The Dragonfly Pool

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT September the Third

Nobody ever forgot where they were on the day that war was declared.

Tally was in the kitchen helping Aunt May to prepare the vegetables for Sunday lunch when the music on the wireless stopped and the announcer said that the prime minister would address the nation at eleven o’clock. Everyone had been expecting it; Hitler had invaded Poland two days before and the democratic countries had had enough. Aunt Hester came hurrying in from the garden and Tally’s father from his study.

The prime minister was old and tired; he had tried to keep the peace and now he told the people of Great Britain that he had failed. An ultimatum had been sent to Hitler demanding that he withdraw his troops from Poland and it had been ignored.

“I regret to tell you, therefore, that a state of war now exists between England and Germany.”

No one ever forgot what happened next either. Almost straightaway the air-raid sirens sounded — that hideous wailing that they had only just learned to recognize.

“Quick, into the shelter,” said Dr. Hamilton, pushing his daughter toward the door.

“Oh dear, my roast will be spoiled — couldn’t you go ahead, and let me—” began Aunt May, and saw her brother’s face.

The shelter was at the bottom of the street. It was not really finished yet and a puddle of water had collected in the bottom. The lady from number 4 said she wasn’t going down into that wetness, she’d rather be bombed than die of pneumonia. She was a very large person and the people behind her got nasty because she was blocking the door.

They had just climbed down when the all clear went. It had been a false alarm.

“Were you frightened?” Kenny asked, when he and Tally met that afternoon in Primrose’s stable.

“Yes, I was — it was the noise as much as anything — that awful wailing. But I’m glad I’ve got it over — the first time, I mean.”

The date was September 3, 1939. The Delderton term began in just over a week.

“Thank God you’ll be out of London,” said Dr. Hamilton.

That evening the king spoke to his people. The aunts as usual were more anxious about the king’s stammer than about what he said, but he got through it very well, speaking slowly and pausing when things might have got out of hand.

As she listened, Tally was back at the dragonfly pool, telling Karil about the British king. That he was a kind man and that his people loved him, but that he was not like Karil’s father.

Well, now Johannes lay under a stone slab in Bergania’s cathedral — and Karil, too, might be dead for all Tally knew of him.

There had been five weeks of term left when they returned from Bergania, and every day Tally had waited for a letter. Karil knew her address at school and at home; all the children had exchanged addresses. For while they had hoped that Karil would be able to come straight to Delderton; they knew that there might be delays.

But there had been nothing. Tally knew now how Julia felt as she waited for a letter from her mother. None of the others had heard anything either; nor had Matteo. At first Tally had written almost every day, then three times a week, then twice… Pride didn’t come into friendship, she told herself, and she knew it might take him a while to settle down, but still there was only silence.

Now, as the king said, “With the help of God we shall prevail,” and the national anthem was played, Tally was remembering Karil’s words as they sat by the dragonfly pool.

“I would have liked us to be friends.”

She had believed him. She had believed everything he said about wanting to be free, about being weary of being a prince.

But she had been wrong. Surely there was no one who could not write a letter and put it in a letter box.

And it hurt. For the rest of the term she had waited and hoped, and here in London, too, when she came home for the summer holidays, but still there was nothing. Well, she wasn’t going to turn into one of those people who sighed and hovered around postmen. There were plenty of other things to do.

And indeed, during those first few days when the long-awaited war became a fact, there was hardly a spare moment.

Aunt May went off to the town hall hoping to become an air-raid warden but was directed to the wrong room and found herself lying on a stretcher, covered in bandages and labeled SERIOUS BURNS in a first-aid practice. Aunt Hester and Tally filled sandbags in the park and tried to shoo off the little children who wanted the sand to make castles.

New gas masks were issued, but Mrs. Dawson, whose dachshund Tally took for walks, refused to be fitted for hers unless there was a gas mask also for the dog. The blackout began and Dr. Hamilton’s surgery was filled with patients who had fallen downstairs in the dark or walked into lampposts. No one knew whether laying in stocks of food was sensible or unpatriotic. Aunt Hester thought it would be hoarding and therefore bad, but Aunt May thought it must be good to save space on ships which had to bring food from overseas, and bought a large sack of pepper which she put under her bed.

“They say pepper is going to be very hard to get,” she said.

Statues were boarded up and the aunts found a paragraph in the newspaper that excited them very much. Among the paintings which were being crated up and sent for safety into a disused mine in Wales were the pictures in the Battersea Arts Museum, which included The Angel of Mercy for which Clemency had posed.

“So she’ll spend the war underground,” they told Tally. “She’ll be as safe as can be.”

Evacuation of schoolchildren to the country began, but without Maybelle and Kenny.

“They didn’t even try to make me go,” said Maybelle. “I drew blood last time.”

Two days after the outbreak of war, Tally’s aunt Virginia telephoned to say that she was taking Roderick and Margaret down to safety in the West Country till it was time for term to begin. Fortunately she had been able to buy their new uniforms before there was talk of shortages or even rationing.

“Roderick has had such a good term,” she told them. “He has made friends with the Prince of Transjordania — such a nice boy — and Foxingham has won their cricket match against Eton. It really is a splendid school.”

She kindly offered to take Tally away with them, but Tally told her father she would rather be hung, drawn, and quartered than go with her cousins to Torquay — and Dr. Hamilton, endlessly busy at the hospital with the evacuation of patients, did not argue.

On the last night before she was due to go back to Delderton, Tally and her father climbed up the hill past the convent and looked out over London. Their own barrage balloon had been joined by dozens of others, silvered in the moonlight. They did not look like kindly uncles now, nor like benevolent sausages — but like serious sentinels protecting the much-loved city.

“We shall come through,” said Dr. Hamilton, and took his daughter’s hand. “You’ll see, in the end we shall come through.”

The next morning, just as the taxi arrived to take them to Paddington Station, the postman came — and there was a letter for Tally in an unfamiliar hand. In an instant she was filled with certainty and happiness. Karil had written at last — he must have been ill; she had been completely wrong to doubt him. She tore the letter open.

It was not from Karil. It was from Anneliese, the German girl who had befriended them in Bergania and who had said she did not want to die young like St. Aurelia. She had managed to write before mail between her country and Great Britain ceased; she hoped that when the war was over they would still be friends and she sent “so much, much love indeed” to Tally and her friends.

She could write from an alien country declaring her friendship, but not Karil.

At Paddington there were throngs of men in uniform and evacuees with labels around their necks saying good-bye to their tearful mothers. Among the bustle and confusion the boys of Foxingham marched, as they had done before, toward their platform, their brand-new striped red-and-yellow uniforms standing out in the gloom of the station, but Roderick was not among them. He was going straight to Foxingham from Torquay. Tally thought she could make out the serious dark-haired boy who might or might not be the Prince of Transjordania — but she turned away. She had had her fill of princes.

Then she saw David Prosser, peering at a clipboard. Even he, efficient though he was, looked as though he had mislaid a child. Not Augusta Carrington — Tally could make her out at the end of the platform. And then she saw her other friends — Julia and Barney and Borro — and ran eagerly toward them.

It was time to forget Karil and move on.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Rottingdene House

Karil stood looking out of his bedroom window at the gray London street. He had pushed aside the heavy damask curtains, and the dusty net curtains, and the blackout curtains which had just been put up, but the view of tired-looking people going about their business did little to lift his spirits.

Rottingdene House was packed from the roof to the basement with his relations, yet he had never felt so alone.

His grandfather’s home was not far from Buckingham Palace where the king lived with his two small daughters, and in many ways it resembled it. Rottingdene, too, was surrounded by spiky railings and boasted a sentry box in the courtyard and a flagpole on the roof with a flag to raise and lower to show whether the owners were at home.

It was not till one got up close to the building that one noticed that though the house was so imposing, it was actually somewhat shabby; that the woodwork needed painting and the stonework was crumbling and that altogether Rottingdene was rather a rundown place. But if the building was run down, the people who lived in it were very grand indeed.

They never went out of doors without a footman or a maid; the carriage or motor that took them through the streets of London had the Rottingdene arms emblazoned on the side, and the soldier who guarded the door had to present arms whenever anybody entered or left.

Which was only right and proper, because the house had as many blue-blooded and royal personages living in it as there are woodlice under a stone.

The Duke and Duchess of Rottingdene had had four daughters and all of them had made brilliant marriages.

The eldest daughter, Diana, had married a Russian prince; the second one, Phyllis, had married a European archduke; the third daughter, Millicent, had captured the heart of a South American ruler who governed a country the size of France.

And the youngest daughter, Alice, had married a proper king — Johannes of Bergania.

But the map of the world had changed cruelly, and one by one the proud Rottingdene daughters came home as their husbands were deposed or hounded out of their country or fell victim to sinister plots.

In Russia, Prince Dmitri, who had married Diana, had to flee his country after being attacked by peasants with pitchforks when the tsar was overthrown.

In central Europe, Archduke Franz Heinrich, who had married Phyllis, had to leave his land and his castles when his country became a republic. And in South America, Millicent and her husband only just escaped being slaughtered in one of the bloodiest uprisings the country had known.

Only Alice did not return home but lay in the soil of Bergania beside her husband.

The daughters who came home did not come alone. They brought their husbands — proud men with mustaches or monocles, who were used to drinking the best champagne and smoking the rarest cigars and clicking their fingers at their valets when they wanted anything. Some came with ancient relatives, who had never in their lives put on their own stockings and would have starved to death if they had had to boil an egg. Some brought nurses or governesses, who had to be crammed into distant attics and boot cupboards where they coughed and quarreled and cried.

Prince Dmitri’s mother, the old Princess Natalia, brought a small, low-slung dog with a topknot and an ancient pedigree. Pom-Pom was descended from a long line of Outer Mongolian pedestal (or snuggle) dogs, which had been bred to warm the feet of the Great Khans in their drafty palaces and now wheezed through the corridors of Rottingdene House, seeking the dark, familiar world of legs and shoes and toes.

Don Alfonso, the South American ruler, brought a monkey which shivered and gibbered from morning to night — and Franz Heinrich brought that treasured jewel, a pearl beyond price, his daughter, Carlotta.

And spying on everybody, controlling everything, was the ancient, bullying, terrifying Duke of Rottingdene. The duke’s teeth rode up and down when he chewed, his hearing aid fell regularly into the soup, and one of his legs was largely made of metal, but he missed nothing that was going on.

It was to this house, full to the brim with discontented rulers, underpaid servants, and disturbed animals, that Karil was brought after his flight.

There was a knock at Karil’s door and a footman in the Rottingdene livery of purple and gold stood in the doorway.

“Your Highness is requested in the Red Salon immediately.”

“Thank you.”

Karil knew why… Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister, was going to make a speech — and there was little doubt about what he was going to tell the nation.

The Red Salon was packed with his relations. Uncle Dmitri sat on one enormous sofa with Aunt Diana and his aged mother, the Princess Natalia, who clutched Pom-Pom on her knee. On another sofa sat Uncle Franz Heinrich and Aunt Phyllis, and on two satinwood chairs sat Uncle Alfonso, Aunt Millicent, and the monkey, looking as always as though it was about to die of misery and cold. The duke sat in an imposing carved chair, closest to the wireless, and scowled. Lesser relatives were dotted about the room.

“Here, Karil,” came Carlotta’s voice, “sit next to me.”

Carlotta looked flushed and excited, and had dressed for the expected announcement of war in a white dress with a big lace collar. The man who came to take the photographs that were sent to Karil in Bergania had told her that she resembled an angel when wearing white, and on important days like this she took care to be angelic.

Karil took the place she offered. At the beginning he had tried to keep his distance from his cousin, but he was getting very tired, and his future here in this place was so bleak that Carlotta could hardly make things worse.

The prime minister came on the air. It was, as everyone had known it would be, an announcement of war. When it was over, the royal uncles got to their feet and saluted the wireless set, and Karil followed suit. In his high-backed chair the ancient duke harrumphed and shook his head, and Pom-Pom coughed.

So that was that, thought Karil. Bergania, occupied as it was by Hitler, was now as far away as the moon; there would be no letters and no contact with his native land.

He was still thinking about this when the air-raid alarm sounded — and at once the seemingly moribund relatives jerked into activity.

“Down into the basement,” shouted the duke, “but in an orderly manner.”

Prince Dmitri seized his wife and his mother and made for the door, reaching it at the same time as Archduke Franz Heinrich and Phyllis. Don Alfonso and Aunt Millicent only paused to catch the monkey before they caught up with them. Carlotta had run on ahead, looking pale and giving little cries of terror.

“Come along, Karil,” said Countess Frederica. Although Karil was in a house full of relations, she still saw him as her responsibility.

He was about to follow her when Pom-Pom freed himself from the arms of the old Princess Natalia and dived under the piano. The old lady tried to catch him, stumbled, fell under the piano on top of him and found she could not get up again.

“Go on! I’ll be all right here,” she cried.

But the people nearest the door turned back. No one minded about the old princess — she had had her life — but Pom-Pom was different. He was waiting to be united with the only other Outer Mongolian pedestal dog still in existence, a bitch now living in Brazil. When this happened, and puppies were born, they would be worth a fortune, and no one wanted him to be hit by a bomb before this happy event could come to pass.

But after a moment fear won over greed and they hurried down to the basement, where another problem awaited them. The servants who were assembled there had to be removed, since it was out of the question that they be allowed to shelter in the same place as their masters. By the time this had been done the all clear sounded and everybody trooped back upstairs, where they found the old Princess Natalia still lying under the piano with her dog.

Karil’s arrival at Rottingdene House had caused some serious problems for the duke and his household. It hadn’t taken long to move out the two governesses who occupied a bedroom on the top floor and give it to Karil, and the boy did not look as though he would be expensive to feed.

No, the problem was that of precedence. Nobody had been absolutely certain whether the son of a king, even a king who was dead, should be served first at table, or go ahead of the others into the dining room. Was he more important than Prince Dmitri, who had a crest with sixteen quarterings, or Archduke Franz Heinrich, whose family had ruled over Lower Carinstein since 1304, or Don Alfonso, who was descended from a long line of Spanish conquerers?

While the matter was being looked into, the uncles and Karil took it in turn to go ahead of the others into the dining room.

The first supper after the declaration of war was much like the other meals Karil had endured at Rottingdene House. The duke sat at the head of the table in an ancient dinner jacket which smelled of mothballs, and slurped his soup. Don Alfonso appeared in one of the twenty or so military uniforms he had brought from South America and fed tidbits to the monkey, and Carlotta, who had changed her dress for the third time that day, simpered and smiled.

On the whole the uncles were pleased about the war, because they thought that once it was over they would become rulers once again. Uncle Dmitri would return to his estate in Russia with ten thousand peasants doing his bidding; Uncle Franz Heinrich would be back in his turreted castle in Lower Carinstein, and Don Alfonso would once more have charge of his vast lands on the Pacific coast. Of course it was a pity that so many people might be killed first, but if it ended with them restored to power it was all worthwhile.

They were kind, too, to Karil, assuring him that once Hitler was defeated, the people of Bergania would clamor to have him back as king.

“It will all be over soon, my boy,” they said, “and then you will be back on the throne where you belong.”

And Karil, who had begun by trying to tell them that he did not want to become king, had long since given up trying to explain.

After dinner everybody retired to the Red Salon to take coffee — and then came the ritual that took place every night, and for which Karil, when he first came, had waited with such eagerness.

A footman entered with a silver salver which he placed on a gilt-legged table — and on it were the letters that had come by the afternoon post.

When he first came, Karil had always jumped up and looked at the tray, sure that there would be a letter from Tally and his other friends. He had never doubted that they would write straightaway and tell him what was happening at Delderton. When nothing had come, either by the morning or the afternoon post, he had told himself that they must be busy returning to school and catching up with their work, but as day followed day and the salver disgorged letters for everyone but him, his hopes had faded and died.

He himself had written straightaway, long letters that he had been careful to seal tightly before he laid them in the brass bowl in the hall where all letters were put for the footman to stamp and carry to the letter box. It was a relief to know that Rottingdene House had a system for posting letters, because he had no money and even buying stamps would have been difficult. He had told Tally about Pom-Pom, who had to be accompanied by two footmen, one at each end, when he went out, in case he was kidnapped by anarchists and eaten. He had told her about the monkey, who looked sweet but bit as soon as one came too close, and about the duke’s hearing aid, which had fallen into the soup but not actually been swallowed. Gradually he found it harder to think of lighthearted things to write — he had begun to plead a little for an answer to his letters, and then to tear them up and try again because he did not want to seem to be making a fuss or admitting his unhappiness.

But as the weeks passed and there was only silence, Karil realized he had been wrong to trust his friends so utterly — and he remembered his father’s words when he asked if he could meet the children who had come to his country.

It never works trying to make friends with people outside our world, he had said. You’ll only get hurt.

The king had been right. Karil had got hurt, and it served him right for being such a fool. Yet tonight, because the outbreak of war was after all not an ordinary day, he got up and walked over as he had done at the beginning, to look at the envelopes laid out on the salver.

But there was nothing. Nothing from Tally — nothing from Barney or Julia or Tod. Nothing from Matteo, who had been his father’s friend.

It was a long time before he slept, that first night of the war, and when he did he found himself floating through a dark sky trying to chase a giant tray — a silver salver from which torn pieces of paper fell and whirled downward. When he managed to catch one it melted like a snowflake and he was left with nothing except a sense of misery and dread.

CHAPTER THIRTY New Term

Daley sat in his big room overlooking the courtyard and watched the children arrive. The headache he always had at the beginning of term was magnified tenfold — he had already swallowed four aspirins, but the throbbing in his temples was no better and even looking at the cedar tree gave him no comfort.

On his desk were the Blackout Regulations for Schools and Institutions and the First Aid Instructions in the Event of Casualties.

