Lord Underwood pincered the small doctor’s arm. “If the King imagines that the people will stand for Lord Dempsey to be slandered or, worse, allowed to die, he has been breathing the court’s febrile air for too long.”
The doctor bowed at the neck and turned to leave, but Lord Underwood held him fast.
“Do not repeat a word of what you just told me to anyone, or your medical career, to start with, will come to an abrupt end.”
The doctor returned to the operating tent. Lord Underwood pressed his ear to the blue- and yellow-striped doorflap and heard a chiseled sound like that of masons aligning stones on a prison wall. Behind him a dozen plumes of black smoke tunneled into the blue sky from the Tournament events that had ended an hour before; on the narrow foxglove-lined road a dozen yards away sections of the home-bound crowd staggered past, clanging tin cups and singling off to purge and relieve themselves. This should not have happened. If Lord Underwood had drunk less ale — if he hadn’t felt so festive in light of the Aqueduct Plan’s upcoming passage — he would have had the wit to run down after his friend and convey him north before the King’s men could bring him to this pretend hospital. Even now he had to hold his head still to stop it from spinning off into the dark.
“Are you all right, your Lordship?” asked a page with glowing red cheeks, squatting beside his master’s phaeton with a misshapen orange mutt leashed to his ankle.
Lord Underwood closed his eyes, opened them, and then marched into the tent. “Out!” he yelled to the men huddling around a supine figure. “Everyone! Leave us!”
In the dark interior, six gray-cloaked men tucked their metal instruments and cloth bandage spindles into hemp sacks and then filed through the doorflap. An apothecary sat on a tree stump in the corner and stirred his pestle and mortar with childlike absorption, deaf to the evacuation, until Lord Underwood loomed over him.
When at last they were alone, Lord Dempsey, on a bed of tightly woven hay bales with a thin white sheet covering his body, his miasmic breath coming in labored gasps, whispered, “They say it’s the end.”
Lord Underwood stood still for a moment before carrying a stool across the room to sit with his elbows bowed out and his hands on his knees. “Then it must be the beginning! These tyros wouldn’t know a fracture from a sprain if they were sober.”
“They are the King’s own physicians.”
“And when did the King last enjoy a day’s health? We’ll get you north immediately, into the care of competent surgeons. Eltherington has gone for your carriage and dispatched a request for diplomatic immunity.”
Lord Dempsey’s eyes rolled to the left. “This is my time. I accept it.”
“In the north–”
“I do not want to die en route to a foreign country, so let us use what hours remain to discuss strategy for the Aqueduct Plan vote. I think that Eltherington ought to secure the quorum while you canvass the Danforth faction. Give them constabulary rights to my Ladbroke estate if they ask for them.”
“We’ll talk about this after you’ve gotten proper medical care.”
“I tell you I’m not going anywhere.”
Lord Underwood leaned over and said quietly, “What if your fall was not an accident?”
Lord Dempsey stared at the ceiling.
“Terryton, disguised as a vendor, was seen hurrying away from your box.”
“I felt no hands on my back.”
“The King’s assassins, unlike his physicians, are skilled at what they do. Eltherington saw him, though, as did Paley and Johnston.”
The patient weakly scratched his leg and coughed, a low rasping sound, as of pumice scraping across a knife. “The King would never harm me.”
“Dempsey, think about the currents of self-interest gathering strength as a result of your reforms. If passed, the Aqueduct Plan will cost the royal treasury one hundred thousand ducats, and with the expense of your Gendarme Deed and Grain Dispensation Act already in effect, as well as the reduced revenue from the Landowner Retribution, the King stands to lose a quarter million ducats from your actions in the next six months alone. How long did you think his personal regard for you would outweigh his pecuniary concerns?”
“A quarter million ducats is nothing to the King.”
“It is everything when he is preparing for war with the north.”
“All the more reason I cannot go there for medical treatment. It would be treason.”
