My sister the White Queen was responsible for World War II. All this time we had thought to blame Catling, but it wasn’t Catling’s fault at all. The war and all its horrors was the construction of the White Queen.
That is what we both found so terrible; the only means to create the power by which to destroy the Troy Game was through the creation of such horrifying destruction and suffering.
Millions would die, were dying, all for Jack’s and my benefit.
We walked for a while in silence. Silence between us, that is, for the dreadful sounds of the air raid continued—the screaming of the bombs and the crump of their blasts; the shocks of explosions; the roar and terror of the conflagrations to our east and north. The part of Southwark that we walked, in the west, had been spared the bombing, so none of the fires or bomb blasts were close to us.
Eventually Jack spoke. “Why don’t you want to go home?”
“I want to be with you tonight, Jack.”
He breathed in deeply. “Why not Copt Hall?”
“It can’t be there. We need to use the power of the air raid.”
Those words almost choked me, but I had to say them. Jack and I were not only about to consummate our relationship, but also consummate the bonding of a Kingman and a Mistress.
We needed to use the power that the White Queen has given us. But, oh, what a loathsome way to cement a union.
He freed one of his hands from mine and cupped my face, kissing me gently.
“Do you think it would be the same between us,” he said, “if I were just a soldier and you just a girl?”
“Yes,” I said, “I think it would.”
His face, his entire being, relaxed. “Aye, you’re right. It would be the same.”
“We need to do what we must if we are to destroy the Troy Game,” I said. “It is our choice if we allow it to destroy us or not.”
His hand moved against my face, so gently, and he gave a slow nod.
“If you had been Genvissa, or Noah, or even Matilda,” he said, “I would have allowed the power to corrupt me. But you…you are the temple bell, and you will keep me true.”
I winced. I hated that temple bell metaphor, and he laughed and kissed me again. “We need to find a bed,” he said. “Soon.”
We found a small rooming house not two streets away. It was—remarkably considering the air raid
—still open for business.
The proprietor was a small middle-aged woman with an air of world weariness that must have come from the continual passage of strangers through her home.
She emerged from a trapdoor set below the stairs
—the house must have had a cellar which she used for shelter—at the sound of the bell tinkling as we opened the front door, and inspected us up and down, arms folded over her apron.
“You’ll be wanting a room, then?”
“If you please,” said Jack.
I bit my lip to keep from giggling. I knew what we must have looked like to her: the foreign soldier about to deflower the naive English girl.
The woman pulled out a book from a drawer in the hall table, opened it to a page marked with string, then picked up a pencil which hung at the end of the string.
“Your names?” she said.
“Major Jack Skelton,” Jack said, his American accent more pronounced than it usually was.
“And…?” said the woman.
“Grace…” Jack said. “Grace…What did you say your surname was, Grace?”
“Orr,” I said, not able to keep the giggle inside any longer. Jack had a mischievous gleam in his eyes that I found immensely reassuring.
“And do your parents know where you are, Miss Orr?” said the woman, looking up from her book.
Now I really had to bite my lip hard. What in the world did I say to that? Incapable of speech, I shook my head.
“Humph,” the woman said. “Don’t expect to get a ring out of this, young lady.”
I suppose I could have drawn the sleeves of my coat up and shown her the diamond bracelets, but I contented myself with wrapping my hands about Jack’s upper arm and gazing up at him adoringly. “I trust him entirely,” I managed to say.
The woman harrumphed again, then glanced up as a plane passed particularly low overhead. “You sure you don’t want to go to one of the shelters?”
“Absolutely not,” said Jack. He winked at the woman. “The excitement, you know.”
What she must have thought of us! In the end she contented herself with frowning at both of us, took payment from Jack, wrote him out a receipt, then gave him a key to a room on the first floor.
“There’s a bathroom at the end of the corridor, and don’t forget to keep the blackout curtains closed.”
That was a reasonably pointless piece of advice, I thought. With all the fires throughout the city, the Luftwaffe would have absolutely no trouble finding London tonight.
We went up the stairs, and Jack unlocked the room.
It was terrible, a cheap soulless room that must have seen the passage of countless people. An iron bedstead (which looked as if it had been purchased at a hospital sale) stood against one wall, the bed covered with a pale green, threadbare, candlewick bedspread. There was a chest of drawers against a wall with a window draped in black curtains, and there was a wooden chair set against another wall, a chipped chamberpot underneath it.
The room was lit by a bare bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling.
We stood in the doorway, looking into it.
“Well,” I managed eventually, “at least it has the advantage of not having a Malcolm likely to interrupt us with a plateful of sandwiches.”
Jack turned to me with an arch expression on his face. “What manner of Mistress are you, then? What manner of Darkwitch, that you would allow a hamand-cheese sandwich to distract you from me?”
I laughed, loving him, and he closed the door, hung his cap on the hook behind it, then turned to me, putting both his hands on my shoulders. “I have made marriages in palaces in Greece and Europe,” he said. “I wish I could do better for you than—”
I put a finger against his lips: “Shush.” Then I leaned forward and kissed him.
When finally I leaned back, Jack turned out the light, then walked to the window, drew back the curtains and persuaded the stiff sash window to open, allowing the sounds of the air raid and the flickering glow of the distant fires to wash through the room and over our bodies.
We made love on that bed—on top of the bedspread because neither of us felt like crawling between the thin, cold sheets—and let none of our fears spoil it for us. Jack had set the tone with his jesting earlier, and we laughed at both surrounding and circumstance, and at ourselves and with each other.
This despite that what we did was in no way just a simple coupling between a man and a woman. It was a marriage, but not the usual kind that people make. It was the union of a Mistress of the Labyrinth and a Kingman who were soon to open a Game, and thus this lovemaking was the opening of that Game. We did not just use our bodies and our emotions to make love, but also the powers of the labyrinth. We twisted the harmonies out of our surroundings, from the shabby cheap room, from the creaking of the old house, and, most importantly, from the sounds of the aircraft, and of the explosions, and of the crackling infernos that raged to the east and north, and from the emotions that poured out of the city—the fear and horror, the pain and bewilderment, the desperation and panic.
We brought the vileness of the air raid, of the entire war, into our bed and into our bodies and used it to make our marriage—a marriage between man and woman, between Jack and Grace, between Kingman and Mistress of the Labyrinth, and between Ringwalker and Darkwitch. It could have been horrific, but we did not allow it to overwhelm us. Of all the marriages made atop that candlewick bedspread that night, the most important was between Jack and Grace. We were aware of all other unions, we revelled in the power we twisted out of the pain and fear of the air raid, but it was secondary to what we felt for each other.
We started it as Jack and Grace, and we ended it as Jack and Grace.
The Troy Game and the White Queen could twist and warp and manipulate, but they couldn’t change who we were that night, nor what we made of ourselves.