Chapter 18 #3
“There are advantages to being outcast,” said Zacharias. “One is set at liberty from many anxieties. There is no call to worry about what others will think, when it is clear that they already think the worst.”
“I suppose you ought to know,” said Prunella. “But you do not seem to benefit much from your liberty. Damerell says you are the most nice-conscienced, duty-bound fellow he knows.”
Zacharias smiled without mirth. His chief aim had always been that he should stand beyond reproach in word and deed, since his colour seemed to prove a ground for any allegation. He was content—or at least resigned—but he needed no reminder of how he was circumscribed.
“I am held by bonds of gratitude,” he said.
The words were bitter on his tongue. “I was born a slave, you know, and should have passed my days in backbreaking labour if Sir Stephen had not taken notice of me. It was by the merest chance that we met. He was travelling on the Minerva in the West Indies, conducting a study of maritime magic levels. He purchased me from the captain, brought me home to England, manumitted and educated me. He was persuaded that with instruction I would be capable of attaining the highest peaks of thaumaturgical achievement—that I might, in time, even become Sorcerer Royal myself.”
A curious sympathy had existed between Zacharias and Prunella since the day they had first met, despite their differences in temperament and disposition, but there had also been constraint.
Prunella was always on her guard, and Zacharias could not be completely easy around her—for more reasons than one, not all of which he wished to articulate to himself.
But today the restless energy that usually animated Prunella was tempered; the tension in her quick movements and ready speech was blunted.
Zacharias realised that he had seen her calm and collected, speaking audacities with composure, but he had not seen her truly at ease. Perhaps she began finally to trust him.
“You must have been very young when you met Sir Stephen, for Lady Wythe is always talking of what you were like as a boy,” said Prunella.
“I was but an infant,” said Zacharias. He added, with some awkwardness, “I was travelling with my mother and father, who belonged to the captain of the Minerva.”
A fine line appeared between Prunella’s eyebrows. “Did not Sir Stephen purchase your parents as well?”
“No,” said Zacharias. “Presumably he did not discern the same potential in them.”
The statement brought up the old anger and confusion, followed by the accustomed guilt, that he should be so ungrateful as to resent the man who had rescued him from bondage. And yet he did resent Sir Stephen, even now.
“I don’t see why you feel obliged to him at all,” said Prunella. “What right had he to part you from your parents when you were so young?”
Her words seemed to echo Zacharias’s own thoughts, thoughts he had suppressed many a time, striving to feel the unclouded gratitude expected of him.
What might his life have been, with a father and mother?
It could not have cost Sir Stephen very much to purchase them as well—certainly not enough to strain his ample resources.
How could his benevolence have extended so far as to move him to free Zacharias, but no further?
But it had been impossible to ask these questions of Sir Stephen or Lady Wythe, whose affection could not be doubted. That Zacharias’s own love for them was leavened with anger was best left unsaid; he tried not to know it himself.
“Very probably I would have been separated from my parents in any event,” he said. “What assurance can I feel that my parents were not in time separated from each other, against their will, and they powerless to prevent it?”
The answers to these questions were too painful to pursue to their conclusion, even in thought. They had only ever served to increase the complicated unhappiness that lay in wait whenever he thought of his parents.
Prunella cast her eyes down, her face troubled. The simurgh nestled close to her and nipped her ear.
“It would be terrible not to have anything of your mother and father,” said Prunella, speaking half to herself. “Not to have anything at all . . . Have you ever tried to find them, Zacharias?”
Zacharias stared at her. “Find them?”
“It is not such an extraordinary notion, surely,” said Prunella.
“If I had money, as you do, I would go and look for my mother and father. Why, you do not even know they are dead. They might be alive! Just think, perhaps you could meet them—you could speak to them!” She clenched her fists, but fell silent.
They walked wordlessly together for a while, but when Zacharias spoke after a long pause, it was as if he was merely continuing a conversation they had been having all along.
“I would not have been rescued from my bondage if not for Sir Stephen’s conviction that he could make of me something extraordinary.
I was not told that I must prove the African’s ability to English thaumaturgy, and Sir Stephen never said in so many words that he wished me to succeed him as Sorcerer Royal.
But that these were the purposes for which I was educated was clear.
Many men and women have lived and died desperate for the advantages I have been granted by a capricious Fate. How could I not perform as expected?”
“Zacharias,” said Prunella. “Did not you want to be Sorcerer Royal?”
She sounded astonished, as if the alternative had never crossed her mind before.
“I have found that opportunity brings with it its own set of chains,” said Zacharias, after a pause. “That power generates demands which cannot easily be gainsaid—as you are learning now, I think.”
“Yes,” said Prunella. She raised earnest eyes to his face. “I know I am a shocking burden to you, Zacharias, but I do wish I could help. I should like to be a friend to you, if I could.”
For some reason she blushed. Zacharias felt a corresponding warmth rise in his own face. He pressed her hand lightly, and found he would like to retain it. Discerning this inclination in himself alarmed him so much that he dropped Prunella’s hand, and assumed his most businesslike manner.
“There is one thing you could do,” he said. “I need to speak to Mak Genggang. Do you know where she is?”