The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [130]
My mother didn’t look up, not even at the very end, and Petra busied herself with Maria, scratching him until his back leg kicked the air. Only my sister was still watching as I closed the door. She didn’t look sad.
In a burst of childhood jealousy or childishly innocent amorality, I once (or more) poked around my sister’s desk and came upon her diary and my father’s half of their correspondence. I read their jokes and messages of love and discussions of books and plays, unlike anything I’d ever written or received. She caught me there, hands in her secrets. “Oh, my,” she fake-purred, trying to sound grown-up about it, trying to cast me as a boy years younger than she, just because I’d snooped. She was trying not to appear angry, just suddenly removed from being my twin, a distant, amused big sister. “A thief in our midst!” she laughed, and I hated her so much, this version of her who abandoned our identicality, pretended not to understand what drove me, pretended she wouldn’t have done the same thing in my shoes, pretended not to be part of our joint agreement against the world. (Obviously, yes, I had broken that agreement by breaking into her desk, except that her secrets in that desk were actually the first violation of our alliance.) I fled her bedroom, pursued by the stuffed bear she threw after me.
In this case I went home, where, shivering and sweating hard and trying to take my temperature, I dropped the ancient thermometer in my bathtub, and a worm of silver mercury slithered from the glass wreckage.
She sent me the 1904 edition of Arthur a few weeks later. No note, just the inscription For Arthur, from Dana.
48
ACT V: Mordred comes to court, knowing Arthur is in Ireland. He means to win Guenhera’s support for himself as the official heir, or perhaps even to seduce and impregnate her, to prove his divine right to the crown. He is greeted by actors who mistake him for an actor as well. Enraged by them and insulted by Guenhera, he then meets Philip of York, who insists that he is the anointed heir. Mordred kidnaps them both. Arthur turns his Irish invasion around to intercept Mordred alongside the Humber River in Yorkshire. In soliloquy, Arthur judges his life and kingdom as failures, but he cannot see what else he could have done. His army is trapped in the mud. Fatalistic, even self-destructive, he is impatient to get on to an ending, even a bad ending. Pictish ambassadors arrive, offering Guenhera and Philip in exchange for Arthur’s abdication. Outnumbered, Arthur is ready to accept when a report arrives of a Pictish attack. Angry at apparently having been lied to, Arthur kills the ambassadors and orders an immediate charge against the enemy. Mordred, surprised by the English movement and apparently not having called for any attack from his side, orders the death of the useless hostages and goes into battle. Guenhera and Philip are murdered. Arthur rallies his troops. Mordred kills Gloucester. Arthur learns of this and then of his wife’s death. Heartbroken, he rages, seems even to think that he won the battle of Lincoln, which he skipped, a victim of his own knightly PR. He cannot go on, realizes he has been a poor king, and finally places himself in God’s hands. At once he sees Mordred and knows he must save Britain at all costs, even that of