“Only against a man who wants you dead.” Lord Underwood looked at a tray on the ground covered with glass containers of rust-red powder, brackish blue liquid, dried reptile limbs, and shredded green leaves. “Do you know what the doctor told me just now, outside?”
Lord Dempsey didn’t answer but looked at his friend attentively. Lord Underwood slowly repeated the doctor’s report. After a moment’s silence, the gallop and creak of a four-horse carriage was heard coming to a stop outside the tent. They looked over at the doorflap, along the center of which a vertical line of late afternoon light burned from floor to ceiling, kindling dust motes into floating sparks of white fire. “Without you to defend yourself that gross slander will be used — if not by the King, then by his allies in the House of Lords — to undermine your reforms. For the sake of the people, you must go north and then return in full strength.”
“I have sworn fealty to the crown and promised to protect it against all aggressors, not become one myself.”
“The crown is the titular head of the people, and it is to them that you owe allegiance, not to a man whose greed stands in opposition to their good.”
There was a loud whinnying of horses and the light through the doorflap disappeared. Lord Dempsey coughed again but barely made a sound. “If I go north, the King must know in advance that my devotion to him is inviolable, that I go only for medical reasons.”
“Unless that is a stratagem, I recommend sending no word.”
“It is the sole condition on which I will go.”
Lord Underwood folded his hands and smiled.
Part Two
At this time the million people who lived in the kingdom were unevenly divided between the city and three dozen outlying villages and farms. A four-year drought was ongoing that, combined with the recent diversion to the kingdom’s western neighbor of two rivers that originated in the north, had caused crops to fail and farmers and merchants to descend on the city to demand tax relief and grain subsidies from the royal storehouses. In answer the King had distributed five hundred pounds of bread a day to heads of household, which was insufficient to meet the people’s need, and street riots broke out, necessitating, for a time, martial law, which turned the public’s affection from the King to those members of the House of Lords, like Lord Dempsey, who were vigorously passing relief legislation and curbing police power. In consequence the King, alarmed by this shift and advised by elderly military generals who had for decades served under his bellicose father, drew up plans to attack the northern kingdom in order to restore the rivers to their prior course. A combination of hope and dread filled the people, whose need for water did not erase their memory of the last war, fought against the south, in which the kingdom had suffered a terrible defeat and tens of thousands of men had been killed or maimed or sold into slavery.
During that earlier conflict, as children, Lord Humphrey Dempsey and the King, then called Master Humphrey and Prince Albert, had studied under the same tutor, the brilliant eunuch Mr. Dodd, and for many years afterward had shared women and horses and country estates, dedicated verse to each other, and enjoyed a fraternal intimacy that was a pleasure for all to behold. But after the King married and Lord Dempsey took his father’s seat in the House of Lords — by which time the war with the south was long lost — they only saw each other at the biannual Fontainbleu Tournament, a three-day jubilee of acrobatics and jousting and archery, with wild game banquets and ale-drinking contests and gypsy burlesques, until the drought made such extravagances impossible and the two friends no longer met socially.
When this year the King scheduled a reduced-scale Tournament in a bid to regain popular support, paying for it with his own money, he’d not anticipated a quarter of the misfortunes that would occur: five knights dead from javelin wounds, three spectators struck by stray arrows, a fire that consumed eight valuable silk tents, and a snake wrestler suffocated in the embrace of a Moroccan anaconda. None of these, however, compared to Lord Dempsey’s accident, news of which spread quickly and mournfully throughout the kingdom.
Later that evening the King, walking with his attendants down the city’s dark and empty alleys and side streets, unclasped his purple oration robe and threw it at a runner, who handed him an ermine coat in return. The crescent moon hung above them like a scythe.
“You are sure he has gone north,” said the King in a tight vibrato.
“A scout spotted his train, including the carriages of Lords Underwood and Eltherington, on the highway three hours ago,” said Caldwell, the King’s domestic consultant, holding a damp sheet of paper. “We have a copy of his note requesting diplomatic immunity from the northern king.”
