The Eyes of a King (33 page)

And then I was on my knees in the grass, with the tears pouring down my face. The pain in my heart was so bad that I thought I was dying. I wondered if I really was. You can die just by wanting to be dead. We had a dog, when I was about four years old, that died like that. My parents sold its only puppy, and it just lay like a stone on its rug until one day it didn’t wake up. That’s what I felt like. As though if I let myself think about Stirling being dead, my heart would just stop beating.

And then someone spoke, close by. I turned. But I was alone. It was the Voice, speaking quite differently from how it had before. “If you get back to Kalitzstad, things will be all right,” said the Voice. “If you get back to the city. You’ll see.” I was not even surprised at how loud it sounded. I did not care.

My legs were shaking, and I could barely keep hold of the gun, my hands were growing so weak. I don’t know why I didn’t let myself think about Stirling, but forced myself to get up, still crying, and climb over the fence and begin walking. For the same reason I froze when the sergeant fired that shot. Not because I valued my life, but because life still had possession of me.

As I stumbled across the open country, I asked the Voice to protect me, to take me somewhere else so that I did not have to think. I remembered that dream—the English mist, the girl, the prince, and Aldebaran. I wanted to go back to a time before Stirling was gone, or a place where none of us existed—not Stirling, or Grandmother, or the sergeant I had shot at, or even me, Leo North. I concentrated all my mind on it. And maybe it
was because I was so tired, but I began to see things. Aldebaran, at a desk in that other country, leafing through papers. The prince standing beside him. The girl, Anna, dancing.

“R
yan, you are not paying attention,” said Aldebaran, pushing back his chair.

“What?” Ryan turned.

Aldebaran shut the book and went to stand beside him at the window. “What are you looking at?” he demanded.

“Just the hotel.” Ryan pointed to the white stone building, a quarter of a mile away, along the shore of the lake. “I was thinking, Uncle. I’m sorry.”

“Shall I read that to you again? I was going over the messages from our allies. I wanted your opinion on whether we should condone a campaign of sabotage or tell them to wait until your return to the country is imminent.”

“Uncle, whatever I say, you will do what you yourself think best.”

“That may be so, but I want your opinion. The time will come when you will have to rule alone. Ryan, you are not listening again.”

“That girl we met …,” Ryan began. “Anna.”

“What about her?”

“Why did you look at her like that? As though you recognized the name Devere.”

Aldebaran sat down again and examined the pen in his hand without speaking. Then he said, “If I tell you, you will not pass it on to her. I know you have been there and spoken to her.”

“I was passing on the road this morning, that was all.”

“This is a serious matter. Do you understand? Not to be passed on.”

The boy hesitated for a moment. Then he turned to Aldebaran and said, “Yes, Uncle. I understand.”

Anna was spinning in the middle of the empty hotel dining room, and her eyes were on the window where Ryan stood. From this distance she could not see that he was there. But the glass was catching the sunlight, and she fixed her gaze on it to stop herself from moving from the spot. “Will you come and help me with this ironing?” Monica called from the kitchen, but Anna did not hear.

It was only when Monica took hold of her arm that she started and turned, landing hard on the floorboards. “Will you come and help me?” Monica repeated. Anna followed her.

In the corridor, guests were passing on their way out of the building. Daniel, the chef, was at the sink, washing the last saucepans from breakfast. “Is that where Ryan and his uncle live?” Anna asked. “That house you can just see on the edge of the lake.”

“Yes, that’s Lakebank,” said Monica. “It’s an old manor house. Here, take this. I’m trying to fix the kettle.”

“A manor house?” said Anna, taking the iron from her. Monica examined the dismantled parts of the electric kettle strewn over the kitchen table. “Do you know them well?” said Anna.

“No one does. They keep to themselves. That’s landed gentry for you.”

“Is that what they are?”

“Apparently. Mr. Field is a sort of recluse, I think. Why else would you live in a big house like that, with gates ten feet high and all the rest? I speak to Ryan, though, when he passes. He’s a polite boy. The uncle is strict with him.”

“He seems like a strange man,” said Anna.

“He’s eccentric, but there is nothing wrong with him.”

Daniel hung up his apron and picked up his car keys from the sideboard. “You will never fix that,” he told Monica, leaning over her shoulder to look at the kettle. “You shouldn’t have taken it apart yourself. Buy a new one—that’s what I think. I’m going to Lowcastle; I will be back in a couple of hours.” He turned and left the kitchen. Monica frowned after him, pushing her hair off her face. She had the same blond ringlets as Anna’s mother; they caught the light now as she shook her head impatiently.

“What were we talking about?” she said. “Oh yes—Mr. Field. There is not much more to tell you. He has lived here fifteen or twenty years, they say, and he is a stranger to everybody.”