There was also an urgent letter from the founders, once again urging Daley to evacuate the school to America. It was a generous offer, and the pictures of the bombing of Warsaw should have made the decision easy — but it was not easy. Outside, the peaceful Devon countryside slumbered in the sunshine; the idea that airplanes would come and drop bombs over Delderton was hard to believe — indeed Delderton village was full of evacuee children from London who had been sent here just because it was safe. But if Hitler invaded Britain, that might be a different matter.

Half an hour later, Tally knocked on the door of his room. Daley had sent for her because he had been worried about her at the end of the summer term. The adventure in Bergania and the rescue of the prince had been kept from the newspapers, and the children seemed to have settled down well — but he had an idea that Tally was still troubled about something.

“Well, how has it been? Is your father well?”

“Yes, he is. Terribly busy with evacuating the hospital and everything, but he is well.”

“And have you had any news from the prince? From Karil?”

“No, nothing. The others haven’t heard anything either. We’ve all written and written.”

“And you think he has forgotten you, and is ungrateful?”

“What else can we think?”

“There are other things that occur to one,” said the headmaster.

But he left it at that.

“I’m going to put him out of my mind,” said Tally — and while it was a lie, it was a brave one. She changed the subject. “Is Matteo still my tutor?”

“Yes, for now.” Everything was so unsettled and uncertain in this first fortnight of the war.

All the same, it was good not being new, thought Tally, knowing one’s way about. Magda was still Tally’s housemother and she was still worrying about Schopenhauer. She had got to the part in Schopenhauer’s life where he was supposed to have thrown a washerwoman down the stairs because she was talking on the landing and disturbing him, and she didn’t know whether to leave it in or not.

“It seems so unlike him to do that,” she told the children.

She also had a new anxiety — Heribert would almost certainly be called up to fight in the German army and she was very much afraid for him.

“I don’t think he will make a good soldier; he was very absent-minded,” she said.

In the village, groups of children evacuated from London wandered about looking for fish and chips and cinemas and crying for their mothers. A fire-watching roster was pinned up — members of staff would take it in turn to watch for incendiary bombs from the flat roof of the gym.

To everyone’s amazement, David Prosser volunteered for the army. No one especially liked him, but that didn’t mean they wanted him to be killed. Before he went he asked Clemmy to marry him and she refused him, but so nicely that he was hardly hurt at all. The man who replaced him was as old as the hills, but he knew his subject.

The children who had shared the Berganian adventure still met on the steps of the pet hut to talk about their lives. When they first came back, expecting Karil to join them, they had been full of plans. Barney had bought a tree frog in a pet shop in St. Agnes as a present for the prince; it was an attractive animal with its shining pop eyes and glossy skin, but they did not try to name it — Karil would want to do that himself, they thought, but as the weeks passed the frog remained nameless.

“Amphibians don’t really need to be called anything,” Borro had said. “They’re all right as they are, so there’s no hurry.”

But as they met for the new term they stopped trying to make plans for Karil.

The axolotl was in good health, and Tally now had charge of the white rabbit that had belonged to the little French girl who had not returned to school. Her parents didn’t want to risk sending her across the Channel and being attacked by the U-boats that now patrolled the waters. She had written to say that Tally could have her rabbit, but though Tally cleaned it out and fed it and took it on her knee, she found it difficult to love it.

“Rabbits are not really very interesting,” she complained — but Julia said that rabbits weren’t meant to be interesting; they were meant to be nice, and this one was.

Barney was very indignant about what had happened in the London Zoo. On the very day that war was declared all the black widow spiders and poisonous snakes had been killed in case their cages were bombed and they escaped and bit people.

“And the boa constrictors, too,” he said angrily. “Just killed outright, which is ridiculous — people would have seen them coming. Or they could have sent them to Whipsnade like the elephants. But cold-blooded murder like that!”

It was really strange, realizing the difference these last weeks had made to their friends overseas. Borro could write to the French girl whose mother bred Charolais cows, because France and Britain were allies, on the same side in the war, but the German and Italian children had become “the enemy” and were as unreachable as the moon.

“It seems so silly,” said Tally. “Only a month ago we were just people.”

As for Karil, it seemed clear now that they were not going to hear from him.

“He’s obviously decided to be a prince after all,” Barney said. “I mean, he was brought up to all that since he was a baby, and now he doesn’t want to have anything to do with us. It’s quite natural really.”

Only Augusta, sitting on the bottom step so that the animal fur would not set off her allergy, said: “All the same, I think it’s funny that you can save someone’s life and they just forget all about you.”

Her brace had been removed in the holidays and her words were very clear.

Hearing their own thoughts spoken aloud upset the others badly — and from then on they did not speak of the prince again.

It was a beautiful autumn, that first autumn of the war, and Clemmy was busy pitting herself against the coming shortages — food rationing was expected the following month and she was determined to garner every berry, every rose hip, every mushroom before the coming frosts.

So every minute that the children were not in class she herded them through the lanes, armed with jam jars and saucepans and pots. The blackberries were more succulent that year than ever; the rose hips hung like crimson jewels from the briars, and on the moors the blueberries clustered between tufts of heather. There were sloes, so dark that their blueness was almost black, and chanterelles growing between the roots of trees. Clemmy was in her element as she led her troop of helpers, her hair streaming in the late sunshine, her cloak blowing in the wind. It is very different picking berries because you feel like a mouthful of something juicy and picking them because you are helping your country and can lay by stores against hardship. Even the detestable Ronald Peabody, who had broken the topmost branch of the cedar tree, picked with the best of them.

In her art classes Clemmy had let the children paint what they wanted, thinking that they might need to depict what they were going through in the changing world. When they came back after the journey to Bergania they had painted the mountains and the palace and the folk dancers, but that was before the outbreak of war. Now they painted orange and scarlet explosions and tanks and toppling houses as they saw them on the newsreels of the invasion of Poland.

But not Tally. Tally, as the term progressed, painted the things she saw on her walks with Clemmy: rowan berries on laden boughs; late foxgloves; fallen leaves, veined and crimson on the grass — and Clemmy realized that Tally was seeking comfort in nature as people have always done when their lives have run into difficulties.

“Nothing matters really when the world is so beautiful,” said Tally — and Julia, who did not agree, who knew that for someone like Tally it is people that matter, just nodded and smiled.

All the time they were in Bergania Julia had not mentioned her mother, and Tally hoped that she was no longer so unhappy about her. But when they had been back at school for nearly three weeks she called Tally into her room and held out a copy of The Picturegoer.

“Look!” she said.

On the center page was a picture of Gloria Grantley in her most pouting pose. The caption read: “Is Glorious Gloria running out of steam?”

The blurb underneath said that the plans for her new film, The Devil in Velvet, had been shelved. The studio refused to comment on the reasons for this decision, and her agent was not available.

“What do you think it means?” said Julia.

“Haven’t you heard anything from Mr. Harvenberg?” asked Tally, who knew that Gloria’s agent was a very important figure in her life.

Julia shook her head. “Not since the holidays. My grandmother wrote when war was declared because she wanted me to go out to America and spend the war there — well, I told you — but my mother didn’t want me to come. She said it was too dangerous traveling by sea because of the U-boats, but of course I knew it was because… she didn’t want me. But do you think she’s in trouble?”

“No, of course not.” Tally was very firm. “This kind of thing happens all the time in the film business, you know it does. I expect her agent wanted more money and the studio is being difficult. You’ll see, it will all resolve itself.”

“It will be awful if it doesn’t. She absolutely lives for her work.”

Tally looked at the picture again. Ridiculous Gloria was lying on her stomach on some sort of animal skin with one foot in very high heels cocked up behind her. Yet it was only because she had gone to see Gloria at the cinema in St. Agnes that they had seen the newsreel which had set the whole Bergania adventure off. But for this horrible woman who treated her daughter so abominably, Karil would now be in the clutches of the Nazis.

That evening Tally wrote one last letter to the prince, calling up everything she could think of to amuse and interest him: Matteo’s last biology lesson, when they had camped for a night on the moor and watched the stags preparing for their annual rut… the visit of the Spanish children, who had given a marvelous moonlit concert in the courtyard… and that the cow Borro was looking after was expecting a calf.

But once again, there was no reply.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Karil and Carlotta

When you are unhappy, time goes very slowly. Karil had been at Rottingdene House for only a few weeks, but he felt as though he had been buried at the bottom of a well for years.

When he woke in the morning, he thought for a moment that he was still at home, because the first thing he saw was a tray with two rusks on it and a glass of fruit juice. But it was not an equerry who brought them; the duke’s servants were so hard-pressed, looking after a household packed with people who could do nothing for themselves, that they could take on nothing extra and it was the Countess Frederica who handed him the tray. The countess had seen to it ever since they had arrived in London that Karil’s life went on exactly as before, and now she told him his lessons for the day and his engagements for the afternoon.

Karil never thought he would be homesick for Monsieur Dalrose’s history lessons, nor that he would miss riding in a procession to open a railway station or welcome a foreign deputation, but it was so. For his lessons now were given by his uncles and they taught him the very few things that they knew. Uncle Dmitri showed him how to design crests and mottoes; Uncle Franz Heinrich taught him how to write national anthems and music for royal occasions, and Uncle Alfonso was a specialist in the design of state uniforms.

No one taught him anything he might have wanted to know, or needed, and there had been no talk of sending him to school. For while no one spoke of money, it was clear to Karil that however grand and pompous the duke was, and however formal the household, there was not much spare cash. Even Carlotta, who could usually get blood out of a stone, found it hard to wheedle money out of her grandfather, and when his relatives needed anything they had to scrabble about among the few jewels that still remained to them and take something to be pawned or sold.

While he was dressing he heard a familiar thud, but as no cries or screams followed, Karil did not come out of his room to see who it was that had fallen over Pom-Pom. The little dog was black and tubular and almost impossible to see in the dimly lit corridors of Rottingdene House as he padded about looking for feet that were worthy of his care.

The duke himself did not come down to breakfast, but the three uncles and their wives were there. In front of Uncle Dmitri was a marmalade jar labeled with the crest of the Drimadoffs. In front of Uncle Franz Heinrich was a toast rack decorated with a silver griffon, which was the emblem of the House of Carinstein, and Uncle Alfonso was feeding a piece of bread to his shivering monkey, who wore a jacket modeled on that of the household cavalry that had guarded Alfonso when he still ruled his lands.

When Karil entered, the three uncles very slightly raised their buttocks from their chairs, because a search through the Almanach de Gotha had shown that the son of a reigning king, even a dead one, did definitely take precedence over another prince or an archduke or a don, and this was the nearest they would get to bowing to their nephew.

The dining room at Rottingdene House was so dark that the light had to be put on even at breakfast, and the food was quietly nasty. The bread was never fresh, the butter slightly rancid, and the bacon undercooked. The truth was that the servants were so ill paid and badly treated that they had long ago given up any attempt to do their job well.

The last to appear as usual was Carlotta, who came into the room in a freshly ironed blouse and a pleated kilt with a tartan ribbon in her shining curls.

“Here comes my little sunbeam,” said her mother, and Carlotta smiled, because in truth she knew herself to be a ray of light and cheerfulness illuminating the dark house.

Being a sunbeam is hard work, but Carlotta did not shirk her duty. She saw to it that the maids crimped and curled her hair several times a day, and that her dresses were laundered and ironed before anybody else’s. She “borrowed” any trinkets she needed from her relatives — her dimpled wrists usually glittered with bracelets — and she never passed a mirror without checking that everything was as it should be.

Carlotta knew that cheering up her Cousin Karil was her job, and she rose to the task. Whenever he came into a room she patted the chair next to her and told him about the interesting things they were going to do that day, and she was always thinking of ideas for refurbishing the palace when they returned together to Bergania.

Countess Frederica had taken Carlotta into her confidence when they first arrived.

“I’m afraid Karil had a really dreadful time on his journey.”

But the dreadful time, when told to Carlotta, did not mean being chased by ruffians and nearly captured, it meant traveling in the company of the most appalling, unruly, and impertinent children.

“I can’t tell you, Carlotta, what the poor boy had to endure. Bad language, sharing a room with utterly lowborn people, being called by his Christian name. There was a girl there who, from the way she spoke to him, seemed to think he was simply an ordinary person. And I’m very much afraid that Karil was taken in by them. He called them his friends.”

“Oh, he couldn’t have done!” Carlotta was really shocked. “What was this girl like?”

“Rude. Abominably dressed. The children all came from some impossible school in Devon where everybody does as they like — and you can believe it or not, they wanted Karil to go there with them.”

“They didn’t! But surely they knew that he was a prince — and would be a king one day.”

“They knew, but they took absolutely no notice. It was the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t think there is any danger that they will try to get in touch with him, but you know how good-natured Karil is — he might find it difficult to snub them.”

“My goodness, yes.” And then: “What was the name of this girl? ”

“Something ridiculous. They called her Tally. I have never met anyone so lacking in respect.”

The countess said no more. Carlotta was a highly intelligent girl; no usurper would get past her. Altogether Countess Frederica was very pleased with the way things had turned out; Carlotta spent most of her free time with Karil and the countess was sure that her amusing prattle must cheer him up.

After breakfast the duke sent for Karil. He lived in a dark, fusty set of rooms on the first floor, which smelled of mothballs, tobacco, and an unappetizing ointment that he rubbed into his joints to ease his rheumatism. The duchess had died three years earlier, but no one had noticed this very much. She had been a browbeaten, skeletally thin woman, usually dressed in a mountain of gray cardigans, who had followed her husband about bleating, “Yes, Mortimer,” and agreeing with everything he said.

“Ah, there you are,” he said, glaring down at his grandson. “I have to tell you that I’m not at all pleased with you! I’m hearing bad things — very bad things — and I won’t stand for them!”

Karil waited, trying to think what he had done, but nothing occurred to him.

“You have been hobnobbing with the servants. Being familiar. Talking to the footmen, gossiping with the maids — and it must stop at once!”

And as Karil remained silent…

“Do you hear me, boy? I’m talking to you and I expect to be answered.”

“I don’t think I was gossiping exactly. One of the maids had sprained her ankle.”

“Are you contradicting me?” asked the duke, turning crimson.

“No, sir.”

“I hope not. I really hope not. Remember you are here for one reason only, to fulfill your father’s wishes. You may have a few years to wait, but you’ll go back to Bergania as rightful king, no doubt about it, so I don’t want to hear any more about you letting people take liberties. Never forget who you are.”

But Karil was beginning to forget just that: who he was, and where he was going.

“You should take a leaf out of Carlotta’s book. She never forgets who she is. You’ll be fortunate to have her to help you when you go back. And of course she has the blood. She’s got the Rottingdene blood from my side, and her father is descended from Attila the Hun. You’ll do very well with Carlotta when the time comes; she’ll see that you behave yourself.”

Karil’s lesson that morning was with Prince Dmitri, who was designing a new coat of arms to be embroidered on the sofa cushions in his room. He was a stupid man, but when he began to talk about fesses and bends sinister and gules he became quite excited.

“I’ve never been happy with just the lion couchant. Now what do you think about a salamander? Rampant, of course.”

After that came Uncle Franz Heinrich, who played him his latest version of a celebration march that would be performed in the great hall of Carinstein Castle when he was restored to his lands.

Uncle Alfonso canceled his lesson because the monkey had eaten something that disagreed with him.

After lunch came the worst part of the day, because Karil had to spend the afternoon with Carlotta. He had asked if he could go out alone; St. James’s Park was only five minutes’ walk away, but the idea had been greeted with horror.

“People like us must never go out alone. It is unheard of — and no footman can be spared,” he was told.

So he had a drive in the Daimler past the shops with Cousin Frederica and Carlotta, followed by tea with the aged Baroness Roditzky in her stifling apartment — and then back to what Karil was beginning to think of as his prison.

After dinner the silver salver was brought in again, but Karil scarcely glanced at it. He had written a last letter a week ago, trying desperately not to sound sorry for himself, and again there had been no reply. Now he had really given up; he was not going to grovel and beg for friendship.

As he was undressing he felt the quartz pebble in his trouser pocket, and for a moment he was back in Bergania, on the mountain, with Tally saying, “Is it to remind you?”

What were they doing now, those people who had helped him and made him feel that life could be a splendid thing?

Well, he would never know.

Karil turned out the light and pulled aside the curtains. Could it be that the duke was right, and his uncles also? His father’s memory was all he had left now, alone as he was, and he began to wonder whether in his own longing to live a life without power or pomp was betraying him. Did he really have a duty to try to follow in his father’s footsteps? Were the plans he had made on the journey just a selfish dream?

Soldiers did their duty. Was he perhaps just shirking his?

There was a short cry from the homesick monkey, an oath as someone stumbled over Pom-Pom, and then silence.

“Oh, why did you have to die?” asked Karil of his father.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Matteo’s Visit

Everyone did their best to carry on as usual that first term of the war. O’Hanrahan, who was very shortsighted and did not expect to be called up, said that in his view the most useful thing to be done about the threat from Hitler was for the children to immerse themselves in the treasures of English literature. The class had decided definitely to turn the story of Persephone into a play. They would work on the script this term, but the actual performance would be the following term, at Easter, which was suitable because it was after all a story about rebirth and regeneration. The children found it soothing that O’Hanrahan was sure that there really would be an Easter term and that the world would not have gone up in smoke before then. At the same time they were already getting angry with Julia, who said again that she absolutely would not play the leading part.

“Does someone have to die before you stop skulking in corners?” said Tally furiously. “There were a hundred people up on the hill when you recited that poem and you didn’t seem to mind that.”

“That was different,” said Julia. “This would be in a theater.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” said Barney angrily. “It would be in a school hall with a stage — if it gets that far.”

Needless to say, Verity did not try to persuade Julia. She was already planning what to wear while being carried off into the Underworld kicking and screaming.

