Inversions (32 page)

She showed him the note. He called you over and you confirmed that it was not your writing, though it might be said to be a decent attempt at it.

Duke Quettil took the opportunity to demand that somebody be brought to justice for the murder of his men, which may have been a little hasty, as it raised the question concerning what they had been doing there in the first place. The King’s expression darkened as he gradually took in all that was revealed, and several times he had to tell people trying to interrupt others to stop, so that he could get clear in his still slightly befuddled head what had actually happened. Duke Quettil, reportedly breathing heavily and with staring eyes and spittle on his lips, at one point attempted to grab the Doctor’s wrist and pull her away from the King, who put his arm round her shoulders and ordered you to keep the Duke distant.

I was absent for all that passed over the next half bell. What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others. Even so, without having been there, I believe there was some quick thinking done in that chamber, principally by yourself, though Duke Quettil must, at the least, have calmed down sufficiently to consider things in a more rational manner again and accept the path you were mapping out, even if he could contribute little of the cartography himself.

The brief of it was that Duke Ulresile was to be blamed. The writing on the note was his. The palace guards swore that Ulresile had commanded them on your authority. Later that night one of Ulresile’s men was brought before the King, sobbing, to confess that he had stolen the scalpel from the Doctor’s apartments earlier that day and that he had killed Duke Ormin, then run away and out of a back door of the Suitor’s Wing shortly before the Doctor entered by the front door. I was able to play my part, averring that the fellow could well have been the man who had rushed towards me in the dim corridor in the Suitor’s Wing.

The fellow lied about the scalpel, of course. Only one of the instruments had ever gone missing and that was the one I had stolen two seasons earlier, the day we had visited the Poor Hospital. Of course, I delivered it into your hands, master, though not in the literal sense in which it was later delivered into the body of Duke Ormin.

Duke Ulresile, in the meantime, had been prevailed upon to remove himself from the palace. I think a more mature mind might have thought this through and realised that to fly so was to appear to confirm any accusations that might be levelled at him, but perhaps he did not think to compare his predicament or possible actions with one so base as poor, dead Unoure. In any event, he was funnel-fed some story about the King’s displeasure being great but brief and largely a matter of a misunderstanding which Quettil and yourself, master, would need a short period to sort out, but a short period which absolutely required the young Duke’s absence.

The King made it very clear that he would take any further attempt to traduce the Doctor’s good name very ill indeed. You promised that everything would be done to clear up the remaining points of confusion in the matter.

*    *    *

Two of the King’s own guards were stationed outside our apartments that night. I slept soundly in my cell until woken by a nightmare. I think the Doctor slept well. In the morning she looked well enough. She completed shaving her head, making a neater job of it than Master Ralinge.

I assisted her in this, in her bedroom while she sat on a chair with a towel round her shoulders and a basin on her knees in which warm suds and a sponge floated. We were due to attend another meeting in the King’s chamber that morning, the better to give our side of the events of the previous night.

‘What did happen, mistress?’ I asked her.

‘Where and when, Oelph?’ she asked, moistening her scalp with the sponge and then scraping at it with a scalpel of all things before passing it to me to complete the job.

‘In the questioning chamber, mistress. What happened to Ralinge and the other two?’

‘They fought over who would have me first, Oelph. Don’t you remember?’

‘I do not, mistress,’ I whispered, with a look round at the door through to her workshop. It was locked, like the one beyond and the one beyond that, but still I felt frightened, as well as a sort of anguished guilt. ‘I saw Master Ralinge about to . . .’

‘About to rape me, Oelph. Please, Oelph. Steady with that scalpel,’ she said, and put her hand on my wrist. She lifted my hand away a little from her naked scalp and looked round with a smile. ‘It would be too ironic to survive a false charge of murder and be delivered from the very brink of torture only to suffer injury by your hand.’

‘But mistress!’ I said, and I am not ashamed to say that I wailed, for I was still convinced that we could not be surrounded by such fatally cataclysmic events and such powerfully antagonistic personages without attracting extreme harm. ‘There was no time for a dispute! He was about to take you! Providence, I saw him. I closed my eyes a heartbeat before . . . there was no time!’