The King read it and sped up his pace. “Send an envoy to retrieve him before he crosses the border.”
“I’m afraid–”
“If my doctors can’t cure him we’ll find others who can.”
“It’s too late for that,” said Stanton, another consultant. “Not only will Dempsey already have reached the north by now, but he likely thinks that you ordered his death. You have no choice now but to charge him, Underwood and Eltherington with plotting against the state, and have them executed upon their return.”
The King stopped and his entourage eddied around him. “Why would he think I ordered his death?”
“Because Terryton’s disguise came apart as he was leaving Dempsey’s box on the wall.”
“And what was that butcher doing near his box?”
“He thought you wanted him dead.”
“I do not understand.”
“He believed that you would be pleased with a solution to the Aqueduct Plan problem. Had we known beforehand, we would have stopped him.”
The King began walking again, with a clipped gait, and his jaundiced face turned a dark crimson in the moonlight as his party entered the lane where his mistress lived. “Have Terryton flayed in a public ceremony tomorrow, and when he is thoroughly dead, collect his family and do worse to them. By Tuesday morning I want every mongrel infected with Terryton blood to have died in a drawn-out spectacle. At the same time put all of my physicians to death. Dempsey, if he lives, will see that I had nothing to do with his accident.”
The party came to the door of a squat stone building whose limestone frontispiece, surrounded by a lacework of tendriled moss, glowed luminous pearl. A bull lowed from a distant field and for answer was met by the deliberate ringing of two cow bells moving toward him.
“I suspect,” said Caldwell, “that Dempsey would interpret such a move as an effort to cover your involvement, and that Underwood has already urged him to lead an uprising against you when he recovers.”
“Against all of us,” said Stanton.
“It would be best to reward Terryton for trying to rid the kingdom of a traitor. Dress up his blunder in the robes of heroism.”
The King spat on his hands and combed down his hair over its recessions. “I will not have my oldest friend killed because of a stupid misunderstanding.”
“Then your blood and that of all your relatives will flow with Terryton’s through the kingdom’s gutters.”
“Or perhaps its new aqueducts,” said Caldwell.
“No,” said the King, “I will talk to Dempsey when he returns, and reason shall prevail.”
“Sire,” said a cloaked figure at the periphery of the crowd, “I humbly request the opportunity to speak with you.”
The King, his hand raised to knock on the door, turned and said, “Is that Pimlico? Were you not among the doctors who attended Dempsey today?”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Guards, arrest him.”
“If you please, Sire, I would like to explain what happened.”
“Incompetence has no excuse.”
Pimlico stepped forward and said, “Lord Dempsey is not what he has long purported to be.”
“Take him away.”
The small doctor continued nervously, “He is, I’m afraid, against reason, against nature, not in fact a man.”
“I won’t repeat myself!”
“Sire, I beg your patience and magnanimity, but Lord Dempsey is an egg.”
Part Three
In the north Lords Eltherington and Underwood were installed in the castle’s guest wing, a corniced seven-chambered suite with running water and thick downy beds. Their servants enjoyed private adjoining quarters. The evening’s entertainment, a dogfight between two Alsatians followed by a theatrical in which a man and woman, performed by two identical-looking pubescent boys with flaxen gold hair, each arranged for the other’s murder after hearing false rumors of infidelity, preceded a banquet meal at which the bravery and wisdom of the visiting lords were solemnly praised by their northern counterparts.
While this went on, and late into the next morning, a team of doctors operated on Lord Dempsey; upon finishing they confined him to bed for a week and said that he was to be very careful, that the slightest physical injury would undo their work and likely lead to his death. Thereafter in his recovery room, Lord Dempsey, too weak to move, played chess with Lord Underwood and argued over which course of action to take when he was fit for travel — the latter advocating armed insurrection, he a peaceful discussion with the King — and ate liquid foods and read the northern poets.
