~ CAROLINE ~
She’d expected Doctor Staniforth to be furious. She hadn’t expected him to storm into her office, not ten minutes after he arrived for the morning.
“I know what you did,” he said, his face boiling red. “Do you think that’s acceptable? The Chief Doctor sets an example for the rest.”
Caro gave him a sweet smile, and took care to bat her eyelids. She hadn’t done that for years. It definitely made her look stupid. But she’d committed to it, so she had to pretend she didn’t look foolish. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Rupert.” She put on the simpering voice she’d perfected as a youngster, working a placement filled with grouchy old fogies who had spent decades slowly losing their memories and compensating with ever-shorter tempers.
Staniforth grunted. “You’ve been in my office. Don’t deny it, I saw what you wrote.”
In an instant the sweet smile was gone. She hoped the stare she was giving him instead was clear enough in saying that she wasn’t going to be cowed. “I was retrieving a file, Rupert. I’d not have needed to bother if you hadn’t taken it from my office.”
“I did no such thing,” Staniforth bristled. “I requested Corporal Rawlinson’s file from one of the nurses, who provided it for me. It’s not my job to police where she got it from.” Interesting. She’d not said which file she’d taken. Staniforth was halfway to a confession.
If she turned the screw, she might get the rest of the confession. “Which nurse?”
“I beg your pardon.”
Caro’s eyes narrowed. “Which nurse? It’s a simple question.”
Staniforth blustered. “Well, it’s hard to tell. It was a while ago, and there are so many of them. I can’t say I ever learned their names.” And this man thought he was a better pick for Chief Doctor?
“Describe her,” said Caroline. “I might be able to help you.”
“She was big,” said Staniforth, quickly. “Yes, big. Tall, but not too stocky. Dark hair. Black, no brown, all the way down to the small of her back. And she wore a funny hat.” He glanced behind him, where through the frosted glass Caro could see Viola Watling approaching. “Just like that one,” said Staniforth. “Yes, that’s her, there.”
Viola stopped for long enough to poke her head through the door. “Doctor Staniforth?”
Caro leaned over her desk. “Viola, sweet, be a doll and step inside for a second. Push the door shut behind you.” Viola did as she was bid, looking nervously towards Caroline.
“Are you sure this is her?” Caro addressed Staniforth, but she was sure to look Viola in the eye. She hoped the look would reassure Viola that she wasn’t the one on trial. It didn’t work. Viola shuffled nervously, clutching at the grey cloche she wore today.
Staniforth looked at Viola for a second, then nodded. “That’s definitely her.”
“So if I checked the video feed, I’d see Viola breaking into my office?”
“No, I never,” Viola stammered, her eyes wide.
Staniforth, too, had wide eyes. “You don’t have a camera in here,” he stammered.
Caro grinned. “I’ll just have a looksee. The footage won’t lie, after all.” She headed across to the little computer gathering dust on her desk, and began to poke away at the keyboard. The machine wasn’t on. Not that Staniforth needed to know that.
“Actually, now that I think about it, I think I might have retrieved the file myself,” he said.
Caro frowned, turning away from the dormant computer. “So you broke in?”
Staniforth shook his head. “The door was open,” he said. “The magnetic locks must have failed. Yes, that’s it. I think Doctor Maynard mentioned something similar happening to her.”
“I don’t use the magnetic locks,” said Caroline. “I’ve never set them up. I lock the door with a key—a key which is always on my person. You’d have had to force entry in order to come into my office uninvited. And I never invited you.”
“You’ve done the same,” said Staniforth.
“No.” Caro shook her head. “I entered an unlocked room within the bounds of my own hospital. Scour the regulations, Rupert, you’ll see it’s there in black ink. Or would multi-coloured better suit you? Maybe something with little pictures. I can have a variant prepared...”
Staniforth hissed. “You’re a little bitch, you know that? They always give the good jobs to the bitches.”
“Are we done here?” She made her voice as firm as she could. “Or should I send for the Lord Constable?”
Staniforth skulked off, tail between his legs, muttering nastiness under his breath.
Viola, the poor thing, was still stood to one side, looking utterly confused. Caro replaced the warm smile she liked to wear on her face. “Sorry to frighten you, sweet. I know you had nothing to do with it. Now, was there something you wanted?” The admin block was a fair step out of the way.
Viola nodded slowly. “I talked with Phina,” she said. “I told her that it was a drunken mistake, that I didn’t fancy her or anything.”
“And?”
“She said she knew. It was just a bit of fun, nothing to worry about.”
Caro felt an unnoticed tension in her shoulders ease. “Well, that’s good to hear. A load off your mind, I expect.”