‘Dear Oelph,’ the Doctor said, keeping her hand on my wrist. ‘You must have forgotten. You were unconscious for some time. Your head rolled to one side, your body went limp. You fairly drooled, I’m afraid. The three men had a fine old argument while you were out of your senses, and then just as the pair who had killed Ralinge slashed at each other, you woke up again. Don’t you remember?’

I looked into her eyes. Her expression was one I found impossible to read. I was reminded suddenly of the mirror mask she had worn at the ball in Yvenir palace. ‘Is that what I ought to remember, mistress?’

‘Yes, Oelph, it is.’

I looked down at the scalpel and the gleaming mirror-surface of its blade.

‘But how did you come to be released from your bonds, mistress?’

‘Why, in his haste, Master Ralinge simply did not secure one of them properly,’ the Doctor said, releasing her grip of my wrist and lowering her head again. ‘A woeful lapse of professional standards, but perhaps in a way a flattering one.’

I sighed. I picked up the soapy sponge and squeezed some more of the suds on to the back of her head. ‘I see, mistress,’ I said unhappily, and scraped away the very last of the hair on her head.

I decided, as I did this, that perhaps my memory had been playing tricks on me after all, because looking down at the Doctor’s legs, I could see her old dagger sticking out from the top of her boot as usual, and there, quite plainly, was the little pale stone on the top rim of the pommel I had been so convinced had been absent yesterday, in the torture chamber.

I think I knew already then there was no going back to the way things had been before. Even so, it was a shock when the Doctor paid a visit to the King by herself two days later and came back to tell me that she had asked to be released from the post of his personal physician. I stood and stared at her, still standing in the midst of unpacked crates and boxes of supplies and ingredients which she had continued to collect from the apothecaries and chemicalists of the city.

‘Released, mistress?’ I asked, stupidly.

She nodded. I thought her eyes looked as if she had been crying. ‘Yes, Oelph. I think it is for the best. I have been too long away from Drezen. And the King seems generally well.’

‘But he was at death’s door not two nights ago!’ I shouted, unwilling to believe what I was hearing and what it meant.

She gave me one of her small smiles. ‘I think that will not occur again.’

‘But you said it was caused by some what did you call it? some allotropic galvanic of salt! Dammit all, woman, that could !’

‘Oelph!’

I think it was the only time either of us spoke to each other in quite such tones. I shrank from my fury like a punctured bladder. I looked down at the floor. ‘Sorry, mistress.’

‘I am quite sure,’ she told me firmly, ‘that will not occur again.

‘Yes, mistress,’ I mumbled.

‘You might as well pack this lot back up again.’

A bell later I was in the depths of my misery, repacking boxes, crates and sacks on the Doctor’s orders, when you came to call, master.

‘I would speak to you in private, madam,’ you said to the Doctor.

She looked at me. I stood there, hot and sweating, dotted with little lengths of straw from the packing cases.

She said, ‘I think Oelph can stay, don’t you, Guard Commander?’

You looked at her for a few moments, I recall, then your stern expression melted like snow. ‘Yes,’ you said, and sat down with a sigh in a chair which temporarily had no cases or their contents balanced upon it. ‘Yes, I dare say he can.’ You smiled at the Doctor. She was just in the act of tying a towel round her head, having finished one of her baths. She always tied a towel round her hair after her bath, and I remember thinking, stupidly, Why is she doing that? She has no hair to dry. She wore a thick and voluminous shift which made her denuded head look very small, until she tied the towel round it. She picked a couple of boxes off a couch and sat.

You took a moment to seat yourself just as you wanted, moving your sword so that it was comfortable, placing your booted feet just so. Then you said, ‘I am told you have asked the King to release you from your post.’

‘That is correct, Guard Commander.’

You nodded for a moment. ‘That is probably for the best.’

‘Oh, I’m sure it is, Guard Commander. Oelph, don’t just stand there,’ she said, turning to look at me. ‘Continue with your work, please.’

‘Yes, mistress,’ I mumbled.

‘I would dearly love to know quite what happened in the chamber that evening.’