Julia’s mother had sent the usual box of chocolates, and the usual note, put in by the shop, sending lots and lots of love, but there was no news about her new film.

“I’m really worried about her,” Julia said, and Tally did her best not to snarl.

Magda had lost the whisk that the aunts had sent to froth up her cocoa, and she was being persecuted by the Delderton air-raid warden, who kept the pub in the village and came up each night to check the blackout at the school.

“I can see chinks!” he would shout at Magda. “There are chinks of light coming from your windows.”

“What chinks?” Magda would cry, running distractedly up and down the corridor. “Where are the chinks?”

And the children would leave their homework and go chink-hunting in the twenty rooms of Blue House.

Clemmy, usually so serene and good-tempered, was having a hard time with the new gardener who had replaced the trusty man she had worked with up to now and who had volunteered for the air force.

“What are you doing?” she shouted at the young lad, who was pouring poison on a spinach bed to kill the snails, and she dragged him indoors to look at the beautiful striations on a snail shell under a magnifying glass before ordering him to pick off the offending animals one by one and transport them to a patch of woodland nearby.

And all the time Daley brooded over the latest letter from the founders in America, trying to make the final decision about whether to evacuate the school. With one stroke of the pen he could secure the safety of all those in his care. The Americans were famously hospitable and friendly, and the founders were ready to do everything to smooth his path.

Yet did he really want to forsake his country now? Was that what he wanted for the children? He imagined the buildings empty, the grass in the courtyard growing between the stones, the cedar tree untrimmed. Or the army would move in — they would be glad of the building.

“I must decide,” he said wearily and reached for the aspirin bottle yet again.

Tally, meanwhile, threw herself into all the activities that were going on. She helped Clemmy resettle the mice that were caught in the kitchen. She dealt with Kit when he said he didn’t want to be an erupting seedpod in Armelle’s drama class, and she stirred Josie’s cauldron of whatever wort they were using till her arms ached.

But sometimes she went off on her own into the woods and made things she had not made since she was six years old: little houses of sticks and interlacing leaves which a worm might come and live in if he felt so inclined, or a necklace of scarlet berries which she did not put on but left lying in the grass. Or she would wander over to the library after supper and Julia would find her bent over a book of those phrases that are supposed to help people with their lives. Sayings like: “You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair.”

“Well, how goes it?” asked Matteo as Tally came to his room for her tutorial. “Any problems?”

“No, not really. I’m all right.”

Matteo looked at her. He knew that she was not all right and he knew why. The other members of staff, though they watched over Tally with concern, were sure she would soon get over her disappointment.

It was a mistake that he did not make. He and Johannes had met when they were seven years old and they had known in an instant that they were going to be friends. Till Matteo was in his twenties his life had been bound up with that of the king — his best ideas and most selfless visions of the future had come from this relationship — and when he cut himself off and stormed away from Bergania some part of him had died.

His friendship with Johannes had lasted for fifteen years. Tally and Karil had known each other only for a few days, but that made no difference. Sometimes you meet someone — and it can be at any age or time — with whom you should go forward into the future. All the children had warmed to Karil, but for Tally the friendship had been special. She had believed totally in Karil and his wish to live a life that was honorable and free — and she believed that in this life she had a part to play. Now the ground had gone from under her feet. She was not the sort of child to pine, but Karil’s silence had hurt her very deeply.

Matteo glanced at the sackbut propped up in a corner of the room. He had not played it since he came back from Bergania.

Then he said, “Karil is safe, I can tell you that. Nothing bad has happened to him. He is with his family.”

Would this make it better for her? In one way yes, but in another way no. She must surely think that an able-bodied boy could write a letter and put it in a box.

There were other things he kept to himself: his visit to a lawyer who told him that there was nothing legal he could do to take Karil away from his grandfather; and the message he had sent to old von Arkel, who was supposed to have fled Bergania and be on his way to England.

Two days later a letter arrived from the War Office addressed to Matteo and he took it to Daley to ask for leave to go to London.

Even though the letter had been seen only by Matteo and the head, its contents mysteriously went around the school and everybody knew that Matteo had been summoned.

“They’ll want him to do something very important and secret,” said Tod. “Maybe they’ll recruit him to be a spy — he speaks enough languages.”

“Or they’ll drop him behind enemy lines by parachute,” suggested Borro.

Barney thought they might want him to be a code breaker. “That wouldn’t be much fun: you just sit in a sealed house somewhere and decipher things, but it’s terribly important.”

Matteo, needless to say, showed no inclination to discuss his coming visit, and at the end of the week he took the train to Paddington.

The children had said good-bye to him with a mixture of pride at the thought of having a teacher who might be facing a heroic fate and sadness at the thought of losing him. But when he returned it was in such a vile temper that the idea of doing without him seemed an excellent idea.

He came back in the afternoon, in time to give his biology class, and when they came out of it the children were stunned.

Matteo had stamped up and down the classroom reciting facts about an animal called amphioxus in a manner which would not have disgraced Smith, the teacher Tally had first mistaken for him. He told them to copy things out of a book, he gave them a test on the lesson he had just given and, unbelievably, for homework set them an essay that had to be at least three pages long.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked Barney, utterly bewildered. “He never sets tests except if we have to sit a state exam.”

“And he thinks amphioxus is a waste of time,” said Borro. “I’ve heard him say so. It’s an animal that examiners mind about but nobody else.”

This was true. Matteo had classified a group of what he called formaldehyde animals: creatures that lived in pickle for the benefit of lazy teachers and no one else.

“Something must really be troubling him,” said Tally. “Perhaps the War Office is sending him to certain death and he’s so upset he can’t remember how to teach properly.”

She was right, up to a point. Something was troubling Matteo, but it was not his interview with the War Office, which had been courteous and brief. They were recruiting a body of men who spoke several European languages for a mission behind enemy lines, the details of which were still being worked out. This first interview was simply to discover whether Matteo would be willing to risk his life in such an enterprise, and when he had said that he would, the conversation had turned to the position in Bergania and ended with an excellent dinner in the Travelers Club.

If Matteo had then returned to Delderton, the children in his class would not have been writing an essay on amphioxus or avoiding him when they met him in the courtyard, but he had not. After a night with a friend he had made his way to Rottingdene House, given his name to the sentry in the box guarding the front door, and rung the bell.

While he waited he looked up at the gloomy gray building with its shrouded windows where Karil now lived. The flag with the duke’s crest hung limply from the top of the flagpole, so the owner was at home.

The door was opened by a footman in an ornate but shabby livery of purple and tarnished gold.

Matteo presented his card. “I would like to see Prince Karil, please.”

The footman’s eyes flickered. “The prince is not at home,” he said.

“Very well. Then I would like to see the Duke of Rottingdene.”

“The duke never sees anyone without an appointment.”

Matteo took a step forward. He did not raise his arm, he scarcely moved a muscle, but the footman retreated.

“I will go and see.”

He returned and said, “His Grace will see you for five minutes only. He has an engagement.”

Matteo followed the footman up a broad staircase with a carpet patterned in fleurs-de-lis. Everything was both shabby and oppressive, and there was a smell of some ointment that Matteo, who did not suffer from rheumatism, could not identify.

The duke’s study was even darker and gloomier than the rest of the house. All the wall space that was not taken up by antlers was covered in bad paintings of horses: pedigree hunters with flaring nostrils and rolling eyes. The duke had bred these on his estate in Northumberland in his younger days. Under the painting of a particularly fearsome hunter he read the name ORION. It was this horse which the duke had had shipped out to Bergania to his daughter Alice as a birthday present. The horse had kicked his stable to pieces and thrown his groom, but Alice had been too afraid of her father not to ride it. If it wasn’t for Orion, Karil’s mother would still be alive.

The duke, sitting behind a claw-foot desk, did not trouble to rise or offer his hand.

“Since you insist on seeing me, I want to make one thing clear. You may have brought Karil to England but this does not give you any right now to interfere in his life. Karil will live here under my roof until he is ready to return to Bergania as the country’s rightful king.”

Matteo tried to steady himself.

“I am perfectly aware that as his grandfather you have the right to determine Karil’s upbringing. The law is on your side, I don’t dispute that. But his father’s dying words to me were about Karil. He asked me to look after him. If I can’t do that, I would at least like to show the boy that I am still here as his friend.”

The duke tried to rise from his chair, collapsed and tried again. His gnarled red hands grasped the sides of the desk.

“His friend!” he spat. “Do you seriously imagine that I would allow my grandson to be friends with an outlaw, a vagabond, a man who travels with a group of mad children without discipline or restraint? You think I know nothing about your journey here but the Countess Frederica has given me details of behavior that makes the blood run cold.”

“Did she perhaps also tell you that we were escaping from men who would have killed your grandson without compunction?”

“I do not deny all that — it is because of this that I admitted you to my house instead of having you thrown out. But you will not come here again. Not ever. An Englishman’s home is his castle, as you are aware, and if I see you here again I will have you evicted and call the police. Moreover, I know something about your past. You were responsible for the king’s early escapades, a bad influence from the start. It was because of you that Johannes wanted to be one of those namby-pamby rulers who pretend that a king can consult his people. A king is a king, an absolute ruler, and one of my tasks before I die is to see that Karil does not forget this.”

For a moment Matteo saw red. He was within an ace of springing forward and fastening his hands around the raddled throat of the old bully. But he managed to get control of himself. There was one thing he still had to do, and it meant being polite when he wanted to kill.

“I shall abide by your decision,” he said, “but I would like to see Karil once to say good-bye. I’m going off to war soon and I may not return.”

“Karil is not at home,” lied the duke.

“I am not in a hurry. I will wait till he returns.”

“No, you won’t,” screeched the duke. He was suddenly crimson, a pulse going in his throat. “You will leave my house this instant.” He pressed a bell on his desk and the footman who had admitted Matteo appeared. “Get Henry and show this man out. Make sure the door is bolted behind him. Hurry.”

During that moment while Matteo waited for the second footman, he felt that anything would be worthwhile — prison, a hangman’s noose — if he could kill the panting, slobbering tyrant glaring at him from behind his desk. He had to call up the image of Karil exposed to scandal and horror to prevent himself from leaping on his enemy.

The footmen came just in time — feeble lackeys daunted by their instructions. Matteo knocked away the arm of the first one, pushed the second one hard against the wall — and left the building.

The hour Matteo spent in the station waiting for the train back to Delderton was one of the darkest of his life. He saw Johannes’s face turned to his, begging him to look after his son. Well, this was how he had looked after Karil. Left him with a power-mad imbecile who would train him to be the kind of tyrant Europe would disgorge in an instant after the war. Karil abandoned in that wretched dark house — and Matteo was powerless. He had betrayed Johannes by leaving Bergania. Now he had betrayed his son.

His rage against himself and the duke only grew on the journey back to school. He gave his lesson on the life history of amphioxus in a black cloud of fury that embraced everything and everyone on earth — and afterward could not recall what he had said.

It was two days before any of the children dared to approach him. Then suddenly he was himself again — and at dawn on the third day he got everybody out of bed to go and look at a badger sett by the river where three cubs were hunting for wasps’ nests.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE The Duke Is Enraged

By the beginning of November shortages and restrictions caused by the war were beginning to bite, and among the things that were in short supply was petrol for private motoring.

The duke needed the Daimler to drive to the Whitehall Bank, of which he was a director, so that the afternoon outings Karil took with Carlotta and the Scold became even shorter and less interesting. As often as not now they spent the time taking tea with whatever family lived close by and was considered worthy of knowing the duke of Rottingdene and his dependents.

Sometimes they even went on foot, with one of the servants walking behind them, to whatever entertainment was suitable, and free.

And one of these places was the National Portrait Gallery. The sides of the building were sandbagged and only three of the galleries were open, but it was a perfectly respectable place, with no danger of seeing pictures of people with nothing on, and would provide, the Scold thought, suitable history lessons for Karil and Carlotta since the paintings were mainly of people who were both important and dead.

For Karil the hour they spent there was interesting. He had expected to see mostly kings and statesmen and governors of the far-flung empire, but he found faces that intrigued him. There were scientists and explorers and other people who had done real things: Florence Nightingale, who had nursed the dying soldiers in the Crimean War, and David Livingstone, who had beaten his way through the African jungle looking for the source of the Nile, and Shelley, who had written great poems about freedom before meeting his death at sea.

Karil had thought that Carlotta would be bored, but she came out with a rapt expression and at first she did not answer when they spoke to her, for the truth was that she had had an inspiration.

They had passed a number of paintings of little girls — the daughters of noblemen and wealthy citizens from all over the land. The girls in the pictures wore sumptuous clothes and sat on thronelike chairs — and their portraits were set in heavy golden frames — yet none of them was more important or had a brighter future than she had herself.

To Carlotta, as she came down the steps of the gallery, it was absolutely clear. She, too, had to have her portrait painted, and soon. It would be a surprise for Karil — a Christmas present perhaps — and when she returned with Karil to Bergania the picture would hang in the palace.

First, though, she had to persuade her parents.

“I’m afraid that would cost too much, my little kitten,” said her father as she sat on his knee and played with his mustache.

“Oh please, Papa,” she wheedled. “It would be such a nice present for Karil. Think how pleased he would be.”

“I know, my angel, but really it isn’t necessary, since Karil is here now and can look at you every day.”

“But I want it to happen. I want it. Royal people always have their portraits painted.”

“You’ve no idea how much a good painter would charge, and a bad one wouldn’t do justice to my sweetheart,” said the archduke, tweaking her ringlets.

But Carlotta didn’t want to have her ringlets tweaked, she wanted to have them painted.

“I’m being very unselfish,” she pointed out, “because you have to sit very still to be painted, and you can get quite uncomfortable; and if I can promise to sit still, then at least you and Mama should find the money. Or Aunt Millicent — she’s got a diamond-studded garter left. I know because her maid told me so.”

Her father stood firm for several days, and then Carlotta began to refuse her food. She did not refuse it completely but often she had only one bun for tea, or a single helping of custard with her pudding, sighing ostentatiously and saying she did not feel well.

“Why can’t we sell Pom-Pom if he’s got such an important pedigree?” she said. “He’ll never get to Brazil now that there’s a war, and anyway he’s far too old to be a father.”

The old princess began to lift Pom-Pom out of Carlotta’s way when she came near him, and the other relatives hid the few valuables they still had as best they could. But when Carlotta had three biscuits instead of four for her mid-morning snack her mother became alarmed. She shut herself up into her bedroom and turned out her drawers and her underclothes and her makeup boxes. There was hardly any jewelry left, but she did find one shoe buckle studded with sapphires. She had been saving it for emergencies, but Carlotta going off her food was a kind of emergency. There was no need to sell it yet — the portrait might not turn out satisfactory or the artist might be persuaded that painting Carlotta von Carinstein was enough of an honor to undertake the work without payment, but at least they could get the portrait underway.

As soon as she had what she wanted, Carlotta got down to the problem of what to wear. Since the picture was to be a surprise for Karil she could not consult him, but she appeared every few hours in a different dress: pink with a broderie-anglaise collar, yellow with appliquéd buttercups, green with a row of velvet bows — and pirouetted in front of mirrors or asked advice from her relatives, which she instantly ignored. Sometimes she thought she would look best holding something — a kitten perhaps, or a bunch of flowers, but there were no flowers to be had in that dark house, and the kitten she brought up from the servants’ quarters scratched and refused to sit still, so she prowled through the rooms of the aunts and the governesses, seeing what she could beg or borrow or simply steal. Bracelets tinkled on her wrists, glittering headbands appeared on her hair, necklaces circled her plump neck — only to be rejected as not good enough.

“I think it would be best if I sat in that big chair in the Red Salon,” she said. “If it was draped in brocade it would look almost like a throne.”

The next thing was to choose a painter and Uncle Alfonso, who was artistic because of designing all his uniforms, went to his club and asked around, and came back with the name of an artist who was highly thought of and not too expensive.

The painter was approached and said he would do it — and Carlotta, for a few days, was thoroughly happy and as nearly good as she was able.

Karil, on the other hand, was in disgrace. The misery of being shut indoors all day was more than he could bear and one morning, when the servants were busy, he had slipped out of the back door and into the street.

The next two hours were spent blissfully alone in the city that was now his home and that so far he had hardly seen.

He wandered through St. James’s Park, enjoying the sight of the waterfowl and watching men digging trenches. There had been a group of people filling sandbags and Karil had stayed to help them for a while; they had been friendly and cheerful. He passed Buckingham Palace, but the sight of the enormous building in which he knew the two little princesses were incarcerated lowered his spirits, and he had made his way up Whitehall and stood in Piccadilly, with its shrouded fountain, and drank in the bustle, the traffic, the advertisements… At last for a while he was free and part of the real world.

He would have slipped back again unnoticed — the servants would not have betrayed him — but Carlotta had been looking for him, and when he returned she was there with her shocked accusations.

“You know that people like us aren’t supposed to go out alone,” she said. “I’m afraid Grandfather is very angry.”

And Grandfather was.

“You don’t seem to understand, Karil, that you are not like other people. You are a future king and—”

“No.” The cry came from Karil without him being aware of it. “I’m not… I’m just a person. No one knows what will happen in Bergania — even if Hitler is defeated the people might not want a king again and anyway it could be years. I’ve got to have some air… I’ve got to learn something. I can’t live like this.”

“Can’t!” roared the duke, and a shower of spittle came from his mouth. “How dare you defy me? While you are under my roof you will do exactly as I order.” His great hands gripped Karil’s shoulders like a vice. “From now on I shall see to it that you are watched at all times. What’s more, you will be locked into your bedroom at night.”

“No! Please. I’ve never been locked in. My father never punished me like that.”

“It would have been better if he had,” said the duke — and he sent for the servants straightaway and gave his instructions.

