You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [37]
He tells the boy of Eleanor’s first imprisonment in Normandy, describing the cell, embellishing, and the story of how Henry kept her for years at Winchester and Salisbury. As he speaks, the old woman draws the cloth across Albert’s forehead. Paul remembers Thomas à Becket, slain at Canterbury, the knights acting on Henry’s angry words, which Paul repeats now, as his teacher repeated them to him: “‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?’ And so they returned to England and stabbed him, inside his own cathedral. Henry’s friend since childhood, his conscience.”
Stringing the memories together now, he begins to paint the picture of the restless king who for thirty-five years never slept in one bed more than a fortnight, ranging over his vast possessions, battling thankless sons. There are the struggles with the barons, the war over France, the last imprisonment of Eleanor. Soon the tale flows easily, of channel crossings and broken treaties, and he opens the Plantagenet world up like a flower for the boy, knowing the hunger for the dramatic statement, the declarations of war, castle sieges, men fighting to the death, victors standing on the ramparts, broadswords held over their heads—all the beautiful wealth and violence of a boy’s imagination.
“Better than any book, that was,” Mrs. McLaggan says when he is finished. She folds the cloth and places it in the wastebasket. “Your granny can’t do that, Albert, can she?”
There is just the hint of a nod from Albert.
“I’m sure I’ve confused some of it,” he says. “There’s a lot to tell—Richard, and the Crusades.”
The light in the room has begun to fade. Ellen will have left the library now, he thinks. She will have walked to the hotel and found him not there. It seems so unlikely that they are still in the same town, that he has not traveled farther than that.
“We’re going to let you rest now,” the old woman says. “Perhaps Mr. Lewis will come back tomorrow. Would you like that?” She leans down and touches her lips to the boy’s cheek.
DOWNSTAIRS IN THE hall, as she is walking Paul to the door, Mrs. McLaggan stops.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have said something about the smell. I didn’t want to frighten you.”
“It’s all right.”
“You see, Mr. Lewis, my grandson, he’s going to die. You’ll think I’m a cruel woman, that he should be in hospital, and you’d be right to think it. But he’s been there, you see, been there for eighteen months. I’d heard of psoriasis before, I knew sadness and worry and so on could make it worse. But I didn’t know it could get this bad.”
She grabs Paul’s arm.
“Mr. Lewis, he wanted to come home. He knew what it meant to leave there, but he wanted to come home.”
OUTSIDE, IT IS nearly dark. Lights have come on in the houses, and in the square the vendors’ stalls are gone. He walks slowly through the gathering dusk. At the ends of the streets he passes, views open of sky and water, shelves of cloud floating on the horizon.
In the room at the hotel, Ellen is waiting for him. She’s been crying, he can see, but has stopped now. She doesn’t have the same alarmed expression she had yesterday. She’s gotten their bags out and some of their clothes are folded inside.
For a few minutes they don’t speak.
“I asked at the desk about the schedule,” she says finally. “We can get a train in the morning.”
“What about the letters you came for?”
She glances up at him. He’s never seen her look this exhausted before.
“I’ve seen them,” she says. She sits perched on the edge of the bed, her hands folded on her lap. The way she gestured: that was one of the things he fell in love with. Her hands would turn open, fingers spread, her arms moving in quick arcs and circles, energy that seemed to him miraculous.
“I’m sorry,” is all he can think to say.
She kneels on the floor and starts packing the rest of their belongings, tears streaming down her face.
IT IS IN the