The Dragonfly Pool (38 page)

And certainly Pom-Pom did not look friendly. He had not enjoyed having his topknot pulled by unkempt strangers. The hair on his back was standing up and his growls came thick and fast.

“Don't be such a coward,” snapped the countess, and George reluctantly bent down and then straightened himself with a cry, nursing his hand.

“I told you, the rotten little cur,” he muttered.

But Karil had had enough.

“Come on, Pom-Pom,” he said. He coiled up the lead, scooped up the little dog, and ran toward the gates of the park.

“Stop, Karil. Stop!” called the countess. She fumbled for her whistle but it had got caught under her collar.

And Karil, running like the wind, had vanished behind a clump of trees.

While Clemmy went on with her story, adding an audience of screaming fans and a bed draped in ostrich feathers, Carlotta was reasonably quiet, but as soon as it was finished she leaped up and said she'd changed her mind.

“I don't want to wear the blue dress. I want to wear the yellow one.”

Francis, who had started blocking in the color tones, tore a leaf out of his sketchbook and let it drop.

“Very well. But there must be no more changes after this. I have to get to a particular point today or I can't promise to get your painting done in time.”

For a few moments Carlotta was quiet—then she began to fidget again. “I'm bored,” she said, “and I don't want to sit with my head turned like this because people won't see my ringlets. I'm going to sit the way I was before, looking straight ahead.”

Francis put down his palette. “I think you'd better make up your mind, Carlotta,” he said quietly, “because if you want me to paint your picture, you'd better make some effort to cooperate.”

At the other end of the room the archduchess and the mournful governess exchanged anxious looks, but it was too late. Carlotta was heading for one of her famous tantrums.

“How dare you talk to me like that?” she shouted. “I won't be told what to do by common people.”

Blind with ill temper she leaped to her feet, knocking over Francis's easel, and rushed from the room, followed by her mother and the governess, both uttering bleating cries.

Francis put down his palette.

“I'm going to find the duke—I'm not going on with this,” he said.

Clemmy did not try to stop him. Alone in the room, she knelt down and began to clear up the mess, which was considerable. The easel had dislodged the box of paints and tubes of color had spilled onto the floor; there was a splash of crimson on the carpet.

She had been working for a few minutes when a quiet voice said, “Can I help?”—and she looked up to see a boy of about twelve standing in the doorway.

Karil, having shut Pom-Pom into the old princess's room, had heard the familiar sound of Carlotta drumming her heels on the floor and made his way to a quieter part of the house.

Now he moved forward to see if he could be of use, and as he did so the kneeling woman got to her feet. Her marvelous russet hair was loose, and as she shook it back from her face it was as though the dark room had acquired its own sun.

But it wasn't her beauty that held him spellbound—it was that she was familiar. He had seen her before.

“Oh, but I know who you are. You're Clemmy—you have to be! I saw you in Zurich at the cheese tasting. It was such a lovely picture.”

And suddenly he was back there among his friends in a world that had held danger, but also friendship and loyalty and hope. And surprising himself as much as her, he burst into tears.

“What is it? What's the matter?” she said, stretching out her arms to him, and she knew in that instant that he had not betrayed his friends, that he was wretchedly unhappy and that the truth lay elsewhere.

“I can't understand why they didn't write,” Karil sobbed. “I wrote and wrote and there wasn't a single word back. They seemed to be my friends and then they just dropped me—even Tally. And Matteo, too. They might as well have let me go to Colditz. I really believed in them.”

Clemmy pushed his hair back from his forehead and waited while he found his handkerchief.

“Oh, Karil, you're such an idiot! How could you think that? You
knew
them. I think Tally must have written you a hundred letters. Magda found her again and again after lights out, scribbling and scribbling. The others, too, but when they didn't hear anything they thought you'd become too grand for them.”

“They couldn't have thought that! They should have trusted me.”

“Yes. And you should have trusted them.” But Clemmy was aware that his hurt, here in this wretched place, must have been even greater than Tally's. “Matteo even came here to try to see you,” she went on. “Did they tell you?”

He shook his head. “I thought I saw him, but when I asked my grandfather he said it wasn't him.” He wiped his eyes and put his handkerchief away. “When I didn't hear anything from Delderton I thought maybe it was a sign that I must forget about trying to lead my own life. That I have to follow in my father's footsteps and learn to be a king . . . that that's what he wanted . . .”

“Is that what they say? That your father would have wanted that? ”

“All the time.”

Clemmy looked down into his face. “Karil, your father was a good man, I'm sure of that. Matteo has talked to me about him a lot since he came back from Bergania. I saw a picture of him once in a gallery; I've never forgotten his face. That was a man who wanted one thing and one thing only for his son—and I'll swear to that with my last breath.”

Karil's eyes held hers.

“What? What would he have wanted for his son?”

“That he should be happy. That he should follow his star.”

