Strangers' Stairs

---

The light catches his pale eyelashes; the tree branches through the leaded glass cast their own dappled shadows.

“Does it bother you that your husband isn’t faithful?”

The room goes very cold.

“You know I abhor gossip, Andrew.”

“No, really. I’m not saying it to hurt you, I just thought you deserved to know.” He mistakes her silence for permission, and goes on. “I started noticing when his absences corresponded with closures on Shiloh’s residential roadways. From there, it was easy. She was the press aide during the Simeon crisis. He still visits her, just… less often, now that he’s married.”

Queen Rose is frozen in her place, the careful arrangement of her limbs becomes a braced position of dread. He crosses over to stand next to her on the carpet. Eyes fixed, pale, radiant. He looks like William had as a boy, and he doesn’t stand any taller than she does, he in glossy loafers and she in elegant but abbreviated heels.

His pale hand, no bigger than her own, reaches to take hers.

“I could be faithful. Not like a husband, of course, but to the family. I know I’m not as strong as Jack is, but I’ll try.”

All the blood has drained from her face. The boy doesn’t know what he’s saying; he is volunteering this information, as if it might help her, this slap in the face, this horrid lie that she knows, she knows, she has known for months, years. She is familiar with misguided attempts to curry favor, she would not have lasted a year in court if she could not see through them. Sly insinuations that a head caterer or a country noble will afford her some benefit in return for a little of this or that, as if they have anything to give her that she could not gather for herself. Gossip, whispers, false sympathy and unwarranted familiarity. She sees through it without difficulty. Court is full of gossips, bare-faced liars.

There is something opaque behind Andrew’s eyes.

This is the boy for whom she had hopes – a playmate for Jack, even a sweetheart for Michelle when she’d outgrown songs and stories and understood that was how it had to be. William’s only son, now motherless, now lonely. This is not the way a boy seeking out a mother’s heart acts; in dining rooms and standing-room-only ceremonies his cold eyes find her, find her children, relentlessly. Time and time again. She’s seen the way he looks at Jack, more than admiring, and now the way he looks at her. Is it the same, really, or different in a way she would prefer not to understand? There’s a man waiting behind those eyes, only waiting. Lake Gihon frozen over, robed with the sweetest and cleanest powdering of snow, and underneath nothing but yawning dark and a sheer drop.

His head is cocked, his eyes are clear. A lock of his hair is falling into his face. Rose is at war with the motherly desire to brush it away.

“I only want to serve you and your family. Would you like me to show you a picture of her?”

“That’s enough. I will hear no more from you today.”

“She’s beautiful–”

“Andrew, enough, for God’s sake–”

“With dark hair.”

Rose turns away, withdraws her hand and sees Andrew’s simply fall to his side, sees it knead into a fist even as his eyes are all slack innocence. He is not a child. At seventeen he is a young man, old enough to enlist, old enough to kill men older and stronger than himself.

“Thank you, Andrew,” she says. Cold. “Thank you, that will be enough.”

“Will I see you tonight?”, he says, in hushed tones. A tender horror.

“We’ll see.”

“Tell Michelle to save a dance for me.”

Silas may have another woman, but to her he is nothing if not faithful. He could have a hundred pretty staffers on the side, but Rose is his queen before God, she is the one to whom he will return every day of his life. Silas is the father of her children, who will grow up good and beautiful. Silas is her husband and her king before God. She loves him better than any other human being on earth. She will follow him into the grave.

If this is the truth. If it isn’t the ugliest kind of treason. If it isn’t – the creeping unease in her gut is not a lie, at least. It still stands. Something must be done.

Andrew departs like a ghost, and she is left only with the closing of the door and the dappled shadows of the leaves through glass.

---

The yoke of Michelle’s dress is embroidered in vines, and at her ears gleam fat little green stones, like grapes. The joys of playing dress-up had diminished with time, and the prospect of learning them again, this time differently as a woman and not simply the princess of the court, was intimidating. There won’t be a television appearance, just dancing and then a state dinner – there are more citizens of Gilboa with televisions now than before the war, but not enough to make such cautious joy worthy of a telecast. Only the King’s words, not his face– after atonement came joy, after desolation came renewal; that was the tone of father’s speech, that the renewal would come. A time for happiness and fruitfulness and love, and for dances she’d practiced until she could do them with her eyes closed, even with achy legs and a tired head.

