The Queen's Necklace (60 page)

They descended a steep flight of stairs to a walkway below, and continued on: past lounging figures of sailors in short woolen jackets and high wooden clogs, past ragged children playing on heaps of garbage, who stopped and stared to see the two strange females go hurrying by. The air was thick with the stench of poverty, fish, and dying river. Finally, Ys and her governess stopped before a ramshackle little building.

When the door of the shop creaked open, when she followed Madame Solange into the sordid interior, Ys was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of despair. She knew this place: these dusty piles of books and papers; these tottering stacks of battered furniture. She knew this sickly odor, rising off heaps of mildewed clothing. It was the stuff of all her nightmares.

A distant bell rang somewhere at the back of the shop. In response, a door creaked open and a stooped figure appeared on the threshold, silhouetted against the pale light of a horn lantern. As he hobbled forward, all of his attention seemed to center on Madame.

“So—you have returned,” said the ancient Wryneck.

“Yes,” said Madame, putting aside her veil with a restless gesture. “Though I must say, I am astonished to find you alive after so many years.”

“I have been somewhat astonished myself. I quite expected that you would have me silenced. I wonder why you did not?”

Madame shrugged, as though the matter were of supreme indifference to her—as very probably it was. “Perhaps I anticipated that this day might come.” She turned toward Ys. “Do you know this place? Do you recognize this Goblin?”

Slowly, reluctantly, Ys raised her veil and gazed wonderingly around her. “I
lived
here amidst all this filth. And this creature reared me—if you can dignify his negligence by such a name!”

“Then you still don't remember it all. You were not a child to be
reared;
you were a wild animal to be broken and tamed. It is often the fate of the orphaned children of Maglore families living in exile. When the parents die, no one is able to teach them, no one knows the way or possesses the necessary strength of will. There have been many such over the years, living on the tolerance of their lesser Goblin neighbors, who are too tender-hearted to have them exterminated. For all that, such children seldom last long. They die as they have lived, like wild beasts.”

Ys covered her eyes with her hands. The memories were coming swiftly now, and there was such an avalanche of them, they threatened to bury her. “No,” she whispered. “No. I was never anything so vile and degraded as
that
.”

“Ah, but you were,” said Madame, on a note of triumph. “Ragged, filthy, bestial. As you would be still, had it not been for the infinite pains
I
took over you. Supposing, that is, you had survived at all.”

But Ys continued to shake her head. This humiliation went far too deep, was too unbearable. “No,” she repeated again and again. “I could never have been like that and be what I am now. If that were true, I could never hold up my head again.” With a final despairing gesture, she turned around and fled the building. The door slammed shut behind her.

The crowded little shop was silent for several minutes, until the Wryneck spoke. “So you spared me only for this. She will never allow me to live, knowing that I remember her as she was, knowing I was a witness to her early degradation.”

Madame spent a moment longer looking after Ys with a puzzled frown. But when she turned to face the old Goblin, her brilliant dark eyes were as hard as ever.

“No doubt you are right,” she responded with a shrug. “But after all—you were always expendable.”

O
mens of spring appeared in the north. As the ice melted and the sun warmed the earth, larches turned a tender green, and purple saxifrage and arctic poppies appeared in the fields. But at Lindenhoff, with the wasting of winter, King Jarred wasted, too. By the time that the larches leafed out, he was unable to rise from his bed. He spent most of his time sleeping; when he was not, he faced a constant parade of doctors.

“His Majesty's blood is in a constant state of ferment,” said an elderly surgeon. “He wants further cupping.”

“Nonsense,” replied a self-important young physician. “The king's condition could only be the result of confluent pustules and a consequent putredinous pestilent disposition of the humors. Bee-glue, cat's-tongue, and laudanum is the only cure.”

“Not so,” insisted a healer-physician from the University of Vallerhoven—who, like most academics, was strong on theory but had little to offer when it came to prescribing a practical course of treatment. “His Majesty suffers from an acid acrimony and a hectic hydropondriachal heat.”