“It is,” Viola agreed. “Phina and I are okay now, Doctor Ballard. You don’t need to keep us apart anymore.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Caro said. “Now, what say you wait there a minute while I finish up here, and then we’ll work the shift together? I wouldn’t want Doctor Staniforth thinking he could try and bully you.”
Viola relaxed visibly at that. Staniforth clearly had her frightened. “That would be good, Doctor Ballard. Thank-you.”
“My friends call me Caroline.”
The shift passed without any further sign of Doctor Staniforth, who seemed to have locked himself in his office to stew. Caro followed her usual post-shift shower by changing into a casual sundress of flowing violet fabric. It seemed appropriate for the bright sunny weather of the day. Taking time to make sure her hair was brushed neatly, the way her husband liked it, she headed for the spot by the Clearwater where she had arranged to meet Chris. There, she waited.
The baby bird had been perched on the edge of its nest for a quarter of an hour already. Caroline had watched it the whole time. Its brothers had taken flight, but they were bigger. This one was the smallest; its down feathers, streaked blue and yellow, were damp where its mother had pushed it twice. “It must be about to leave the nest for the first time,” she said, when Chris approached. “Is there anything so wonderful to see?”
“Food,” he grunted. “Gold. Bed, after a hard day of work.”
“Don’t take the fun out of things. You’re late.”
He’d promised her the day, but it was nearly half gone and he’d only just shown up. “The meeting overran,” he said, by way of apology. “Bradshaw’s tenacious. He lets nothing go. I swear he writes down everything I ever say so he can regurgitate it over and over.”
She flicked his nose. “Have you tried getting things finished? He’d have nothing to regurgitate then.”
“You don’t have a politician’s brain, do you? It’s not as simple as that. Things take time.”
“Easy, I’m only being droll.”
“Yeah, well, that’s all well and good, but perhaps it would be more helpful if you came to one of these meetings. It might open your eyes to the realities of life. You are on the Council, after all. I damn near had to suck Coningsby’s dick to get you there.”
She felt her fists clench into balls. “I didn’t ask you to. Remember that. I’m a doctor, Chris, not a ruler. That job comes first.”
Then came the hammer blow. He spoke whisper-soft, without emotion, and his words crushed her. “I should have left you behind.” He’d done so many times before, when he was still making his name. There were more than a few occasions where she’d gone to an assignment without him. But all that was temporary. It only took a few months to go from, say, Belaboras to Opteris. A few months was nothing.
This was forever.
“You don’t mean that.” Perhaps if she said it with enough conviction, it would become true. What did his eyes say? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d said a hurtful lie for effect. Those lies had tells, subtle but easy to see if you knew what you were looking for. Sometimes his nostrils flared, sometimes his pupils dilated. If he was nervous, he’d usually restate the same point in successive sentences, using different words. She couldn’t see any of those tells. He still loved her. Ian had assured her of that. She was just beginning to wonder if Ian had got it wrong. It had been a long time since Chris had shown any of that love.
“Come. We agreed to go for a walk today. That’s what we’ll do.”
It wasn’t unheard of for them to argue, usually about something petty that didn’t really matter to either of them. They’d gone through the same charade a hundred times or more. Chris just needed to blow off steam. He’d picked an argument with her because he knew it wouldn’t escalate—he’d apologised after the last time, taken it on the chin when she’d made him sleep out in the living area for a few nights, and vowed not to go too far again. She wasn’t about to inflame the situation by aiming a low blow. They’d shout at each other a bit, make a few cheap snipes, then she’d let him marinate in his miasma of fury for a little while and he’d be chipper again. The first few times it had happened, she’d been hurt. Why did she have to be the one to suffer, because somebody else had done something to piss Chris off?
Then it had been her turn to be cross. For what reason, she couldn’t remember. She’d forgotten why she was upset before she’d stopped shouting, it was that important to her. Once she’d unloaded on Chris for leaving too many crumbs the last time he ate some toast, she felt much better. It was therapeutic. And what sort of hypocrite would she be to stop her husband from doing something which she knew worked?
They began the walk in a stewing silence. Chris led the way, and his eyes never left the ground. Twice, he nearly bumped into people, and Caro had to apologise for him. Their route meandered, but it spent little time within the boundaries of the town; instead, it snaked up the foothills at the side of the valley, where traffic was far lighter. Master Dombric at least stopped to say hello as he passed them on the crest of the slope, which seemed to provoke Chris into speaking at last. “Do you remember the day we went to the South Gate?”