T
he Voice was telling me a story as I walked, in fragments and faint images that were hardly real. Perhaps I wanted so desperately to be somewhere else that my mind had conjured these things—the prince, the girl who was our English relative, Aldebaran as he appeared to a stranger. And after a while I grew too tired. All I could see now was what was there in front of me—the marsh and then the hills, deserted, with the wind sweeping over them. It was so bleak and empty that the tears ran down my face as I walked, and I thought of Stirling and no longer had the energy to stop myself. But I kept walking.

Eventually it grew so dark that I could not go on. I could see the lights in Kalitzstad, but I couldn’t see where I put my feet. I stumbled and fell. I did not get up after that. I lay down, with
my head on a rock, to wait for sunrise. I could not understand why I hadn’t reached the city yet, but it was several miles away and I could go no farther.

It was eerie in the hills at night. I could hear slow footsteps on the grass, coming closer and then moving away again. And someone breathed. The darkness pressed in close, but I saw something glint in it. Perhaps someone was watching me, waiting for my eyes to close. Only I wasn’t quite sure if it was real, or if I imagined it all, or if I was dreaming.

This is what it’s like all the time for you now, Stirling, I thought. Lying alone in the dark, with only the dead for company. I couldn’t bear it. “Stirling’s in heaven now,” said the Voice, sounding like Father Dunstan or Grandmother. “Now go to sleep.” I shut my eyes.

Listening to the footsteps, I imagined it was the Voice, incarnated in the safety of the dark, where I could not see its form, padding gently around me like a guardian angel. As I drifted into sleep, I realized that the footsteps were only my own heartbeat.

And even in the wilderness, I dreamed. It was England again, and night there also, and over Aldebaran, the prince, and Anna, the same stars were shining.

“A
nna, stop dancing now,” Monica was calling. “It’s late; you will disturb the guests.”

“I have to practice,” said Anna.

“I know. But please—can’t you do it tomorrow? And dancing in those shoes will damage the floor.”

“I didn’t have time to go up and get my ballet shoes or I would have done.”

“Have you finished sweeping?”

“Yes. I put the broom away.”

Anna stopped where she was and leaned against the stack of tables in the deserted dining room. Through the open doors she could see the constellations, patterns she knew well. Monica was walking about the kitchen putting things away, her heeled shoes echoing on the tiles. “Are you looking at the stars?” she said then. Anna nodded. “I remember when you were four years old and Mam bought you that astronomy book. You were so determined to learn them. Michelle thought you were too young for a book on astronomy. But maybe she wasn’t the one who knew you best.”

Monica fell silent. Anna was thinking then of the clear nights that winter after her Nan had died, when she had propped the book on the radiator under her window and learned the patterns of the constellations. Monica, leaning against the kitchen doorway, was thinking of the same thing. In the darkness they could hear the waterfalls. They were close, somewhere out there beyond the open doors.

Monica was still standing there when Anna came back to the kitchen. She was looking at the line of photographs on the windowsill. “Do you know what is strange?” she said, turning.

Anna came to stand beside her. “What is?”

“We’re the only ones left—Michelle, you, and me.”

It was true. Half the people laughing so surely in the photographs were gone now. “That’s why I came here to help you,” said Anna. “We’re still a family.”

Monica turned to her and seemed about to speak, then put her hand on Anna’s shoulder for a moment. “I don’t know what
that picture of Richard is doing still there,” she said then. “I should take it down.” She picked up the photograph of her former husband and brushed the dust off it, then put it back.

Anna thought of something then. “Monica, your father?” She glanced toward the photograph.

“Yes,” said Monica, her voice changing. “What about him?”

“Was his surname Field?”

There was a silence. “That’s what Mam told us,” said Monica then. “It made no difference anyway. Why do you want to know about him?”

Anna shook her head. “I don’t. Sorry.”

“Go up to bed now, will you?” Monica said. “I want to start breakfast at quarter to six.”

When Anna was almost at the door, Monica spoke again. “Listen, I will make sure you have time to dance tomorrow. I know this audition is important. All right?”

Anna nodded, then turned and trailed along the darkened corridor, rubbing the aching muscles in her arms. A car swung past on the road outside, the distant yellow of the headlights glittering faintly through the jewels of her necklace. She twisted her fingers through the chain absently as she climbed the stairs. It was the same necklace, the bird necklace with one jewel missing, that she had worn all her life.

Anna fell to sleep that night with the necklace in her hand. She dreamed she was dancing, years from now. In the dark beyond the stage were her family, all the people in Monica’s photographs and the photographs beside her bed, as though they had never been gone. And in the dream she could see her future family, a tall man and a child, gazing up at her with the light edging their faces, gazing up proudly with their faces turned to gold.