Under this regime, Karil became more and more desperate. He even wondered if he was beginning to lose his reason — for he had been sure that he had seen Matteo, a few days earlier, walking across the courtyard away from the house. He had been standing at an upstairs window, and by the time he’d managed to pull back the curtains and struggled with the heavy sash cords, the man had gone.

“Was Matteo here?” he had asked his grandfather — and the duke had scowled and told him not to be stupid.

“The sooner you realize that those vagabonds you came over with have forgotten you, the better,” he said.

Karil did realize it. He was too proud to show his grief, but his body began to let him down. He developed a cough that did not go away, he lost weight, and found it difficult to sleep.

At night, the sound of the key turning in the lock seemed to set the seal on a life to be lived without love, or endeavor, or hope.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR The Painting

It was not only David Prosser who was in love with Clemmy. The children at Delderton were used to seeing young men standing outside the school with their motorbikes, hoping she would go out with them. But Clemmy had a boyfriend to whom she was absolutely faithful. She had known him since she started work as a model and she loved not only him but his work. Francis Lakeland was a landscape painter who did quiet and very beautiful paintings of the countryside. People liked these and they were shown in exhibitions, but no one bought them very much because they were too peaceful and didn’t have anybody being set on fire or dismembered or sitting with their mouth open, screaming.

So, to make some money, Francis Lakeland took on commissions to paint portraits of society people who wanted their wives and daughters to look beautiful.

A week after half term, Clemmy had a letter from Francis in which he asked her to come up to London for a weekend because he expected to be called up for the army.

“It won’t be straightaway,” he wrote, “but I want to see you badly and I need to talk to you about a piece of work I’ve been asked to do.”

The idea of Francis in the army made Clemmy’s stomach crunch up in a most alarming way. He was a gentle, scholarly man, serious about his work but funny about everything else. It wasn’t easy to think of him as a soldier.

All housemothers had a free weekend each month, and a week after she got his letter Clemmy arrived in London. She and Francis wandered hand in hand through the city and it was when they were sitting in one of their favorite places, a bench in St. James’s churchyard in Piccadilly, that Francis told her about his commission to paint Carlotta von Carinstein, the daughter of an exiled archduke.

“Oh Francis, do you have to?” asked Clemmy, for she knew how much he disliked the fawning and flattery that went with painting the children of rich and snobbish people.

“I don’t have to — but the money would be useful. Only I have to go tomorrow and set it up and I wondered if you could possibly come along and pretend to be my assistant. She’s supposed to be an absolute horror and you know how good you are with children.”

“Yes, of course I’ll come. Where does she live?”

“It’s a place called Rottingdene House — a great gloomy mansion. Her grandfather’s the Duke of Rottingdene — why, what’s the matter?”

Clemmy had frowned. She knew the name of Rottingdene House only too well. The children had spoken of it when they came back from Bergania — and she could see the name now on the envelopes that Tally left for the postman.

And she didn’t want to go there. She understood how easy it must have been for Karil to get drawn back into his former life, but he had hurt his friends.

“What is it?” asked Francis.

“Nothing. It’s all right. Of course I’ll come.”

It would be as well to keep an eye on Francis, she thought. He had a temper and had walked out of more than one sitting when his subjects had thrown their weight about.

And after all, they were most unlikely to meet the prince: painters in those sorts of places were not usually admitted by the front door.

So the following day, carrying Francis’s easel and his box of paints, they made their way down Pall Mall toward Rottingdene House.

As Clemmy had expected, they were shown in by the back door and told to wait in a small cold lobby. No one offered them a cup of tea or suggested that they should sit down, and they saw no member of the household. When they had waited for nearly half an hour, they were shown into a stuffy and overfurnished drawing room and into the presence of Carlotta’s mother, the Archduchess of Carinstein.

“My daughter is preparing herself,” she announced. “She will be with you in five minutes.”

Again they waited — not for five minutes, but for fifteen. Then Carlotta swept in, followed by one of the mournful governesses, and stretched out her hand so that Francis could bow over it. At the same time her eyes swiveled over to Clemmy, waiting for her curtsy.

She waited in vain. The painter said, “Good morning”; his assistant smiled — and that was all. It was an outrage, and for a moment Carlotta thought of sweeping out again. But the vision of her picture framed in gold on the wall of the Berganian palace stopped her, and she walked over to a large carved chair, draped in a piece of brocade.

“This is where I’m going to sit,” she informed them.

She had decided in the end to be angelic, and wore a white lace dress and a white ribbon in her hair.

“I’m afraid there won’t be enough light with the chair at that angle,” said Francis. “It will have to be moved closer to the window.”

Carlotta scowled, but she allowed him to adjust the chair. Then she got into it, clutched the chair arms on either side and stared at Francis.

“It doesn’t matter what you wear today, Carlotta,” said the painter, “because I’m only doing the preliminary sketches, but next time I don’t want you to wear a white dress. I’d like you to wear blue… or yellow.”

“I always wear white dresses,” said Carlotta, “when I’m being photographed.”

“But you’re not being photographed. You’re being painted,” said Francis.

Carlotta’s mouth shut in a tight line. “I don’t see why you should tell me what to wear.”

Clemmy now moved toward Carlotta. “You see, Mr. Lakeland has noticed how beautifully a blue dress would take up the color of your eyes. Your eyes are a most unusual blue — it’s more of an azure or ultramarine. On the other hand, yellow would blend with your hair. Your hair is such a rich blond — not boringly flaxen. Of course you can wear white — only it is… well… a bit ordinary.”

“All right,” said Carlotta. She waved her hand at the governess. “Go and fetch the yellow organdie,” she ordered, “and the blue velvet. The one with the embroidered collar.”

The governess hurried away and came back with the two dresses on her arm.

“There’s no need to change this time,” said Francis. “Just tell me which one you’d prefer to wear and then I can block out the color tones before I go.”

“I’ll wear the blue.”

She sat back in the chair and Francis began to sketch the outlines of her face and arms.

“That drape is much too fussy,” he said to Clemmy. “I’ll have the chair as it is.”

“I won’t sit on a bare chair,” said Carlotta.

“But surely you don’t want people to look at the drapes rather than at your face?” said Clemmy, deftly removing the brocade. She was getting a little bit worried about Francis.

“Could you perhaps turn your head a little,” he said, taking up his sketchbook. “Just find a position that’s natural and comfortable.”

“I don’t want to be natural,” said Carlotta. “People like me aren’t meant to look natural; they’re meant to look important.”

But she allowed Francis to turn her head aside, and for a short time she sat still. Then she began to wriggle and kick the legs of the chair and say she was tired.

“You’ve done very well,” said Clemmy. “Have a good stretch and then you can come back for a bit longer.”

But when she sat down again Carlotta said that her foot had gone to sleep and she didn’t want to sit with her head tilted, because people wouldn’t see all of her face.

“You see, Carlotta,” said Clemmy soothingly, “this painting will be shown for hundreds and hundreds of years. People will look at it and say how lucky the prince of Bergania is to have such a beautiful friend. You will be remembered long after you’re dead and—”

“I don’t care,” said Carlotta. “My shoulder’s stiff and I’m bored.”

“Shall I tell you a story?”

“What sort of a story? Will it be about me?”

Clemmy sighed and racked her brains. The kind of story that ordinary little girls might like, about going to live in a castle with a regiment of soldiers to salute her, would hardly satisfy Carlotta, who probably thought that all this was going to befall her in any case. So perhaps a film-star story… a story about being discovered and taken to Hollywood like Shirley Temple, who was driven everywhere in a white Rolls-Royce and was a millionairess at the age of seven. It was Clemmy’s least-favorite topic but Francis, who had reached for his paints, shot her a look of gratitude, and she cleared her throat and began.

“Once upon a time…”

While Clemmy was telling her story, adding more and more preposterous details, Karil was walking through St. James’s Park, supporting the old Princess Natalia, who was pulling Pom-Pom along on his lead. On the other side of the princess was the Scold, and ten paces behind came the smallest and most useless of the duke’s footmen, the knock-kneed George. Because he did not trust George to restrain Karil, the duke had given the Scold a whistle to blow in case the boy showed signs of running off.

It was almost funny, thought Karil, how awful it was, this slow procession through the dank and chilly park. The old princess had arthritis and winced when she put her right foot on the ground; Pom-Pom had a cold, which made it even more difficult than usual for him to breathe through his squashed-up nose, and George had been turned down by one of the housemaids and stared ahead of him, seeing nothing but his sorrow.

The Scold had planned the afternoon carefully. They must stay out till four o’clock at least so that Carlotta’s surprise was not spoiled. The dear girl was keen that Karil should suspect nothing and be overjoyed when he received her portrait at Christmas, and this meant prolonging the walk for as long as the old princess could stay on her feet — and after that finding somewhere where they could shelter.

They had not walked far when the princess collapsed onto a damp bench.

“You had better take Pom-Pom, Karil,” she said. “I must rest. My heart is not good.” She sighed deeply. “Oh, when will the messenger come?”

“He will come soon, I’m sure,” said Karil.

Almost every day he had to listen to the old lady as she told him about Pom-Pom’s betrothed, the only other Outer Mongolian pedestal dog in the world, who had been taken to Brazil by a Russian count now working as a stevedore on the docks in Rio de Janeiro. A messenger would come to fetch Pom-Pom, Princess Natalia had told him; puppies would be born — and the ancient line of dogs bred by the great khans would be continued.

“And then I can die!” was how the story always ended.

Karil would have liked to let Pom-Pom off the lead — it seemed to him all wrong that a dog bred by the great khans of the Mongolian steppes should be pulled along like a prisoner. Such dogs had been prized beyond rubies; they were offered as living hot-water bottles to honored palace visitors whose feet were cold; they traveled in the khans’ own saddlebags when the rulers rode to war — lifted in and out by their topknot. And now the last survivor of this honorable race had to pad through the muddy paths of a London park and lift his leg against soiled lampposts.

After a while the princess struggled to her feet and they set off for another laborious walk of a hundred yards or so.

“I have heard that old Simonova Ravinsky has died,” said the old lady presently. “Ridiculous! She was only eighty-three.”

The Scold agreed that it was indeed ridiculous and they managed to cross a small bridge across a ditch. The park, on this wretched day, was almost empty — even the waterbirds were silent. Only Pom-Pom’s wheezing could be heard above the gathering wind.

“And they say that Count Suratov is turning an unpleasant color,” Princess Natalia went on.

“What sort of a color?” inquired the Scold.

“Purple,” pronounced the old lady.

“That is a bad sign, certainly,” said the Countess Frederica. “Turning purple is definitely a bad sign.”

After three-quarters of an hour they reached a small pavilion. It was open to the weather, but at least there was a roof to shut out the rain that was beginning to fall. The Scold looked at her watch. Another hour at least before they could return.

They sat on damp, gilt-legged chairs and watched the rain fall in gray strings into the lake.

The footman shivered and took up his position at a suitable distance. It was going to be a long afternoon.

But now suddenly there was a diversion.

Two rough-looking men in shabby raincoats made their way up the steps. One had a heavy dark beard and wore a battered hat pulled down low. The other was younger, with a chin full of stubble and burning black eyes.

They lurched into the pavilion, hiccuped a few times, and stopped to stare. Then they bent down to pat Pom-Pom.

“Nice little doggy,” said the bearded man. “Come along then. Come to Jack.”

Pom-Pom rolled his bloodshot eyes and rumbled in his throat.

“Now then,” said the man, “I’m not going to hurt you…”

He squatted down on his haunches and tried to pull the dog toward him.

“Careful,” said his companion. “He might bite you.”

“No, he wouldn’t. Dogs don’t hurt me, not ever.”

He belched loudly and tugged at Pom-Pom’s topknot.

The next moment there was a piercing scream as the old princess rose from her chair. “Anarchists!” she screeched. “Anarchists. They will cut him up and eat him!”

“No, no,” said the Scold. “I’m sure they’re just tramps.” And to the two men: “Be off with you. Go away. Shoo!”

But the men, who were too drunk to understand, showed no sign of moving. They continued to sway slightly and tell Pom-Pom that he was a nice little doggy.

“I know anarchists,” shrieked Princess Natalia. “In Russia they were everywhere! They will eat my Pom-Pom, and he will never become a father in Brazil! Quick, quick, we must take him home.”

“I’ll take him,” said Karil.

“No, no!” cried the Scold. “You can’t go back now; you’ll spoil Carlotta’s surprise.”

But Karil was getting bored with the fuss about Carlotta’s surprise. “I know all about the portrait,” he said. “I’ve known about it for ages, but I’ll be careful to make sure she doesn’t see me.”

“We must get the police… the police!” shrieked the old lady. She took a step backward, sending her chair crashing against the metal table, and the tramps, disgusted by the commotion, shuffled out into the rain.

“Silly old geezer,” one of them muttered.

But the Princess Natalia was now in the grip of fully fledged hysterics. “They have gone to fetch bombs,” she cried. “They will explode him and when the messenger comes he will be dead! He must go home!”

“George,” called the Countess Frederica, and the footman who had been huddled into his overcoat moved reluctantly toward her. “Pick up the dog and hurry back to the house with him.”

“He’ll bite me,” said the footman. “He doesn’t like me and he’s all upset now. He’ll bite, as sure as eggs is eggs.”

And certainly Pom-Pom did not look friendly. He had not enjoyed having his topknot pulled by unkempt strangers. The hair on his back was standing up and his growls came thick and fast.

“Don’t be such a coward,” snapped the countess, and George reluctantly bent down and then straightened himself with a cry, nursing his hand.

“I told you, the rotten little cur,” he muttered.

But Karil had had enough.

“Come on, Pom-Pom,” he said. He coiled up the lead, scooped up the little dog, and ran toward the gates of the park.

“Stop, Karil. Stop!” called the countess. She fumbled for her whistle but it had got caught under her collar.

And Karil, running like the wind, had vanished behind a clump of trees.

While Clemmy went on with her story, adding an audience of screaming fans and a bed draped in ostrich feathers, Carlotta was reasonably quiet, but as soon as it was finished she leaped up and said she’d changed her mind.

“I don’t want to wear the blue dress. I want to wear the yellow one.”

Francis, who had started blocking in the color tones, tore a leaf out of his sketchbook and let it drop.

“Very well. But there must be no more changes after this. I have to get to a particular point today or I can’t promise to get your painting done in time.”

For a few moments Carlotta was quiet — then she began to fidget again. “I’m bored,” she said, “and I don’t want to sit with my head turned like this because people won’t see my ringlets. I’m going to sit the way I was before, looking straight ahead.”

Francis put down his palette. “I think you’d better make up your mind, Carlotta,” he said quietly, “because if you want me to paint your picture, you’d better make some effort to cooperate.”

At the other end of the room the archduchess and the mournful governess exchanged anxious looks, but it was too late. Carlotta was heading for one of her famous tantrums.

“How dare you talk to me like that?” she shouted. “I won’t be told what to do by common people.”

Blind with ill temper she leaped to her feet, knocking over Francis’s easel, and rushed from the room, followed by her mother and the governess, both uttering bleating cries.

Francis put down his palette.

“I’m going to find the duke — I’m not going on with this,” he said.

Clemmy did not try to stop him. Alone in the room, she knelt down and began to clear up the mess, which was considerable. The easel had dislodged the box of paints and tubes of color had spilled onto the floor; there was a splash of crimson on the carpet.

She had been working for a few minutes when a quiet voice said, “Can I help?”—and she looked up to see a boy of about twelve standing in the doorway.

Karil, having shut Pom-Pom into the old princess’s room, had heard the familiar sound of Carlotta drumming her heels on the floor and made his way to a quieter part of the house.

Now he moved forward to see if he could be of use, and as he did so the kneeling woman got to her feet. Her marvelous russet hair was loose, and as she shook it back from her face it was as though the dark room had acquired its own sun.

But it wasn’t her beauty that held him spellbound — it was that she was familiar. He had seen her before.

“Oh, but I know who you are. You’re Clemmy — you have to be! I saw you in Zurich at the cheese tasting. It was such a lovely picture.”

And suddenly he was back there among his friends in a world that had held danger, but also friendship and loyalty and hope. And surprising himself as much as her, he burst into tears.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” she said, stretching out her arms to him, and she knew in that instant that he had not betrayed his friends, that he was wretchedly unhappy and that the truth lay elsewhere.

“I can’t understand why they didn’t write,” Karil sobbed. “I wrote and wrote and there wasn’t a single word back. They seemed to be my friends and then they just dropped me — even Tally. And Matteo, too. They might as well have let me go to Colditz. I really believed in them.”

Clemmy pushed his hair back from his forehead and waited while he found his handkerchief.

“Oh, Karil, you’re such an idiot! How could you think that? You knew them. I think Tally must have written you a hundred letters. Magda found her again and again after lights out, scribbling and scribbling. The others, too, but when they didn’t hear anything they thought you’d become too grand for them.”

“They couldn’t have thought that! They should have trusted me.”

“Yes. And you should have trusted them.” But Clemmy was aware that his hurt, here in this wretched place, must have been even greater than Tally’s. “Matteo even came here to try to see you,” she went on. “Did they tell you?”

He shook his head. “I thought I saw him, but when I asked my grandfather he said it wasn’t him.” He wiped his eyes and put his handkerchief away. “When I didn’t hear anything from Delderton I thought maybe it was a sign that I must forget about trying to lead my own life. That I have to follow in my father’s footsteps and learn to be a king… that that’s what he wanted…”

“Is that what they say? That your father would have wanted that? ”

“All the time.”

Clemmy looked down into his face. “Karil, your father was a good man, I’m sure of that. Matteo has talked to me about him a lot since he came back from Bergania. I saw a picture of him once in a gallery; I’ve never forgotten his face. That was a man who wanted one thing and one thing only for his son — and I’ll swear to that with my last breath.”

Karil’s eyes held hers.

“What? What would he have wanted for his son?”

