It was dark when he awoke. He was flat on his back, a hand was on his shoulder and a familiar voice was swimming hazily into view.
“Arthur?”
The prince blinked, tried to sit up, winced. “Darling? Darling, is that you?” The prince attempted a rueful grin but discovered that smiling seemed to hurt him now, that it cost him dearly.
“Arthur? Are you going to tell me what’s been going on? I’ve heard the most fearful noises.”
“Leviathan…” Arthur tried to push himself up. “I think Leviathan must be here.” The prince was in the most relentless, unstinting kind of pain. He wanted to say more, to explain as much as he could, wanted more than anything, to beg Laetitia’s forgiveness, to throw himself upon her mercy and plead for the balm of her understanding, for her sweet clemency. But he found himself unable to speak a single word — his throat tight and dry, his innards churning and swirling in a tempest of gastric distress, his head pounding with a fusillade of thunderclaps.
Just before he sank back into unconsciousness and the horrified face of his wife vanished first to a distant point of light and then into absolute nothingness, Arthur Windsor was granted clear and unambiguous knowledge of what was happening to him. These are withdrawal symptoms, he thought, having attended several lectures on the subject as part of the work that he did for a spectrum of young people’s charities. I am in withdrawal from ampersand.
Shortly before he went under, he managed to croak out a few words. “Stay in here. Promise me that you’ll stay in this room.”
But by then he was already sliding into unconsciousness and he never heard his wife’s reply.
The next twenty-four hours were a study in pain and terror. There were moments of relative lucidity when he saw Laetitia and heard her voice quite clearly, moments when he sensed that she held him in her arms, rocking him gently as a mother would a child, even (although this may have been an auditory hallucination) that she was singing to him, some old melody part-remembered from his childhood. Once when he awoke, she persuaded him to drink a little water. On another occasion, when he emerged momentarily from the deep mists of his mind, he discovered her seated before him on the bed eating the most peculiar combination of food — peanut butter ladled directly from the jar, gherkins, pork scratchings, sardines. For some time afterward he believed (quite erroneously) that this had simply been some overheated imagining of his. Certainly, it grew almost impossible for the prince to tell what was real and what were merely tricks, snares and booby-traps laid by that ampersand which still fought for a foothold in his system. There were the sounds that he heard from outdoors, the screeches and whisperings, the savage cries of triumph. More than once, he discovered himself clutching at Laetitia’s arm and imploring her not to leave him. The shutters were down, so he could not see outside, but there existed not the slightest doubt in his mind that it was still snowing. He even believed that he could hear it, the ceaseless patter of the snow, the unending fall of ampersand from the sky, and as he lay in this febrile state, he was visited by memories of old sins. He saw the woman at the station explode all over again, as though in slow motion. He even thought that he heard the laughter of Virtue and Mercy, although he never saw them, their power fading, perhaps, even then. But whilst he longed for it, the small, gray cat never visited him again. Something in the prince told him that the animal’s strength was very weak now, if, indeed, it had not been extinguished altogether.
The future king of England slept and dreamed and sweated. His wife lay beside him, doing everything that she could to ignore the terrible roars and shouts from outside, noises strangely echoed beside her as her husband swam in and out of consciousness, calling out unfamiliar names and screaming for forgiveness, his body a battleground for forces beyond her comprehension.
And so it went for a day and a night until, early in the dawn of the third day, as the prince seemed at last to be coming back to her, Laetitia heard a firm, decisive knock upon the door.
“Who’s there?” she cried out, shaking her husband hard to stir him. “Arthur? Someone’s at the door.”
The prince groaned, stirred and clutched at his forehead in a theatrical gesture which Laetitia had hitherto believed to be confined to stage drunks.
Then it came again — the same solemn tapping.
Laetitia looked around for something with which she might defend herself. Although the room lay in sepulchral gloom (the power having gone out almost forty-eight hours earlier and the emergency generator secreted beneath Clarence House failing only a very few minutes thereafter), it was still possible to see that the place was tastefully studded with objects of breezily incalculable wealth — several immensely rare vases, pottery fragments which were believed to predate Christ, a glass case of butterflies, all extinct — but none of them looked as though they might prove of much use as a weapon.
Arthur was at least sitting up now and had taken to rubbing his eyes, with hands clenched into fists like a child woken in the night. Laetitia was about to urge him into action when, from the other side of the door, she heard just about the most welcome voice in the world.
“Ma’am? Are you all right?”
Relief gushed into her voice. “Silverman?”
Behind her, Arthur, on his feet and searching for something on the floor by the bed, started to mumble a warning, but Laetitia ignored him and opened the door onto an old friend.
It was a friend, however, sadly changed. Mr. Silverman stood upon the threshold, badly bruised, stained in mud, grease and blood, his left hand horribly mangled as though he had dipped it, for some inebriate dare, into the spinning rotors of an uncompromisingly efficient piece of farming equipment.
“Silverman! My God!” The prince, leaning against the end of the bed, seemed to be stowing something into his trouser pocket. “What the devil have they done to you?”
The equerry stepped inside, closed the door and began to speak, briskly, urgently, but without obvious emotion, like a junior officer returned alone to HQ to deliver news of some catastrophic rout. “Mr. Streater took out some of his frustrations upon my person, sir. Shortly before imprisoning me in one of the wine cellars.”
“But you escaped?” Laetitia asked.
“Indeed, ma’am.”
Arthur gestured toward the gory remnants of Silverman’s hand. “But not, it seems, without some cost to yourself.”
“This is nothing, sir.” The man looked hideously pale, his skin taut and glossy with sweat, but it was still possible to discern a blush. “It’s a scratch.”
“Can you tell us what’s going on out there?”
Silverman appeared to sway slightly on his feet. “I think you might be able to teach us something about that, sir.” There was a trace of recrimination in his voice — not obvious and probably invisible to anyone who did not know him but to Arthur and Laetitia strikingly and uncomfortably apparent.