Agent of the Crown (55 page)

“Would you wait for a few minutes?” Alison
said. She approached the forge rail, where the two men’s
expressions had grown confused, as if they couldn’t believe what
they’d heard. She nodded politely to them, leaned on the forge
rail, and said, “Might I have a moment of your time, master
blacksmith?”

“Just a—” Ben said, then turned around fast,
tongs in hand. “
Milady Alison!
”

“Hello, Ben,” Alison said. It had taken most
of a year to convince him to stop calling her
Milady
Consort
, as if they weren’t related at all. “Surprised?”

“Of course!
Lainie!
”

A small black-haired girl with extraordinary
blue eyes that always made Alison catch her breath came running out
of the house. “Ma’s in the workshop,” she said in that lilting
northeastern accent that sounded like music. Her eyes went round.
“Grandmama!
” she shrieked, and threw herself at Alison’s
legs, making her totter.

“Zara, be careful,” Ben said. “Go tell your
ma who’s here.”

The little girl ran off. “She’s grown,”
Alison said.

“Going to overtop me and Lainie both
someday,” Ben said, pushing his light brown hair from his brow. “No
question whose grand-niece she is, either.”

“It breeds true, the North good looks,”
Anthony said. “I wonder if Telaine knew that when she named
her.”

“No question at all,” Alison said.

The workshop door opened again, and Telaine
Garrett came out at a run. “Grandmama,” she said, hugging Alison.
“You shouldn’t have come all this way. Was it a comfortable trip?
You should bring your things inside, we’ve got room—”

“Actually, I thought I’d stay with my old
friend Agatha Weaver,” Alison said. “She knows I’m coming.”

Telaine’s eyes went wide. “I can’t believe
she kept it a secret from me!” She laughed and shook her head. “All
right, actually I can. Of course you would—” She stopped and
glanced over her shoulder southward. “Happen you wouldn’t want to
come upon her unawares and expect her to put you up. But I think
she’d be happy to see you, awares or not.”

“I hope so,” Alison said. “But I’ll have
supper with you, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. Ben’s cooking tonight, so it’ll
be edible. Do you—”

“Yes, I’d like to see Agatha now. Will you
show me where she lives?”

Telaine linked her arm with her grandmother’s
and led her down the street, the carriage following slowly behind
them. Alison observed her covertly. She’d seen her and, later, her
family once a year every year since her marriage, when they came to
stay at the palace for a few weeks, but she’d always wondered if
Telaine was different when she was at home.

She sounded different, for one, dropped the
cultured accents she always used, probably by habit, in the palace.
She’d put on weight since she’d had her three children, which was
as well because she’d always been too thin, just like her mother.
Her walk was every bit as confident as it ever was, but there was
something about it here in Longbourne that was different. It said
this was
her
place, that she was a part of it as if she’d
lived here her whole life. It warmed Alison’s heart to see her so
happy. If only Julia—but that was a worry for another time, and
Alison was about to step into the past.

Telaine took her around the back of a long,
low building that had an upper story half the size of the lower
one, with three windows ranged across it. She pushed open the back
door without knocking. It opened on a tidy kitchen with a pot of
something that smelled delicious bubbling over the fire. In the
distance Alison heard clattering and rattling and the faint whir of
a spinning wheel. “Aunt Weaver, you have a guest,” Telaine called
out, and led Alison out of the kitchen and down a short hall into
the great central room of the house.

A young woman and a slightly younger man sat
at spinning wheels; the young man turned to see who’d entered and
let go the puffy wool in his hand, which the wheel, spinning on its
own, swallowed up. An enormous loom filled the back of the room,
clattering away, but its movement slowed and then came to a halt as
the woman behind it let her hands and feet fall idle. Alison felt
as if she’d sprouted roots that went through the floorboards into
the earth and kept her from moving, kept her from falling, as the
weaver left the loom and came to greet her.

Sweet heaven, she looked just the same.
Older, maybe—she appeared to be in her mid-thirties—but the eyes,
sharp as diamond, the black hair like Anthony’s, the firm chin and
the look that said
You had better not be wasting my time…
how
under heaven had she ever fooled
anyone
into believing she
was an ordinary woman?

