And so, like a fool, I did ask her, and she only squeezed my hands and shook her head. “I would let you if it was possible, Oelph,” she said quietly. “It is so sweet of you to want to accompany me. I shall cherish always the memory of that kindness. But I cannot ask you to come with me.”
“I would go anywhere with you, mistress!” I cried, my eyes now full of tears. I would have thrown myself at her feet and hugged her legs if I had been able to see properly. Instead I hung my head and blubbered like a child. “Please, mistress, please, mistress,” I wept, no longer even able to say what it was I wanted, her to stay or me to go.
“Oh, Oelph, I was trying so hard not to cry,” she said, then gathered me in her arms and folded me to her.
At last to be held in her arms, pressed against her, and be allowed to put my arms round her, feeling her warmth and her strength, encompassing her firm softness, drawing in that fresh perfume from her skin. She put her chin on my shoulder, just as mine rested on hers. Between my sobs, I could feel her shake, crying too, now. I had last been this close to her, side by side, my head on her shoulder, her head on mine, in the torture chamber of the palace, half a moon earlier, when the guards had tumbled in with the news that we were needed because the King was dying.
The King was indeed dying. A terrible sickness had fallen upon him from nowhere, causing him to collapse during a dinner being held for the suddenly, and secretly, arrived Duke Quettil. King Quience had been in the middle of a sentence, when he stopped speaking, stared straight ahead and started to shake. His eyes had revolved back into his head and he had slumped down in his seat, unconscious, the wine goblet dropping froze his hand.
Skelim, Quettil’s doctor, was there. He had had to remove the King’s tongue from his throat, or he would have choked to death immediately. Instead he lay there on the floor, senseless and shaking spasmodically while everybody rushed around. Duke Quettil attempted to take charge, apparently ordering that guards be posted everywhere. Duke Ulresile contented himself with staring, while the new Duke Walen sat in his seat, whimpering. Guard Commander Adlain posted a guard at the King’s table to make sure nobody touched the King’s plate or the decanter he’d been drinking from, in case somebody had poisoned him.
During all this commotion, a servant arrived with the news that Duke Ormin had been murdered.
My thoughts, oddly, have turned to that footman whenever I have tried to envisage the scene. A servant rarely gets to deliver genuinely shocking news to those of exalted rank, and to be entrusted with something as momentous as the intelligence that one of the King’s favourites has taken the life of a Duke must seem like something of a privilege. To discover that it is of relatively little consequence compared to the events unfolding before you must be galling.
I was, subsequently, more than usually diligent in quizzing, as subtly as I could, the servants who were in the dining chamber that evening, and they reported that, even at the time, they noticed that certain of the dining guests did not react as one might have expected to the news, presumably just because of the distraction of the King’s sudden predicament. It was almost, they hazarded, as though the Guard Commander and the Dukes Ulresile and Quettil had been expecting the news.
Doctor Skelim ordered that the King be taken directly to his bed. Once there he was undressed. Skelim inspected the King’s body for any marks that might indicate he had been shot with a poisoned dart or infected with something through a cut. There were none.
The King’s blood pulse was slow and becoming slower, only increasing briefly when small fits passed through him. Doctor Skelim reported that unless something could be done, the King’s heart was sure to stop within the bell. He confessed himself at a loss to determine what had befallen the King. The doctor’s bag was delivered from his room by a breathless servant, but the few tonics and stimulants he was able to administer (little better than smelling salts by the sound of them, especially given that Quience could not be induced to swallow anything) had no effect whatsoever.
The doctor considered bleeding the King, in effect the only thing he could think of which he had not tried, but bleeding somebody with a weakening heartbeat had proved worse than useless in the past, and on this occasion, thankfully, the urge not to make matters worse overcame the need to be seen to be doing something. The doctor ordered some exotic infusions to be prepared, but held out little hope that they would be any more effective than the compounds he had already administered.
It was you, master, who said that Doctor Vosill would have to be summoned. I am told that Duke Ulresile and Duke Quettil took you aside and that there was a furious argument. Duke Ulresile flew from the room in a blinding rage and later took a sword to one of his servants such that the poor fellow lost one eye and a pair of fingers. I find it admirable that you stood your ground. A contingent of the palace guards was sent to the questioning chamber with orders to take the Doctor from there by force if necessary.
I am told that my mistress walked calmly in to the terrified confusion that was the King’s chamber, where nobles, servants and, it seemed, half the palace were assembled, crying and wailing.
She had sent me, with a pair of guards, to her chamber for her medicine bag. We surprised one of Duke Quettil’s servants and another palace guard there. Both looked anxious and guilty at being caught in the Doctor’s rooms. Duke Quettil’s man held a piece of paper I recognised.
I have never, I think, been so proud of myself for anything I have done in my life as for what I did next, for I was still half terrified that my ordeal had merely been postponed rather than cancelled. I was shaking and sweating with the shock of what I had witnessed, I was mortified at the callow and cowardly way I had felt in the torture chamber, ashamed of how my body had betrayed me, and my mind was still spinning.
What I did was take the note from Quettil’s servant.
“That is the property of my mistress!” I hissed, and stepped forward, a look of fury on my face. I grabbed the note from the fellow’s fingers. He looked blankly at me, then at the note, which I stuffed quickly into my shirt. He opened his mouth to speak. I turned, still quivering with rage, to the two guards who had been sent with me. “Escort this person from these apartments immediately!” I said.
This was, of course, a gamble on my part. In all the excitement, it had been quite unclear whether the Doctor and I were still technically prisoners or not, and therefore the two guards might rightly have concluded that they were my jailers, not my bodyguards, which was the way I was treating them. I would modestly claim that they were able to recognise something transparently honest and true about my righteous indignation and so decided to do as I commanded.
The Duke’s man looked terrified, but did as he was told.
I buttoned up my jacket to further secure the note, found the Doctor’s bag and hurried to the King’s chamber with my escorts.
The Doctor had turned the King on to his side. She knelt by his bed, stroking his head in a distracted way, fending off questions from Doctor Skelim. (A reaction to something in his food, probably, she told him. Extreme, but not poison.)
You stood, master, arms crossed, near the Doctor. Duke Quettil lurked in a corner, glaring at her.
She took a small stoppered glass vial from the bag, holding it up to the light and shaking it. “Oelph, this is the salts solution number twenty-one, herbed. Do you know it?”