“That he should be happy. That he should follow his star.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Karil Sees His Way

Are you feeling all right, Karil?” asked Countess Frederica nervously.

Karil looked up from his plate of lumpy breakfast porridge.

“Yes, thank you. I’m absolutely all right. I’m fine.”

The Scold frowned. That was what was worrying her. Karil looked different; he had not smiled like that since before his father’s death. She was pleased of course, but it was… strange.

“Your cough seems better,” said Aunt Millicent, the kindest of the aunts.

Karil nodded and agreed that his cough was better, and the two women exchanged puzzled glances.

For really it was extraordinary that a bad cough should almost disappear in twenty-four hours, and it wasn’t just unlikely but impossible that Karil, in that short time, could have got fatter — yet the boy’s face had completely lost its pinched and undernourished look.

Yet nothing, surely, had changed. Karil had not been there the day before when Carlotta had stamped out of the room and thrown over the easel of the painter who had treated her so rudely. By the time the Scold returned from the park Karil was in his room, and since then his routine had been as usual. Yet something was making her uneasy and she went on peering at him throughout the meal.

But nothing could touch Karil. He was in a different universe since he had talked to Clemmy. He could have leaped into the air and stayed there, or climbed the church steeple outside his window without a backward look. It seemed to him that the waterbirds in the park no longer screeched, they sang; the grass was greener and the sky a brighter blue. Because every moment there was a voice inside him saying, “Your friends have remembered you.”

The first day and the second after Clemmy’s visit, Karil was too happy to consider any plan of action, but on the third day he set his mind to finding out what had happened to the letters he had written to Delderton and those his friends had written to him.

Somebody had deliberately destroyed them — but who?

The duke himself? Would he have acted in secret? Or the Scold? No, she was strict but not deceitful like that. Surely they would just have told him that letters were forbidden? Karil was in constant trouble for talking to the servants but it was the servants who could help him — and he waited till he could get George alone, as it was George who brought up the silver salver with the letters. At last he managed to speak to him as he refilled the decanters on the sideboard in the dining room.

“George, I’ve been wondering about the letters that come here. I’ve been expecting to hear from some friends.”

George was surprised. “You’ve had a pile of letters, Your Highness. More than anyone. They came thick and fast at the beginning — wouldn’t they be the ones you mean?”

Karil stared at him. “They may have come to the house, but they never came to me.”

George shook his head. “The little baroness always asked for them as soon as they came in. She said you were in a hurry and she’d take them up to you. I’m not allowed in the drawing room till the supper’s been cleared, but she said you couldn’t wait.”

So it was as easy as that.

“And what about the letters that go out of here? The ones we put in the hall,” asked Karil.

“They go out with one of the men at nine o’clock to the post office — punctual as anything.”

“But they’re in the hall overnight?”

George nodded. “Have been ever since I came.”

“I see. Thank you. Don’t say I’ve been asking, will you?”

“No, Your Highness. I won’t say a thing.”

For a few minutes after George left, Karil was overcome by a murderous rage. He wanted to put his hands around Carlotta’s throat and squeeze till she fell to the ground. But killing Carlotta wouldn’t really help in the long run. The letters were gone.

Or were they?

He was pushing open the door of her room before he was aware of what he was doing. Carlotta slept in a small room next door to her parents. It had been a dressing room and there were two huge mirrors on the wall and a third mirror on the table beside her bed, so that Karil saw her reflected threefold as she fixed a brooch onto the collar of her dress.

“Oh, Karil,” she said, turning around and simpering a little, for her cousin had never before visited her in her bedroom, “you can help me choose which—” and broke off, because Karil had grabbed hold of her, turning her away from the mirror, and was digging his fingers viciously into her shoulders.

“Where are the letters?” he demanded. “Where are the letters from my friends that you stole?”

“You’re hurting me,” she whined. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. And if you don’t tell me what you’ve done with them, I really will hurt you. I’ll hurt you as you’ve never been hurt before.”

“Ow! Stop it. You’ve gone mad.”

“And I’ll go madder. Where — are — the letters?” he said slowly through clenched teeth.

“I don’t know… I’ve thrown them away. I did it for your sake.”

But Karil had seen her eyes swivel to the bureau beside her bed.

“Get them,” he ordered.

She crossed the room, crying noisily now, and he watched as she unlocked the bureau.

“I can’t find—” she began, and whimpered as Karil came up behind her and grabbed her arm. “Don’t! Let me go.”

She opened another drawer and brought out a thick bundle of letters addressed to him. He saw at once that they had been opened.

“You won’t tell?” she said, sniffing.

Karil didn’t answer. As soon as he had the letters in his hand, Carlotta had ceased to exist.

Back in his room he pulled a table across the door and began to read.

There were close on fifty letters. There were letters from Barney, telling him about the tree frog he had bought for him, and letters from Borro about the farm. Tod had written, and Julia, and even Kit, who was no letter writer, all looking forward to what they would do when Karil came. There was a letter from Matteo — brief but very heartening.

Most of the letters were from Tally. At first they were excited, hopeful, telling him about the play, about an otter cub which had become separated from his mother and they had to take back, and about Armelle who was trying to put them in touch with their internal organs — but always looking forward to when he came. Not “if” he came. Only and always “when.”

The letters went on through the summer holidays, describing the aunts and Kenny, who was trying to take over the vegetable round with Primrose because his father had become an air-raid warden — but the letters were shorter now, and he could sense her hurt as she asked why he didn’t write back. Then a last letter written in the autumn term — a letter that did its best to be funny about the new gardener who seemed to be about ten years old.

And then no more letters as she gave up hope.

When he had finished, Karil went over to the window and stood looking out. All the uncertainties of the last weeks had gone; he felt very calm and very resolute. It was as though his father’s strength had flowed into him — and he knew exactly what he would do.

Carlotta and the uncles were already at breakfast when Karil came into the dining room the next morning. The uncles raised their behinds but only very slightly, and then — for some reason — raised them a little more because there was something different about Karil today.

But it was his cousin whom Karil addressed first. Carlotta looked pale and had been crying and she rubbed her shoulder from time to time to show that she was in pain.

“I’d like to speak to you privately,” he said to her. “Will you come to the schoolroom when you’ve finished?” And to Uncle Dmitri: “You will excuse me if I’m a little late.”

The schoolroom was at the top of the house — unheated and dismal. Karil had kept Carlotta waiting and the glance she gave him was full of fear and apprehension, but his first words caused her to break out in smiles of relief and even triumph.

“Carlotta, I’ve come to apologize. I treated you shamefully yesterday. Of course stealing is very wicked and very wrong — when I’m on the throne I shall make sure that theft is dealt with most severely — so it’s not surprising that I lost my temper. After all, my great-great-grandfather was known as Karil the Cruel.”

“Was he? Was he really?” Carlotta was fluttering her eyelashes. “I didn’t know that. How… exciting. What did he do?”

“Oh, impaled the heads of his enemies on spikes outside the palace gates. That kind of thing,” said Karil, who had just invented this particular ancestor. “I’ll show you when we get back to Bergania.”

“We?” said Carlotta, licking her lips. “Am I going back with you?” But she was a little suspicious. Karil had always refused to discuss his return and turned aside her offers of help.

But her cousin was coming to the point. “You see, Carlotta, I was very angry when you took my letters, but now that I’ve read them I’m really very grateful to you because my eyes have been opened.”

“Have they?” Carlotta was breathing heavily, hanging on his every word.

“Yes, they have. I can’t understand now how I allowed these people to be so familiar and take such liberties with me. Calling me by my Christian name, using all sorts of unsuitable phrases, thinking that I would like to come to their ridiculous school. Reading all the letters together like that made me realize how deluded I had been.”

“Countess Frederica did say she thought you were not yourself on the journey to England.”

“The countess was quite right. I see now that I was so shocked by my father’s death that I had lost all judgment.” Karil shook his head solemnly from side to side. “I don’t mind telling you, Carlotta, that I have had a narrow escape. Of course, I blame myself — I must have allowed them to forget my position — but I assure you it won’t happen again. From now on I am going to prepare myself for my royal duties and let nothing stand in my way. And I rely on you, Carlotta, to help me.”

“Oh, I will, Karil. I will!” Carlotta’s face was flushed with excitement. “I have some really good ideas about how to decorate the palace when we get back — you know how artistic I am.”

“I shall be very interested to hear about them. Perhaps when we go for our walk in the park we can discuss this further. Be sure to be careful and button your coat up well — it’s turning very chilly. That little muff of yours may not be warm enough.”

To the uncles Karil did not go into details about his conversion, but they could not fail to notice that Karil was now a different boy.

“I wonder if you could help me to design a better crest for the House of Bergania,” he asked his Uncle Dmitri. “Our motto is too… well, it isn’t strong enough. ‘The Truth Shall Set Thee Free’ doesn’t sound very royal, does it? A perfectly ordinary person could have a motto like that. Could we look through your book?”

“Yes, indeed, indeed,” said Uncle Dmitri happily. “I will think about this — I have some very strong motifs. Mailed fists, of course, and dragons rampant.”

“And something metallic — crossed pikes perhaps. Or axes? Would that be possible?”

“Everything is possible for people like us,” said Uncle Dmitri proudly.

His other uncles, too, noticed with relief the change in Karil.

“I think I would like to learn a really martial piece of music for my return to Bergania. Something that makes my subjects realize that I have come back not just as a figurehead but to take the reins of state into my hands. I don’t know what key it should be in, but I feel there would be a lot of tubas and trombones. And a separate piece for Carlotta — a kind of theme tune for her when she alights from her carriage. I think she might have her own anthem.”

“Ah yes, dear Carlotta,” said her father. “I was not sure if…”

“Yes, yes, I know. I’m ashamed to say that I was quite confused when I first came… my father’s death…” he paused, and Uncle Franz Heinrich patted his shoulder.

“Of course, my boy. I quite understand; it takes time after such a blow to find one’s true path again.”

Don Alfonso, too, was very sympathetic when Karil explained his change of heart — and produced sketches for a uniform which he thought might be suitable for Karil’s household guards and one for Karil himself to wear on state occasions.

“You said you did not like plumes, I think?” he inquired, but Karil said he now realized that plumes were necessary to add to a monarch’s dignity — and Alfonso went off happily with his sketch pad to see what he could do.

After a few days the Scold came to Karil and told him how pleased she was to notice the change in him.

“The way you helped Carlotta when we were getting ready to go for our walk and made sure she had her gloves… Sometimes I have felt that you would never come to your senses and see where your destiny lies, but now at last I feel I shall have my reward for all the work I have done.”

Gradually, as Christmas approached, Karil’s position in the household changed. The uncles did not only lift their behinds when he came into the dining room, they stood up for him. The servants no longer dared to smile at him, and the governesses curtsied as he passed. Karil had become more than dignified; he had become kingly.

But it was Pom-Pom who set the seal on Karil’s new status. His ancestors had always known which of the great khan’s companions were worthy of their attentions. There came an evening when Karil was reading aloud from the Almanach de Gotha, that historic volume which gives the titles and descendants of all the royal houses of Europe. The fire had gone out, the uncles and their wives sat dozing in the cold, when Pom-Pom rose from the hearth rug, stretched, and looked about him. Then slowly he wheezed his way across the room, stood for a moment deep in thought — and flopped down onto the frozen feet of the prince of Bergania.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Christmas

The staff had been worried about Tally being sad — but Tally not being sad was almost worse.

As soon as Clemmy returned from Rottingdene House Matteo called Tally into his room and told her what Clemmy had discovered there.

“So you see how far he was from forgetting you.”

Tally stared at him. Her face crumpled up and for a moment it looked as though she was going to cry. “Really?” she said. “You’re not making it up?”

“I’m not making it up,” said Matteo, and he asked Clemmy to come and describe her visit to Rottingdene House.

“So we have to bring him here at once,” said Tally, when she heard what Clemmy had to say.

This was what Matteo had been afraid of.

“Look, Tally, if you do anything rash you could get Karil into serious trouble.”

And later in the day he called in all the children who had been to Bergania and told them the same thing.

He might have spared his breath. Tally was transformed. The worms of Delderton looked in vain for new houses and the book of Important Sayings stayed closed, as she surged through the school getting ready for her friend.

Daley was sitting at his desk, sighing over the file labeled EVACUATION. He had got as far as writing letters to all the parents asking them whether they would send their children to America with the school. They were piled up on top of his filing cabinet, ready to go to the post.

A knock on the door made him close the file and call, “Come in.”

Tally entered and the headmaster smiled; the change in the girl since Clemmy had returned from London was amazing.

“Can I speak to you?”

“Of course.”

Tally came up to his desk. “It’s about Karil.”

Daley, who had heard all about the prince from Matteo, said, “What about Karil?”

“You have to give him a scholarship. Please. He has to come here. He can’t stay in that awful place.”

“Perhaps you’d better sit down,” said the head. And then: “Scholarships don’t grow on trees, you know. I would have to consult the board.”

“You would give him a scholarship if he was a refugee from Poland or from Spain and he’d been bombed. Well, he is a refugee — just as much as them.”

The headmaster was silent, wondering just how much to tell her.

“When you first came back from Bergania,” he said presently, “Matteo consulted me about the prince. I explained that I could give him a scholarship but only if he came here with the consent of his guardian. I could not shelter the boy as a runaway. And it seems that this consent will not be given.”

“It has to be given. It has to,” said Tally. “It’s not fair to keep him there like a prisoner. It’s a dictatorship like Hitler and we’re all fighting that. That’s what Delderton is supposed to be about, fighting injustice.”

“Yes,” agreed Daley, “that is what the school is about, certainly — among other things.”

But he felt very tired.

“I told him what it was like here,” Tally went on. “That it’s a place where you can find out who you are. I told him about the river and about Clemmy moving the snails and Matteo finding the otter cub. And about the play — it’s going to be good… and oh, everything. And it’s wrong not to let him come. It’s simply wrong.”

When she had gone Daley sat for a while, looking out at the courtyard while Tally’s words went on sounding in his head.

I told him it was a place where you can find out who you are, she had said — and it was as though she had given him back the vision he had had when he first came to Delderton. He had spent ten years making a place where children could be themselves. And suddenly he found that he had come to a decision, and he carried the letters to the parents over to the wastepaper basket and tipped them in.

He and his children would stay.

It was getting too cold to meet on the steps of the pet hut, so the children sat inside on upturned wooden boxes while they discussed Karil’s future. It made life difficult for Augusta, who had to wear a gauze face mask, but she was used to being uncomfortable.

“Someone should blow up the duke,” said Tod, who had reverted to anarchism again.

But Julia, who was sensible about everything except her mother, said that she saw what Daley meant.

“A school can’t just kidnap a pupil,” she said, and Barney, who was convinced that the tree frog was very intelligent and was trying to train it to walk up and down its ladder, said he thought that Karil might have to arrange his own escape.

Tally, however, was deaf to common sense.

“People said we couldn’t get to Bergania with the Flurry Dance but we did, and it looked as though we couldn’t get Karil away from those thugs but we did. So we can do this if we have to. It’s meant that Karil should be here. I knew it straightaway.”

In the staff room Magda, who had grown very fond of the prince on the journey, wondered about his Uncle Fritz, the minister of culture. “Isn’t an uncle an important relative, too?” she asked Matteo. “Perhaps he could do something.”

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with him — and von Arkel, too. They got out of Bergania, but no one knows where they are now. And I don’t know how long I’ll be here — I’ve had another letter from the War Office and things are moving.”

But Tally listened to nobody who told her that Karil might not come. If she could, she would have told the badgers and the foxes that the prince was on his way. And so, with less than three weeks to go till the Christmas holidays, she concentrated on the play.

To everyone’s surprise Tally did not want to act — she wanted to help with the lighting and the production, but she had no desire to take a part, which Julia thought was a bit much: “When you do nothing but nag me.”

But Tally said that was different. “Karil may want to act though. He could be the king of the Underworld perhaps.”

“He won’t want to be the king of anything, not even Hades,” said Borro. “I’ll bet my last sixpence on that.”

“And anyway, he may not be any good,” said Verity.

But the next thing was to get word to Karil — and now Tally wrote a letter to Kenny, who had taken over his father’s vegetable round and was driving Primrose through the London streets.

Kenny was a good friend; he had never failed her yet.

It was a particularly cold winter, the winter of 1939. Coming back for the Christmas holidays, Tally found the aunts bundled into cardigans, looking like koala bears and huddled over the oil stove in the kitchen. In her father’s surgery a single bar of the electric fire stopped the patients from turning blue before they got to the doctor. Aunt Hester had to bandage the pipes in the bathroom to stop them from freezing — but Tally and Maybelle and Kenny went skating on the frozen pond.

The Russians had invaded Finland, where the temperature was minus forty degrees and the soldiers fought on skis. A German patriot had thrown a bomb at Hitler but it missed him, which was a shame. Skirmishes on the Western Front suggested that the war was beginning to gather pace.

All the same, Christmas was lovely — it always was in the doctor’s house. Tally went with Kenny on his rounds with Primrose, delivering holly and mistletoe to his customers, and came back with armfuls of greenery with which to decorate the rooms. Aunt May cooked the turkey which the butcher had saved for them, though meat was getting scarce. The lady with the German sausage dog sent a Christmas tree from her brother’s market garden, and Dr. Hamilton’s patients trooped in with strange presents they had made for him. Though the aunts had been worried that the king’s stammer would trouble him, with the war on his mind, he got through his speech on Christmas Day with hardly a stutter, and in the evening they went to hear The Messiah at the Albert Hall.

Tally did her best not to spend time with Roderick and Margaret during the holidays, but a week before the Delderton term began again, her Aunt Virginia rang up to say how much her children were longing to see their cousin, and Tally was invited for tea.