Mistress Weaver’s expression was placid, but
her voice was sharp as she said, “Maris, Jonathan, you’re excused
for the day. I ain’t seen my friend for…a long time, and happen
we’ve a lot to talk about.”

Maris and Jonathan wasted no time in tidying
up their work places and running out the front door, shouting
happily at their freedom. “Aunt Weaver,” Telaine began, then looked
from one face to the other, slipped her arm free of Alison’s, and
said, “I’ll see you at supper. You’re invited, Aunt Weaver, if you
want.” She left the room, and soon Alison heard the faint sound of
the back door shutting.

Alison looked at Mistress Weaver. “It’s been
a long time,” Anthony said.

“It’s been a long time,” Alison said.

“Sixty years,” Mistress Weaver said. Her blue
eyes glittered. “A lifetime.”

She blurred in Alison’s vision.
“Zara,
” Alison said, and went toward her sister, arms
outstretched, as Zara did the same, and they clung to each other,
weeping, though Alison didn’t know if it was joy or sorrow at how
fate had robbed them of those sixty years.

“You haven’t changed,” Zara said.

Alison laughed through her tears. “Because
I’ve always been wrinkled and white-haired and limped from a broken
hip that never healed right?”

“Your eyes are the same,” Zara said, pulling
away to look into those eyes, “and you still walk like you own the
world.”

“Like you’re about to take on the whole damn
world at once,” Anthony said in her ear.

“I never really believed in your inherent
magic until now. It’s impossible to comprehend, when the last time
I saw you you had most of your face blown away.”

“By you. Thank you.”

“I had nightmares about it for weeks. Thank
heaven Anthony and I had each other. Was it worth it?”

Zara’s eyes went distant. Alison wondered
what she was seeing. “I imagine sometimes what would have happened
if we hadn’t killed me,” she said. “I picture young Jeffrey wasting
his life, waiting for me to die. All those children becoming
nothing more than hangers-on at court. Telaine never becoming an
agent, never finding her heart here.

“I won’t say it wasn’t hard. But I had love—I
doubt I’d have found that if I’d stayed Queen—and I’ve made a life
and I even got to see my descendants grow up. Though I thought
about murdering Telaine when she gave that child my name. Said ‘I
thought she should have a little of my favorite relative’s spunk’
and I near burst into tears right there. Never tell her that.”

“I wouldn’t. And she does. Have spunk, I
mean. She’s the terror of the palace whenever she visits. The only
time I see her quiet is when she’s in the Long Gallery looking at
her namesake’s portrait. Who knows what she’s thinking?”

“Probably that her Aunt Weaver looks
uncommonly like Queen Zara North,” Anthony said. “She knows it’s
time to move on and can’t bear to. But I can hardly blame her for
that.”

“I wish I could have come sooner,” Alison
said. “But that was just one more sacrifice.”

“It was,” Zara said, “but I’m glad you’ve
come now. Let’s get your things inside. And then we can talk.”

There wasn’t much time before supper to talk.
Zara showed her the room she’d be staying in. “Fitted it up with a
better mattress,” she said. “Used to be this old, thin thing with
hardly any padding to it. Put Telaine on it her first night in
Longbourne, see what she’d do. Not a word of complaint. I’d been
expecting fancy manners and demands for special treatment.”

“Even when she was pretending to be a
brainless socialite, haughtiness wasn’t part of her character,”
said Alison, lowering herself onto the bed. It was soft and
welcoming and she thought about pleading tiredness and taking a
real nap, but that wasn’t what she was here for. “She’s her
father’s daughter, down to the bone. There’s very little of Elspeth
in her.”

“She says it skipped a generation and
appeared in young Julia,” Zara said, leaning against the bedroom
wall next to the dressing table and idly running her finger over
the mirror’s rim. “The child does take after her great-grandmother,
except for the eyes.”

“Who knows how these things come out in the
blood? Owen doesn’t look like any of his maternal relations. Ben’s
never said the boy looks like anyone on his side of the family.
Though he doesn’t talk about them much.”

