The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (19 page)

“What’s your name?” Theron asked.

“Frannie—Francesca, really. What’s yours?”

“Theron—Alexander, really. But it was my father’s name, so I don’t use it.”

She thought this over. “May I have it, then?”

“What, Alexander?”

“Yes, I like it. I think it is an excellent name, and if you really don’t want it, I’d like to have it.”

“You’d look a bit funny as an Alexander.”

Frannie blushed and fidgeted with her braid. “It’s not for me. It’s for a . . . friend. Well, not an actual person. Something I’m writing.”

“So you’re a writer,” Theron said. She looked at him defiantly. He recognized that look—he wore it himself, still, when cornered into admitting he wrote poetry. The worst thing to do would be to smile; the second worst to tell her he was a writer, too. “Good,” he said. “What are you writing about?”

The defiant look slipped through astonishment into eagerness. “An adventure,” she confided. “There’s going to be a swordsman in. I had planned to sneak out and watch, although Mama has expressly forbidden it. But now I think it is just as nice in here. Anyhow, my grandfather says that swordsmen aren’t what they were. Did you ever see any of the good ones?”

Theron was about to object that he wasn’t anywhere near as old as her grandfather, who might well have seen the likes of Harding, or even St Vier—but then he stopped. Richard St Vier had been his father’s first and most famous lover. The house that Theron lived in had originally been his father’s idea of a joke: an urban palace in Riverside, built outward from the crumbling old house he had inhabited with Richard.

Because of this, people sometimes expected Theron to be more than a little interested in swordsmen. Because of this, he had scrupulously avoided them. But, in fact, Theron had seen Richard St Vier.

“Yes,” he told Francesca. “When I was a little boy. I used to wake up at night, when the moon was bright, because I could hear thudding on the wall. Like one very heavy drop of rain, paced and regular; it would keep up for a while, and then stop, and then start up again, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. One night, I got up to see where it was coming from. I followed the sound to a room down the hall. The windows were open. It was full of moonlight. And I saw a man practicing the sword against the wall, striking it over and over. That’s what the thumping was. I didn’t recognize him. My mother doesn’t keep swordsmen—not active ones, anyway. I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t notice me; he just kept on practicing.”

“It might have been a visitor.”

“It might. We often have people staying with us. But here’s the strange thing. When I went back to the room the next day, there were all sorts of chairs and tables and things that hadn’t been there the night before—in fact, it was a room I knew perfectly well.”

Frannie tightened her arms around herself. “Who was it?” she breathed.

“I finally asked my mother. At first she didn’t answer. Then she told me that it was someone who’d lived in the house long ago, and who liked to come back sometimes; and that it was all right with her, so I was not to bother him.”

The girl snorted. “Well, at least she told you that much. I hope you asked the servants.”

He grinned. “I did. I asked my nurse. She knew right away. St Vier, she said. The greatest swordsman who ever lived. That’s who it had to be.”

“Oh my gosh! Did you go back?”

“I think so. I must have.”

“How can you not remember?” she asked scornfully.

“Because it was like a dream. The moonlight, and the man, and me standing in the doorway . . . I can remember watching him, but it all seems like one long dream. I didn’t hear him every night. Sometimes I thought I’d made it up, but then it would start again. I wanted to go find him one time because I wanted to ask him to come round in the day for once and take care of some boys outside who always made me play skellies with them but they made me put in two for their one.” She made a sympathetic noise. “But either I didn’t go, or I didn’t speak to him when I did. Maybe I got better at skellies and forgot.”

“Do you still hear him?”

“No. I haven’t heard him in years.”

She shivered deliciously. “I’d give anything to see a ghost. In the day, anyway. I will put one in my book. Not a swordsman, though, or people will think I stole it from you.”

“Actually, not. I’ve never told anyone but you.”

“After your mother and your nurse.”

“Just so.”

