Memtok touched his shoulder almost gently. “Cousin, take hold of yourself. Your prerogatives were not abridged. You see that, do you not?”
“Yes. Yes, I see it,” Hugh mumbled through his hands.
“Then why are you overwrought?”
“He was—he is—my son.”
“He is? Then why are you behaving as if he were your nephew?” Memtok used the specific form, meaning “your eldest sister’s oldest son” and he was honestly puzzled by the savage’s odd reaction. He could understand a mother being interested in her son—her oldest son, at least. But a father? Uncle! Memtok had sons, he was certain, throughout the household—“One-Shot Memtok” the former slutmaster used to call him. But he didn’t know who they were and could not imagine wanting to know. Or caring.
“Because—” Hugh started. “Oh, forget it. You did your duty. Conceded.”
“Well—You still seem upset. I’ll send for a bottle of Happiness. I’ll join you, this once.”
“No. No, thank you.”
“Oh, come, come! You need it. A tonic is excellent, it is excess that one must avoid.”
“Thanks, Memtok, but I don’t want it. Right now I must be sharp. I want to see Their Charity. Right away if possible. Will you arrange it for me?”
“I can’t do that.”
“Damn it, I know that you can. And I know he will see me if you ask him.”
“Cousin, I didn’t say that I would not; I said ‘I can’t.’ Their Charity is not in residence.”
“Oh.” Then he asked to have word sent to Joe. But the Chief Domestic told him that the young Chosen had left with the Lord Protector. He promised to let Hugh know when either of them returned—Yes, at once, cousin.
Hugh skipped dinner, went to his rooms and brooded. He could not avoid tormenting himself with the thought that it was, in part at least, his own fault—no, no, not for failing to read every useless paper that came into his office the instant it arrived; no, that was sheer bad luck. Even if he checked his “junk mail” each morning, it probably would have been too late; the two orders had probably gone out at the same time.
What did anguish his soul was fear that he had pushed the first domino in that quarrel with Duke. He could have lied to the boy, told him that his mother was, to Hugh’s certain knowledge, a maid-in-waiting or some such, to the Lord Protector’s sister, safe inside the royal harem and never seen by a man. Pampered, living the life of Riley, and happy in it—and that other tale was just gossip servants talk to fill their idle minds.
Duke would have believed it because Duke would have wanted to believe it.
As it was—Perhaps Duke had gone to see Their Charity. Perhaps Memtok had arranged it, or perhaps Duke had simply tried to bull his way in and the row had reached Ponse’s ears. It was more than possible, he saw now, that his advice to Duke to see the head man might well have resulted in a scene that would have caused Ponse to order the tempering as casually as he would order his air coach. All too likely—
He tried to tell himself that no one is ever responsible for another person’s actions. He believed it, he tried to live by it. But he found that cold wisdom no comfort.
At last he quit brooding, got writing materials, and got to work on a letter to Barbara. He had had not even a moment’s chance to tell her his plans for them to escape, no chance to work up a code. But she must be ready at no notice; he must tell her, somehow.
Barbara knew German, he had a smattering from one high school year of it. He knew enough Russian to stumble through a simple conversation, Barbara had picked up a few words from him during their time in the wilderness—a game that they could share without giving Grace cause for jealousy.
He wrote a draft, then painfully translated the letter into a mishmash of German, Russian, colloquial English, beatnik jive, literary allusions, pig Latin, and special idioms. In the end he had a message that he was sure Barbara could puzzle out, but he was certain that no student of ancient languages could translate it into Language, even in the unlikely event that the scholar knew English, German, and Russian.
He was not afraid that it might be translated by anyone else. If Grace saw it, she would pronounce it gibberish; she knew no Russian, no German. Duke was off in a drug-ridden dream world. Joe might guess at the meaning—but he trusted Joe not to give him away. Nevertheless, he tried to conceal the meaning even from Joe, hashing the syntax and using deliberate misspellings.
