Particular Friends, Episode 5 – Camille Alexa

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Particular Friends

by Camille Alexa

-5-

The richly attired man threw back the lid of a large box by the hearth–one I had supposed to hold spare kindling–and pulled forth rope and a bottle of lamp oil. All the while he muttered to himself under the guise of speaking to me. He was obviously utterly mad.

“They thought they could hide it from me, the birth. They thought they could pass it off as some random deWinter by-blow. That was a bit of a surprise–deWinter of all people!–but not too farfetched. Besides, who’d care about a Jonathan deWinter?”

At the sound of my name, I began to feel the blood pumping through to the ends of my fingers and toes. Perhaps, with the help of this bit of adrenaline and some concentration on my part, I could regain use of my limbs! I must try, I told myself. I cursed the empty pot of tea on the table and the soporific it had obviously contained.

“… No, nobody would be interested in a mere deWinter baby, illegitimate or no. But a child born to the Royal Consort, and not by the Queen–that was an intolerable situation! The Queen would have been furious! Betrayed by her own inner court! I would have been banished.  Banished, or beheaded.”

He began binding Augustine to the chair where she slumped, though his knots looked loose, slovenly. I decided it was merely a precaution against her premature awakening.

“… And they got away with it, too. For nearly seven years, I believed them. Seven years. But suddenly, overnight, the Royal Consort wasn’t good enough for her! She distanced herself from me, and after deWinter departed in secrecy with the evidence of our royal infidelities, she began spending more and more time with that ridiculous Springfield creature–”

He pulled tight a knot over poor Augustine’s bosom, though she was beyond noticing, and glanced angrily at the open woodbin near the fire. Following his gaze I saw what I’d not noticed before: crammed amongst kindling twigs and bits of twisted paper was the unnaturally folded body of a slender woman–perhaps as much as thirty-five years of age–with pale hair and high cheekbones. Her vacant unblinking eyes stared from beneath tangled curls, and I could see dark bruising on her throat. I knew with sinking certainty I beheld the true Mistress Springfield for the first time.

Though I’d never met her, I felt that to some degree she had died on my behalf. Tears prickled the back of my throat, and I grabbed onto my outrage as a drowning man might clutch at a floating log swirling past him in a swollen river.

Irony: that our attacker, a man, dismissed me as a threat on the basis of my gentler gender. He’d dispatched with Mistress Springfield, and at that very moment was dousing Mistress Augustine liberally with lamp oil. When half the bottle had been emptied to drench Mistress Augustine’s skirts, the man turned to me, rope in hand, no doubt intending to repeat his performance. I could already picture the final act of this gruesome play, in which our villain set us both alight on his way out the door. The fire would dance in his eyes as he watched the manor burn from a safe distance, and all that would ever be found of the rest of us would be ash and a few small remnants of tooth and bone.

I could not let that happen. I would not.

He was unprepared for my sudden lunge. To me it felt as though I moved through water, so sluggish were my limbs; but to a man who thought me immobilized by some drug or poison, I must have appeared as though rising from death.

He may have been barrel chested, but he was spindly of leg and arm. In all, he could best me with weight, but not with strength or youthful vigor. I fought for my life and that of Mistress Augustine, and I knew it.

We rolled across the floor, lamp oil streaming over us both from the jar he still clutched. We writhed on the carpets, him trying to choke the breath from my throat, and me trying to prevent such an occurrence. Our struggles carried us into the base of the table; the table where Augustine had set the lantern when we’d entered the room.

With the jarring impact of the crash, I managed to free myself from my attacker’s grip. I rolled from him as shards of hot lantern oil and bits of burning wick rained down, and only by the grace of the Deity was I able to crawl back to the chair where Augustine was bound. By the sheerest luck–in which I have never placed much faith–I discovered that the knots constraining her were indeed as haphazard as they had appeared. I didn’t manage to untie Augustine, so much as loosen her bindings enough to slide her from the chair beneath the coils of rope.

Though this all occurred in the space of a minute, perhaps two, it passed as an eternity. The figure behind me–not so fortunate in avoiding the broken lantern–wailed and burned, crashing into walls and pieces of furniture in his attempts to douse the flames licking across his silks and velvets like the tongues of hungry animals.

I managed to drag Augustine to the doorway. I had no idea how I would transport her through those near-endless passageways of ancient dry wood paneling and those labyrinthine corridors before the entire manor burned down about our heads, but I vowed to try. My last glimpse of the parlor as I dragged Augustine from the room was of the creature who had once been Consort to Queen Redux Victoria the Third, Her Royal Highness of New Britain and the most powerful woman on the planet. He careened off one wall, then another. His lush mohair cloak fused to his flesh, its flaming scrap-ends clinging about his shoulders like a mantle of living gold. His hair blazed, and he emitted a high keening sound I was certain was meant to be laughter.