A smile lit on her face like a moth, dusty and fragile and not very beautiful, but alluring in its fragility.

“Are you sure you’re really a man?” she blurted out unexpectedly.

Theron laughed, unoffended. “I’m sure. But you’re not?”

“You don’t talk like my brothers or my father,” she explained. “And there’s your hair. Men don’t have long hair.”

“University men do. It’s a badge of honor.”

“Mama says University is a very wicked place that encourages young men in bad habits.” She propped her elbows on the open book. “Do you have bad habits?”

“Of course not—well, yes, I suppose your mama would think so. They’re not very bad, or very interesting, and I won’t tell you about them, so don’t bother asking.”

“I didn’t think you would,” said Frannie resignedly. “Are you married?”

“No,” said Theron, surprised. “I’m not.”

“Would you like to be?”

“I don’t—no. Not just now.”

“Why not?”

Why not?
He thought for a moment, and another moment. Patiently, she waited, because she really wanted to know. He thought of all the things that were possibly true. But to tell them to the little girl, he would have to talk about very tedious adult things like duty and responsibility. While she might sympathize, she probably got enough of that at home already.

Trying to be helpful, Frannie suggested, “Maybe you just haven’t met the right one yet.”

Theron thought, But I have. And then he knew what to tell her: “I’m in love with someone else. Someone I can’t marry.”

She sighed with a romantic’s innocent relish. “Oh my
gosh
—that is just
tragic
!” Shyly: “Would you like to tell me about it?”

“So you can write about it? No.” Her face registered her disappointment. To keep himself from laughing aloud, Theron asked, “What about you?”

“I don’t think I actually will get married. I am not clever or pretty, or good at sums or sewing. All I can do is make up stories, and that won’t get you a husband.” She spoke with absolute certainty.

“It would if he liked stories,” Theron pointed out.

“Stories are for babies,” she intoned fiercely, a lesson she had been forced to memorize. “Children like stories. Men don’t like stories.”

“Some do. And there’s history—that’s all stories, and men study them for years at University.”

“Yes, but they’re
true!
That’s so utterly, utterly different.” She hid her face in her hands, and he realized that he had in some way managed to betray her after all. He wished that he had not.

She mastered herself, and straightened, holding out her hand across the book. “It’s been delightful to meet you, Theron—Lord Theron, I mean. I hope you pass a pleasant evening.”

He bowed and said, “And you, Lady Francesca. I wish you all success with your work.” He won a smile from her, and said impulsively, “In a few years, when your hair is up and you are presented to society, I hope that you will send me an invitation to your first dance. My name is Alexander Theron Tielman Campion, at your ladyship’s service.”

THE THOUGHT OF THIS GIRL BEING LACED INTO CORSETS and put on the market in three years or four depressed Theron utterly. He wondered if her mother and sisters would have drummed all the “nonsense” about stories out of her head before then, or if she would continue to perplex her dinner partners by talking about it. He didn’t know which fate was kinder to wish on her. He had the impulse to call on Sophia to rescue this girl, as she so often rescued street orphans and kitchen drudges from poverty. But poverty of spirit was not the same, was it? He himself had fought it successfully, making a life for himself that satisfied the needs of his mind and his spirit, despite opposition from his cousin and his peers. But the odds faced by Sophia’s son were not the same as those facing a nobleman’s daughter.

He stood outside the door and considered fetching some sweet cakes and sugared almonds to bring Frannie as an offering. But she had closed the door with such gentle finality, like a queen indicating that the interview was at an end.

So Theron reentered the ballroom and passed beyond it to where the young men were sharing whiskey in a corner of the conservatory, and entered the community of bad boys drinking, which required very little conversation, polite or otherwise. There was the Randall heir, young Clarence, and Sebastian Hemmynge, who attended geography lectures when he was sober, Ralph Perry, the son of the house, and Tom Deverin, down for his first Season in the city. Theron shoved Deverin aside on the stone bench, accepted the bottle of whiskey, and took a numbing mouthful.

