Diana Jones - The Crown of Dalemark

The Duke was flanked by two dismal portraits of the Adon, both much, much older, and beyond that was an even older portrait of Enblith the Fair, who was supposed to have been the most beautiful woman ever, daughter of the Undying and a famous queen. The portrait was cracked, but even so Maewen could only suppose that ideas of beauty had changed. Enblith reminded her very strongly of Aunt Liss – and no one had ever called Aunt Liss a beauty, even when she was young. I bet she managed people into thinking she was lovely , Maewen thought. That was all women were supposed to be in those days. And she pushed between easels to the portrait that truly fascinated her.

It was called Unknown Minstrel Boy, and she kept wishing she knew more about him. He was probably about her own age, and he had red hair – which Maewen had always secretly wished for herself – with the paleness that always goes with such hair. He was rather richly dressed in dark maroon satin, so either he was a very good minstrel or a young aristocrat posing as one. Good minstrel , Maewen decided. It was in the way his pained eyes met yours and yet looked way, way beyond, full of thoughts and knowledge and strong sadness. Someone’s let him down badly , Maewen thought when she first met those eyes. She wished she knew who had and why. And kept going back to look.

She wanted so badly to know about that boy that in the end she joined the afternoon guided tour that went round the pictures. The advantage was that the students had gone home by then. The disadvantage was that this tour was always taken by Wend. It took Maewen several days to muster courage to go with it. When she did, the mere sight of Wend started her fizzing with embarrassment again. Wend saw her and gave her a polite little bow and a restrained smile. Maewen felt her face flooding with red. It was the awful way Wend never seemed to show any emotion but politeness. But she clenched her teeth and followed the other tourists.

The picture of the minstrel boy was famous for several reasons, she discovered. Nobody had ever been able to find out who the boy was, although he was important enough to have been painted by the best artist of the time. And he must have been important to Amil the Great too, because Amil made a special bequest of the picture to his grandson, Amil II. Books had been written about the picture. Some theorists suspected the boy was Amil himself, before he won the throne. Amil the Great had also carefully preserved the cwidder that had been painted with the boy. It was obviously old, even then. The minstrel boy had his hand dreamily wrapped across the cwidder, half hiding the strange old lettering inlaid on the front. And the actual selfsame cwidder was in a glass case just beside the portrait, very fragile and cracked-looking, despite careful restoration.

“Well, fancy that!” said everyone, raising cameras and jostling for the best shot of it.

After that Wend took the party into the ballroom, where he told them that the paintings on the wall and the ceiling had been done in the time of Amil II. Nobody knew what Amil the Great really looked like, and the purple trousers were a pure invention. This so amused Maewen that she left Wend’s embarrassing presence in order to go down to the hallway and buy a postcard of Amil in his breeches and write a “Wish you were here” message on it to Mum and Aunt Liss. Then she made a foray into Kernsburgh itself to post it.

The city was even more crowded than the palace, and the traffic was terrible. A very few glances into the shops as she passed showed Maewen that she had barely enough money even for ordinary presents for Mum and Aunt Liss. Kernsburgh sold things from all over the world, and it was expensive. But the distressing thing to someone who had been brought up in the country like Maewen was that the place seemed to have almost no trees once you were down on street level.

“Where do all the trees go?” she asked Dad that evening.

It was a perfect example of the way she and Dad got on. Dad knew just what she was talking about although he was busy laying out sheets of stiff paper and notebooks on the other end of the table. “In people’s gardens, I think,” he said. “I believe Amil the Great planned it that way, because there were no trees on the site when he started to rebuild Kernsburgh.”

“Then he made a mistake,” Maewen said. “It’s all buildings and cars, and it makes me cough.”

“You’d have coughed worse when the place was new,” Dad said. “Two hundred years ago it would have been smog from coal fires. Though I’m never sure it was such a good thing when they discovered oil under the Marshes. It makes the Queen a rich woman, I suppose, but it has its drawbacks.”

“Where is the Queen?” Maewen asked. “I’ve been almost all over the palace now, and—”

“Oh, she very rarely comes here these days,” Dad said. “She’s pretty old, you know, and she prefers the warmth in the South. She almost only ever comes to the Tannoreth for state occasions.”

“And the Crown Prince?” Maewen asked, feeling rather let down.

“He lives in Hannart,” Dad answered absently, busy with a notebook. “Doesn’t get on with his mother or with public events.”

“What are you doing?” Maewen asked him.

“Trying to establish our family tree,” said her father. “It’s a hobby of mine – and damned exasperating too. You can come and look if you like.”

Maewen came and leant on his square, warm shoulder, and he spread scrawled books and careful diagrams out for her to see. “Here,” he said. “My family. As far as I can tell we go back to one of the travelling Singers. I think his name may have been Clennen, but Singers wandered about so and were so little documented that it’s a fiendish job to find out for sure. Compared with that period, the last hundred years were a doddle, and I thought those were bad enough. And when we get to your mother’s family, things get even worse. Here.” Dad pushed sheets of paper in front of Maewen, hectically scrawled all over in pale pencil. “See? There’s some connection with Amil II’s brother Edril, but that’s as far as—”

“You mean Mum descends from Amil the Great!” Maewen exclaimed.

“So do a lot of people. If you mean that accounts for your mother’s standoffish vagueness,” Dad said drily, “I hardly think so. If you remember that everyone has four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, you can see that almost everyone has to be related if you go back far enough. We’re talking here about doubling the number of ancestors each person has every generation, and halving – or even quartering – the number of people those ancestors could have come from. The population of Dalemark was quite small until a hundred years ago.”

He was lecturing again. Maewen tried to listen. She was quite interested in the difficulties Dad had had sorting out the two generations around the time of Amil the Great. School history didn’t tell you half the confusions and revolutions there had been then. But there was so much of it. It had been dark for hours and she was yawning before Dad said, “Well, that will have to do for now. I’ve another long day tomorrow.”

Once she was in bed, Maewen tried to sort out how she felt about Dad and the divorce. She was very fond of Dad – achingly, fiercely fond – but not so much when he lectured. And try as she might, she could not be upset that he was quite happy to be divorced from Mum. She had expected to feel sad – she felt she ought to feel sad – but whenever she passed the big busy office on the floor below and saw Dad conferring with secretaries, snapping instructions at Wend, or consulting with Major Alksen – and sometimes all three at once – she was glad she did not have to live with him and Mum at once. These were two strong-minded people who were both utterly buried in their work. And one of those, Maewen felt, was enough at one time.