The draft read:
My darling,
I have been planning our escape for some time. I do not know how I will manage it but I want you to be ready, day or night, to grab the twins and simply follow me. Steal food if you can, steal some stout shoes, steal a knife. We’ll head for the mountains. I had intended to wait until next summer, let the boys grow some first. But something has happened to change my mind: Duke has been tempered. I don’t know why and I’m too heartbroken to talk about it. But it could happen to me next. Worse than that—You remember Ponse’s saying that he wanted to see our twins as matched footmen? Darling, studs do not serve in the Banquet Hall. Nor is there any other fate in store for them; they are both going to be tall. It must not happen!
And we can’t wait. The capital city of the Protectorate is somewhere near where St. Louis used to be; we can’t run all the way to the Rocky Mountains carrying our two boys—and we have no way of knowing (and no reason to expect) that all four of us will be sent to the Summer Palace next year.
Be brave. Don’t touch any Happiness drug in any form from here on; our chance is likely to be a split-second one, with no warning.
I love you,
Hugh
Kitten came in; he told her to watch the show, not bother him. The child obeyed.
The final draft read:
Luba,
Ya bin smoking komplott seit Hector was weaned. The Count of Monte Cristo bit, dig? Kinder too klein machs nix—ya hawchoo! Goldilocks’ troubles machs nix—as the fellow said, it’s the only game in town. Good Girl Scouts always follow the Boy Scout motto. Speise, schuhen, messer—what Fagin taught Oliver, nicht? Da! Schnell is die herz von duh apparat; Berlin is too far from the Big Rock Candy and Eliza would never make the final curtain.
Em ander jahr, nyet. It takes two to tango and four to play bridge, all in em kammer, or the trek is dreck. A house divided is for the vogelen, like doom. Mehr, ya haben schrecken. Mein Kronprinz now rules only the Duchy of Abelard. Page Christine Jorgenson, he answers—I kid you not. Spilt milk butters no parsnips after the barn is burned so weep no more, my lady—but falsetto is not the pitch for detski whose horoscope reads Gemini. Borjemoi! Old King Coal is a Merry Old Soul but he’ll get no zwilling kellneren from thee. Better a bonny bairn beards bären y begegn Karen—is ratification unanimous? Igday eemay?
Verb. Sap.: I don’t drink, smoke, nor chew, nor run around with twists who do. Cloud nine is endsville for this bit. Write soon, even if it’s only five dollars utbay swing the jive; the dump is bugged and the Gay Pay Oo is eager.
Forever—H.
Kitten was long asleep before Hugh finished composing this jargon. He tore the draft into bits and dropped it down the whirlpool, went to bed. After a long time haunted by Duke’s giggling, foolish, happy, drug-blurred face he got up and broke his own injunction to Barbara, dosed his sorrows and his fears with bottled Happiness.
17
Barbara’s answer read:
Darling,
When you bid three no-trump, my answer is seven no-trump, without hesitation. Then it’s a grand slam—or we go set and don’t cry. Any time you can get four together we’ll be ready to play.
Love always—B.
Nothing else happened that day. Nor the next—or the next. Hugh doggedly dictated translations, his mind not on his work. He was very careful what he ate or drank, since he now knew the surgeon’s humane way of sneaking up on a victim; he ate only from dishes Memtok had eaten from, tried to be crafty by never accepting a fruit or a roll that was closest to him when a servant offered
him such, avoided drinking anything at the table—he drank only water which he himself had taken from the tap. He continued to have breakfast in his room, but he started passing up many foods in favor of unpeeled fruits and boiled eggs in the shell.
He knew that these precautions were futile—no Borgia would have found them difficult to outwit—and in any case, if orders came to temper him, they need only grab him after subduing him with a whip if it proved difficult to drug him. But he might have time to protest, to demand that he be taken before the Lord Protector.
As for whips—He resumed karate practice, alone in his rooms. A karate blow delivered fast enough would cause even a whip wielder to lose interest. There was no real hope behind any of it; he simply intended not to go peacefully. Duke had been right; it would have been better to have fought and died.
He made no attempt to see Duke.