“You’re not going out,” Rose announces, her voice tight. Michelle springs up, hands leaping instinctively to fix an earring or the errant button on her cardigan, to smooth her hair or tug down a hemline, to preempt ’not dressed like that, young lady,’ but that was her father’s prerogative – he would have said it with a laugh in his voice, or at worst a stern affection. Don’t be in such a rush to grow, puppy, you’ll hurt yourself. Her mother would have swept over and fixed an errant bra strap or a smudge of blush herself, gently or briskly, before waiting for Michelle to work it out.

She doesn’t. She stares, not at Michelle but almost through her, past her.

“What’s the matter? I’m all ready, father’s teaching Jack to tie a tie again–”

“There’s not going to be a party, sweetheart. The royal family is staying home tonight – to offer our prayers for our soldiers. Another battalion has been lost along the Gath border.”

“Can’t we go for the dancing and come right back again?”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, give your mother a moment–”

She shoos her out of the bathroom suite with a trembling hand (what’s wrong with mom?) and Michelle listens to the sound of the tap running for what feels like a very long time. She rubs at her cheeks, itching under powder.

Rose sits down with her afterward, without explaining, and rubs Michelle’s hands; it’s the thing she remembers most as strange, on a temperate summer day. The tide of confusion pulls back and leaves dull dejection behind. It wasn’t really about a battalion lost, another helicopter brought low, it couldn’t be – could it be? Queen Rose said her prayers for soldiers lost, or at least was seen to, but to halt official functions every time new casualties were reported would mean the end of birthday celebrations, observances, state dinners. There should still happiness, some kind of new growth; will there ever be again?

---

Andrew Cross is seventeen and not too old to be seen in stifled tears at the court hearing, looking stiff and small. Treason is transmuted into smaller treason – boastful words and state secrets, unwise statements about the war effort in a public forum that a dozen witnesses will attest to having heard. Unfortunate, unpleasant, but not ugly. The queen’s nephew cannot be seen to be what he is.

Rose does not articulate the full nature of her distress even to her husband, her fears of how far this breach of propriety may have gone. She doesn’t know what she’d say, what it is that she dreads. A boy like that is simply dangerous. Putting him away would be the kind thing to do, the humane thing to do in point of fact. William knows better than to disagree.

---

Jonathan Benjamin would have preferred better company than this, but beggars and choosers, and so on.

He couldn’t remember what Andrew was like when they were both children, not any more. Ten years in court was a long time, and more than that since William Cross and his father had gotten along. Some sickly boy who took tea on the terrace with the Queen, and caught bugs in jars. It’s difficult to distinguish the long-past shadow from what’s presently before him taking coffee from a saucer on the nightstand, like a dissolute secretary. (Slim-cut suit, gray; expensive shoes, new; expensive necktie, selected by Silas.) The newspaper is spread on the bed in front of him.

“Good morning, cousin.”

Jack must bite his tongue before dashing off a few choice words about Silas relenting enough to drop him off a present; he is seized with the horror that it might be true. Creepy Cousin Andrew, all tied up in a bow. This is the third visit, all unannounced, all unchaperoned. Instead he quips, lamely. “Still catching up?”

“I’ve got a lot to read.”

“Did Silas send you?”

“Somehow I doubt he even knows I’m gone.” Andrew looks up at him and smiles, thinly. The morning light cuts a path across his cheek and leaves the rest in shadow.

Jack doesn’t know whether he’s coming to find Andrew attractive, in a grotesque sort of way, or it is simply the alternatives that lend him appeal. Familiarity bred contempt, though he doesn’t have an overabundance of tender feeling for him. In any case, desperation is something he’s familiar with, and it’s the order of the day. There’s precious little acceptable about this entire situation. At least Silas had the generosity to throw him in the ring with someone transparently untrustworthy. He means to wear him down, to break his bones and bow his head, and God knows in this velvet-gilt birdcage that it must be working.

How would Silas Benjamin have liked Andrew for a son? One natural-born, not nestled in among the royal family like a cancerous growth. He’d have kept his mouth shut more than Jack, that was for damned sure; Jack didn’t know if he’d heard him string more than two sentences together when talking with the elder Cross, and he’d been nothing if not deferential. If it was something that had to be learned through experience, they both had.