She was still a teenager when they’d been to the South Gate. An old archway of yellowed stone, in the middle of a scarcely relevant market town somewhere on Belaboras, visiting it was something of a rite of passage. The history was bloody, but it was just that—history. In the modern age, the South Gate was wholly unimpressive. That was all she remembered of her visit—just how disappointing it all was. She put on a smiling face and nodded.
“I promised you’d be a queen,” Chris continued.
Stolen novel; please report.
“I thought you were joking.” Thought, or hoped.
His face darkened. “That’s not something I’d joke about. You were born to be a queen.”
“I was born to shit in nappies. The rest is experience.”
“No.” He shook his head. “You have a royal family. Royal blood.”
“I had an ancestor who worked for old King Lawrence,” she said.
“And who married his daughter.”
She laughed. “No, King Lawrence’s daughter was the Little Princess Eleanor. She died when she was three. My however-many-greats-grandfather married King Lionel’s daughter. And his eighth daughter at that, we’re about as far from royalty as it gets.”
“All these kings have confusing names,” Chris muttered.
The ground here was soft, almost spongy underfoot. Clumps of heather sprouted infrequently, and flowers grew in pretty rows of yellows and pinks and blues. “Look at them all,” she said, pointing them out to Chris. There were similar plants in the meadows around her home, where her grandmother used to take her walking on summer’s days. They liked to see how many they could find. It was always a competition, between Caro and Tessa, and Armand until he grew older and stopped being interested in such womanly distractions as flowers. Nana Raine sent someone to count as many pink peonies as they could see, and somebody else the lemon-yellow bellflowers. Whoever had misbehaved the most would be sent off to find umbels of starfire.
Starfire was a favourite of Nana Raine. There was always a vase of them on the mantle of her study. The flowers were a fiery orange, so sweetly smelling that nothing else could be smelled for hours afterwards, and when they started to wither the leaves would be crushed up and stirred in with that night’s soup. Those were the nights Caro missed the most. But starfire didn’t exist on the meadows. Nana Raine had it shipped in from warmer climes. The person tasked with finding starfire umbels was destined to lose.
Armand reckoned he found one once, growing in the shade of a dovetree. There was only his word for it, of course; they were strictly forbidden from picking the flowers. “They’re the souls of the rested dead, waiting for their next body to be born,” Nana Raine said, whenever Caro asked, “and to pick them is to deny them life. That is unforgiveable.” The rule only applied to the flowers in the meadow, of course, and not the ones Nana Raine brought in. They were the souls of foreign dead, so it didn’t matter if they were never born again.
She wondered who could have died to leave their souls in these flowers.
“We’re a long way up, here,” said Chris, who had at some point pulled ahead. He was stood at the edge of a cliff, his hair buffeted by a kindly wind. “You wouldn’t want to fall from up here. It would kill a man.”
“I’ll try not to fall, then,” she said, with a smile. He could be so morbid at times, but never when he was angry. Their argument had been forgotten.
It was surprising just how far up they were. The climb was so gentle, and the surroundings so captivating, that she hadn’t noticed. In fact, it hadn’t really felt like they were climbing at all. And yet they had. It had to be at least a few hundred metres down to the valley. If she’d realised, she wouldn’t have come so close to the edge to see for herself. She shuddered bodily.
“Let’s move away from the edge, shall we?” She’d grabbed a hold of Chris’ arm without noticing; his skin was an unnatural white where her hands were. She let go.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded. “A bit uneasy. That’s all.” Nothing more needed saying. Chris looked over at the cliff-edge, and back to her again, then pushed her gently away. Why couldn’t she handle a bit of height? Chris swore he didn’t think less of her—that it was perfectly normal, especially given her past, for her to be uncomfortable. But nobody else got upset. Only her. Father would have told her to get over herself, and he would have been right—she was a grown woman, not a little girl, and she was much too old to be letting things from thirty years ago get in the way of her life.
If Father had been a bit more cautious, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Chris kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Come on,” he said, taking her hand in his as he started to walk. “We’ve got a lot still to see.”
It wasn’t flat land here. Even the grassy plateaus had waving hills, and humps of bleached rock. Chris was leading them towards just such a hump, with narrow trees growing on either side. Beyond, she could see only the sun, and vaguely, far away, the shadowy aspect of a mountain. The shape was faded, far further than they could walk today. Good. Chris could walk there with somebody else.
“Do you think you’d change anything? If you could go back in time, start again?”
Chris turned to her. “And lose you?”
“You don’t have to go back that far. A few years, perhaps.”
He stopped walking, perching on the white rock. She sat beside him. “What could I possibly want to change? I have you, and I have this planet. I’d say my life is perfect.”
She grimaced. “When I was a girl, I figured I’d have had some children by now.”
“And when you were a teenager, you swore you never wanted children. I was there, Caro, it was pretty much your motto.”
