The Mortality of Queens

24 - The Fourth Girl

Arthur

Arthur watches the running figure discard a bow as it races towards the group. His would-be assailants are turning now to face the archer, shuffling uncertainly. Only the leader steps towards the threat and its bedraggled followers parade out upon each side, clubs and spears to the fore. The leader is little discomfited by the arrow shaft protruding from his back. It is fletched with three white feathers, tipped with crimson. Arthur feels he should know those colours.

The approaching warrior unsheathes a slim sword. Somehow Arthur knows it for an argentium blade. He hopes and believes it will be deadly to the fifteen or so creatures now ranged before him.

The leader extends his club to engage the warrior, but the sword lashes down to disarm him – literally – the club flies away with half a forearm attached. The creature screams but the cry is cut irrevocably short as its borrowed body topples onto the sand.

≈

Amorrie mumbled something indistinct, but it was enough to bring Arthur awake. He had fallen asleep in a chair after the visit to the Reedston Eel Fayre. Nouhou running off, the two-headed eel, the church bells ringing from the empty plague village, Miss Pikestaff's late return on her walk back, causing Arthur to set out to meet her with a lamp, quaking at every unnatural cry from the reed beds; all these had unsettled him, so that when he retired early to his room he called for Amorrie. She had no obligation to attend him, as she had already visited briefly in the morning, but she did, and he declared his disquiet to her. She offered no counsel but fell asleep in his lap and he drew strange comfort from it.

The next day he met with the Gracegirdle girls as they gathered by his easel and canvasses in the schoolroom. They had begun the week suspicious of him and he could find no blame for them in that. The tallest, Lavinia, had particularly wanted nothing to do with his commission.

He had won them around through his admiration for their father's pictures, which, though melancholy, displayed vision and inventiveness; and by his suggestion that these sombre landscapes could form backgrounds to their portraits. They had been curious too about Amorrie and how much she resembled their father's imagined character, the Ace of Moons.

Tabitha had shown much sympathy for Nouhou's plight and said it had been kind of Arthur to remove the child from the reach of the long-haired ruffian, who scared the former page-boy so.

Finally, Arthur's sketching talent convinced them that he was a real artist who wanted nothing more than to paint them as they wished to be portrayed, in clothes they were comfortable with and that he would be faithful to their ideas.

On the Saturday morn, Tabitha arrived first. She had been the most patient with him and he was happy that his several sketches had caught her delicacy and graciousness. She was already in her costume, a russet silk scarf that set off her chestnut hair, a makeshift tiara as might be worn by an Arabian princess and long blue skirts over which the enterprising Miss Pikestaff had fashioned embellishments to turn the chiffon into something that passed for exotic. Arthur had added an imagined peacock tail design onto the chiffon.

He put up Tabitha's still unfinished canvas.

'Oh, I am Scheherazade, Mr Tenebris,' she said, her fingers almost drawn to touch the canvas. 'And the white bird with the curly beak is perfect, every bit as good as a white peahen.'

'An avocet,' he said. In the illustration, it dabbled behind her. The background was of one of her father's reedy desolations.

'I have chosen a swallowtail as my emblem, but could the av-o-cet,' she pronounced it cautiously, 'be part of my face pattern too?'