The king suffered them all patiently, allowed them to physick him, sweat him, blister him, bleed him; apply mustard plasters,
clysters, leeches, and freshly slaughtered pigeons; give him simples, purgatives, cathartics, and anodynes; dose him with epsom salts, calomel, alkermes and theriac. None of this did him the least bit of good.

But early one morning a new man came in. He was an elderly physician with keen grey eyes and a brisk way about him that made something—some dim sensation of hope perhaps—stir inside Jarred for the first time in weeks. The doctor brought with him a surprising assistant: a roguish old fellow with jet-black hair, a crimson eye-patch, and a jagged white scar that slashed across his cheek under a three days' growth of rough grey stubble. The two men presented such a remarkable contrast between them—the trim physician and his disreputable-looking assistant—that Jarred smiled faintly in spite of himself.

At a word from the doctor, the servants filed out of the room. Approaching the bed, he took the king's wrist between his thumb and two fingers. Inside the frilled linen cuff of his nightshirt, Jarred's flesh was shrunken, the bones seemed as brittle and the skin as fragile as that of a child. “The pulse is very weak, but it is steady. I do not think he will be harmed by a little wholesome excitement—indeed, it may do him a great deal of good.”

The physician stepped back from his place by the bed, to be replaced by his colorful assistant. “Your Majesty, do you know me?”

For a moment, Jarred failed to understand him. Then he became aware of several things almost at once: The black hair was a wig; the scar was too spectacularly vivid to be true; he had heard this voice before, a thousand times.

“Francis?” he said weakly. Then, with a marked increase in volume as the full improbability of the situation struck him: “
Francis?
”

“Yes, sir, it is I. Your old tutor, your second father,” said the old man, with an emotional quiver in his voice as he lifted the gaudy crimson eye-patch and cast it aside. “I have been forbidden to approach
you, but they could not keep me away, not while you remain so very, very ill. My good cousin here came to my aid and smuggled me in to see you.”

The faint smile turned into a full-fledged grin. “My dear friend, I can hardly say how glad I am to see you. But in such—such a ridiculous disguise! What were you thinking?”

The philosopher smiled, too, though somewhat shakily. “That no one would suspect staid old Doctor Purcell of such a bizarre deception. That no one would imagine for one moment that the doddering old fellow with his clocks and his tiny machines had enough dash or sense of romance to appear before his king in this flamboyant fashion. And as you can see, I was perfectly correct.”

The king closed his eyes; for just a moment, this was all too much for him. “I don't understand. That is, I understand why you left the palace—but how were you forbidden to even visit? I gave no such order.”

“It was the queen,” said Purcell. “Your Majesty, have you no suspicion of her yourself?” Jarred's eyes flickered open, but he gave no other response. “Shortly after I left Lindenhoff, I discovered that
she
was the one who had arranged to publish my papers. You know, of course, what havoc she has created with the palace staff. One would expect a few such changes—she would naturally wish to advance people of her own—but she appears to be systematically isolating you from everyone that you ought to be able to trust. Under the circumstances, I cannot help thinking she must be responsible for this sickness as well.”

“But why?” Now that Jarred saw her so rarely, the fascination exerted by his queen was affecting him less. Though some impression lingered of the pleasure she had bestowed during their wedding trip, the memory of pain was considerably sharper. “I don't say you are wrong, but if you are right, what does she hope to gain? If I die—and it seems to me, Francis, that my life
is
slipping away—then she loses everything when Rupert succeeds me.”

Purcell shook his head ruefully. “I have no idea what she hopes to gain. Nor do I know who she really is, with her mysterious past and her Goblin servants. Not who she claims to be. I have spoken with travellers from Montcieux and Château-Rouge—no one knows anything about the Debrûles.”