He continued to hide food from his breakfast tray—sugar, salt, hard bread. He assumed that such food must be undrugged even though he ate none of it at the time, because it did not affect Kitten.
He had been going barefoot most of the time but wearing felt slippers for his daily exercise walks in the servants’ garden. Now he complained to Memtok that the gravel hurt his feet through these silly slippers—didn’t the household afford anything better?
He was given heavy leather sandals, wore them thereafter in the garden.
He cultivated the household’s chief engineer, telling him that, in his youth, he had been in charge of construction for his former lord. The engineer was flattered, being not only one of the junior executive servants but also in the habit of hearing mostly complaints rather than friendly interest. Hugh sat with him after dinner and managed to appear knowledgeable largely by listening.
Hugh was invited to look around the plant, and spent a tiring morning crawling over pipes and looking at plans—the engineer could not write but could read a little and understood drawings. It would have been an interesting day in itself if Hugh had been free from worries; Hugh’s background made engineering interesting to him. But he concentrated on trying to memorize every drawing he saw, match it in his mind with the passageways and rooms he was taken through. He had a deadly serious purpose: Despite having lived most of a summer in this big building, he knew only small pieces of it inside and only a walled garden outside. He needed to know all of it; he needed to know every possible exit from servants’ quarters, what lay behind the guarded door to sluts’ quarters, and most particularly, where in that area Barbara and the twins lived.
He got as far as the meander door that led into the distaff side. The engineer hesitated when the guard suddenly became alert. He said, “Cousin Hugh, I’m sure it’s all right for you to go in here, with me—but maybe we had better go up to the Chief Domestic’s office and have him write you out a pass.”
“Whatever you say, cousin.”
“Well, there really isn’t anything of interest in here. Just the usual appointments of a barracks—water, lights, air service, plumbing, baths, such things. All the interesting stuff, power plant, incinerator, air control, and so forth, is elsewhere. And you know how the boss is—likely to fret over any variation from routine. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll make my inspection in there later.”
“However you want to arrange things,” Hugh answered with a suggestion of affronted dignity.
“Well…everybody knows you’re not one of those disgusting young studs.” The engineer looked embarrassed. “Tell you what—You tell me flatly that you want to see everything in my department that is—and I’ll trot up to Memtok and tell him you said so. He knows—Uncle! we all know—that you enjoy the favor of Their Charity. You understand me? I don’t mean to presume. Memtok will write out a pass and I’ll be in the clear and so will the guard and the head guard. You wait here and be comfortable. I’ll hurry.”
“Don’t bother. There’s nothing in there I want to see,” Hugh lied. “You’ve seen one bath, you’ve seen ’em all, I always say.”
The engineer smiled in relief. “That’s a good one, I’ll remember that. ‘You’ve seen one bath, you’ve seen ’em all!’ Ha Ha! Well, we’ve still got the carpentry shop and the metal shop.”
Hugh went on with him, arm in arm and jovial, while fuming inside. So close! Yet letting Memtok suspect that he had any interest in sluts’ quarters was the last thing he wanted.
But the morning was well spent. Not only did Hugh acquire a burglar’s insight as to weak points of the building (that delivery door to the unloading dock; if it was merely locked at night, it should be possible to break out) but also he picked up two prizes.
The first was a piece of spring steel about eight inches long. Hugh palmed it from some scrap in the metal shop; it wound up taped to his arm, after an unneeded plumbing call, for he had gone prepared to steal.
The second was even more of a prize: a printed drawing of the lowest level, with engineering installations shown boldly—but with every door and passage marked—including sluts’ quarters.
Hugh had admired it. “Uncle, but that’s a beautiful drawing! Your own work?”
The engineer shyly admitted that it was. Based on architect’s plans, you understand—but changes keep having to be added.
“Beautiful!” Hugh repeated. “It’s a shame there isn’t more than one copy.”
“Oh, plenty of copies, they wear out. Would you like one?”
“I would treasure it. Especially if the artist would inscribe it.” When the man hesitated, Hugh moved in fast and said, “May I suggest a wording? Here, I’ll write it out and you copy it.”