Clarence Randall rose, knocking over a potted fern. “ ’D better get back in there,” he said. “M’mother’ll want to know where I am.”

“Oh, hell, Randall, don’t be such a pussy boy,” said Hemmynge. “Stop looking for your mama; let’s go out and look for some
real
women.”

“You insulting my mother, Hemmynge?” Randall was a handsome boy, with powerful shoulders and muscular legs. This was his first city Season, and it showed.

“Lord, no. I am spefic—spe
cif
ically not insulting her by not lumping her with the sort of woman one goes out and finds in—in our condition.”

“I’m not drunk,” said Randall inaccurately. “
You
may be drunk, but I’m not drunk.”

“Nobody said you were drunk,” soothed Deverin.

“Not drunk. Randy!” chortled Hemmynge. “Look here—I am a Scholar of the University.” He smoothed his fair hair, which fell loose below his shoulders.

“What’s that got to do with the state of your dick?” Perry razzed.

“Shut up, Perry. I’m
explaining
it to you. Because last year, St Cloud explained it all to us. About the Harvest time. It’s when they killed the king.”

“By god, you’re right!” said Randall. “My great-great-something—yours, too, Campion, and probably Perry’s as well—did kill the king in the fall. I may not be a
Scholar of
the University,
but I do know that!”

“You don’t know jack,” said Hemmynge. “Duke David killed him in the spring. That’s why we have Spring Festival, idiot!”

Theron took another drink to stop himself from giggling. They were not so bad, these fellows. Really, they were not.

“Anyway, it symbolized something,” Hemmynge went on. “Sex, that’s what it was. We must go out and prove the rods of our potent manhood—give our seed to the land, for the good of the harvest!”

Deverin put his rose satin arm around Theron. “You go ahead. I’m going to stay here and prove my rod with Campion, eh, Theron?”

“No.” Theron slid away. “I’m going to go, too.”

“I thought you didn’t—”

“Oh, get the hayseed out of your ears, Tom!” Hemmynge howled. “The lady artist, remember?”

Theron shoved the bottle at him to shut him up. It worked.

“All right, then.” Randall drew himself up. “If we’re going, let’s go.”

“Let’s go,” echoed Deverin, a little doubtfully. “Who’s going?”

They pulled together into a ragged group. “So where to? Fat Madge’s?”

“I can’t go to Madge’s,” Perry objected. “I’ve got a girl there who thinks she owns me.”

“Hey, Theron,” said Hemmynge. “Take us down to Riverside, I hear there are great girls cheap in Riverside.”

There were. And some of the ones who came to Sophia for abortions or cups of tea even used to demand when he was going to bring them some of his rich friends for trade. But Theron said, “It’s too far. And it’s raining.”

“What about the girls in the kitchen, then?” Hemmynge persisted. “Maybe they’d like a little tickle.”

“Maybe my mother would kill me,” said Perry indignantly. “What kind of a house do you think we keep?”

“Well, then, it’s Madge’s,” Randall concluded. “Don’t worry, Ralph, I’ll keep your girl occupied!”

They poured out into the rainy street, their cloaks pulled tight against the wet. They passed other revelers, their torches sputtering. Theron was enjoying himself—there was something to be said for just going out drinking and having a good time with people.

At Fat Madge’s, the tables were laden with harvest fruit and quaint earthenware jugs of wine and little figures woven of straw into shapes that left no question of the purpose of the festivities. The room was crowded; plenty of people were out for a good time tonight. Theron switched from whiskey to wine and ate grapes and watched his friends pick out girls. “What about you?” a big woman kept asking him, but he waved her away like a fly. Like a fly she kept coming back, and finally she said, “You like a boy, then? I got a nice boy, he’ll be down in a minute. Or two.” She guffawed.

Theron said politely, “Thank you, I’ve already got one.”