdered lapis and struck golden sparks from the King’s blood-red dragon banner.

For the hundredth time, she half-closed her eyes against the fiery colour of meadow flowers and silken pavilions. For the hundredth time a blinding glint from someone’s mailed shoulder forced her to blink and turn her head to see the King.

In crown and heraldic red robes, bearded, belted, bear-like, he sat enthroned by an oak tree with two wolf-hounds at his feet. Youthful vigour lay couchant in his gigantic limbs and in his big veined hands, but his level look was grave and wise. There was a sheathed sword lying across his knees, and his fingers moved up and down the scabbard as though it could make music.

A harper sat at his right hand, mouth open in song. At something the minstrel said, graceful feminine heads swayed and laughed all around, and white hands clapped, scattering flashes of colour from undersleeve and lining. Yet no sound reached Blanche’s ears. Unlike the vision, it had been lost long ago.

By the King on his left hand sat the Queen in a shower of silver-blonde hair that fell unbound to her hips. When she smiled it was to herself, secretly, as if to a jest only she heard. With the ladies round about she was tying may-thorn hoops, but then she looked up—this was Blanche’s favourite part—and her mouth seemed to shape Blanche’s name. In a turmoil of green robes she came forward, arms opening.

B
LANCHE WOKE
.

On most nights it was easy to turn over and go back to sleep, but tonight wakefulness caught and held. At last she slid out of bed and tiptoed to her dressing-table, feeling across it for her mother’s ring. It slid onto her finger. She couldn’t feel the spidery words against her skin, but she remembered them.
Guinevere
.

Guinevere was the name of a queen from legend. Like the one in the dream she had had since childhood.

Impossible thoughts wheeled through her mind.

In the next room, she heard Nerys moving, opening her wardrobe door…

For years, Nerys had woken her at midnight on her birthday, and they had stolen downstairs to have hot cocoa and cake by the kitchen fire. Blanche was much too old for midnight feasts now, of course. And it was a night too late. Still…they were both awake. And she wanted some company.

Blanche shrugged into her peignoir and went out into the hall. There was no answer to her tap at Nerys’s door. Blanche hesitated, and nearly gave up and went back to bed. Then she remembered the creak of the wardrobe door. Perhaps she had knocked too softly. She twisted the handle, cracked the door ajar, and peeped in, whispering, “Nerys?”

There was light in the room. The curtains had been pulled back, and moonlight pooled on the floor. But the wardrobe door also sat ajar, and from it came a warm golden glow…

Nerys was nowhere to be seen.

Blanche assumed, yawning, that Nerys must have left a lamp burning in there. It seemed a dangerous thing to do, and she closed the door behind her and crossed the room to the wardrobe.

She opened the door and saw at once that there was no lamp. It was more like…

…more like
daylight
.

Blanche blinked at the light, and her heart skipped a little faster, but she was too curious to be frightened. Instead she ducked her head and stepped through the wardrobe door.

S
HE EMERGED FROM A BIG WOODEN
chest, up-ended so that its lid functioned like a door. Blanche glanced about her, and for a moment imagined that her childhood dream had come to life. A swift rush of gladness took her by the throat and almost knocked her to her knees. It was just like waking the morning after a nightmare to discover that one’s worst fears had not, after all, come true. Then she shook herself, a little ashamed of the notion. Did she
want
to live in a picture-book? And her waking life was hardly a nightmare. She looked around again, with a more critical eye.

She stood in a pavilion, surrounded by the spicy smell of the woods on a warm spring morning full of light and birdsong. The pavilion itself was just like the ones in her dream, made of imperious saffron-coloured silk that rippled in the morning breeze. Sunlight filtered through the wall and drenched the pavilion’s interior with rosy light.

It was like standing inside a jewel, and the pavilion’s furniture was rich enough to do it justice. There was a couch, chairs, and a low table all made from carved and inlaid wood. On the table goblets and bread and apples and roasted meat were set out.

And still Nerys was nowhere to be seen.

Blanche stood without moving for a space, head bent to listen. Apart from the sighing of the breeze and the sound of birds, she could hear nothing. She was in a lonely place, then, and not (alas!) in the busy meadow of her dream.

Curious to see the place to which she had wandered, she began to move forward, lifting her eyes from the ground—and with a gasp, saw she was no longer alone. The flap of the tent was still falling without a whisper of sound behind a newcomer.

He was young and savage and dirty, reeking of horses, clad in skins. There was a knife almost as long as her forearm strapped to his calf, and he carried a pair of javelins with knapped-stone blades point-down in one hand.

He spoke.

“
Duw a rodo da ywch, arglwyddes
.”

2

Logres

—O mother

How can ye keep me tether’d to you?—Shame.

Man am I grown, a man’s work must I do.

Follow the deer? Follow Christ, the King,

Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King—

Else, wherefore born?

Tennyson

I
N THE DAYS WHEN A MAN
might travel from one end of Britain to the other without leaving the shade of the greenwood if he kept his word, let his sword rest lightly in its sheath, and watched for foes, when roads were hard to find and friends harder, and fire and steel the first necessities of life—long ago, deep in the hills of Wales, there lived a boy and his mother.

The boy’s name was Perceval, and all the days he could remember he had run wild in the woods wearing deerskin and wolfpelts, knowing no enemies but wolves and wolf’s-head outlaws, knowing no human company but that of his mother. But hers was enough. In her stories, in the long passages she had him memorise, and in the unknown languages in which she drilled him until he could speak and understand them with ease, lay a door to the outside world that had captured his imagination.

This could be ignored in the winter, when the world was dead and the cold and hunger bit so hard that survival took all their time and energy. But when each spring came and the sun gathered warmth and the whole forest woke into life, the call sounded more insistently to leave the hidden hills and go out into the world of men and deeds.