The Sword-Edged blonde

SEVEN

I hadn’t enjoyed such swanky accommodations in a long time. When we were kids, Phil and I watched his father’s guests go in and out of these elaborately appointed rooms, often accompanied by a train of assistants and servants. Once we planned to sneak our dates into one of them, but his mother busted us and we both got grounded. And once I had sneaked into one, with Janet. So even though I was a grown man, I still felt like I was about to get in trouble as I sat on the edge of the ridiculously soft bed.

After a bath I changed into clean clothes and ate two of the huge rolls, packed with ham and cheese and brought by a serious-looking, matronly servant. Two thick parchment folders were stacked next to the reading lantern on the desk. I finished the second roll, opened the top folder and began to read.

Two hours later I’d finished the files, and the rolls weren’t sitting too well alongside what I’d learned. I closed the second folder, walked to the window and opened the wooden blinds. It was dark, and although the night was filled with city sounds, the breeze seemed cool and clean. I certainly didn’t feel the same way.

All the guests at the state dinner the night of the murder agreed that Queen Rhiannon had seemed in her usual good spirits, charming the visiting bigwigs and even, once the after-dinner wine started flowing, favoring them with a song. She’d left at around 9:30 and gone upstairs, ostensibly to feed her son before retiring.

The head nursemaid, Beth Maxwell, reported that the queen arrived just before ten. I knew something about the layout of this castle, and nearly thirty minutes seemed a long time to get from the dining room to the nursery. Still, why would she hurry? Dawdling certainly wasn’t a crime.

Nurse Maxwell left the baby with his mother and went to fold some linen in the laundry. Next, one of the maids, Sally Sween, entered the nursery to refill the night lamps with oil; the queen appeared to have dozed off in her rocking chair, with young Pridiri asleep in her arms. This, evidently, was not unusual, and the maid left them alone. And they stayed alone for the next hour. So from about 10:30 to 11:30, the queen could’ve done anything.

At 11:30, Nurse Maxwell returned to the nursery to put away the fresh bedclothes and diapers. She found the door locked, which according to her had never before happened. Miss Sween joined her in pounding on the door, but they got no answer. When they smelled smoke, they summoned a captain of the guard, Thomas Vogel, who forced the door open.

Here I found the guard’s report most illuminating, because he was a trained soldier who could observe accurately in a crisis. The queen lay on the floor, naked, covered in “a red substance that appeared to be blood.” Marked on the floor was a circle, with “various ideograms inscribed along its border with chalk.” He also described a knife, a stick with three feathers attached, and a bundle of what he correctly judged to be sage. In the center of the circle, a cauldron had been set up over a small brazier. This, plus the incense, supplied the smoke the two women smelled.

As the women attended to the fallen queen, Vogel examined the cauldron. Inside it he saw “boiling water and several pieces of bone, one of which appeared to be an infant human skull.” The window was open, but he stressed that no one could have gained access through it, as the window was barred and opened onto a sheer four-story wall well inside the castle’s guarded perimeter.

The queen awoke then, and was immediately violently ill. Vogel, in some sort of triumph of observational skill, mentioned that “she expelled large chunks of what appeared to be boiled meat.”

Vogel dispatched Nurse Maxwell, the calmer of the two women, to immediately fetch King Philip. He then shut the door to the room and insisted nothing be touched. He spent the few minutes before the king and Wentrobe’s arrival sketching the designs and placement of items within the circle. He also provided a list of banquet guests, along with capsule summaries to help jog people’s memories: Lady who bark-talked to her poodle, Blond man with the ugly chimpanzee, Countess with flatulence problem, Baron and young footman with family resemblance.

I smiled; with a dozen men as cool-headed as Vogel, I could rule the world.

And so the king and Wentrobe arrived, and pieced together-no pun intended-what must have happened. The queen, who had never before shown any interest in mooncraft, had, for reasons unknown, ceremonially sacrificed her son and cannibalized his corpse.

The queen claimed to remember nothing other than falling asleep while she nursed. This obviously wasn’t much of an alibi, and the scrutiny Phil knew he’d face if he tried to delay action left him with only one option: he arrested her for murder and had her held in the prison tower reserved for the most dangerous, or most important, criminals. And then secretly, he sent for me.

Queen Rhiannon had been in that tower a week now, with no visitors except for the staff and no contact with the outside. Not even Phil had been to see her, since that would give the wrong appearance. No date had been set for her trial, but Phil would have to announce it soon.

