The Dragonfly Pool

“I do not deny all that—it is because of this that I admitted you to my house instead of having you thrown out. But you will not come here again. Not ever. An Englishman’s home is his castle, as you are aware, and if I see you here again I will have you evicted and call the police. Moreover, I know something about your past. You were responsible for the king’s early escapades, a bad influence from the start. It was because of you that Johannes wanted to be one of those namby-pamby rulers who pretend that a king can consult his people. A king is a king, an absolute ruler, and one of my tasks before I die is to see that Karil does not forget this.”

For a moment Matteo saw red. He was within an ace of springing forward and fastening his hands around the raddled throat of the old bully. But he managed to get control of himself. There was one thing he still had to do, and it meant being polite when he wanted to kill.

“I shall abide by your decision,” he said, “but I would like to see Karil once to say good-bye. I’m going off to war soon and I may not return.”

“Karil is not at home,” lied the duke.

“I am not in a hurry. I will wait till he returns.”

“No, you won’t,” screeched the duke. He was suddenly crimson, a pulse going in his throat. “You will leave my house this instant.” He pressed a bell on his desk and the footman who had admitted Matteo appeared. “Get Henry and show this man out. Make sure the door is bolted behind him. Hurry.”

During that moment while Matteo waited for the second footman, he felt that anything would be worthwhile—prison, a hangman’s noose—if he could kill the panting, slobbering tyrant glaring at him from behind his desk. He had to call up the image of Karil exposed to scandal and horror to prevent himself from leaping on his enemy.

The footmen came just in time—feeble lackeys daunted by their instructions. Matteo knocked away the arm of the first one, pushed the second one hard against the wall—and left the building.

The hour Matteo spent in the station waiting for the train back to Delderton was one of the darkest of his life. He saw Johannes’s face turned to his, begging him to look after his son. Well, this was how he had looked after Karil. Left him with a power-mad imbecile who would train him to be the kind of tyrant Europe would disgorge in an instant after the war. Karil abandoned in that wretched dark house—and Matteo was powerless. He had betrayed Johannes by leaving Bergania. Now he had betrayed his son.

His rage against himself and the duke only grew on the journey back to school. He gave his lesson on the life history of amphioxus in a black cloud of fury that embraced everything and everyone on earth—and afterward could not recall what he had said.

It was two days before any of the children dared to approach him. Then suddenly he was himself again—and at dawn on the third day he got everybody out of bed to go and look at a badger sett by the river where three cubs were hunting for wasps’ nests.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The Duke Is Enraged

By the beginning of November shortages and restrictions caused by the war were beginning to bite, and among the things that were in short supply was petrol for private motoring.

The duke needed the Daimler to drive to the Whitehall Bank, of which he was a director, so that the afternoon outings Karil took with Carlotta and the Scold became even shorter and less interesting. As often as not now they spent the time taking tea with whatever family lived close by and was considered worthy of knowing the duke of Rottingdene and his dependents.

Sometimes they even went on foot, with one of the servants walking behind them, to whatever entertainment was suitable, and free.

And one of these places was the National Portrait Gallery. The sides of the building were sandbagged and only three of the galleries were open, but it was a perfectly respectable place, with no danger of seeing pictures of people with nothing on, and would provide, the Scold thought, suitable history lessons for Karil and Carlotta since the paintings were mainly of people who were both important and dead.

For Karil the hour they spent there was interesting. He had expected to see mostly kings and statesmen and governors of the far-flung empire, but he found faces that intrigued him. There were scientists and explorers and other people who had done real things: Florence Nightingale, who had nursed the dying soldiers in the Crimean War, and David Livingstone, who had beaten his way through the African jungle looking for the source of the Nile, and Shelley, who had written great poems about freedom before meeting his death at sea.

Karil had thought that Carlotta would be bored, but she came out with a rapt expression and at first she did not answer when they spoke to her, for the truth was that she had had an inspiration.