‘I am sure you already do, Guard Commander.’

‘And I am equally sure I do not, madam,’ you said, with a resigned sigh in your voice. ‘A more superstitious man would think it must have been sorcery.’

‘But you are not so deceived.’

‘Indeed not. Ignorant, but not deceived. I think I can say that if I had no other explanation I would be sorrier the longer the matter went unexplained and you were still here, but as you say you are going . . .’

‘Yes. Back to Drezen. I have already inquired about a ship . . . Oelph?’

I had let drop a flask of distilled water. It had not broken, but the noise had been loud. ‘Sorry, mistress,’ I said, trying not to burst out crying. A ship!

‘Do you feel your time here has been a success, Doctor?’

‘I think so. The King is in better health than when I arrived. For that alone, if I can take any of the credit, I hope I may feel . . . fulfilled.’

‘Still, it will be good to get back amongst your own kind, I imagine.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you can imagine.’

‘Well, I must be going,’ you said, standing. Then you said, ‘It was strange, all those deaths at Yvenir, then good Duke Ormin, and those three men.’

‘Strange, sir?’

‘So many knives, or blades, at any rate. And yet so few found. The murder weapons, I mean.’

‘Yes. Strange.’

You turned at the door. ‘That was a bad business the other night, in the questioning chamber.’

The Doctor said nothing.

‘I’m glad you were delivered. . . unscathed. I would give a great deal to know how it was accomplished, but I would not trade the knowledge for the result.’ You smiled. ‘I dare say I will see you again, Doctor, but if I do not, let me wish you a safe journey back to your home.’

And so, a half-moon later, I stood on the quayside with the Doctor, hugging her and being hugged and knowing that I would do anything to make her stay or be allowed to follow her, and also that I would never see her again.

She pushed me gently away. ‘Oelph,’ she said, sniffing back her tears. ‘You will not forget that Doctor Hilbier is more formal in his approach than I. I have respect for him but he’

‘Mistress, I will not forget anything you have told me.’

‘Good. Good. Here.’ She reached into her jacket. She presented me with a sealed envelope. ‘I have arranged with the Mifeli clan that you have an account with them. This is the authority. You may use the earnings on what pleases you, though I hope you will do a little experimentation of the type I taught you ‘

‘Mistress!’

‘ but the capital, I have instructed the Mifelis, the capital only becomes yours when you achieve the title of Doctor. I would advise you to buy a house and premises, but’

‘Mistress! An account? What? But what, where?’ I said, genuinely astonished. She had already left me what she thought might come in useful to me and what I might be able to store in a single room in the house of my new mentor, Doctor Hilbier from her supplies of medicines and raw materials.

‘It is the money the King gave me,’ she said. ‘I don’t need it. It is yours. Also, there is in the envelope the key to my journal. It contains all the notes and the descriptions of my experiments. Please use it as you see fit.’

‘Oh, mistress!’

She took my hand in hers and squeezed. ‘Be a good doctor, Oelph. Be a good man. Now, quickly,’ she said, with a desperately sad and unconvincing laugh, ‘to save our tears before we both become hopelessly dehydrated, eh? Let us’

‘And if I became a doctor, mistress?’ I asked, in a far more collected and cold manner than I would have imagined I was capable of at such a moment. ‘If I became a doctor and used some of the money to mirror your trip, and come to Drezen?’

She had started to turn away. She turned halfway back, and looked at the wooden decking of the quay. ‘No, Oelph. No, I . . . I don’t think I’ll be there.’ She looked up and smiled a brave smile. ‘Goodbye, Oelph. Fare well.’

‘Goodbye, mistress. Thank you.’

I will love you for ever.

I thought the words, and could have said them, might have said them, perhaps nearly said them, but in the end did not say them. It may be that that was the unsaid thing even I did not know I had thought of saying that let me retain a shred of selfrespect.

She walked slowly up the first half of the steep-set gangplank, then lifted her head, lengthened her stride, straightened her back and strode up and on to the great galleon, her dark hat disappearing somewhere beyond the black webbing of the ropes, all without a backward glance.