On his sixth day the hosting king, accompanied by two giant servants, came to express his happiness at the pace of Lord Dempsey’s recovery, and to extend an invitation for him to stay as long as he liked and perhaps enjoy a hunting expedition in the foothills of Mount Matteson.
“Thank you, I will not forget this kindness, but we must return tomorrow.”
The elderly monarch stared at the layered bandages covering Lord Dempsey’s body. “We hope you will do us the honor of taking home a collection of our soft cheeses.”
“That is most generous of you.”
The two smiled at each other while a slick black dachshund scratched at the door and moaned for egress. “We are not unaware of the influence you wield at home, especially with your king.”
“It has been some time since my king and I were together regularly.”
“Nevertheless, you and he have a history of friendship.”
“That is true.”
The northern king swayed in place and was instantly supported by his servants, who lowered him onto a chair three feet from Lord Dempsey’s bed. “There is something we would like to discuss with you, then, if we may.”
“Certainly.”
“Although it is not generally known, we have scrofula and must soon abdicate our throne. Because we haven’t a son, the next in line for succession is our nephew, Amberson, who, despite his reputation as an idler and popinjay, is in fact an angry, violence-prone young man.” The northern king placed a hand over his eyes and looked as peaked as the convalescent. “I mention this because your king is preparing to attack us, and if he does Amberson has promised to respond by waging total warfare. No matter how modest or justified your invasion, he will lead our army on full-scale raids to lay waste your villages, farms and city, to rape and plunder and turn what might have been a brief skirmish into protracted destruction. It is not hard to imagine the near-complete annihilation of our neighboring kingdoms within a few years. To avoid such an outcome, I ask you to urge your sovereign to abandon his war plans.”
Lord Dempsey, sweating in the room’s heat, his hair thickly pasted to his forehead, trembled in unison with his pale visitor. “I will relay your message, but there can be little hope of success so long as you allow rivers that have from time immemorial flowed through our land, to be channeled to the west. If war results and your nephew escalates the conflict, the onus will fall squarely on you.”
“We offered your king a chance to pay more than the west for river privileges, and he refused.”
“You demanded two hundred thousand ducats a year for what had formerly been both free and in accord with nature’s design.”
The northern king’s voice hoarsened. “We have the same right to profit from our water as you do from your forests, which are more abundant than ours. And why should the west, which hitherto lacked any regular waters, suffer for what is as much nature’s caprice as her design?”
“Our forests are more plentiful than yours because we did not cut them down in a paroxysm of greed forty years ago. Besides, the west has a fifth of our population and profligately wastes the water for lack of which our people are now starving and rioting.”
The northern king stood up. “I will not trouble or argue with you further. If you care about your people you will do what is right.”
“We are as one in that belief.”
The next day, on the muddy road south, Lord Underwood, gazing out the carriage window, said that the King had not responded to Lord Dempsey’s message about going north for medical treatment, which was further proof that there could be no rapprochement between them, that Lord Dempsey had to lead a campaign against the crown, and that his victory in the court of popular opinion would render meaningless his loss in the court of a corrupt king. Lord Dempsey replied that peace and unity in the kingdom were vital at that moment, and that he was sure the people wanted as much.
After entering the city through a broad gate of black steel, they were stalled at a road block of standing horses, parked carriages, pedestrians and tethered livestock. Lord Underwood called through the window for an explanation from the driver, who answered that a mime performance was taking place up ahead. A man bearing a strong resemblance to Lord Dempsey, dressed in a ministerial orange and blue robe and wearing a feather cap, seated in the middle of a row of fellow mock lords on a cardboard wall, was applauding an imaginary game. The man rose for an ovation and then, after a dark figure wearing the king’s purple ran past him, he teetered and fell face forward to the ground, and then, after a full minute of pounding drums, someone began to sing: Humphrey Dempsey sat on a wall/ Humphrey Dempsey had a great fall/ All the King’s horses and all the King’s men/ Couldn’t put Humphrey together again. When the chorus started up again more voices joined in, until soon everyone in the street was singing it and growing louder and more enthusiastic with each pass. Men slung their arms around each other and women pigeoned their heads back and forth and children clasped hands and spun around in circles screaming: HUMPHREY DEMPSEY SAT ON A WALL! HUMPHREY DEMPSEY HAD A GREAT FALL!
