Clare had snorted while wrestling the drawer back into the chest. ‘Don’t start telling tales.’
‘You tell so many stories,’ Fitz had said. He had already been half asleep, snugly tucked against the warm inner wall of his room.
‘I tell so many stories,’ Clare had agreed, ‘and every one of them is true.’
As he had fallen asleep, Clare had told him his favourite story, the story of how she had come to be his Bibi: how she had been standing by the shore of the sea, weeping, when she had noticed his little basket floating on the waves; how she had plucked him from the water and hung up his little blanket on a gorse bush to dry against the wind; how in the basket she had found by his side a great ruby, the size of her fist, along with a delicate bone-handled brush, and a letter – a letter that revealed he was a little lost prince, a letter that spoke of a deadly enmity between two brothers, the one a just king and the other a villainous usurper, how the villain had triumphed and the good brother had been driven to despair, how the villain had sought the prince’s life, how his mother had roused him in the night, and dressed him, and hurried with him wrapped in her arms through the city, to the shore, and how – even as the howl of dogs and the tramping feet of horses had sounded in her desperate ears, even as the searchers had found her and were drawing their swords from their scabbards to cut her head from her shoulders – she had launched his helpless little body on to the waves with a prayer.
And Clare had told him the rest of his favourite story, that his mother, the young queen, had loved to brush his infant head with the soft bristles of the bone-handled brush, that she sent with him the great ruby that was once the king’s, and that she had prayed to all the genies of the earth and sea and sky that they would guide and shelter her little boy upon the waves to the waiting arms of his new Bibi. And she told him that a tempest must have swept him across the oceans as if under full sail, and carried him for thousands of miles past strange and terrible coasts, past jungles that trailed their hanging vines longingly into the salt sea, past cliffs of granite and chalk on which the tides crashed and were crumbled, past cities and great trading ports, past nations and creeds and wars and through the lives of millions upon millions, past colonies of seabirds and the nurseries of great whales, through forests of bizarre seaweed and the wrecking and contorted reefs of colourful corals, until he drifted on a clear blue day on to the shore here, in England, not half an hour’s walk down the shady lane from Clare’s own tiny cottage.
‘Am I really a prince?’ he had asked her. The questions were part of a litany, a time-honoured ritual that they both loved.
‘You are, you are,’ Clare had answered, hushing him. ‘Such a ruby as your mother sent, as big as your fist and as red as wine, could only be the gift of a king.’
‘And where is the little bone-handled brush now, Bibi, that my mother sent with me?’
‘It is here, my little prince, it is here,’ said Clare, and she had stroked his hair with the five fingers of her white hand, sliding them through the thick strands and tufts of ink, lightly rubbing the delicate skin of his head. And she had sung to him his favourite song, a lullaby which like a great and gaudy jewel always crowned the little ritual of reminiscence.
‘Over the sea, the green, green sea,
beyond the swelling throes,
where sun and spray at last agree
with gold to pave the skies, and rose,
though the hour be late
still does he wait –
he waits there still, my prince, for me.
Be gone, you winds, into the west,
be gone, you sailing stars,
be gone, bright moon, unto your rest,
be gone all longing, strifes and jars:
though the hour be late,
still will he wait,
my prince, my peace, and all, my best.
Upon an island all of stone,
within a golden hall,
there lies my true love’s burning throne
with pearl and lapis crusted all.
A kingdom he
will give to me
when I am his, and he my own.’
And Clare had kissed him, and said to him the words she had always said to him every night, her arms enclosing him, and the warm green scent of her hair draped round him: ‘I will keep you safe forever.’
Now his room lay dark around him, and he was alone. Now, outside the low window, on the other side of the room, the wind was howling in the hedges. He could almost feel it running its rough hands under the slates of the roof above, unsettling them, pushing for a way in. Every few moments it seemed to stamp at the single-paned window, like an impatient visitor, its blunt force knocking the whole casement flat against the wall that held it. The violence of it made him shiver.
Fitz drew the duvet over his head and reached his hand down into the corner, where the bedpost met the wall, for the little lamp he kept hidden there. Mr Ahmadi Senior had given it to him one afternoon, not long before he died, with strict, conspiratorial instructions to conceal it from Clare. A child should read in the night, Mr Ahmadi Senior had said. When your dreams rise to the surface, like silt stirred in the quiet pools between