“Doesn’t talk about them at all. He’s hiding
something, but Telaine won’t dig for it. Says it’s his business and
none of hers.”

“She seems happy.”

“She is.” Zara stretched. “I’m going to pull
supper off the fire and put it in the cold room. Won’t hurt it to
be heated again tomorrow. Then we can see what Ben’s come up with
tonight.”

Alison had to work hard not to be appalled at
Telaine’s relatively primitive living conditions. How long had it
taken her to adapt to this small house, with its plain furnishings
and little rooms and the narrow staircase that led up to where the
children slept?

“You’re a bit of a snob, love,” Anthony said.
“Would you have complained at all if I’d asked you to leave the
palace and live in the forest with me?”

She shook her head, then smiled at Ben when
he asked if anything was wrong. It was true, she was accustomed to
luxury. She watched her granddaughter swipe a cloth across her
three-year-old daughter Julia’s face, making the child laugh.
It’s not about the furnishings,
she told herself,
it’s
about who shares them with you
.

After supper, she brought out presents: an
old book of folk songs for Ben, a newly printed schematic for the
Device that propelled Jeffrey’s new toy for Telaine, picture books
for Julia and Zara, and a huge encyclopedia of Tremontanan animals
for eight-year-old Owen, whose eyes gleamed when he saw it. “You
remembered, Grandmama,” he said.

“Your grandmama has never forgotten anything
to do with books in her life,” Telaine said.

“I’m afraid I’m a bit single-minded in my
interests,” Alison said, “but it’s such a joy, matching people with
books they didn’t even know they needed.”

“You don’t mind if I spend all night in the
workshop again, do you?” Telaine said, teasing Ben, who put his arm
around her waist and pulled her close for a kiss. “Well, all right
then,” she said, breathlessly.

“Pa, sing for us,” Julia said. She climbed
onto her father’s lap and turned the pages of his book.

“One of these?” Ben said. “I think I need
some practice.” But his hand stilled hers, and he ran his finger
down the staves of music on one of the pages. “Or…happen not.”

They settled in around the fireplace while
Ben stood before them, moving his lips as he ran through the words
of the song. “Good thing for me my voice has changed some since I
was young,” he said. “More a baritone than a tenor, these
days.”

“Still the most beautiful voice I’ve ever
heard,” Telaine said.

“Zara’s going to follow his example, you
know,” Anthony said. “She’s only five and you can hear it in her
voice.”

Alison said nothing, just watched Ben as his
stance shifted and he began breathing rhythmically. Did Telaine
know her husband was a classically trained opera singer? He’d never
given any hint of being more than just a man with a gift for music
and a love of folk songs. But Alison had attended many concerts in
her day, most of them against her will, and in her boredom with the
music had turned her attention to the singers, observing how they
stood, how they moved, the way they held their chests and throats
and lips. Ben Garrett might not have taken up the profession, but
it wasn’t for lack of either talent or training. Well, if Telaine
wasn’t interested in ferreting out her husband’s secrets, it wasn’t
any business of Alison North’s.

“I’ve heard this song before, but it never
had words, not that I knew anyway. It’s an old lullaby that’s
supposed to come from the time of Haran, back when we still
worshiped gods,” Ben said. “The words are in—is this Kantnish?”

Alison took the book from him. “An old
dialect of it. I can’t read it.”

“Well, whoever wrote it down translated it
into something we can understand. Couldn’t sing it else.” He closed
his eyes, took in a slow breath, then held the book where he could
easily read from it, and sang.

Now the day is over,

The sun, it dips into the sea.

It burns a path along the waves

That bring you back to me.

The stars will be your blanket,

The moon will paint the grasses blue,

The night will be your guardian

‘
Til I come home to you.

Then rest you on your pillow

Within your cradle, slumber deep.

I’ll watch o’er you ‘til morning comes

As peacefully you sleep.

The last notes of the song floated away,
leaving silence behind. Ben lowered the book. “I liked it,” Julia
said.

“That was beautiful. You can tell it’s an old
melody, can’t you?” said Telaine.

“Don’t know how good a translation it is, but
it feels sad.” Ben held the book so little Zara could look at it.
“Thanks, Milady Alison.”