Lord Underwood held his breath and stared out the window. “It’s a miracle. There’s no use debating now; the revolution is about to begin, and we didn’t even have to launch the first salvo! As though God Himself has decreed it — a stampede of popular support — driver!” He banged on the roof and shouted for the carriage to press forward — they must make Lord Dempsey’s presence known so that he could give a speech — and then turned to his friend, whose seat was empty.
Part Four
Over the next twenty-four hours the King gave two public addresses. In the first he lamented the disappearance of Lord Dempsey, who apparently had run away because he was, and it grieved the King to say this, for he had loved him like a brother and was saddened by this revelation, an egg. No one knew how he had perpetrated this deceit for so long, but the fact was indisputable — for this reason and no other the King’s doctors had been unable to heal him — and it thus stood to reason that his work in the House of Lords, the so-called Dempsey reforms, although on the surface judicious and laudable, had been proposed and pushed through the House of Lords for dubious, perhaps unnatural, ends. The King’s second address stated that the Grain Dispensation Act, Gendarme Deed and Landowner Retribution were temporarily suspended, pending further review, and that the Aqueduct Plan’s vote would be postponed. Which did not mean a return to intolerable living conditions for the people. The King’s advisors had written up an official declaration of war against the north that he would sign the next day, and afterwards he would personally lead the army to victory over their thieving neighbor, thereby restoring the two rivers to their rightful banks and ending the water shortage that afflicted the kingdom.
After the first speech, someone in the audience cried out that Lord Dempsey was no more an egg than his mother, the venerable Lady Dempsey, was a chicken, and they would not abide his being maligned in this ill-spirited, absurd fashion. If the King did not immediately produce Lord Dempsey, the greatest friend and champion of the people who’d ever lived, they would storm the castle and behead everyone inside. Three of the King’s armed guard later sustained serious injuries keeping out the mob, among whom eighty-seven were wounded, and the King himself went into tremors and had to be laid out naked on his bed with a fan-boy and water bearer at his side. After the second speech, delivered to an audience stuffed with royal plants who applauded the King’s every fifth word, a cheer was started up to crush the north and bring back the rivers. The non-planted audience members, however, incensed at both the call for war and the King’s continued failure to produce Lord Dempsey, attacked the royal sympathizers, and in the resulting melee another two hundred and seven people were injured.
In the middle of the night the King heard a noise and opened his eyes on the pitch of his bed chamber; judging by the position of the moon it was after two in the morning. He lit and touched a match to a candle, whereupon a tall figure in the shadows sprang into view beside the open window.
“You!” said the King, sitting up in bed and drawing the covers high over his chest, for there was a strong draft in the room.
Lord Dempsey stepped forward and said, “I’m here to relay a message to you from the northern king.”
When he finished speaking, the King thanked him for the communication and said, “We’d like to apologize for not going to you after your fall, but Stanton and Caldwell promised us that it was a minor injury and that you would be back in the House of Lords within a week. As soon as we discovered its gravity and that Terryton was responsible we put him to death, not to disguise our tracks but to punish a horrible act of which we had neither foreknowledge nor approval.”
Lord Dempsey nodded.
“And we are sorry for calling you an egg. One of our physicians, who swung with Terryton the next day, had the temerity to claim as much, and although the nonsense should never have been repeated, our advisers convinced us that you are actively opposed to the state and should be discredited with the people. They repeated that you intended to start a revolution so many times that we felt we hadn’t a choice.” The King looked at his visitor plaintively and said, “You don’t know what it’s like to be surrounded by people who cast aspersions on those you love. One begins to lose perspective. But please know that our personal feelings for you have not changed.”
