“I’m sure it does. You ought to rest now.”
“Not just yet. I have business to take care of.”
“What business?”
He gave me a look that was almost metallic in its indifference.
“Presidential business,” he said.
* * *
No mention was made of the attempted assassination in the city press, for it was a delicate subject; but Julian arranged to make public his response to it, as I discovered the following morning when I left the Palace grounds for a walk down Broadway.
A crowd of pedestrians thronged the street beyond the 59th Street Gate, gazing upward with wide eyes. It was not until I reached the sidewalk outside the great walls that I could see what had attracted all their attention.
High on the iron spikes that surmount the stone wall two Severed Heads had been mounted, one to the left of the Gate and one to the right.
This was as gruesome a sight as anything I had seen in Labrador , more shocking for its presence in an otherwise peaceful city. However, it was not without precedent. The heads of traitors had been displayed here in earlier years and other conflicts, though seldom since the turbulent 2130s. From ground-level it was difficult to discern the identity of the victims, since the heads were contorted by death and had been pecked at by pigeons. But some of the curious onlookers had fetched opera-glasses in order to satisfy their curiosity, and a consensus had emerged among the crowd. The head on the left was not familiar to anyone present (nor could have been, for it belonged to the assassin captured in the Library Wing). The head on the right, however, was the one that had recently rested on the shoulders of Deklan Conqueror, the former President, who had once feared his nephew as a usurper, and had nothing to fear now but the judgment of a righteous God.
The unpleasant trophies remained there most of a week, rotting. Small boys gathered every day to toss pebbles at them, until the ghastly ornaments at last came loose from their spikes and tumbled back onto the Palace grounds.
* * *
Julian wouldn’t speak of the beheadings, saying only that justice had been done and that the event was finished. I hoped he had not ordered the executions, but had only sanctioned them—though that was bad enough. I did not, of course, feel any sympathy for Julian’s uncle or the anonymous assassin, since the former had committed many murders and the latter had attempted at least one. But the cutting off of their heads without benefit of trial did not seem to me entirely civilized; and I could not help thinking that the public display of their remains served no better purpose than to make Julian appear brutal and imperious.
During that same week, in another imperious act, Julian dismissed every serving member of the Republican Guard—some five hundred altogether—and replaced them with members of the Army of the Laurentians, selected by Julian personally from a list of those who had fought by his side at Mascouche , Chicoutimi , and Goose Bay. Many of these men were my comrades as well, and it was startling to walk down the halls of the Executive Palace and find myself greeted not with the malign stares and suspicion to which I had become accustomed, but by hearty hails from old friends and acquaintances.
That feeling was compounded one Friday evening when I went to join Julian and Magnus Stepney to plan out the next week’s efforts on Charles Darwin.
The new Captain of the Republican Guards, whom I had not met, was standing watch over the Library Wing when I turned a corner in one of that building’s long halls and nearly collided with him.
“Watch out,” the new man cried, “I’m not a door you can swing wide and walk through—state your business, mister—but— be damned if it isn’t Adam Hazzard!
Adam, you bookworm! I’ll shake your hand or know why not!”
He did shake my hand, and it was a bruising experience, for the new Captain of the Guard was Mr. Lymon Pugh.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so glad to see him, but at that moment he seemed like an envoy from a simpler and easier world. I told him I hadn’t expected to meet him again, and that I hoped the Palace was a good place in which to find himself employed.
“Better than a slaughterhouse,” he said. “And you! Last time I saw you, Adam, you had just married that tavern singer from the Thirsty Boot.”
“I did, and we have a daughter now—I’ll introduce you!”
“You wrote a book, too, somebody told me.”
“A pamphlet about ‘Captain Commongold,’ and a novel which is selling adequately well; and I’ve met Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, and worked beside him. But you must have accomplished things just as significant!”
He shrugged. “I lived to my present age without dying,” he said. “That’s enough to boast about, by my lights.”
* * *
Calyxa kept her distance from The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin, as well as from Julian himself. Having supplied the score and lyrics, she felt no need to involve herself in the minutiae of movie-making, especially during a time when she was instructing Flaxie in the fundamentals of eating, and standing upright, and such useful skills as that.
She continued to meet with Parmentierist friends from the city, however, and Mrs. Comstock (or Mrs. Godwin, as I could not get accustomed to calling her) pursued certain of her contacts among the lesser Eupatridians. More importantly, the two women consulted one another and formulated plans to deal with any crisis that might arise out of Julian’s political situation.
“Do you know very much about Mediterranean France?” Calyxa asked me with a certain affected casualness, one September night as we lay in bed.
“Only that Mitteleuropa claims it as a Territory, while it insists it’s an Independent Republic.”
“The weather there is very clement, and Mediterranean France has cordial relations with other parts of the world.”
“I expect that’s so… what about it?”
“Nothing at all, except that we may have to live there one day.”
I didn’t dismiss her assertion out of hand. In fact we had discussed the possibility several times before. In the event of a disaster, such as the collapse of Julian’s presidency and the ascension to the Executive of hostile agencies, all of us (including Julian) might need to flee the country.
But I fervently hoped those conditions would not arise; or, if they did, that it would happen far in the future, when Flaxie was older and better able to travel. I didn’t like to think of taking an infant on a trans-Atlantic journey. I was not even willing to let Flaxie be taken for rides in the streets of Manhattan , especially not now, with a new Pox circulating and half the citizens going about with paper masks over their noses.
“You can’t leave these arrangements to the last hour,” Calyxa said. “Things need to be set up in advance. We decided on Mediterranean France—”
“Wait— who decided?”
“Emily and I, between us. I consulted the local Parmentierists, and they say it’s an ideal refuge. Emily has connections with people in the shipping business—right now she would have no trouble arranging passage for us, though that might change, with a changing situation.”
“I still hope to spend my life in America and write books,” I said.
“You wouldn’t be the only American author in Marseilles. You can send manuscripts by mail.”
“I’m not sure my publisher would agree to that.”
“If things get much worse in Manhattan , Adam, you may not have a publisher.”
Perhaps that observation was true. But it didn’t cheer me up, or help me sleep.