I let the night’s wind blow through my hair. I could just make out the top windows of the prison tower, visible over the peaked roof of the king’s main audience chamber. I thought I saw a figure move across one of the windows, but it was too far and too dark to be sure. My first glimpse of this mysterious Queen Rhiannon?

The next morning I got down to work.

I pushed open the nursery door. The hinges, well-oiled as everything else in the castle, made barely a peep. The door swung slowly back and bumped softly against the wall. I stood on the threshold, absorbing the scene for a long moment before I finally entered the room.

I wasn’t sure if this was the “official royal nursery from time immemorial,” but Phil had been nursed in this room, and Janet. One of my earliest memories was of Phil and me repeatedly slamming our thick little skulls against the slats of his crib. Now the room was empty, the lamps unlit, and the smells of smoke and dried blood still hung in the air. The light through the window fell on the scene of the crime like the blazing finger of some god.

The cauldron had been removed, and the brazier, but the designs chalked on the floor remained, and the big red stains. I carefully walked around them, remembering that moon priestesses cast their spells clockwise. They wrote in a symbolic language I couldn’t quite translate, but that usually had some sort of common theme. For instance, almost every symbol might feature a bird, if the spell had something to do with the primary magical element of air. But these designs meant nothing to me; one featured a bird, the next two a dragon, and the one after that a mermaid. To me, and I suspected to any real moon priestess, it was gibberish.

I walked to the window and looked out. Vogel’s report had been accurate; the bars were close enough to keep any small inquisitive bodies from accidentally tumbling through, and the wall beneath the window was sheer straight down to the courtyard. I shook the bars and examined the corrosion around the bolts that held them in place; they were anchored into the stone as securely as the day they’d been installed. No one, or at least no human being, had entered through them.

A soft knock and cleared throat got my attention. I turned to see a tall, portly man with a long mustache standing at attention in the door. “Thomas Vogel, Sergeant of the Palace Guard,” he announced stiffly, “reporting as ordered, sir.”

“At ease, sergeant,” I said. “I’m a civilian.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and clasped his hands behind him in military at-ease. He was about as relaxed as the bars over the window.

“Come in and close the door,” I said, and he did so, standing in front of it. I sat on the window ledge. “Your report was very thorough. I didn’t ask you here because I found any fault in it, I just wanted to walk through the scene with you. Does anything look like it’s different now?”

He took a slow look around, moving his head from left to right. “The cauldron and brazier are gone. The linen on the crib’s been changed. The cushion on the rocker is different. And one of the pictograms is smeared.”

I smiled. I’d deliberately smudged the corner of one drawing with my boot to see if he’d notice. “Damn,” I said softly, “why are you just a sergeant?”

“I notice things,” he said flatly.

I nodded. “Okay, help me out now. Where was the queen, exactly, when you came in?”

He stepped forward and pointed. “Kneeling here, in the middle of the circle. She was facing the door. The cauldron was in front of her.”

“And she was naked?”

He actually blushed a little. “Yes, sir, she was.”

“Where were her clothes?”

“In a pile right there. As if she just undid them and let them fall.”

“Including her shoes?”

He squinted with thought. “Yes, sir, her shoes were under the pile.”

I nodded. That was odd; a formal gown around your knees would make it hard to then step out of the kind of shoes a queen would wear. I hadn’t yet met her, but the Rhiannon I’d heard described seemed far more graceful than that. “What did she do the moment you opened the door?”

“She looked up and gasped.”

“In surprise?”

“No, sir. More in satisfaction.” He took a deep breath and went “ Ahhhhh, ” imitating her response.

“Did she protest the interruption?”

“No, sir, she seemed intoxicated.”

“How long did that last?”

“Until the king arrived. Then she seemed to sober up.”

“He does have that effect on people.”

“Yes, sir.”

I walked around the circle. “Did you find the chalk she used to draw this?”

“No, sir, we did not.”

“How do you explain that?”

“Two possible explanations, sir. One, she used all the chalk she had for the designs. Two, she threw the chalk out the window, and it shattered below. I found no fragments, but the courtyard has a lot of traffic. They could have been thoroughly crushed before I was able to search.”

I nodded again and returned to the window. “Sergeant, is there anything, any detail, that was left out of your report? I know it might seem inconsequential, but you never know what might be crucial.”

He stared straight ahead, resolutely formal. “I’m aware of that, sir. My report is as thorough as I can make it. I wrote down everything I observed. The questions you’ve asked me here are more matters of interpretation.”

