“But too late,” said the boy.
“Yes, Karil. Too late.”
The boy could not blame him more than he blamed himself, thought Matteo. He should have made himself known to the king as soon as he arrived, but he had wanted to find out who the conspirators were and how serious the danger to Johannes. So he had hidden from those who might recognize him — the minister of culture, the waitress at the Blue Ox — and pursued his inquiries in secret. By the time he spoke to the king he knew where the danger lay — but not that it would come so soon.
Karil had been listening intently, but it was a tremendous effort: his eyes clung to Matteo’s face almost as though he was lipreading.
“I saw how my father held you… how he wanted to be with you. I will remember.” He looked around at the trees and the pool as though wondering where he was. “Now I must go back.”
“No!”
Matteo spoke more loudly than he meant to and Karil shrank back. “I must,” he repeated. “I must see my father buried.”
“No,” said Matteo again, making an effort to speak calmly. “No, you must come away with us. You must carry on somewhere else. It is what your father would have wished.”
“I don’t want to go on being a prince,” said the boy in a thread of a voice.
“You don’t have to be a prince — only the person that you are and the man you will become.”
But the boy shook his head.
Matteo changed his tack. He took him by the shoulder. “Listen, Karil, the men who killed your father are not isolated criminals. They are part of a conspiracy that will take over Bergania and perhaps the whole of Europe. Once they have you in their power they will do one of two things. They will use you. Or…” He paused deliberately, judging how much the boy could take. “Or they will kill you.”
There was silence after that. Tally looked aghast at Matteo, then at the boy still deep in shock. But Karil had understood.
“I have to trust you,” he said. “I see that. But…” He made a hopeless gesture.
Matteo turned to Tally. “I’ll take him over the mountains. You’ll have to make your way back with Magda. We can stay overnight with the king’s old nurse.”
But as soon as he had said it he realized it would not do. Old Maria’s hut would be searched straightaway by anyone looking for the boy.
“No,” said Tally, “you’ll be caught.” And then: “There are better ways of getting Karil out of the country.”
Matteo was about to cut her short. Yet it was uncanny, the feeling she had had about Bergania from the start. Perhaps she deserved to be listened to.
“Karil said he had to trust you,” Tally went on. “Well, you have to trust us. All of us. Barney and Julia and Borro… even Verity.”
Matteo waited.
“It’s quite simple,” she said. “Karil must become a Deldertonian.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Last Dance
As soon as she returned to the campsite Tally was surrounded.
“Where have you been?” everyone wanted to know. And then, lowering their voices: “Did you find him?”
Tally nodded and told them what had happened.
“Matteo’s with him. But we have to get him down from the hill and into our tent. And then smuggle him back to England. We’re going to pretend he’s one of us.”
Magda frowned. “Does Matteo agree to this?” she asked.
“He didn’t like it, but there’s no other way. Matteo wanted to take him alone over the mountains, but they’ll already be watching the borders.”
“There have been announcements the whole time on the loudspeakers,” said Barney. “Everybody is to keep off the streets.”
“But do they say anything about keeping off the mountains?” asked Tally.
“How are we going to bring him down without being seen?” Julia was very worried. “I suppose in the dark—”
“No, we’re not going to wait for the dark. And we’re not going to creep about or slink. I’ve had an idea.”
Julia sighed. “I wish you’d stop having ideas.”
“This one is about trust. Karil said he’ll trust Matteo, and I told Matteo he’ll have to trust us. And we’ll have to trust the other children here. We’ll have to tell them what we’re doing so that they can help us and know what to do.”
“And what are we going to do?” asked Borro.
“We’re going to do what we came to Bergania to do. We’re going to dance.”
There was a pause while the others stared at her.
“All of us,” Tally went on. “In full costume. And we’re going to sing, too, and maybe recite — I don’t know exactly; we may have to improvise. It’ll be a sort of homage to the king, a… a rite for his passing. Only the point is, there’ll be so many of us that no one will notice if we come down with one more person. There’s a meadow by the entrance to the hunting ground that’s almost flat — that will make a kind of dancing floor. We’ll wear our Flurry clothes and make sure that we’re closest to the entrance, and while the ceremony is going on, Karil can slip out and join us. Only we’ll need some clothes for him.”
“I’ve got a spare shirt,” said Tod eagerly. “And he can have my white trousers — I’ll find something else.”
He was desperately keen to help the prince.
“He can have my hat,” said Kit. “It’s got the most stuff on it. It’ll hide his face.”
“There’th a lot of ivy under the bridge,” said Augusta. “We can drape our headth so that you can hardly see our faces. Ivy’s uthed a lot for funeralth.”
But the most important thing was to get the other groups to join in, because Tally’s plan depended on a swirling mass of people in which one extra dancer would not be noticed and it was this that everyone was worried about.
“There must be more than a hundred children here,” said Julia. “We can’t trust so many children not to give anything away.”
“Why not?” said Tally. “Why should anyone betray the prince when they know he is in danger? Why do there have to be traitors?”
“Not traitors,” said Barney, “but idiots who blab.”
“We have to trust them,” repeated Tally. “We have to. If they don’t know what’s happening, they won’t be able to cover up if anything goes wrong.”
But the others still looked doubtful.
“Do we know them well enough?” Borro wondered.
“How long does it take to know whether people are decent?” Tally demanded. “One can make friends in a minute. Look at the little German girl with the pigtails around her head and Conchita? They only knew each other for a day and Conchita’s still crying. When I was six I fell on the pavement outside my father’s surgery and Kenny came past driving Primrose and stopped to pick me up — and that was that. I’d trust him with my life.” She looked around entreatingly. “Only we haven’t got much time,” she said. “Matteo is sure it was the Gestapo who organized the shooting of the king, so the prince is in dreadful danger.”
“I could ask Lorenzo,” said Verity — and for the first time she spoke about the Italian boy she had been flirting with without her usual simper.
“I’ll talk to Jacqueline,” said Borro, thinking of the French girl who had been so informative regarding the milk yield of her mother’s dairy cows.
Barney said the Scandinavians would join in, he was sure. “They’re really keen on justice and things being fair.”
“The Spaniards did that lovely saraband when they were practicing,” said Julia. “That would work beautifully for a funeral dance.”