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45

"I THINK YOU'RE CRAZY!" ALICE SAID ANGRILY. "IT WON'T JUST BE Boche bullets you'll have to avoid. All those hundreds of boys who knew you at Fallow are all out there now, subalterns, mostly. It will only take one: 'By Jove! That fellow looks just like that cricketer chappie, Exeter. I say! Wasn't he the one who murdered old Bagpipe Bodgley?' And then, my lad, you'll be in the—"

"You're nagging," Edward said.

They were in Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe in Vicarsdown. The village was bigger than he remembered, he said, and she had retorted that it would still fit inside Piccadilly Circus, which was not true. But the tea shoppe was an authentic Elizabethan building and delightful, although it must have had some other purpose originally, because authentic Elizabethans had drunk ale, not tea. It was tiny, cramped, and rather dark—pleasantly cool. They were drinking tea. They were eating homemade scones spread with strawberry jam and cream thick as butter. It was too precious a moment to waste quarreling.

Edward's eyes were cold as a winter sea. "Furthermore, those hundreds of boys are not all out there now. Half of them are dead. And you persist in treating me as your baby brother, which I'm not, anymore."

She lifted her cup. "Yes, you are. You always were my baby brother to me, and you always will be. When we're both a hundred years old, with long white beards, you will still be my baby brother." She took a sip of tea, watching to see if he would accept the olive branch.

"I don't think I'll like you in a long white beard," he said reflectively. "Promise me you'll dye it?"

She laid down the cup and reached across for his hand. "I promise I shall stop thinking of you as a baby brother if you'll tell me about Ysian."

"What about her? I didn't take advantage of her. I hope that doesn't surprise you."

"Not in the slightest." She knew it would surprise most people, though. "Did you love her?"

He pulled his hand away and began heaping cream on a scone like a navvy loading a wheelbarrow. "I've told you everything. She's a very determined young woman—I have rather a weakness for those, you know. She was sixteen and I was a stranger. She fell for me like a ton of bricks, naturally. It wasn't me, just the charisma."

"You haven't answered the question."

"No, I didn't love her."

"What happened to her? When did you last see her?"

"About a year ago. Mrs. Murgatroyd took her on as cook, at Olympus. She's a good cook, although of course she knew only Lemodian recipes."

Romance cracked and shattered into fragments. "But not educated? Just a native wench? Not good enough?"

He stared at her in disbelief, face flaming cruelly red. His knife clattered down on the china plate.

"Oh, Edward, I'm sorry!" she said quickly. "That was abominable of me! I'm sure you behaved like a perfect gentleman. Oh, I mean—"

"I was a stranger," he said in a very quiet, tight voice. "Strangers never die, except from boredom or violence. I know I don't look any older than I did when I left here. Ysian is eighteen or nineteen now, I suppose. Ten years from now she will be twenty-nine, and ten years after that, thirty-nine. Had I stayed on Nextdoor, I would still be much the same as I am now. Why do you think the Service sends people Home on leave—especially bachelors? One reason is that they have to marry other strangers! Love between stranger and native is unthinkable. It leads to unbearable heartache. It leads to . . . to abominations. The Chamber—Never mind."

"I hadn't thought of that. I'm sorry. You didn't let yourself fall in love with her, you mean?"

He went back to destroying scones. "I did not tell her I loved her. I never gave her any encouragement whatsoever. I used you as an excuse, actually. Hope you don't mind. Had I been free to react to Ysian like a normal man, I'd have thrown my heart at her feet and rent my garments and piled ashes on my head and writhed in the dirt until she promised to marry me. That wasn't possible, so nothing was possible. Just friends."

How wonderful the world would be if emotion could be dosed with logic so easily! I am sorry, Sir D'Arcy, but your married status inevitably precludes any further communication between us . . . .

"Look!" Edward pointed out at the sunlit village beyond the little diamond-pained windows. A Gypsy wagon was being hauled along the street by an ancient nag. Dogs barked, small boys ran after it.

He watched as it disappeared around the corner. "Last time I was here, a Gypsy told my fortune. That's a different wagon, though."

"You believe in that stuff?"

He twisted his face. "I didn't used to, but that one hit the mark pretty well. She said I'd have to choose between honor and friendship. Sure enough, I was forced to abandon Eleal when I might have been able to help her."

"Come off it, Edward! That might just as well have applied to Ysian."

His eyes glinted like razors. "I don't rat on my friends very often. Abandoning Ysian, if that's what I did, was the honorable thing to do. You might like to know the rest of the prophecy, though—Mrs. Boswell the Gypsy also said I'd have to choose between honor and duty, that I could only find honor through dishonor. Explain that one, because I can't!"

Was there a chink here to work on? "Well, if your duty is to enlist, but the honorable thing is to avenge your parents' murder—"

"Never give up, do you?" Even Edward could lose his temper. If that happened she would have lost any hope of making him see reason.

"You haven't seen Ysian in a year?" The girl was the only bait she had to coax him back to Nextdoor and away from the Western Front.

He flashed a look of exasperation at her. "Told you," he mumbled. "She's at Olympus, working for Polly Murgatroyd. She's very nice—Polly, I mean. I wrote to her before I crossed over—to Ysian, I mean . . . ." He frowned, dabbing at his mouth with the napkin. "As the man who promised to deliver the note then tried to kill me, she probably never got it."

"You weren't at Olympus?"

He shook his head, chewing. "I took two years to get there and when I did, I didn't stay long. The Committee decided it was too dangerous, both for me and for everybody else—didn't want Zath sacking the place in the hope of catching me. I was packed off to Thovale, which is very small and rural, but not too far away. I helped set up some chapels there. I became a missionary!" He laughed gleefully. "Holy Roly must have turned in his grave! But we all do . . . they all do it."

"You'd make a good preacher." She could just imagine him running his parish like a school dormitory.

"I didn't! I can't ever believe that I know better than everyone else. I don't like telling people what they must think. It's immoral!"

"Doesn't a stranger make a good preacher?"

"Yes," he admitted glumly. "I could pack in the crowds. I converted heathens to the Church's new and improved heathenism. My heart wasn't in it, though. Jumbo Watson can convert a whole village with a single sermon. I've seen him do it."

Alice abandoned the Ysian campaign. If he could stay away from the girl for a whole year to do something he did not believe in, then thoughts of Ysian were not going to discourage him from enlisting.

"The Liberator?" she said. "It's a noble title—calls up memories of Bolivar, William Tell, Robert the Bruce. Doesn't it tempt you at all?"

He rolled his eyes in exasperation at her persistence. "Not too terribly frightfully, no. There were a couple of times—and the Filoby Testament predicted them both. I almost gave in to Tion, because he said he would cure Eleal's limp. That was a very close-run thing! And then in Tharg, the prince—" He popped a jammy, creamy morsel in his mouth and chewed blissfully.

"What about the prince?"

"That didn't work either, but it came close, too. That particular prophecy ends, but the dead shall rouse him. That's me, rouse me. And that part did work, Alice, because I saw the dead—in Flanders. How many lives has this war cost?"

"No way of knowing. What you read in the papers is all censored."

"Well, the dead speak. They say it's my turn. I have to do my bit, and that's that." He glanced at his wrist and then at the grandfather clock in the corner.

She sighed. Two more miles to Harrow. Her legs ached already. "Time to go, isn't it?"

Edward nodded. "Wish I hadn't eaten so much." He surreptitiously slid the last scone into his pocket. He grinned sheepishly when he saw that she had noticed. "Another offering."

Alice shook her head in disbelief. It was Friday afternoon in England and they were on their way to meet a god.

 

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Framed