I stumbled only several paces into the corridor before our driver found us. Thank the Deity she did, for I was momentarily blinded from the fire, my panicked strength had ebbed, and I had not the slightest notion how I would find our way out of this maze of tinder-dry wood and cold marble and death. But clever Augustine had given clear instructions to Rogers to follow us if we’d not appeared after a specified amount of time. It had not been chance that Rogers had brought her rifle this night.

She handed gun and lantern to me, which I gratefully took as she shouldered my burden and trotted off down the hall carrying the unconscious Augustine. Behind us, a sickly yellow glow and choking, greasy smoke billowed into the corridor. Staggering after the rapidly departing driver and her unconscious employer, I heard no more eerie laughter: just the cackle and crackle of flames feeding on whatever it was they could find to consume.

* * *

Augustine poured a fresh cup from the teapot and offered it to me. “It’s a good thing you’re insatiable. Who knows where we might be if you had eaten less at Craving Manor, and been more incapacitated by that so-called tea.”

I shuddered, shook my head, and buttered another scone. “But Augustine,” I said around bits of sweet icing and currant, “I still can’t believe it. And let someone else take Craving Manor! It’s ghastly, truly. I swear I don’t want it.”

“No need to swear.” Augustine smiled that smile of hers and settled back with her tea. The day was perfect: beautiful and sunny, all traces of the recent ice storm banished by warmth and light. But weather was capricious, and well-known to change its mind without an instant’s notice. Much like the human heart, I supposed. I thought of the romantic intrigues of the Imperial Court and shuddered again.

“The damage from the fire was contained to one wing,” Augusta said. “Besides, Craving Manor is your birthright, a gift given by your father to your mother in the heady days of their affair–”

I cringed. “That creature! That foul beast! Please, dear Augustine, if you are my friend, don’t refer to that person as my father. He murdered Christopher, thinking the poor boy was me! I haven’t had a father for eighteen years, and if that’s my only candidate, I think I prefer the alternative. And as for my mother… .”

I closed my eyes and breathed in the clean air and sun. Dapples of shade from fruit trees patterned my eyelids. The heady scent of the air, with just its hint of lavender and mint from Augustine’s kitchen garden, reminded me of my real mother. Not Lady Velasquez who may have borne me from her body, though she did her best to keep me safe from palace intrigue and fatal jealousies by sending me away to live with her best, most particular friend.

I opened my eyes. Augustine was studying me, and I found that rather than making me shy, it made me bold. I smiled, and she smiled back. “My mother,” I continued, “is the woman I loved in my childhood, the one I called as such, the one who parted from me only to hide me, to keep me safe. I know she never would have done so if she could have seen any other way. It’s as though she offered herself in my place, to satisfy that wicked man’s wrath and fear and jealousy.”

Augustine’s smile faded. “That’s almost exactly how it happened, Jonathan; she died rather than tell him your whereabouts, though he discovered them years later, much to the detriment of your young friend. That part I deduced and confirmed via courier before the Consort killed Emily Springfield, though there are some pieces to the puzzle I don’t think we’ll ever understand.” Her eyes lost focus a moment, as though peering deep into the distant past. Then she smiled, returning to the present, and said with briskness, “Besides, he’s gone, and the Queen has abdicated the throne. It’s said she’s entered solitary residence at a convent on the coast, to dedicate herself to the Deity and spend the remainder of her life in contemplation and prayer. Just this morning she publicly announced her intention to pass the throne to her eldest son.”

That made me sit up in my chair. “Pass the throne to a boy? A man, in position to be the most powerful ruler in the world?”

Augustine nodded, her eyes sparkling. “Shocking, isn’t it?”

I sat back again, my mind spinning. For the first time I wondered if my dreams of navigating the stars, of traveling to other worlds–not as decoration on the arm of a powerful woman, not as some wealthy Mistress’s houselad, but as a strong, free individual in my own right–might be a genuine possibility.

Augustine must have read something of my thoughts in my eyes. “We might be at the dawn of a whole new age, Jonathan. Many of us have long believed men are capable of something more, deserving of something better in the way of equality. Not all worlds are as this one.”

I reached for her hand across the table. She reached for mine at the same time and we met halfway over the ivory expanse of the tablecloth.

“It might even become the case–” I said, battling a sudden return of shyness. I hoped my cheeks weren’t as pink as they felt.

I cleared my throat and began again. “It might even become the case, that a woman and a man could become more than merely a Mistress and her consort. They might become partners, or even . . .” I lowered my gaze to our hands, clasped amidst the tea and the sugar cubes and the cucumber sandwiches and the damask napkins, “. . . particular friends.”

She squeezed my hand, flashing me one of those radiant, good-natured smiles which always made my stomach plummet as if off a cliff in my hollow middle.

“I think they just might,” she said.

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Camille Alexa lives in an Edwardian home with a modest array of fossils, driftwood, pressed flowers, and other very pretty dead things. Her book, PUSH OF THE SKY, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was nominated for the Endeavour Award. More information at http://camillealexa.com.

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