This usually meant that Roderick and Margaret wanted to show off something that they had bought, or brag about something they had done, and this time was no exception. Though they had been equipped with brand-new uniforms the last time Tally had seen them, a great deal of shopping had been done since then. Margaret had two new Sunday dresses and a new dressing gown with a St. Barbara’s crest on the pocket. What’s more, the girls of St. Barbara’s did not carry their gas masks to school in cardboard boxes like common children, but had special cases in the school colors of blue and green.

“And I’m getting kid skating boots — they’re being sent from Harrods,” said Margaret. “It’s that very soft leather and it’s incredibly expensive. Some of the girls just have ordinary leather ones, but Mummy wanted me to have the best because my ankles are so sensitive.”

Roderick’s bed was again piled high with clothes striped in ferocious red and yellow. It had been necessary to replace his blazer and his cap, and he had an entire new kit for rugger on which he had left the price tags so that Tally could see them.

“Pretty steep, aren’t they?” he said proudly.

But what he particularly wanted to boast about was the kind of pupils that were coming to Foxingham. Not only was the Prince of Transjordania still there but his younger brother was going to join him, and so was a great-nephew of the Kaiser who was third in the line of succession to the Prussian throne should it ever be restored.

“I’ve made good friends with Transjordania,” said Roderick carelessly. “He’s not really stuck up at all, not when you get to know him. Of course he doesn’t bother with everybody, but I know how to treat him.”

If it wasn’t for the amazingly good tea which her aunt Virginia served, Tally would have found the afternoon almost impossible to get through. Virginia was the sort of person who always seemed to be able to get hold of sugar and chocolate and all the other things that were in short supply. She had come back from Torquay when the expected bombs did not fall on London, but she had kept her flat down there so that if air raids did start she would be able to get away at once.

“It’s all so terribly trying,” she said wearily. “Now the maid wants to go and join the ATS. I don’t know how I’m supposed to get through all the work myself. But there it is — servants never know when they’re well off.”

“I tell you, it’s no good,” said Kenny, sitting on an upturned crate in the storeroom behind his father’s shop. “It’s a fortress, that place. I took the cart around like you asked me to, but they didn’t want any vegetables and they just shut the door in my face. I had some mistletoe and chestnuts for roasting and all sorts of stuff, but they said no one celebrated Christmas there and I can believe it. You’ll never get a message through to Karil like that. Just give it up, Tally.”

But giving up on things was not one of Tally’s talents. “Couldn’t we try once more? Please. If you take me there I might get an idea. I just want to let him know that it’s all right about the scholarship and he can come. There must be some way I can get a note to him.”

Kenny shrugged. “I’ll take you if you like, but not with the cart. There’s nowhere to leave Primrose — it’s all posh streets with snooty people.”

So the following Saturday they took the Underground to Trafalgar Square and walked down the Mall to Rottingdene House.

The huge gray building with its spiked railings was a grim sight. They walked all around it, but there was no side door other than the one that Kenny had tried; it was the most sealed-up and unapproachable place Tally had ever seen.

But when they came around to the front of the house, they found a small group of people waiting on the pavement.

“It’s about now they come out,” said a woman in a purple headscarf.

“Who?” said another bystander. “Who is it comes out?”

The woman wasn’t sure, but she thought it was royalty. “My sister saw them last week; she said they were ever so friendly.”

Tally waited, keeping out of sight behind Kenny and stamping her feet on the pavement to try to keep the blood flowing.

It seemed most unlikely that anyone would come out of those forbidding iron gates, but after half an hour the sentry in the box stood to attention, the front door with its heraldic crest was thrown open and three people emerged.

She saw Karil first; he was exactly the same in spite of the cap pulled over his ears against the cold. Behind him came the Scold, black as ever in a fur coat the color of ink… and between Karil and the Scold came Carlotta.

Tally recognized her at once. She wasn’t wearing a white dress — or if she was, it was hidden under her velvet-collared coat — and she wasn’t holding flowers. But her long blond ringlets, her simpering smile, were exactly as they had been when she peered out of the window of the Daimler on the quayside at Dover.

It was Karil though who held Tally’s gaze. He had put his arm around Carlotta’s shoulders in a chivalrous and protective way, as though he was sheltering her not just from the cold but from anything bad that life might throw at her, and now he adjusted her scarf so that it covered her throat more securely and the Scold, looking down, nodded in a pleased way.

Then a footman came out of the back of the building and took his position behind them and they set off slowly toward the gate. The sentry saluted, the gate swung open and the bystanders stood aside to let the important people through.

“Long live Your Highness,” cried the lady in the purple headscarf, and Karil smiled and lifted his arm once, and twice, and three times, in that gracious wave that princes learn from infancy. Then he nodded to the footman, giving the signal that they were ready to set off, gave his arm to Carlotta, and they moved away.

Karil had not seen her and Tally stood stock-still in the icy cold. There was no escaping what she had seen. If ever there was a boy who was doing what he was best at, leading the life he was born to, it was Karil.

“Come on,” said Kenny.

And she tore up the note she had written and followed him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN The Future King

Although Karil had long ago given up expecting anything good to happen in his grandfather’s house, even he was surprised by the sheer awfulness of the Rottingdene Christmas. There was no tree, no candlelight, no exchange of gifts, no music. The duke took morning prayers, the cook sent up two underdone chickens — and that was that.

Still, it meant that he was not expected to find a gift for Carlotta. Karil was used to hard work, but being nice to Carlotta was one of the most grueling tasks he had ever undertaken. Her treachery, her vanity, her lies seemed to grow rather than lessen with each day that passed, and yet somehow he managed to act the part of a devoted cousin and a prince who wished her to share his life.

And still he did not know yet whether his plan was going to work. His uncles now treated him with respect, the servants scuttled past him, and the governesses curtsied when he came into the room.

But it was the duke that mattered, and two days after what passed for Christmas his grandfather sent for him.

“I have to tell you, my boy,” he said, “that I have been most pleasantly surprised by your behavior in the last few weeks. I understand from Carlotta that you have seen the error of your ways.”

“Oh, I have, sir, I have,” said Karil fervently. “I can’t believe now how foolish I have been. And how ungrateful, when you have given me a home and a chance to fulfill my destiny. From now on I shall devote all my waking hours to preparing for kingship. I want to learn to be a proper ruler, not one of those weak kings who can’t make up his mind and has to keep consulting his ministers. A king should be an absolute ruler and his subjects should obey him without a moment’s hesitation.”

“Quite so. Quite right. I must say, I thought you would never see where your duty lay. What brought you to your senses?”

Karil was ready for this.

“I had a dream, sir. A dream of my future in the palace at Bergania. I was being crowned in ermine and at my side was… Carlotta.” Here Karil nearly forgot his script, because even mentioning Carlotta’s name made his gorge rise. But he gathered himself together. “It made me realize how fortunate I am to be here — and how lucky I am to have someone who, in good time, will share my life.”

The duke nodded, thinking of the double line of Rottingdene blood that would flow into the restored kingdom of Bergania.

“Yes, indeed. She will make an excellent queen. There are people who think that twelve is too young to decide about one’s future bride, but that’s just poppycock. Where duty is concerned, one can never begin too young.”

“Indeed, sir, indeed,” said Karil, and stood waiting with his head humbly bowed. Was it going to work or had this whole charade been in vain?

The duke cleared his throat. He harrumphed and considered.

Then he said, “Well, well, we all make mistakes. I think it’s time I called off the watchdogs. I’ll get the whistles back and tell the servants you no longer need to be followed.”

“And my room at night, sir? The locked door? Of course I know I deserved it, but it is a little humiliating.”

The duke hesitated, and Karil felt his heart hammering in his chest. Everything depended on this one thing.

Then: “Very well,” said the duke. “I’ll tell the servants it’s no longer necessary.”

Left alone, Karil flopped down on his bed and punched the pillows in triumph. Stage one was completed! Once he was no longer watched and could get out of his room at night he could plan the next part of his escape. For from the moment he had read the letters Carlotta had stolen, he had had only one idea — to escape from this house of snobbery and deceit and arrogance and join his friends.

His troubles were far from over, but he would let nothing dismay him. Among the many unreadable books in the duke’s library were some that were not unreadable at all: the stories of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. All these boys had run away from cruel employers with almost nothing in their pockets, and all of them had reached safety. One of the obstacles was simply getting out of the house. The back door was bolted and barred at night and the keys kept by whichever footman was on duty. To ask a servant to help him would be to risk getting him into trouble, but luck was on Karil’s side. The housemaid George loved so hopelessly left to work in a munitions factory, and soon afterward George announced that he, too, was leaving, going to join the Ambulance Corps.

If he was going anyway, thought Karil, perhaps he could be persuaded to leave the back door unlocked the night before he left.

Everything Karil did now had only one aim: to help him get away. He had taught himself the route to Delderton; it was nearly three hundred miles, but anything was possible when one was desperate. It was no good arriving when the school was empty, but as soon as the Christmas holidays were over he would make a break for it, and he began to assemble things he would need to disguise himself. He found some of Princess Natalia’s hair dye in a bathroom, and a pair of wire spectacles that could be made to stay on his nose — and when Countess Frederica came with his fruit juice and rusks he thanked her nicely but he did not eat the rusks; he hid them in a shoebox in his cupboard. They had infuriated him ever since he stopped teething but now they had their uses. Rusks do not go moldy and he could chew them on the journey.

This was the stage he had reached in his preparations when the duke sent for him again.

If he expected that his grandfather had seen through his deception, Karil’s fears were laid to rest as soon as he entered the room. The old tyrant looked as affable as he was able, and sitting near him were the three uncles. They, too, looked friendly and relaxed, and even before the duke began to speak Karil was ready to receive good news.

And it was good news! It was incredible, wonderful, and amazing news!

“I have to say, Karil, that up till now I have been utterly opposed to the idea of sending you away to be educated,” the duke began. “Your behavior was such that I didn’t think you could be allowed to leave this house. But in the last weeks you have changed so completely that I think you may be trusted to conduct yourself properly even when you are not under my roof, so I have decided to send you to boarding school.”

He stopped to clear his throat and the uncles nodded and beamed. If Karil went away they would no longer have to give him lessons, or lift their behinds from their chairs when he came into the dining room. Only the monkey, who did not know what was going on, continued to look sad.

“As you know,” the duke went on, “many of the world’s rulers were educated at one or other of Britain’s famous schools — but one of the obstacles has been money. These schools are exceedingly expensive and the cost of supporting all the people in my household is crippling. Not to mention the burden of income tax. The amount of tax I am forced to pay by those scoundrels in Whitehall is outrageous.” The duke’s face became crimson as it always did when he spoke about income tax, but he pulled himself together. “However, Karil,” he went on, “I have just received the most gratifying news. One of the best schools in the country has offered you a scholarship. The headmaster has just written to me.”

Karil stood stock-still. He had heard the word “headmaster” and the word “scholarship” and immediately he remembered Tally’s words on the train.

I’ve got a scholarship, she had said, so why not you?

After that the duke’s words surged over his head unheeded. Delderton had offered him a scholarship, and the duke had agreed to let him go! He’d been wrong to think nobody understood him or cared about him; underneath all his bad temper the old man wanted to do his best, and Karil felt ashamed for having misjudged him.

The duke was still talking about the school.

“Of course, I’m not surprised that they want you — to have a member of a ruling house on their books can bring them nothing but glory. But you may be sure that they understand how to deal with royalty; the place has been a cradle for princes for generations. You will be treated with all the respect due to your rank but with the iron discipline that will help you fulfill your purpose in life. Countess Frederica will take you tomorrow to be fitted for your uniform. Harrods sets aside a special changing room for pupils like you.”

Only now did Karil come down to earth.

“Uniform? But they don’t have uniforms. They wear what they like.”

The duke stared at him, frowning. “Don’t be foolish, boy. Of course they have uniforms. Have you ever heard of a school which doesn’t?”

Karil took a deep breath, steeling himself. Then he said, “What is the name of the school, Grandfather? The one I’m going to.”

The duke told him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT The Stripy Boys

It was Magda who was in charge of the school train so the children were being very careful, making sure she had all their names ticked off and that there wasn’t too much swirling about. They knew that she had been having real difficulties in the holidays with Schopenhauer and the washerwoman whom he had (or had not) thrown down the stairs, and they would not have stooped to play the kind of tricks they might have played on David Prosser.

So far she had not lost a single child — and the children in her own house were settled in their carriage even though there was another ten minutes before the train was due to go. Paddington Station was in its usual bustle: soldiers coming home on leave crossing with soldiers off to their new postings; evacuees who should have been in the country returning home — and parties of schoolchildren in charge of their teachers marching toward their trains.

And now, in spite of all their care, Magda was in trouble.

“There’s one missing,” she said, poking her head around the door and looking anguished. “A new boy called…” she peered anxiously at her list, “called Stephen Bellingham. If you see him, let me know.”

They promised, and went on talking of their plans for the term. Tally was in the far corner by the window talking to Julia, who had not troubled to buy The Picturegoer because her mother never appeared now in film magazines. Kit, to everyone’s surprise, was not crying and saying he wanted to go home.

More children got onto the train. Doors slammed. Verity took her place by the window bar in the corridor so that she could be seen in her new, suitably tattered skirt.

Seven minutes until the train was due to go…

“Here, you have the window seat,” said the boy who had accompanied Karil into the carriage. “My name’s Hamilton. Roderick Hamilton. If I can do anything to help you, I’ll be very pleased.”

He looked at Karil with eager admiration mixed with curiosity. The same look was on the faces of the other boys in the compartment, and Karil realized that once again he was back to being a freak, a person set aside by his birth, to be fawned on to his face and sneered at behind his back. One boy handed him a bag of crisps, another offered to put his bag up in the luggage rack. All stared at him as though he was somebody out of a zoo.

“There’s someone you’ll like,” the boy called Hamilton went on. “The Prince of Transjordania. He’s in the next carriage — I can fetch him for you; I’m good friends with him.”

“No, it’s all right, thank you. Don’t bother him,” said Karil, who needed the Prince of Transjordania like he needed a hole in the head.

“Oh, it wouldn’t be a bother — not for you.”

Karil was silent. It was as bad as he had feared — or worse. These boys had been brought up to be snobbish and servile and nothing he could do would break through the barrier.

How was it going to end? How would he ever get away? Escaping from Foxingham would be harder even than getting away from his grandfather’s house. Already, as the boys were marched onto the platform by their teachers, he saw that it was a place where ruthless discipline prevailed. And the ridiculous uniform with its ferocious red-and-yellow stripes would make him a sitting target for his pursuers.

He turned his head to look out of the window — and found himself gazing straight into Tally’s eyes.

“What is it?” asked Julia. “What’s the matter?”

Tally had given a little gasp and was staring transfixed at the railway carriage beside their own.

“It’s Karil,” she said.

Julia followed her gaze and, as they looked, Karil’s arm went up in greeting. It was the same gesture he had made when he was with Carlotta at Rottingdene House, or driving through the streets at home. The only greeting that he knew. A royal wave.

Tally turned her head away. “That does it,” she said. “He’s going to Foxingham to be a prince.”

It wasn’t till she finally gave up hope that Tally realized how much she minded. Fortunately Julia had a handkerchief — and the others hadn’t seen. When she looked up again, Karil had gone.

“The train opposite,” said Karil, completely bewildered. “Where does it go?”

“Oh, that’s another school train,” said Roderick. “It goes to a really weird place called Delderton. We could pull down the blind if you like so that they can’t see us.”

Karil shook his head. “It’s all right, thank you.”

“Would you like to borrow my comic?” said another boy. “I’d be very pleased.”

Karil stared at him blankly. Then he clutched his stomach.

“Excuse me…” he said. “I have to go.”

The others made way for him. “It’s at the end of the corridor,” they said, realizing that a prince would not be able to utter the word toilet — and opened the door for Karil.

As soon as he was out of their sight Karil began to run. Then he jumped down onto the platform, and as he did so he tore off his blazer and his cap and threw them on the ground. The train was wreathed in clouds of steam — no one seemed to have noticed him. He ran for dear life, ran and ran — and now he unwound his scarf and pulled his jersey over his head, and still he ran. He had reached the barrier, which was unmanned now that the train was ready to leave, and cut across to Platform 1 where the Delderton train still waited. Not once did he look behind him; he could not afford to lose a second — but he managed to pass his hand through his hair so that it looked disheveled and unkempt. Anyone seeing him run now would see a boy in dark trousers and a white shirt who could belong anywhere.

He was on the right platform now, and the Delderton train still stood there, though the doors were being slammed and the guard had his flag at the ready. He was raising his whistle to his lips just as Karil managed to wrench a door open and leap onto the train — and the guard cursed him. Those unruly Delderton savages were always late.

The train began to move as Karil made his way along the corridor, looking for the right compartment. Then he found it — and banged on the window, and as Barney pulled back the door he almost fell into the carriage.

No one spoke at first. Then Kit said, “You’ve still got your tie. It won’t go down the hole — I tried flushing mine. You’d better give it to Tally; she kept mine for me.”

As Karil took off his tie and handed it to her, the door slid open again and Magda stood there with her clipboard and her list.

She peered shortsightedly at the children.

“Oh, good, you’ve found the new boy,” she said. “I’m pleased to see you, Stephen. I’ll just tick off your name.”

But on the way out she turned her head and winked.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Arcadia

Even before he opened his eyes Karil knew that he was happy. He had never before trusted the day, but now he sat up and stretched and looked at his little room with its small desk and the single chair and the view out onto the courtyard and the cedar tree, and though he never forgot the death of his father he knew that he was in the one place he wanted to be, and with exactly the people that he cared for.

The door opened a crack and Tally put her head around it.

“Hurry up — we’re going over to breakfast. I’m just going to wake Barney.”

Karil had been fortunate. Stephen Bellingham had not ended up in Wales like Augusta, but he had chicken pox and would be late coming to school, so Karil had been given his room, two doors down from Tally and Julia.