“They’re administering Ms. Wolfsen her pregnancy test, and I believe she’s permitted to telephone her family. I thought I’d take the opportunity of your lack of supervision to pay you a visit. Coffee?”

Jack rakes his fingers through his hair and questions whether looking presentable is worth the effort. His eyes are red, he’s nicked himself in several places while trying to shave and his bare torso – thank God he hasn’t reverted to military norms of decency in sleepwear – is picked out in scratches. Lucinda has gamely tried to turn his frustration with her into a game, to make something good out of an ugly nothing, but roughness suits her poorly.

“You’re not here to put a bullet in me, are you?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Andrew says, mildly.

“Too bad.”

“Don’t consider anything too rash; I’d give your situation seven, eight months tops, in my professional estimation. You’ve been deployed for longer.”

“You’re kidding. Eight months of house arrest while my father watches me fuck my way through my civic duty.”

He had been deployed with men he trusted, men who adored him. Men with whom there could be no pretense, no judgment, not in the dark. Here he is imprisoned with only a weeping woman for company, guest appearances by vermin notwithstanding. Living death, a waking torment, whatever soaring rhetorical flourish Silas could construct to demonstrate his contempt. Life in the grave. Jack has never known safety in his father’s stronghold.

Andrew folds his newspaper curtly and glances again in Jack’s direction.

“You can’t imagine what exile is like,” Andrew said, eyebrows slightly raised. “Here you have your fiancée. Your father still feeds you, there’s a window and a little light. They haven’t forgotten about you. You still exist.

Exile is empty. At first it’s only homesickness, and you miss the city lights and your family and everything. Did they send you to boarding school, Jack? Or did you have a tutor, I don’t remember. You lie there in the dark and think about everything you’re missing, and you think about all the nice things in life.

Then they turn the lights on, for weeks at a time. You don’t keep track of the days any more, because there aren’t any. You can’t count the passage of time when you don’t have anything to keep track of – I used to count plates, until they stopped feeding me every day. Too much opportunity for error in the data. It wasn’t bad being lonely, but they gave me books; I couldn’t read them. The letters were just shapes. There’s no room to do anything except pace. Once a year they’d take me out and cut my hair. You do little things to amuse yourself – talk to yourself, scratch at the stones in the walls. Pull out your eyelashes. I started hearing voices before very long – don’t make a face, Jack. I lost myself there. I died there. And I swore that I’d come back again – to spite your father, if nothing else. You have my sympathies, Jack.”

This recitation of miseries has long since started to bore him. Jack snaps.

“You think I don’t know what your sympathy’s worth?”

“I want to help you, Jack. Your father won’t live forever, and in the meantime, you deserve to know what your sister’s up to. "

“To hell with my sister–”

“David Shepherd, then. Wherever your heart is. I guarantee you won’t hear the truth from Silas. I’ll tell you things, and maybe some day you’ll tell me things. That’s all I’ve wanted, all along, just to be friends.”

“Friends,” Jack echoes blackly, and goes to dress. His hands ghost over a row of familiar, near-identical suits and shirts. Clothing no longer gives him pleasure; who’s there to impress? “You may have noticed, I’ve got a bad track record with those.”

He doesn’t even hear him get up until Andrew’s hand is resting on his shoulder blade, fingering along a still-pink mark from one of Lucinda’s false nails. The soldier’s instincts still in him keep him ramrod straight and still, waiting for the slightest twitch, a shift in weight from one foot to another, the smallest sign of hostility. (It wouldn’t be difficult. He could probably – definitely – kill him here.)

The remaining princeliness in him forbids him to act. He has nowhere to run.

“Looks worse than it is,” Jack says, dryly.

“I’m glad to hear it. I promise, Jack, if your father meant to trip you up this wouldn’t be the way he’d go about it. We have too much in common. It scares him.”

Unsettling as his cousin is, he is a traitor, not a liar. He’s not sure if Andrew is speaking of the obvious – they are both veterans of captivity in one sense or another, David’s rescue was not the first time Jack had found himself a hostage of sorts – or a more intimate thing, his hand is on Jack’s upper arm, now, decidedly friendly – or some other obscure thing that’s supposed to speak to Jack’s soul.

“What’s so common about men like us?”