“I didn’t want children,” she agreed, repeating the lie she’d learned to believe in. “But I still assumed I’d have them. I thought when I got to twenty-five or twenty-six it would just happen, and then when that didn’t happen I thought it would be thirty-five instead. Now here I am, looking at the world from north of thirty-five, and zip. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have made something happen earlier.” It nearly had. Once, when Chris was away on one of his missions, she’d been taken by brooding. Every day she checked, until one day the test told her she was pregnant. She’d been so excited to tell Chris when he came back. She’d taken up sewing, started to weave nice gifts for the little baby girl. Half a menagerie awaited the child, by the time Chris arrived. But the baby had never lived. That was the worst day of her life. Since then she’d been loath to get her hopes up. She’d not become pregnant since, no matter how much she tried.
Chris shook his head. “Think what you’d have had to give up. Things would be different. It’s not like we’d be having the same conversation in the same place, with progeny running at our feet.”
“Must you use the word ‘progeny’?”
“You’d have made sacrifices over the years. You’d have missed out on so much.”
“I wouldn’t have known it, though. I can’t miss something I’ve never known.”
Chris sighed. “It’s not too late, Caro.”
“Isn’t it? How do you know? What if there was only one moment in the whole history of the universe where we could make a child together, and I was too busy working to be there.”
He laughed. “If there was only moment in the whole history of the universe, then frankly I don’t think the odds were ever in our favour. It’s a long history. Things don’t follow some sort of ordained destiny, Caro. Just chemical reactions.”
“Chemical reactions?” She raised an eyebrow. “Is that all our love is to you?”
“You shouldn’t knock chemical reactions,” said Chris. “Look, Oliver Wrack’s wife is pregnant. I’ll invite the two of them to our chambers one night. If you’ve got babies on the brain, perhaps that’ll help.”
I can’t see why it would. She smiled demurely. Since Essegena had become a real place they could really stand upon, rather than a distant hypothetical, nice moments with Chris had been unfairly sparse. He was trying today. She needn’t provoke him needlessly.
“Now, would you look at that,” said Chris. “That’s a lake and a half.”
She turned to follow his gaze. Previously hidden from them by the rock they were now using as a bench, the lake stretched for miles. Looking distantly, to the north, it seemed as if it went right to the very base of the glowing uplands with their rows upon rows of stock-straight trees. Even nearby, the grassy opposite bank was barely visible. The glint of sunlight off the water dazzled her. She squinted, and raised a hand to shield her eyes. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured.
“Fit for a queen,” Chris said, nodding. “How far do you reckon it goes? I can’t see the other side.”
“Perhaps it never ends.”
He nudged her in the ribs. “Look at that there,” he said. “It’s a wonder this place is here.” He was pointing at the lake’s southern shore, the side closest to the valley. A strip of grass and grey-brown rock ran between the water and the precipice. From here, it didn’t look any more than five feet or so wide.
“It must just be the perspective,” she offered. “It’ll be that much wider up close, you’ll see.”
“I hope so,” said Chris. “If the rock here’s soft enough, it’ll erode all that pretty quickly.”
“Perhaps we should find somewhere else to build. Somewhere safer.”
“That won’t be needful,” said Chris. “I’ll send Master Holden up with a team, maybe Master Peulion too. If it’s weak, let them build it stronger. Really, it’s just a huge dam.”
Caro was uncertain. Sure, a good dam would keep the water up here even if the rocky strip wore away, but that didn’t mean it was a good idea to build directly beneath it. What if something went wrong? But Chris knew best. He always did, it seemed.
She slipped off her shoes, standing them against the rock, and padded barefoot towards the water’s edge. The grass ran almost all the way down to the shoreline, the soil getting drier and sandier as it neared the water. At the very edge, a small beach of dark, sodden sand had formed. Caro squeezed her toes here, enjoying the feeling of the sand between them. It had been too long. She’d forgotten what it was like.
“You watch there’s nothing sharp,” Chris called. He was still on the grass, tracing a path parallel to the water. “I can’t carry you back if you cut your feet.”
“I’m not six years old, Chris,” she shouted. But she did cast a cautious look at the ground in front of her, just to confirm there was nothing there. She kept it to herself. Chris didn’t need to know that she was an idiot.
The water was icy cold. A jolt of shock coursed through her, and involuntarily she gasped. It was clear, though, almost like a sheet of glass. This water is pure, she thought—the taint of industry hasn’t touched it. She felt almost guilty to be the first. She took a few more steps, rolling up the legs of her trousers to keep them dry, and stood for a time with the water covering her ankles. Somewhere, deep in her mind, came the illusion of her screams, Tessa’s screams, sisters caught in a bitter fight to splash the other one more. That was what summers were for.