Everything was right for Karil. Armelle was at her most extraordinary this term, asking the children to be bursting seeds about to germinate or the gaping mouths of roots as they thirsted for water, but Karil went along with her cheerfully. He would have been the gaping mouth of a cheese grater if she had asked him to, surrounded as he was by his friends.

He thought dipping sheep’s wool into vats of strangely smelling dyes was splendid, and helping in the kitchen, especially when Clemmy was in charge, was the greatest fun — the warmth, the interesting smells and friendly clatter were delightful. Karil had been lonely all his life, but he was never lonely now.

Whatever lessons they did fired his imagination: in chemistry classes he wanted to be an inventor, in art he thought it would be wonderful to be a painter. When the professor asked him what instrument he would like to learn Karil wanted to say, “All of them. The oboe and the clarinet and the fiddle and the double bass — every instrument there ever was.”

In the pet hut he was among old friends: the axolotl, the outsize rabbit… and the present that Barney had bought for him and that he had expected never to see.

“We didn’t give him a name — we thought you should do it,” Barney said.

Karil did not have to look long at the strange creature, with its blown-out cheeks and moist pop eyes.

“Mortimer,” he said. “No doubt about it — he’s a Mortimer. That’s my grandfather’s name — he has those bulging eyes. But it’s odd that something as nice as a tree frog can look like somebody as nasty as my grandfather.”

As soon as he found out how Karil had come to Delderton, Daley had asked Matteo to come and see him.

“I’ll have to send the boy back,” he had said. “I can’t possibly be part of a deception like that. The duke must be informed and so must the headmaster of Foxingham.”

Matteo did not answer at once. He stood gazing out of the window with his back to his old friend. When he turned he looked as though the last minutes had aged him, and he spoke with more feeling in his voice than Daley could ever remember hearing before.

“I understand your position,” he said. “No one could fail to do so. But I would ask you to wait. To do nothing for a short time. I would ask this as a last favor.”

Matteo was due to leave at the end of the month. His mission would be dangerous; Daley knew this.

“I have a plan,” Matteo went on. “It may come to nothing, but if it worked it would clear you completely of responsibility. Give me three weeks — I won’t ask for more than that. I have seen Karil happy for the first time, and I know that the king…” Matteo’s voice broke, and Daley, knowing the guilt Matteo felt about Karil’s father, did not interrupt. “Probably it’s no good,” he went on, “and the duke will trace him very soon, but I won’t be able to forgive myself if I haven’t done my best. It’s hard to explain the horror of the setup at Rottingdene House.” His expression changed and he came to stand beside Daley. “I’m bigger than you,” he told the headmaster. “I can tell them that I threatened to knock you down or blackmail you if you didn’t do as I asked!”

Daley smiled. “Very well. You’re in the wrong, as you know, and you’re exposing me and the school to all sorts of risks. But… it isn’t often you see a child so much in his element as that boy. I’ll wait.”

Meanwhile, Persephone had reached the stage of casting and rehearsals.

Kit, as they waited in the classroom for O’Hanrahan, was ready to be helpful.

“She’s not called Percy Phone,” he explained to Karil. “It’s pronounced Per-Seff-On-Ee.”

Karil thanked him. No one snubbed Kit since the adventure in Zurich, but he knew the story well. He had read it with his professor of Greek in the ancient version handed down from Homer’s time, and he especially liked the part where Zeus, the King of the Gods, took pity on the goddess Demeter’s sorrow and sent a messenger to Hades to bring Persephone back.

But there was not an entirely happy ending. Like all the best stories, it had a twist at the end; for before she left the Underworld, Persephone’s husband had forced her to eat five pomegranate seeds — and for each seed she had to return every year and spend a month back in Hades. And during these five months winter fell again on the land, until Persephone was reunited with her mother and spring and summer blessed the earth.

“It breaks down really well into scenes,” said Tally. “There are all those maidens and things dancing with Persephone — Greek girls always have maidens — and then there’s thunder and lightning and the rocks split asunder and out comes the king of the Underworld and carries her away.”

“Then there’s Hades,” said Barney. “There are lots of stories about what went on there: Sisyphus pushing a rock up a slope forever and ever and it falling down just when he gets to the top, and Tantalus trying to get a drink of water from a spring that dries up just when he opens his mouth.”

Karil nodded. “And everything very cold and gray and icy.”

But at this stage the most important thing was the casting of the parts.

“We thought you might like to be the king of the Underworld,” said Borro, looking at Karil out of the corner of his eye — and grinning when Karil exploded in just the way they had expected.

“Anyway, I’m not going to act. I might not be here by the time you do the play; they’re going to catch up with me sooner or later. But anybody can come roaring out of rocks and carry people off. It’s who will play the heroine that’s important.”

There was silence while everyone looked at Julia; everyone except Verity, who looked at the floor.

“She can really act. I mean really,” said Barney.

“Yes, I know,” said Karil.

“How?” said Tally. “How do you know?”

“When you were up on the hill fetching me and I was hiding with Matteo… I looked out… I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, but I saw Julia. She was standing there reciting and everyone was absolutely silent, looking at her. Even people who can’t have understood a word… Because of the way she was.”

“It’s called stage presence,” said O’Hanrahan, who had come in to join them.

Julia was bent over her desk, trying not to be there.

“I’m sorry… I can’t,” she muttered.

No one tried to persuade her. They had been through this so often. And then, to his own surprise, Karil began to speak.

“At home, in Bergania, I heard a lot about duty. The Countess Frederica kept nagging me about it; it was my duty to salute properly and smile at little girls who curtsied to me and make small talk to the wives of ambassadors. Maybe it was my duty — I don’t know; I thought it was pretty silly. But that doesn’t mean that duty doesn’t exist. My father knew about it. He knew about forcing himself on when he was tired and bored, or sitting on his horse in uncomfortable clothes, or listening to his ministers in meetings that went on and on. Giving everything he had to his people. Duty exists and it’s real. It means sharing any gift or talent that you have with people who need it. It means not being afraid or selfish or tight — but open. And in my view,” said Karil, “it’s Julia’s duty to be the heroine of this play.”

Then he fell back in his chair, aghast at what he had done. He had not been at Delderton for a week and here he was, lecturing and pontificating.

But now Julia had lifted her head and her voice carried very clearly, because that was one of the things she knew — how to make herself heard if she wanted to.

“All right,” said Julia. “I’ll do it.”

Everybody stopped dead and stared at her.

“You’ll do it?” repeated Tally. “Really? You’ll be the heroine? You’ll be Persephone?”

“I’ll be the heroine,” said Julia, “but I won’t be Persephone. Persephone’s not the heroine; she’s just a pretty girl who gets carried off. Anyone can be her… Verity can.”

In the classroom one could have heard a pin drop.

“The heroine,” said Julia, “the person who matters, is her mother. It’s Demeter, who roams the earth looking for her daughter and never gives up. Not ever. Because loving her daughter, and finding her, matters more than anything in the world.”

Tally, who alone knew Julia’s story, looked at her friend.

“And you’ll be her?” she asked quietly.

Julia nodded. “Yes, I’ll be her.”

After that everything fell into place, and a few days later casting was complete and they moved into the hall to begin rehearsals. Ronald Peabody was to be the king of the Underworld.

“He’s nasty enough,” Borro had agreed, but he also acted well.

And Verity got her wish and played Persephone. She took the part seriously, working out how to scream and struggle and wondering what to wear while doing it, and if her lines got fewer and fewer as Tally and Karil adjusted the script, she did not seem to notice it. Persephone was described in the old myth as having “delicate ankles,” and that was enough for Verity. And she could dance.

The rest of the casting went without a hitch. Borro was Hermes, the messenger chosen to bring Persephone back, and a tall senior whose voice had broken reliably played Zeus, King of the Gods.

And the scenes in Hades were easy. Being horrible or tortured or weird is always popular. Tod was Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his rock up a hill, Barney made an excellent Tantalus, never quite allowed to sip the water that reached to his mouth — and no one felt like refusing Kit when he asked if he could be the man whose liver was pecked out by an eagle, even though he belonged to a different myth.

As for Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the gates of Hades, there was a stampede of juniors all wanting to be one of his heads. Since the heads did not speak and would be covered in masks it was difficult to choose, so they drew lots — but the good thing about Hades is that it is always full, and those children who were not picked to be a head could still gibber and wail and wobble across the stage.

Karil and Tally were joint stage managers and were incessantly busy. “Bossy” was the word Verity used, and she had a point, but there was so much to remember.

O’Hanrahan directed, never raising his voice but holding the play completely under his hand. At the beginning Tally had been put in charge of the script; she was to gather up ideas and make notes, ready for the actual writing. So she had gone to the library, found a book called Greek Myths for Schools—and gone back, puzzled, to O’Hanrahan.

“It’s not like you told it to us,” she said. “It’s sort of flat. You must have made an awful lot up. All that about Persephone’s delicate ankles, and Demeter tearing off her headband in grief…”

O’Hanrahan shook his head. “No, I didn’t make it up. The words are all there in the original Greek, just as they were nearly three thousand years ago.”

And he went to his bookcase and began to read. The musical words, serious but beautiful, went straight into Tally’s soul. Understanding no word of the ancient language, she yet sensed the story’s depth and resonance.

The next day she took Greek Myths for Schools back to the library — and they began to write their play.

Now, as rehearsals began, she was eagle-eyed, watching for missed lines — a fierce prompter protecting every syllable of the script.

As for Karil, he was everywhere, attending to the lighting, assembling props, checking the thunder sheets, experimenting with the sound of rain. To serve the play after years of being served, to be part of something and yet not singled out, was his greatest joy. He knew he was on borrowed time — any day now the duke would find out where he was, but meanwhile there was the present, there was this day — and Karil set himself to live in it.

Like all plays that take off, Persephone reached out into every activity in the school.

Clemmy knew all about the Greeks; she had posed for a dozen painters who had tried to show the beauty of the ancient world.

“You’ve got to realize that the Greeks really adored their flowers and their trees and their countryside. They absolutely worshipped them.”

She found pictures of the flowers that Persephone had been picking when she was carried away, precise botanical drawings full of detail and loving care, and she stood over the scene painters.

“Remember this was Arcadia, it was Paradise. Everything was flooded with light — that blue is far too muddy.”

Josie and the housekeeper, with a team of helpers, ran up the costumes, and the old professor left his ancient manuscripts long enough to be really helpful about the music.

“We want dreamy music for the beginning and scary music of course for Hades and a lament for when Demeter is roaming the earth, but at the end there has to be something glorious — a proper hymn praising the gods,” said Tally.

“Full of triumph,” said Karil.

“Oh, there does, does there?” growled the old man.

“Couldn’t you compose one?” they asked him.

“No, I could not. If I could compose triumphant and glorious music, I wouldn’t be here teaching a lot of hooligans.”

But he found a chorus from a Handel opera, which made the hair stand up on the nape of one’s neck — and he bullied the school choir into learning it.

As the weeks passed, O’Hanrahan began to look tired.

“You’re working too hard,” Clemmy told him.

But she knew what was happening. It was possible that what they had here was not just a school play — it was a play. A number of things were coming together. The children acting in it had had a real experience: a king had died; a war was beginning.

And there was Julia. But about Julia’s performance, nobody would speak.

Matteo had reported to the War Office and received his instructions. Now he walked down Piccadilly, turned into Old Bond Street, and made his way toward Grosvenor Square. He passed Polish cavalry officers in their glamorous uniforms, come to join the Allies, sailors on leave from a British submarine, high-ranking American servicemen from the embassy nearby.

But he saw none of them. What he saw in his mind was a huddle of children, some tearstained, who had got up at dawn to say good-bye.

Barney, whom he had turned into a biologist… Tally, whose problems seemed always to be about other people… Julia, whose mother he had mentally throttled many a time…

And Karil, Johannes’s son…

If his plan misfired… if the people he was now seeking out refused to help him, or had not yet arrived, then Karil’s future was bleak indeed.

In front of a tall, narrow house, he stopped and rang the bell. The house, though in the fashionable area inhabited by embassies and diplomats, was shabby, and the servant who opened the door wore no uniform, only a leather apron. He had gray hair and a weather-beaten face and looked like a man who had spent his life out of doors.

Matteo spoke a few words and the man’s face lit up.

“Yes,” he said, answering in the same language, “they are here.

Please come upstairs, Your Excellency.” And then: “I remember your father.”

Matteo followed him up the uncarpeted stairs and into a room with a scrubbed wooden table and a few upright chairs. As he entered, the two men standing by the window turned. A man with long silver hair and light blue eyes, and an old man with a wise face and a full white beard, who came forward with both his hands stretched out.

“Welcome, Matteo, welcome!” he said in Berganian. “As you see, we have reached safety.”

It was von Arkel, the faithful prime minister who had served the king for so many years, and with him was the king’s uncle Fritz, the minister of culture. The chief of the army was about to join them, they told Matteo, and together they meant to form a government-in-exile.

“We shall have to see what we can do,” said von Arkel. And then: “You have news of the boy?”

CHAPTER FORTY Dry Ice

The headmaster of Foxingham School put down the cane with which he had been beating a boy called Widdrington and went over to his desk.

Widdrington was a dreary little runt of a boy who seemed to have been made for punishment. Even before he came into the room he began to snivel and whimper, and already with the first whack on his bare bottom he was screaming the place down. It was quite difficult to stop after the regulation twelve thwacks — the temptation was to go on and draw blood, and there wouldn’t have been any trouble if he had. Widdrington’s parents were too grateful to the headmaster for accepting the boy at Foxingham. They were thoroughly vulgar, self-made people and desperately anxious to have their sons educated with the upper classes.

He should have been beating young Hohenlottern next, thought the head. The boy had skived off the early-morning run, pretending to have a cold — but he was third in line of succession to the kingdom of Prussia if it was ever restored, and the headmaster preferred to deal with boys like that in other ways. Fortunately young Transjordania never gave any trouble. With his father ruling over one of the wealthiest countries in the Middle East, too much physical punishment might have been awkward.

Thinking about these two boys made the head turn his thoughts to the prince of Bergania. He had been happy to give the boy a scholarship; if the war went the right way young Karil would become king, there was no doubt about that, and Foxingham’s reputation as a cradle for princes would be enhanced.

But how long was he going to wait for the duke to send his grandson? Karil had had an attack of homesickness and run back to his grandfather, that much seemed certain. The other boys had all described how the prince had rushed out of the train, and there was really no other explanation. Probably Karil was very attached to his grandfather, who was reported to be an upright and excellent man. So far it had seemed reasonable to say nothing to the duke and wait for the prince to come — one didn’t want to expose the boy as a milksop — but the head had his honor and dignity to consider.

He pressed the bell on his desk and his secretary, a gray-haired, sharp-nosed woman, entered the room.

“Nothing in the post from Rottingdene, is there?”

“No, sir, nothing at all. Matron was wondering how long she should keep his trunk — it’s more than three weeks now. Should she send it back?”

The headmaster rose and went to the window. Outside, in the driving rain, the bottom form was doing PE. In their singlets and shorts they shivered with cold, and the headmaster was annoyed.

“Silly ass, that Johnston. He’s not working them nearly hard enough. A couple of whacks on their legs and they’d soon warm up. I shall want to see him after the class.”

Then he turned his attention once more to the problem of the prince of Bergania. The behavior of the namby-pamby PE teacher had soured his mood, and he found that his patience was exhausted.

“I’ll write to the duke today. This nonsense has gone on long enough. Either he sends his grandson straightaway or the scholarship is canceled.”

The duke picked this letter off the silver salver in the dining room — and the effect was spectacular. First he turned a brilliant scarlet — his breath came in gasps, he threw the letter across the table. Then he let out a roar which sounded through the entire household. The monkey scuttled for cover; Pom-Pom hid under the sofa.

“You have had bad news?” said Aunt Diana, who was not very bright.

The duke shot her a look of contempt and loathing.

“I have been deceived. I have been made a fool of and I WILL NOT STAND FOR IT.”

His fist came down on the dining table, and a glass ashtray slipped to the floor and shattered.

“Oh poor little Pom-Pom! He will cut his feet,” cried Princess Natalia.

“Poor little Pom-Pom can go to the devil!” shouted the duke.

He had risen from his chair and was pacing the room.

“It’s an outrage and an insult and I will not forgive it. I shall sue the headmaster — the idiot. Does he really think I would let my grandson skulk at home? I’m going to ruin him and ruin his school. And as for Karil… the boy is a deceitful monster. I suppose I should have expected it, with all that foreign blood.” He kicked a chair and swore — he had used the wrong leg, the one that wasn’t made of metal. “As soon as he’s back I’m going to break his will. I’m going to beat him within an inch of his life — and that will only be the beginning. Defying me, making a fool of me.”

The uncles waited, hoping his rage would die down, but it didn’t. Eventually the Archduke Franz Heinrich said, “Where do you think the boy can be?”

The duke stopped pacing and lowered his bull-like head.

“He must have run away,” said Aunt Phyllis, “but where to?”

The duke scowled at her. But it was true he had no idea where to search for Karil.

Then Carlotta rose from her chair. She was wearing white, which was fortunate, for she might well have been a messenger from on high as she laid her hand tenderly on her grandfather’s arm.

“I think I know where he might be, Grandfather,” she said, with her most winning smile. “I can’t be sure but I think so. You see, letters used to come for him from that dreadful school… from the children he came to England with. I thought Karil was cured, but now I think perhaps he’s run away to be with them.”

The duke shook off her arm.

“What?” he roared. “Those disgusting delinquent brats… those nudist anarchists… those gutter rats… It’s impossible. I won’t believe it. Even Karil cannot have sunk so low.”

But the Scold now came to stand beside Carlotta. “I’m afraid the dear child may be right. I said at the time that they had a most dangerous effect on him. I could…” But the Scold fell silent. She had done everything she could to keep Karil away from Tally and her friends — but though she had scolded and bullied the boy for years, she had also loved him. Suddenly she did not want him hounded anymore.