“True. And you’ve been invaluable, thank you.”

“Will that be all, sir?”

“Mostly. Except… do you think the queen did it?”

“ ‘Think,’ sir? I’m a soldier. I don’t think.”

“You must have an opinion.”

“As do we all, along with a certain orifice.”

Vogel clearly was not going to commit himself; perhaps he had done just that at some point in the past, which explained why he was still a mere sergeant. “Yes. Well. Thank you again. And please keep this conversation just between us for the time being.”

“Of course, sir.” He bowed and left with the same precision he’d arrived.

I looked down at the bloodstain on the stone. I knelt and ran my finger across it, then smelled my fingertips. It was blood, all right. Something had died in this room. But that was the only thing that might truly be what it seemed.

Nursemaid Beth Maxwell was a cheery, round young woman who would no doubt make a good mother herself, should she ever run across a man whose tastes ran to acres of rolling white flesh. She wore a neat, spotless uniform and a little cap over her tight brown curls, and looked up at me with guileless eyes. Phil let me use his office for these interviews, which conveyed a lot more authority than I’d command on my own.

“I appreciate you seein’ me on such short notice,” I said, exaggerating my country accent so she’d feel less threatened. “Just want to ask you a coupla things ’bout that night in the nursery.”

She shuddered at the memory. “I’ll never forget a thing from that night.”

“That’s what I’m hopin’. When the queen came in from the dinner party, did she seem upset or anything?”

“No, just the opposite. She seemed almost silly. I assumed she’d overindulged a bit on wine during dinner, although that wasn’t like her, especially since Diri was born-that was our nickname for the prince, you know. The king called him P.D., but he was our little Diri.” She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “But she certainly didn’t seem depressed.”

“Did you say anything to her?”

“Just reported that Diri had spent a quiet evening, and had only just begun to fuss because he was hungry.”

“Fuss?”

“Yes, you know how babies are.”

“Not really.”

“Oh. Well, their little tummies know when things are supposed to happen, and if they don’t get fed right on time, they let you know they’re not happy about it.”

“So she was late, then?”

She thought for a moment. “A bit, I guess. No more than a few minutes.”

I thanked her and showed her out. I was starting to get an idea, but I tried not to dwell on it until I had more information. I wanted the theory to fit the facts, not the other way around. I made some quick notes and stared at the battle scene painted on the ceiling until the next timid knock on the door.

The maid Sally Sween was way too pretty to work in a bachelor household. Had she been in service back when Phil and I were teenagers, I shudder to think of the lengths to which we’d have gone to win her favors. As it was, her exquisite face was puffy with fear-spawned tears, since being summoned to the king’s office was almost never a good thing.

“Would you like a drink?” I asked. Her uniform worked hard to control her decolletage, which distracted me more than I wanted to admit. She shook her head. I poured myself one. She crossed enviable legs as she waited.

Finally I said, “You stated that when you first checked on the queen and the baby, she was asleep in the rocking chair, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was the baby asleep?”

She blinked. “Well… I assume so. He wasn’t crying or anything.”

I nodded. “Now I need you to think real hard on this one. Did you actually see the baby in the queen’s arms?”

She thought so hard I was afraid her eyes would pop from her face. “She had a bundle in her arms that I thought was her son, but… I can’t swear to actually seeing him. Is that important?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. But inside I felt another click as more things aligned.

I kept my gaze as even as I could. What I’d asked was horrendous even to me, but I couldn’t let Phil know that, or I knew he’d talk me out of it. He stared at me over his desk, speechless.

Wentrobe finally spoke. “Baron LaCrosse, are you sure that’s needed?”

The use of the title made me grit my teeth. “Pretty sure,” I said, although I kept my eyes on Phil.

“Well, I don’t know if I can condone this,” Wentrobe said. “It’s… it’s sacrilegious.”

“It’s necessary,” I said. “I just need one workman to help me. No one else has to know.”

Phil looked down for a minute. “Okay,” he said at last. “I did ask for your help, so I have to let you do your job.” Then he looked up and added, “But no workman. You and I’ll do it.”

Wentrobe looked stricken. “Your Majesty, I don’t think-”

“No one is going to desecrate my son’s tomb,” he snapped. “If I do it, then I know it’ll be done with respect.” He stood up and took a deep breath. “Exactly what do you think you’ll find?”

“The last piece of the frame,” I said. I didn’t want to give him my entire theory just yet. “Then maybe I can see the whole picture.”