Hugh walked away with the print, inscribed: To my dear Cousin Hugh, a fellow craftsman who appreciates beautiful work.
That night he showed it to Kitten. The child was awestruck. She had no concept of maps and was fascinated by the idea that it was possible to put down, just on a piece of paper, the long passages and twisty turns of her world. Hugh showed her how one went from his quarters to the ramp leading up to the executive servants’ dining room, where the servants’ main hall was, how the passage outside led, by two turns, to the garden. She confirmed the routes slowly, frowning in unaccustomed mental effort.
“You must live somewhere over here, Kitten. That is sluts’ quarters.”
“It is?”
“Yes. See if you can find where you live. I won’t show you, you know how. I’ll just sit back.”
“Oh. Uncle help me! Let me see. First, I have to come down this ramp—” She paused to think while Hugh kept his face impassive. She had confirmed what he had almost stopped suspecting; the child was a planted spy. “Then…this is the door?”
“That’s right.”
“Then I walk straight ahead past the slutmaster’s office, clear to the end, and I turn, and… I must live right there!” She clapped her hands and giggled.
“Your billet is across from your mess hall?”
“Yes.”
“Then you got it right, first time! That’s wonderful! Now let’s see what else you can figure out.”
For the next quarter hour she took him on a tour of sluts’ quarters—junior and senior common rooms, messes, virgins’ dormitory, bedwarmers’ sleep room, nursery, lying-in, children’s hall, service stalls, baths, playground door, garden door, offices, senior matron’s apartment, everything—and Hugh learned that Barbara was no longer billeted in lying-in. Kitten volunteered it.
“Barbara—you know, the savage slut you write to—she used to be there, and now she’s right there.”
“How can you tell? Those rooms all look alike.”
“I can tell. It’s the second one of the four-mother rooms on this side, when you walk away from the baths.”
Hugh noted with deep interest that a maintenance tunnel ran under the baths, with an access manhole in the passage Barbara’s room was on—and with even deeper interest that this seemed to connect with another that ran clear across the building. Could it be that here was a wide-open unguarded route between all three main area
s of servants’ land? Surely not, as the lines seemed to show that any stud with initiative need only crawl a hundred yards to let himself into sluts’ quarters.
Yet it might be true—for how would any stud know where those tunnels led?
And why would a stud risk it if he guessed? With the ratio of intact males to breeding sluts about that of bulls to cows on a cattle ranch. And could thumbless hands handle the fastenings?
For that matter, could those trap doors be opened from below?
“You’re a fast learner, Kitten. Now try a part you don’t know as well. Figure out, on the drawing, how to get from our rooms here to my offices. And if you solve that one, here’s a harder one. What turns you would take and what ramp you would use if I told you to take a message to the Chief Domestic?”
She solved the first one after puzzling, the second she traced without hesitation.
At lunch next day, with Memtok at his elbow, Hugh called down the table to the engineer. “Pipes, old cousin! That beautiful drawing you gave me yesterday—Do you suppose one of your woodworkers could frame it for me? I’d like to hang it over my desk where people can admire it.”
The engineer flushed and grinned widely. “Certainly, Cousin Hugh! How about a nice piece of mahogany?”
“Perfect.” Hugh turned to his left. “Cousin Memtok, our cousin is wasted on pipes and plumbing; he’s an artist. As soon as I have it hung, you must stop by and see what I mean.”
“Glad to, cousin. When I find time. If I find time.”
More than a week passed with no word about Their Charity, nor about Joe—a week of no bridge, and no Barbara. At last, one day at lunch, Memtok said, “By the way, I had been meaning to tell you, the young Chosen Joseph has returned. Do you still want to see him?”
“Certainly. Is Their Charity also in residence?”
“No. Their Gracious sister believes that he may not return until after we go home. Ah, you must see that, cousin. Not a cottage like this. Great doings night and day—and this humble servant will be lucky to get three meals in peace all winter. Run, run, run, worry, worry, worry, problems popping right and left,” he said with unctuous satisfaction. “Be glad you’re a scholar.”