The duke stopped pacing.

“I’m going to hunt the wretched boy down like the criminal he is — if it’s the last thing I do!”

The day began so well.

They were rehearsing the scenes in the Underworld. They had agreed that Hades should be a place of confusion and mist, with the trapped spirits looming in and out of the vapor.

And that meant dry ice!

The blocks of frozen carbon dioxide had arrived the night before, heavily packed in straw — a special consignment as a try-out before the play at the end of term. They had to be carefully lowered into a tin bath and warm water poured over them, and Karil, filling the buckets from the tap in the cloakroom, was in a state of bliss. The more water you poured, the mistier and more obscure the stage became.

The three little girls who were the heads of Cerberus were near the front of the stage; their masks had not been finished yet, but their necks swayed alarmingly. Barney was on a ladder, trying to reach his jet of water. Other spirits dashed about moaning and beseeching.

The ice was going so well that it was becoming harder and harder to make out the characters onstage.

“Isn’t it amazing stuff?” whispered Tally, and Karil nodded.

More mist floated onto the stage. And more figures blundered about. One was very large and used language that was not in the script as he tripped over a rock.

“It’s a policeman!” cried one of the heads of Cerberus.

“Two policemen,” called out the second head.

The men were enormous, looming in and out of the vapor with their arms stretched out in front of them.

For a moment, Karil was turned to stone. Then he threw a last bucket of water into the tub, ran out of the wings, jumped over the end of the stage, and raced the length of the hall.

Straight into the arms of a third policeman, guarding the door.

It was over so quickly, all the hope and the happiness. As he was led away by two of the policemen, it was all Karil could do to walk upright and hold up his head. Knowing what awaited him, he felt a despair so deep that he did not know how he would bear it.

Behind Karil and the policemen came his friends. The officers tried to shoo them away, but they had been through too much with Karil to leave him now.

Apparently he was not to be driven straight back to the hell of Rottingdene House. The policemen were making for the headmaster’s study, and Karil shivered. Had the duke come himself to clamp him in irons? Everything seemed possible.

Daley was seated behind his desk. Yet another policeman stood beside him — a swarthy man with a mustache, holding a briefcase — but this was clearly a high-ranking officer, because the men who had held Karil saluted him.

Karil’s friends had followed him into the room.

“It’s no good throwing us out,” said Tally, “because we won’t go.”

“Your manners are deplorable,” said Daley. “But as a matter of fact I wasn’t going to. Karil may be glad of your support.” And to Karil: “This is Chief Inspector Ferguson from Scotland Yard.”

The inspector nodded at the policemen. “You can let him go now,” he said. He walked over to Karil. “You’d better sit down, Your Grace. I’m afraid I’ve got some very bad news for you.”

He pointed to a chair and Karil sat down, ever more confused and bewildered. Had the duke decided to send him straight to Borstal? The fact that the inspector was being so kind was surely ominous. And why was he calling him Your Grace? That was his grandfather’s title.

“Perhaps a drink of water, sir?” suggested one of the policemen, and Daley poured out a glass from the carafe on his desk.

Karil took it but could not bring himself to drink. His heart was beating so loudly that he thought it must be heard by everybody in the room.

“What is it?” he managed to ask. “The bad news…?”

The inspector laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’d better prepare yourself, Your Grace. It’s as bad as could be. Your grandfather is dead.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE The Play

People had been streaming into the school all day: parents and sisters and aunts. Some came by train, some by car using their saved-up petrol coupons. The hotels in the neighborhood were fully booked, though some of the visitors were staying in the school itself or in houses in the village.

It was the end of term; the parents would see a performance of Persephone and take their children home the following day.

And it was spring. After days of grayness and rain, Delderton was bathed in sunshine; primroses and violets studded the hedgerows. In the pet hut the large white rabbit was molting; Borro’s cow had had her calf, and Delderton was in a festive mood. As well as the play, there were exhibitions of the children’s paintings, and the garments made out of Josie’s carded wool, and all the things that are made in school carpentry workshops the world over: bookends and small tables with wobbly legs and boxes into which things could be put (provided one didn’t need to shut the lid). But the play was what everyone had come for.

Tally’s aunts were among the first to arrive; her father had an urgent meeting at the hospital and was coming on a later train. They wanted to see everything that Tally had described in her letters. The cedar tree, Magda’s room, Mortimer, the library, Clemmy’s art room, and Clemmy herself. They admired everything, knew where everything was — it was as though they had been to the school there themselves.

“Oh yes, yes, of course,” they cried as Tally led them through the building. Karil they knew already; he had stayed the night with them in London after his grandfather’s funeral and was coming to spend the Easter holidays. After a while they disappeared into the kitchen because it looked as though Clemmy could do with some help.

Thank God I decided to stay, thought Daley, as he watched the visitors arrive. Well-trained visitors, whose children had told them about the importance of the cedar tree and who stopped to admire it or pat its trunk. They all came: Barney’s father, Borro’s parents, the older sister who had brought Tod up…

Early in the afternoon a guest arrived in a large closed car — a man wearing a shabby dark suit, with straggles of silver hair under his hat — and was taken to Magda’s room, where she was frantically sorting the children’s clothes for packing.

“Oh!” she said. “You were able to come — we hoped, but…”

The minister of culture nodded. “There is not so very much to do at the moment — we watch and hope that things will change and that one day Bergania will be free again. But there is certainly time to visit my nephew.”

“He’ll be in the hall — they’re very busy with the play. We haven’t said anything to him in case you were detained. It is such splendid news that you and the prime minister will act as Karil’s guardians till he is of age.”

“Yes, we agreed as long as Matteo joined with us. Neither of us is young anymore.”

But now he had seen the manuscript laid out on Magda’s desk.

“Ah, Schopenhauer,” he said. “You are nearly finished?”

“Well nearly, but not quite,” admitted Magda. “You see, there is the question of this washerwoman. Here is a man who has devoted his life to Reason and the Will — is it likely that he would throw a washerwoman down the stairs?”

The minister of culture bent over the page she showed him.

“It’s a problem, certainly; don’t you think perhaps what really happened was that he just gave her a little push — nothing serious — and her legs were weak from standing over a washtub all day, and she fell?”

Magda looked at him gratefully. “Yes. Yes, that seems very probable. You think I should write it like that?”

They were still discussing this urgent matter when the door opened and Karil burst into the room.

“Magda, we need—”

Then he stopped, drew in his breath — and threw himself into the old man’s arms. “Oh, Uncle Fritz, I never thought you’d be able to get away.” And then: “Have you brought him?”

Uncle Fritz nodded. “He’s in the car.”

He led Karil to the shabby limousine and opened the door — and the last of the Outer Mongolian pedestal dogs lifted his head from the seat and wagged his tail. Committing a dreadful crime seemed to have done him good. He looked younger and fitter.

“Poor little murderer,” said Uncle Fritz, scratching his ears.

For it was Pom-Pom who had killed the Duke of Rottingdene.

Trying to get away from the duke as he stamped and raged and swore, the little dog had taken shelter on the hearth rug in front of the fireplace in the Red Salon. The room was usually quiet during the day, and Pom-Pom was fast asleep when the duke came rampaging in, looking for his hearing aid and cursing the servants who must have stolen it and sold it at a vast profit. He started to pull open drawers and throw sofa cushions onto the ground, and in his fury he knocked over a heavy brass lamp.

The lamp clattered to the floor and Pom-Pom leaped up terrified, just as the duke staggered backward, stepped on him, and crashed with his full weight into the marble edge of the chimney piece.

There was nothing to be done. By the time the uncles came running, the duke was lying on the floor with a fractured skull — and quite definitely dead.

But that was only the beginning.

For when the lawyers and the accountants came and the duke’s affairs were looked into, it was discovered not only that he had absolutely no money but that he had been cheating the bank, borrowing money and embezzling it.

And the bank did what banks do when this happens; they took over all his possessions, including his house and his furniture — indeed everything he owned.

Karil came back for the funeral but he returned straightaway to Delderton. He had inherited his grandfather’s title, but anyone addressing him as “Your Grace” got thoroughly snubbed, and all he wanted was never to hear the name of Rottingdene again. Fortunately the uncles were too busy worrying about what would happen to them and their families to want to look after him.

And even if they had wanted to keep Karil they could not have done so, for by then Matteo’s plan had succeeded and he had arranged for the Berganian government-in-exile to declare Karil as its ward.

But Rottingdene House now emptied as everyone left to avoid the bailiffs the bank had put in to wind up the duke’s affairs. The servants were dismissed and the governesses went off to stay with relatives who were even harder up than they were themselves. And poor Princess Natalia went mad.

After she found Pom-Pom lying squashed under the duke, she scooped up the little dog (who was not dead though he ought to have been) and started rushing through the emptying rooms wailing and crying.

“Oh, when will the messenger come?” she moaned. “When… when?”

She was still rampaging through the house a few days later when a tall, distinguished-looking stranger came up the steps, and with a screech that echoed to the rafters she ran toward him.

“You have come!” she cried joyfully. “You are the messenger! You have come to take my Pom-Pom to his bride.”

And before he could protest, she had thrust the little dog into Uncle Fritz’s arms.

So now Pom-Pom had become the mascot for the government-in-exile, and it was clear that Uncle Fritz was already very fond of him.

“And the uncles?” asked Karil as they scooped Pom-Pom out of the car. “Are they all right?”

The minister for culture nodded.

“They’ve all got jobs. Uncle Dmitri is a doorman at the Ritz and Uncle Alfonso is driving taxis. And Franz Heinrich is going up to an island in the Outer Hebrides as gamekeeper to a Scottish landowner.”

“Goodness! I can’t see Carlotta on a Scottish island.”

“No. Carlotta couldn’t either. She threw some remarkable tantrums. But Countess Frederica has got a job as adviser to the aunt of the Prince of Transjordania, who has a house in London. She wants someone to live in and show her how things are done in British society, and the countess has accepted as long as she can bring Carlotta.”

They had reached the courtyard and a number of children came to pat the dog, but Uncle Fritz’s mind was elsewhere.

“These buildings,” he said, looking around, “do you know what happens to them in the holidays?”

“I don’t think anything does,” said Karil. And the children standing around agreed that the buildings stayed empty.

The minister of culture’s eyes lit up. “Good,” he said. Good. They would make an excellent center for a festival. Not folk dancing perhaps but drama or music…

The hall was full, everyone was in their seats, when a large cream-colored limousine drew up under the archway. Cars like that were seldom seen at Delderton, where the parents didn’t go in for obvious luxury and were more likely to arrive on a tandem or hitch-hike to their destination. Two people got out — a woman wearing a hat with a veil and a silver fox fur over her shoulder, and a small man in a raincoat.

Everyone was in the hall except for one of the maids, who had been stationed by the door to collect latecomers.

“Just take us straight in,” ordered the woman, talking with a slight American accent. “We’d like to sit near the front.”

“I’ll do my best,” said the maid, looking hard at the newcomers, “but it’s very full.”

She led them into the hall and, as luck would have it, there were two vacant seats in the third row. Followed by disapproving stares, for not only were they late, but parents at Delderton did not wrap themselves in the pelts of dead animals, the elegant woman and the small man in the raincoat slipped into their seats.

And the curtain went up.

It went up on a ravishing Greek landscape — flowers and a view of light blue sea and streaming sunshine — and on Persephone and her maidens playing with a painted ball.

Whatever was wrong with Verity’s acting, she looked lovely, with her tousled dark hair and her bare feet and the delicate ankles she set such store by, and from Verity’s parents and the parents of the girls who were her companions there came a sigh of pleasure.

Musicians came in from the wings and Persephone led her girls into a dance. One of the maidens, a very small junior, stumbled and for a moment it looked as if she would fall, but Verity scooped her up and dusted her off with scarcely a break in the rhythm, and the people in the audience smiled, thinking the mishap had been meant.

The music died away. Persephone was left alone to gather flowers with which to bind her hair. She picked crocuses and lilies and asphodels — and then bent down to the narcissus with its multiple heads and roots deep in the ground: the flower that had been grown as a lure for the innocent girl.

The sky darkened. There was a rumble of thunder, faint at first, then growing stronger… a bolt of lightning and a grim moaning as of sufferers in the bowels of the earth… and with a final crash, the Lord of the Underworld burst from the rocks. This was no pantomime villain but a powerful ruler — there had been enough children at hand to coach Ronald Peabody in the true bearing of a king — and seizing the pale and trembling girl, he drew her slowly, relentlessly, down into the terrifying dark. In the moment that the light was lost to her forever, she emitted a single, piercing cry — and then all was silence.

The curtain dipped only for a moment. It rose on Demeter, the Goddess of Plenty, arriving with her entourage of nymphs and dryads.

It was necessary for Demeter to be beautiful, so Julia had become beautiful. She moved across the stage, tall and bountiful, and radiant with power and grace.

But she was looking for her daughter.

“Persephone?” she called. “Where are you? Are you hiding? Is it a game?”

The audience watched spellbound, almost unable to bear it, as Julia, still searching, became uncertain, then bewildered… then afraid… then desperate. Till she understood that the unthinkable had happened and her child was lost — and a look of such anguish spread over her face as stopped the heart.

The curtain went down to an ovation. Yet some of the parents were almost nervous that someone so young could transmit such terrible grief. The woman in the silver fox fur took out her handkerchief and sniffed.

Backstage, the scene shifters moved silently, preparing Hades.

Everybody liked Hades. The anguished figures, half obscured by mist, going about their terrible tasks; the wailing of the dead. Cerberus got a special clap, and so did Karil’s dry ice. In the background Persephone languished beside her husband, toying with her pomegranate.

But the next act belonged to the sorrowing Demeter. The radiant goddess had vanished; here was a grief-stricken woman looking for her child. Julia had become old — not because of her makeup but because oldness came from inside her. It was in every movement she made, every sigh she uttered. She wore a black cloak and they could see how its folds weighed on her, how it hurt her to walk. And the world she moved in was a dead world — the crops had withered, flocks lay stricken in the fields. The grieving goddess had turned aside from her duties, and famine stalked the land.

The people she met could tell her nothing of her daughter’s whereabouts.

Disguised now as an old nurse, she begged for a child to look after — and they could see how she tried to love it — tried and tried, bathing it and tending it — but failed because it was not the child she longed for; it was not her daughter.

Then came the voice of the Sun God, telling her that Persephone was lost forever, deep in the bowels of the earth — and with a cry that echoed that of her daughter as she was carried off, the broken goddess fell to the ground.

There was a short interval and the parents blinked and came down to earth. They had long since stopped watching only their own children; they were watching a play.

In the last act the gods on Olympus took pity on the goddess and the dying world and sent Hermes to the Underworld to bring Persephone back. And now the audience, watching Julia, saw a reversal. Demeter, reunited with her daughter, grew young before their eyes; she became tall and radiant and utterly beautiful.

“My God,” whispered a man in the audience. “I swear she makes the light come out of herself.”

In the final tableau, Persephone knelt at her mother’s feet, and as Demeter raised her hand the stage grew light, petals streamed down from above, and the entire cast entered, bearing fruit and flowers and garlands of leaves. The glorious hymn to Demeter was sung, the curtain fell — and the woman in the silver fox fur broke into noisy sobs.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” said Julia, “but it’s what I really want to do. Act, I mean. I know you think I can’t do it but—”

“Oh no, my darling, no no. Not at all; I may have said…” She extracted a mauve and scented handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. Daley had lent them his room, but there seemed to be nothing to drink on his desk, and she signaled to her agent, Mr. Harvenberg, who slipped out for a gin and tonic. “But I was wrong, I see that now. Only it’s such a terrible profession. There is such heartbreak.” She clutched Julia, digging her long fingernails into her daughter’s arm. “I wanted to do my best for you and that meant acting younger than my age so that I could make a lot of money for us. And I have made a lot — and I shall make more when I’ve sued the film company. I’m going to take them to the cleaners. You’ve no idea how they’ve treated me.”

“Aren’t you going back to Hollywood then?” asked Julia.

“Go back to that sewer? Never! I wouldn’t go back if they asked me on their bended knees. I’m going to stay and do my bit for my country. I’m going to join the WVS. The uniform is dreadful — that miserable bottle green — but I shan’t let it put me off. You’ll see, my darling; you’re going to be proud of me. Now come and give me a kiss.”

Afterward Mr. Harvenberg took Julia and Tally aside.

“They sacked her. Booted her out. Said she was all washed up, too old. Don’t take too much notice — she’ll find someone to protect her. There’s a boyfriend lined up already. Doubt if she’ll last in the WVS, whatever that is. You mustn’t take anything she says to heart. I’m off back to the States, but if you want anything let me know.” He extracted his card and handed it to Julia. “It’s much too early to say, but if you want to go in for the profession later, I might be able to help you. You’re not a looker like your mother, but you can act and that counts for something. Not much, but something.”

Everyone had gathered together in Magda’s room — the aunts, the minister of culture, those parents who were staying in the school… But Dr. Hamilton had taken Karil aside and was talking to him in the courtyard.

“Matteo came to see me before he went abroad,” he said. “He asked me if I was willing to have you stay for the holidays. Not just these holidays, but all of them.”

Karil waited.

“I said I was more than willing. That I would be delighted, if it suited you.”

“There’s nothing I’d like better,” said Karil. “But you don’t know me.”

For Tally’s father had been at a conference when Karil had come to stay after the funeral.

Dr. Hamilton smiled. “Tally knows you,” he said. “That’s enough for me.”

As they made their way upstairs and into Magda’s room, they heard Kit’s plaintive voice.

“I don’t like cocoa with skin on…” he began.

But there wasn’t any skin on it. The aunts had made the cocoa.

And the party began.