“I don’t care what you call me or accuse me of, and I would be prepared to publicly attest my loyalty to you now as always, but when we were children you said you’d never let your people go hungry, and you promised not to continue the policy of war your father followed during his reign. It’s the wholesale betrayal of those pledges that upsets me.”
The King’s voice rose. “Did we legislate a drought or ask the north to divert our rivers? Is it our fault that we can’t afford to dispense more than five hundred pounds of bread a day, or that the police, to maintain order, have had to use forceful measures against our subjects? And as long as the subject is childhood vows, what about yours to uphold and protect our court? You talk about public avowals of loyalty, but ever since entering the House of Lords you’ve made us appear to be an avaricious, stupid despot.”
“I am less responsible for that portrait than you.”
The two were breathing heavily, separated by fifteen feet of cold marble floor, with a single flickering flame to illuminate and cast them in shadows, as wind from outside filled the window curtains like ship sails. Lord Dempsey’s gloved hands were in fists, and the King’s bedcovers had fallen to reveal his flushed neck and face. A minute passed and they relaxed by degrees, staring at each other with a combination of anger and love.
“To think how close we once were,” said the King, “and how aligned were our visions!” He brushed at the folds of his bedsheet and failed to smooth them away. “So they might have continued, if not for politics.”
Lord Dempsey smiled sadly. “It is more than politics when innocent people’s lives are at stake.” Turning around, he walked to the window sill and rested a foot on the purple davenport beneath it. “Will you agree not to declare war on the north tomorrow, but instead to negotiate for the return of the rivers? Two hundred thousand ducats a year might wound your pride, but it would save your people immeasurable suffering.”
The King, looking up, his body half-moving to stand and bridge the distance between them before falling back, nodded.
“Then all is not lost.”
Part Five
At that moment Lords Underwood, Eltherington and Paley were sending town criers and provocateurs to spread the rumor that Lord Dempsey had been abducted and killed by the King; full-throated men went from village to farm to outlying pub, inciting their listeners to reject the call for war with the north and instead to unite their energies against the King, as bloodthirsty a tyrant as had ever sat on the throne. For who had through his parsimony and negligence allowed the rivers to be diverted? The King! And who had offered insufficient bread to feed thousands of hungry families? The King! And who had fought Lord Dempsey’s generous, valiant reforms, each of which lightened the people’s burden and put food in their pantry and sought to maximize what few resources the land had left? The King!
By dawn hundreds of thousands of people thronged the streets of the city, trying to get close to the public square, where Lord Underwood was to make their case for revolution and officially demand the King’s head on a pike. Choruses of “Humphrey Dempsey sat on a wall/ Humphrey Dempsey had a great fall” rose and fell spontaneously, mixed in with “Down with the King!” and “Send tyranny to the devil!” At eight o’clock Lord Underwood, in the company of Lords Eltherington, Sainsbury, Farrington and Wessex, flanked by a legion of the standing army that had decided in a midnight parlay to transfer their allegiance to the House of Lords, strode onto a balcony overlooking the masses and spoke on the evils of their current monarch, recapitulating the criers’ arguments and adding new ones. Full of references to the Lord Dempsey he knew personally, a wise and great-souled man — a saint! — who, if he were there, would powerfully refute the King’s pathetic attempt to brand him an egg and excuse a criminal war, his speech ended with a peroration on the people’s responsibility to both themselves and to their fallen advocate, Lord Dempsey, to depose the King.
“Who’s with me?” shouted Lord Underwood.
“We are!” bellowed the crowd, a sound more resonant than thunder.
“I can’t hear you for the blood in my ears. Who’s with me?”
“We are!”
“Who?”
“We are!”
Jostling in the square led to enthusiastic shoves and fists stabbing the air, followed by a deafening rendition of “Humphrey Dempsey sat on a wall/ Humphrey Dempsey had a great fall/ All the King’s horses and all the King’s men/ Couldn’t put Humphrey together again,” at the end of which Lord Underwood raised a glinting sword above his head and pointed it toward the castle and was about to scream for them to charge when from an opposing balcony across the square, a figure in a ministerial orange and blue robe appeared.