She moved a foot, and it caught on something hard. Glancing down, she saw there was something buried in the sand, barely poking up. It didn’t look like a pebble. She reached down to it. Her clothes were soaked, but she ignored it. The thing, whatever it was, fit perfectly in her hand; she pulled at it, but it refused to give way. She was suddenly excited. What if Bessily’s figure wasn’t the only one beneath the water?
“Chris! Give me a hand with this!” While she waited for him to arrive, she set to work digging at the sand surrounding the object. It was loose when Chris got to her.
“What is it?”
“Dig this sand away.” He scraped it off, and she returned to pulling at the thing beneath the water. Hard at first, it became easier the more she worked at it. Suddenly, it came free, lifting up plenty of silt. It slid out easy then.
“It’s just wood,” said Chris. He sounded let down.
But Caro shook her head. There were markings on it, carvings, blunted to illegibility by years of submersion. And if she squinted, she could almost make out the shape of a man. If she turned it the right way... yes, and if that was the head, then those were definitely eyes, two small notches. “I think it’s some sort of figurine,” she said. “An old idol perhaps.” Bessily had found the Willow Queen. Who could this fellow be? She looked for something distinctive, something she could pin on a character from the stories. The figure could be any of a million ancient heroes. Perhaps there was a Lysander the Pug-Ugly.
She turned to Chris. “How can this be here? I thought we were the first people here—bleeding stranger aside.”
Chris grimaced. “In a technical sense, no,” he said. “But this place should definitely be empty.”
“In a technical sense?” Caro put her hands on her hips, the way her mother always used to when she was cross.
He stood straight. A single drop of water snaked down his face, holding on his chin. “There was another mission. Long time ago, centuries. They never reported their arrival, so the Unity assumed they hadn’t made it.”
“And you never thought to mention that?”
“It was classified information,” he protested. “High Commissioner Peulion told me in confidence. Besides, it never seemed relevant.”
She shook her head. “Never relevant? Chris, do you not remember when three people completely disappeared? I had a man in the hospital who wasn’t on the ship. I’ve been taking shit from Doctor Staniforth for months because of him. Where do you think he came from?”
His eyes were bulging as he scrambled for words. “I assumed it wasn’t linked.”
“Why would you assume that? Chris, that’s the only thing that makes sense. He had to come from somewhere, unless you think he just sprang into being like magic.” She turned to start back, still holding onto the figurine. “You have to hold a meeting. The Council needs to know. About this, and about anything else you’ve been keeping secret. And you’d best find somewhere to sleep tonight, because there’s no way you’re sleeping with me.”
She left without waiting for him, stopping only long enough to scoop up her shoes and jam them on her feet. Her mind was reeling. How much had she been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for? Ian had sworn that Chris still loved her. Either Ian was lying, or Ian didn’t know his friend as well as he thought he did. If Chris really loved her, he’d not have found it so easy to forsake the most important part of their relationship. The truth was the only thing she asked of him.
What else had he lied about? Was there another woman, perhaps? No, she would not think about that. If there was another woman, she didn’t want to know. Chris had lied to her, he’d hidden this fact from her, but that was all he’d done. It had to be.
Halfway down the slope, she caught sight of a soldier, trudging towards her with eyes half closed. They opened fully when he noticed her. She couldn’t help but that notice that the man was focused on her chest. Of course she’d worn clothes that turned transparent when wet—what could be more appropriate attire for a trip to a lake? “You.” She snapped her fingers, and he looked at her face. He had the good graces at least to look bashful.
“Mistress Ballard,” he said. “Can I help you?”
“Doctor Ballard. There’s more to me than being married to the Governor. Where are you going?”
He looked at her. “Plateau Watch,” he said. “What’s it to you?”
Plateau Watch. Was that the name Bessily had mentioned? Sod it. “I need you to take a message there, if you’d be so kind. For Mistress Bessily Edwards. Have you got some paper?”
The soldier nodded, and retrieved a small scrap from the pack on his back. She leaned against the trunk of a nearby tree and scribbled a hasty message. Then, she wrapped the paper around the damp figurine, and handed it to the soldier. “Give her this.”
“How will I know who she is?”
“Ask. Somebody there will point her out to you. Oh, and make sure she gets the message, not anybody else.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The soldier nodded and continued on his way, moving southwards along the trail half-formed in dead and trampled grass.
Caro carried on towards the town, conscious of her wet clothes clinging to her with every step she took, and dreaming of the warm bath she’d take when she was safely back in her quarters, with the door locked tightly behind her.