He gave a half-humorous sigh. “If Mr. Guilian were here, no doubt he would spin us some fanciful story, as have some of the wilder imaginations down in the streets, who have named her the Queen of the Goblins—but I am a practical man, and can see no practical purpose behind this plot of the queen's. She cannot hope to rule in your place, for she has neither popular nor political support. And if you were to die—as my cousin, Doctor Wildebaden, and I are determined you shall
not
—she must step aside in favor of Lord Rupert. Unless—” The old man caught his breath sharply. “Unless, Your Majesty, it should happen that she is pregnant with your heir and hopes to be named regent after you are gone?”

Jarred moved his head wearily from side to side. “I don't think so. We have not—we have not shared the same bed for so many months.” But as his eyes moved listlessly around the room, he chanced to notice something. Throwing off the bed-clothes, he struggled to rise. “Francis, she may have a way of gaining
both
popular and political support. My music box, the one that sat on that table there for so long—it seems to have disappeared!” He fell back, breathless, against the feather pillows.

The philosopher and his cousin exchanged a puzzled glance, no doubt wondering if the king was delirious. The physician stepped forward again to check his pulse.

Jarred laughed weakly, mirthlessly. “No, gentleman, I am not wandering, though I am undoubtedly agitated. Francis, you remember that jeweled casket of silver and satinwood? The one with a miniature golden city inside, and a hidden movement that played twelve different tunes? Did you never guess what it really was? With
your knowledge of clockwork and other machines, I thought you had guessed long ago that our famous Crystal Egg was considerably less than it seemed—and the music box considerably more.”

A tense, attentive look came into the philosopher's eyes. “The music box is the Winterscar Jewel? I admit that I knew the Egg was a sham, but as I never had the chance to examine the music box closely—then, too, you kept it here so openly and I had an idea that you must keep the genuine engine somewhere safe under lock and key.”

“It seemed perfectly safe where it was. My father and grandfather both kept it right here in this room, and nothing ever happened to it. I thought that to lock it away after so many years would cause people to wonder, people to suspect—people in other countries who had reason to know that the so-called Jewels are all of them fakes.”

The two old men exchanged another glance; some unspoken question seemed to pass between them. “But does the
queen
know?” said Purcell to the King. “Did you ever confide in her?”

“I never said anything to anyone. Rupert knows, of course, but it was my father who let him in on the secret, before I was even born. It was only proper, as he was the heir.”

Jarred made another effort to rise, and succeeded in raising himself up on his elbows. “It may be that we suspect the queen wrongly. There have been so many strangers inside this room, so many doctors and their assistants—it might have been any one of them. Even without knowing its true nature, they might have been tempted by the precious metals and the gemstones.” He fell back again, panting. “Though there are other costly things in this room, smaller and more easily carried away.”

Purcell clasped his hands behind his back, began to pace the floor. “I think we must go on the assumption that the queen has it—who else would dare? And if she does, then she certainly has the
power to inflict grievous destruction on the city of Tarnburgh. That is, assuming she has the least idea how to manipulate the Philosophic Engine inside.”

“Whether she knows or not, even for her to make the attempt could be—catastrophic.” Suddenly so tired that he could hardly think, Jarred looked pleadingly across at the two old men. “What are we to do, to get it back again?”

“At the moment, nothing,” said Purcell, coming to a halt beside the bed. “But perhaps we will be able to come up with some plan. In the meantime, we must concentrate our efforts on your full recovery.”

“How are we to do that? The truth is, I sometimes wonder if I
want
to get well, if the effort to recover is even worth it.”

“That is your illness talking, Your Majesty, not the man that I know and respect,” Purcell said sternly. He had taken charge now, had slipped back into the long abandoned role of schoolmaster and mentor. It was necessary to do so, in this time of crisis. “You will get well and perhaps very soon.”

“How?” said Jarred, fretfully. “Have you some miraculous medicine to give me?”

“There is a tonic that should do you some good,” Doctor Wildebaden answered in Purcell's place. “But the greatest good, I think, will come when you simply stop ingesting any potion or poison the queen may have been slipping into your food. From this time onward, do not eat or drink anything, unless it should come directly from my hands.”