Chapter 1
Every word ever to exist has already been written. Every note has been played on every possible instrument: not twice, but hundreds of thousands of times. And so, the logical mind might argue that there is nothing to do in the entire world that hasn’t already been done.
Imagine that comfort. Not a single unspoken word. Not one unpainted stroke. No patch of our world uncovered. Everything laid bare.
Charlie looked down at his poisoned hands: knots between the links of his fingers no different from tree-knots. Bigger and less concentric, maybe. But the same.
A fruit-picker, he woke up before the rest of the world. Most of Montagne was forced up too early. It began at first light, with the roosters who cracked and cwoddled their morning song over farmers fields. Next came the church bells, waking the godliest faithful and the worst sinners to join them for morning restitutions. Which began at 7 or thereabouts, except on Sundays when they came later because the rector had to be dragged in and dusted off from the night before.
The market woke next. Big beast that unfurled it’s first tent at around 10am, and rolled up the last one late into the evenings.
The castle woke up when it pleased, or so thought the townsfolk. They worked hard for flour, sugar, and even peanuts while the princess in her stupid castle looked down on them all.
What would they have given to see the princess now? What would Charlie give? He waited at his usual place, under her windowsill, given a rare break from the fields. He waited to see the pale lengths of her hair tied up in some elaborate style no woman could effect on her own head, the chiffon layers of her skirts upon skirts shimmering, mirage-like, in whatever breeze there was.
Plenty, on the balconies. None, down here in the dust of the ground.
Charlie knew she woke before the marketplace opened. His job was to pick apples and pears in season...and to climb on wooden ladders and shake mulberries from trees. He smelled of fruit salad and apple cider. Though his hands were stained and his clothes often torn, there were worse ways to smell. Like the sewage cleaners or the farmers who waded through pig excrement and horse semen all day.
Speaking of seamen, one might smell like a merchant sailor. Like his friend Sean Reilly, who had been to a million places and, as far as Charlie was concerned, they all stunk like rotted teeth and dead fish.
His friends and the barmen called him a dandy.
“Here he comes, Charlie Bottom, smells just like an apple blossom!” They’d shout, when they saw him. That was all right. It was good natured teasing. Even the princess had done it once, smiling from the corners of her eyes.
She’d inhaled slightly, and winked at him before walking on with her entourage of at least fifty men. She wore them the way lady-brides wore a bridal train, trailing out behind her at such length that, from the back of her, they were all you could see.
Since then, he’d come to the castle every day and waited directly under her balcony. Every morning she came out, resting her hands on the rail and looking out over the horizon. She sang the songs of their people and of far-off races he knew not, or told stories of strange places full of stranger people. He understood none of this. He picked fruits and had picked fruits since he’d been no taller than a berry-bush. He lived on them, too. They were his only pay.
Fruits, and a mattress stuffed with straw. How did her mattress feel? Was it stuffed with cotton or wool? He blushed.
There’s no reason for you to be thinking about the princess’ mattress, he told himself, standing ramrod straight and six feet tall. A wobbly six feet it was, and one he was still getting used to. Charlie was at the age where Lords and Ladies went away on ships to study higher education before coming back to marry. The beau chosen by her father for the princess had gone, and would come back.
And so this was his time, the time under her balcony. Which would amount to nothing. Her beau would return, they would marry, have beautiful babies, and one day his own children would stand under this very window, smelling of berries and wishing to be noticed.
“It’s not our responsibility to notice you.”
The voice was a bird singing, a viola playing a flourish, a flute being percussed. He knew it from never having heard it. He bowed without looking up from the dust he’d always lived in, and stared wide-eyed at her bejewelled and gold-threaded shoes covered in beads. The dust didn’t stick to her shoes: nor to her gown, with its million layers of chiffon.
“Your highness,” he said, with more flourish than necessary, feeling the ghost of the executioner’s axe upon his throat.
“It is your responsibility to keep away from the castle. We cannot give you what you desire. Ask for it in the village.”
“May I stand?”
“Very well.”
“May I address the Princess directly?”
“Very well.”
He looked her in the eye and she was young. Her nose and cheeks were sprinkled all over with freckles. Green eyes flowed without humour above her soft cheekbones and lips the pink of mirages in the desert. She looked like an ordinary girl. An ordinary girl in expensive clothes.
“You winked at me. In the marketplace. When they said I smelled like flowers.”
“How presumptuous.” Her tone was flat. And her eyes.
“You deny it?”
“You? Charging me? My guards can remove your head for such insolence.”
“Death has no power.” But it did, and he shook in fear. Still, the words would not stay back. “I’ll die justified.”
She sighed, “I relent. I winked. Here is the peasant I’ve seen in the fields, I thought, and climbing in the fruit trees. You climb very well.”
Did he dream it? Did her look imply that she’d taken notice of more than his climbing? Heresy! Such impropriety...even in thought! Admit it! Admit it and be hung! It’s no less than you deserve!
She whispered, “I know something else about you.”
“Katherine!” came a man’s voice...booming and too close.
Over her shoulder, she called “Coming, father!”
Again, her eyes sparkled. Again, she winked.
“That way. Climb over the garden wall, where he can’t see you. Into the brick garden, there, and through the smallest door. Wait. I’ll find you.”
“Can I trust you?”
“With the fealty you owe the crown,” She ran off, holding her skirts, to meet her father and a hundred men who would kill him if they found him.
Standing alone, Charlie mocked “with the fealty you owe the crown.”
The grasses blew in a hot and dusty wind that must have come straight from the Enemy himself.
“She could have just said I had no damned choice.”