Confusion quickly segued into reverent awe, as the awareness spread that it was Lord Humphrey Dempsey, alive. The silence was nearly as sweeping as the noise had just been.
“Good people,” said Lord Dempsey, when he had their attention. “In times of chaos it can be difficult to pick out the notes of caution that are perforce quieter than those of action, but I beg you to listen, for now is no time to discount what little reason is still available to us, for we are poised, for the first time in our history, to destroy ourselves through either revolution or war. The question, which is as awful for a nation as for an individual to ask, seems to be: How do we want to die? At the hands of our brothers or at those of our neighbors to the north? Given the general momentum of this morning, and how my name has been used by my friends in the House of Lords to incite you against the King, this apparently is a Hobson’s Choice. I do not blame you for leaning toward the most expedient form of suicide. I understand the impulse, borne of hunger and frustration and the institutional rot of governing bodies, to charge headlong into the abyss, out of which will come, before the first shoots of grass grow from the present King’s grave, merely another vessel of power that will in due course grow as many horns and fangs as it can be argued that all rulers display. I believe, however, that we as a people have the option of a third way, one which lacks the flash and filigree of battle but has a compensatory beauty, one which allows for a future dry of the blood and tears that will otherwise drown us all long before the restoration of any rivers can water our crops. I propose, my friends and countryman, a way of peace. I propose that you lower your swords and spears, that you put away your quivers and sharp stones, and that you go home to your families and continue the arduous task of survival, which is, I am here to tell you, about to become easier. I spoke with the King last night, and he has promised to pay the north what they are asking for water rights to the two rivers. This will in no way be an admission that the north had the moral or legal right to take them away from us in the first place, and it does not preclude the King from using his influence to someday reduce or eliminate the annual fee, but for now it will spare us the terror and torment of war, and it will return to you your livelihoods, and it will allow us to focus our thoughts and energies on improving the lives of everyone in the kingdom.”
When Lord Dempsey stopped to breathe — he appeared fatigued and disoriented, shuffling awkwardly two steps to the left on his balcony — a man in the known employ of the King’s advisers shouted, from the edge of the crowd, “He lies! He’s nothing but an egg!” followed by a volley of refutations and demands that the King and his henchmen be put to death. Lord Dempsey gripped the railing in front of him and called out for quiet, for order, for reason to be given its due before emotions swept them all into a nightmare from which they would not emerge, and then, unnoticed at first by anyone but the two most directly involved, a rock sailed through the air and hit Lord Dempsey in the arm. Then another rock flew after the first and hit its mark, and another and another, by which time everyone had stopped and turned up to watch their hero reduced to a thousand irregular white shards floating down upon them like confetti, revealing absolutely nothing on the inside.
What came next hardly warrants retelling, so familiar is the story of how the King, when he learned of Lord Dempsey’s fate, locked himself in his bed chamber and didn’t emerge until the northern army, which eventually routed his own armed forces, marauded through the land under the command of Amberson and left scorched ground and embers and salted earth in its wake, and finally arrived at the King’s stronghold, where Caldwell and Stanton, whose efforts to cast Lord Dempsey as an abomination against nature had successfully redirected the people’s anger from the crown to his allies in the House of Lords, bringing to a permanent end the Dempsey reforms, and trained the nation’s wrath on the north, stormed the castle and killed everyone but the King, whom they carried north in a triumphal march through his decimated land, past his emaciated, half-dead former subjects, and then through those parts of the north that had, when the war was not yet decided, themselves been scourged. Nor need the King’s final posture be recounted, his kneeling before the northern king as a sentence of death was read aloud to the ecstatic mass of northern people assembled at his back, as he whispered to himself, “There is no north. There is no north. There is no north.”
