“If them two write back and forth long enough, I guess I could get rich arter it,” he said to no one at all, and roared laughter in spite of his aching head.
61
Peyna unfolded Peter’s second note and saw that this time the prince had left off both of their names. That was very well. The boy learned fast. As he read the note itself, his eyebrows shot up.
Perhaps your request to know my business is presumptuous, perhaps not. It matters little, since I am at your mercy. Here are the two things your eight guilders per year are to purchase:
1. I want to have my mother’s dollhouse. It always took me to pleasant places and pleasant adventures, and I loved it much as a boy.
2. I would like to have a napkin brought with my meals-a proper royal napkin. The crest may be removed, if you like.
These are my requests.
Peyna read this note over and over again before throwing it into the fire. He was troubled by it because he did not understand it. The boy was up to something… or was he? What could he want with his mother’s dollhouse? So far as Peyna knew, it was still in storage somewhere in the castle, gathering dust under a sheet, and there could be no reason not to give it to him-not, that was, if a good man was charged with going through it carefully first, to make sure all the sharp things-tiny knives and such-were removed from it. He remembered quite well how enchanted Peter had been with Sasha’s dollhouse as a very young boy. He also remembered-vaguely, very vaguely-that Flagg had protested that it was hardly fitting for a boy who would someday be King to be playing with dolls. Roland had gone against Flagg’s advice that time… wisely, Peyna thought, for Peter had given the dollhouse up, all in good time.
Until now.
Has he gone mad, then?
Peyna did not think so.
The napkin, now… that he could understand. Peter had always insisted upon a napkin at every meal, always spread it neatly on his lap like a small tablecloth. Even when on camping trips with his father, Peter had insisted on a napkin. So oddly like Peter not to ask for better food than the normal poor prison rations, as almost any other noble or royal prisoner would have done before asking for anything else. No, he had asked for a napkin instead.
That insistence on always being neat… on always having a nap-kin… that was his mother’s doing. I’m sure of it. Do the two go together, somehow? But how? Napkins… and Sasha’s dollhouse. “at do they mean?
Peyna did not know, but that absurd feeling of hope remained. He kept remembering that Flagg had not wanted Peter to have the dollhouse as a little boy. Now, years later, here was Peter asking to have it again.
There was another thought wrapped up inside this, as neatly as filling is wrapped up in a tart. It was a thought Peyna hardly dared to entertain. If-just if-Peter had not murdered his father, who did that leave? Why, the person who had originally owned that hideous poison, of course. A person who would have been nothing in the Kingdom if Peter had followed his father… a person who was nearly everything now that Thomas sat on the throne in Peter’s place.
Flagg.
But this thought was hideous to Peyna. It suggested that justice had somehow gone wrong, and that was bad. But it also sug-gested that the simple logic in which he had always prided himself had been washed away in the revulsion he had felt at the sight of Peter’s tears, and this idea-the idea that he had made the single most important decision of his career on the basis of emo-tion rather than fact-was much worse.
What harm can there be in his having the dollhouse, as long as the sharp things are removed?
Peyna drew his writing materials to him and wrote briefly. Beson had another two guilders to drink up-already he had been paid half the sum he would receive for the prince’s little favors each year. He looked forward to more correspondence, but there was no more.
Peter had what he wanted.
62
As a child Ben Staad had been a slim, blue-eyed boy with curly blond hair. The girls had been sighing and gig-gling over him since he was nine years old. “That’ll stop soon enough,” Ben’s father said. “All the Staads make handsome enough lads, but he’ll be like the rest of us when he gets his growth, I reckon-his hair’ll darken to brown and he’ll go around squintin’ at everything and he’ll have all the luck of a fat pig in the King’s slaughtering pen.”
But neither of the first two predictions came true. Ben was the first Staad male in several generations to remain as blond at seventeen as he had been at seven, and who could tell a brown hawk from an auger hawk at four hundred yards. Far from developing a nearsighted squint, his eyes were amazingly keen… and the girls still sighed and giggled over him as much now, at seventeen, as they had when he was nine. As for his luck… well, that was another matter. That most of the Staad men had been unlucky, at least for the last hundred years or so, was beyond argument. Ben’s family thought that Ben might be the one to redeem them from their genteel poverty. After all, his hair hadn’t darkened and his eyes hadn’t grown dim, so why should he not escape the curse of bad luck as well? And after all, Prince Peter was his friend, and Peter would some-day be King.
Then Peter was tried and convicted of his father’s murder. He was in the Needle before any of the bewildered Staad family could get their minds around what had happened. Ben’s father, Andrew, went to Thomas’s coronation, and he came home with a bruise on his cheek-a bruise his wife thought it might be prudent not to speak of.
“I’m sure Peter’s innocent,” Ben said that night at supper. “I simply refuse to believe-”
The next moment he was sprawling on the floor, his ear ring-ing. His father was towering over him, pea soup dripping from his mustache, his face so red it was almost purple, and Ben’s baby sister, Emmaline, was crying in her high chair.
“Don’t mention the murdering whelp’s name again in this house,” his father said.
“Andrew!” his mother cried. “Andrew, he doesn’t under-stand-”
His father, normally the kindest of men, turned his head and stared at Ben’s mother. “Be quiet, woman,” he said, and some-thing in his voice made her sit down again. Even Emmaline stopped crying.
“Father,” Ben said quietly, “I can’t even remember the last time you struck me. It’s been ten years, I think, maybe longer. And I don’t think you ever struck me in anger, until now. But it doesn’t change my mind. I don’t believe-”
Andrew Staad raised one warning finger. “I told you not to mention his name,” he said, “and I meant it, Ben. I love you, but if you say his name, you’ll be leaving my house.”
“I’ll not say it,” Ben replied, getting up, “but because I love you, Da’. Not because I’m scared of you.”
“Leave off!” Mrs. Staad cried, more frightened than ever. “I won’t have the two of you bickering this way! Do you want to drive me insane?”
“No, Mother, don’t worry, it’s over,” Ben said. “Isn’t it, Da’?”
“It’s over,” his father said. “You’re a good son in all things, Ben, and always have been, but mention him not.”
There were things Andy Staad felt he couldn’t tell his son-although Ben was seventeen, Andy still saw him as a boy. He would have been surprised if he’d known that Ben understood his reasons for striking out quite well.
Before the unfortunate turn of events of which you now know, Ben’s friendship with the prince had already begun changing things for the Staads. Their Inner Baronies farm had once been very large. Over the last hundred years, they had been forced to sell the land off, a piece at a time. Now fewer than sixty reels remained, most of that mortgaged.