A
re you feeling all right, Karil?” asked Countess Frederica nervously.

Karil looked up from his plate of lumpy breakfast porridge.

“Yes, thank you. I'm absolutely all right. I'm fine.”

The Scold frowned. That was what was worrying her. Karil looked different; he had not smiled like that since before his father's death. She was pleased of course, but it was . . . strange.

“Your cough seems better,” said Aunt Millicent, the kindest of the aunts.

Karil nodded and agreed that his cough was better, and the two women exchanged puzzled glances.

For really it was extraordinary that a bad cough should almost disappear in twenty-four hours, and it wasn't just unlikely but impossible that Karil, in that short time, could have got fatter—yet the boy's face had completely lost its pinched and undernourished look.

Yet nothing, surely, had changed. Karil had not been there the day before when Carlotta had stamped out of the room and thrown over the easel of the painter who had treated her so rudely. By the time the Scold returned from the park Karil was in his room, and since then his routine had been as usual. Yet something was making her uneasy and she went on peering at him throughout the meal.

But nothing could touch Karil. He was in a different universe since he had talked to Clemmy. He could have leaped into the air and stayed there, or climbed the church steeple outside his window without a backward look. It seemed to him that the waterbirds in the park no longer screeched, they sang; the grass was greener and the sky a brighter blue. Because every moment there was a voice inside him saying, “Your friends have remembered you.”

The first day and the second after Clemmy's visit, Karil was too happy to consider any plan of action, but on the third day he set his mind to finding out what had happened to the letters he had written to Delderton and those his friends had written to him.

Somebody had deliberately destroyed them—but who?

The duke himself? Would he have acted in secret? Or the Scold? No, she was strict but not deceitful like that. Surely they would just have told him that letters were forbidden? Karil was in constant trouble for talking to the servants but it was the servants who could help him—and he waited till he could get George alone, as it was George who brought up the silver salver with the letters. At last he managed to speak to him as he refilled the decanters on the sideboard in the dining room.

“George, I've been wondering about the letters that come here. I've been expecting to hear from some friends.”

George was surprised. “You've had a pile of letters, Your Highness. More than anyone. They came thick and fast at the beginning—wouldn't they be the ones you mean?”

Karil stared at him. “They may have come to the house, but they never came to me.”

George shook his head. “The little baroness always asked for them as soon as they came in. She said you were in a hurry and she'd take them up to you. I'm not allowed in the drawing room till the supper's been cleared, but she said you couldn't wait.”

So it was as easy as that.

“And what about the letters that go out of here? The ones we put in the hall,” asked Karil.

“They go out with one of the men at nine o'clock to the post office—punctual as anything.”

“But they're in the hall overnight?”

George nodded. “Have been ever since I came.”

“I see. Thank you. Don't say I've been asking, will you?”

“No, Your Highness. I won't say a thing.”

For a few minutes after George left, Karil was overcome by a murderous rage. He wanted to put his hands around Carlotta's throat and squeeze till she fell to the ground. But killing Carlotta wouldn't really help in the long run. The letters were gone.

Or were they?

He was pushing open the door of her room before he was aware of what he was doing. Carlotta slept in a small room next door to her parents. It had been a dressing room and there were two huge mirrors on the wall and a third mirror on the table beside her bed, so that Karil saw her reflected threefold as she fixed a brooch onto the collar of her dress.

“Oh, Karil,” she said, turning around and simpering a little, for her cousin had never before visited her in her bedroom, “you can help me choose which—” and broke off, because Karil had grabbed hold of her, turning her away from the mirror, and was digging his fingers viciously into her shoulders.

“Where are the letters?” he demanded. “Where are the letters from my friends that you stole?”

“You're hurting me,” she whined. “I don't know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. And if you don't tell me what you've done with them, I really will hurt you. I'll hurt you as you've never been hurt before.”

“Ow! Stop it. You've gone mad.”

“And I'll go madder. Where—are—the letters?” he said slowly through clenched teeth.

“I don't know . . . I've thrown them away. I did it for your sake.”

But Karil had seen her eyes swivel to the bureau beside her bed.

“Get them,” he ordered.

She crossed the room, crying noisily now, and he watched as she unlocked the bureau.

“I can't find—” she began, and whimpered as Karil came up behind her and grabbed her arm. “Don't! Let me go.”

She opened another drawer and brought out a thick bundle of letters addressed to him. He saw at once that they had been opened.

“You won't tell?” she said, sniffing.

Karil didn't answer. As soon as he had the letters in his hand, Carlotta had ceased to exist.

Back in his room he pulled a table across the door and began to read.

There were close on fifty letters. There were letters from Barney, telling him about the tree frog he had bought for him, and letters from Borro about the farm. Tod had written, and Julia, and even Kit, who was no letter writer, all looking forward to what they would do when Karil came. There was a letter from Matteo—brief but very heartening.