Andrew slips in between him and the mirror, straightening Jack’s collar and smoothing the front of his shirt fussily. If Lucinda had been doing it, she’d have looked up at him from under her eyelashes modestly, seeking some kind of approval for this little gesture. Both temptress and the promise of a dutiful wife. Andrew’s eyes remain on his work. Strangely businesslike as blatant come-ons go.

“We’re both fatherless, more or less. We’re free to work on our own account, to act for ourselves. And besides, I know what you like.”

“Do you?”

All of Gilboa now knew what he liked. Jack still has this choice, and he has no reason to expect Cross will force the issue; his own affection is so seemingly indifferent, Jack doesn’t doubt that if he denied him this nothing of value would be lost. Not love, not trust. He couldn’t possibly feel any more violated by an ill-considered tryst than by every other misfortune that’s piled up around his neck over the past half a year. He’s used to making do; if his couplings haven’t been anonymous, they’ve grown out of some other bond like a cancer, unspeakable and difficult to cut away without new growth. He didn’t have the luxury of a partner who served a single purpose. Comrades became lovers, or some near thing, strong arms to embrace him. Only Joseph had been worthy of something like trust, and look what he’d done with that. He won’t think about Joseph here, not in this prison cell with its soft furnishings and its soft lights. He won’t think about Joseph at all.

“I have for a very long time.”

Andrew looks up at him drowsy-eyed; Jack kisses him and bites his lip. He embraces him so he won’t have to look at those eyes any longer.

Andrew checks the time on the watch hanging too-heavy on his his wrist – it’s the elder Cross’, who else’s? – glinting from under a stiff white cuff.

“We have… about 38 minutes. Make it last.”

---

When Lucinda returns, he is dressed presentably again and she is a vision sheathed in gunmetal gray, her hair in a sleek braid down her back. She smells like roses, her fingernails are painted a different color – why does he notice these things? The color of the moss in his prison cell.

“Was that– William Cross’ son in the hallway?” Not a popular name in the palace any more, at least by Andrew’s own report. The Queen’s nephew only.

“I wouldn’t know.”

She looks at him, and you can practically see the cogs turning behind her eyes, the way she schools her pretty face into a dull kind of surprise. “I think it was. He’s– nice.”

In his mind it all processes, that his wife is a beautiful woman, but when he is lost in her soft limbs, her caresses and words and idiot tears all pour down on him with the curtain of her hair and he could kill her.

In the prison of his waking hours, she is taken away from him and thrust back into his arms like a dish of food – not to sustain him, but to prolong his torment until he’s finally reckoned a free man. Champagne and oysters until you gag. Jack doesn’t know what they do with her when she’s taken out of his sight – whisked off to be made prettier, perhaps, Lucinda Wolfsen is the latest punchline to a long-standing joke, that Jack Benjamin is a cruelly exacting admirer of the feminine form and must constantly search for lovelier and lovelier women to satisfy himself. The joke and the lie in it had satisfied for years. Jack Benjamin was not unnatural, he simply had the very highest of standards.

The fault isn’t hers that she is not Joseph, she isn’t even David, and she can’t be – by now she must know, or suspect, that in the few stilted instances they’ve had sex he hasn’t been thinking of her. Because she loves him, she won’t ask why. He detests every inch of her beautiful flesh, and would never tell her. She is the sum total of every expectation that Jack falls short of, she is every woman he has ever had or been seen to have refined to her purest elemental characteristics and her presence is torture. He hates her because of what he is and everything she ought to be to him. She deserves a better man, and she’ll never have one as long as Jack is alive.

Lucinda Wolfsen is the very pattern of a beautiful and compassionate wife, and every night she spends in Jack’s arms she spends in tears. Every night he spends in her presence, Jack prays to die. Better than crying over a dead man, a sham wedding, a little bit of blood.

---

Ten years later, David is king, and it is Jonathan who stands beside him, not behind him.

They watch the procession of old tanks go by on the video screens, down avenues of grim-faced civilians, old soldiers and scarred state officials, military advisers grim with wreaths in their hands.

Jack would swear he sees Andrew Cross again, a defector among the rows of grey-faced men. Ten years on he still looks too young for his uniform, with his hair cropped short and his wide mouth in a fixed smile. He is the only one smiling when the cameras pass him, but the camera lingers only long enough to see him salute, and he is gone.