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Updated: June 17, 2025
We had had no more trouble that day. After the encounter in the king's garden Mercer and I had followed the two girls swiftly home. We were not molested in the streets, although the people crowded about us wherever we went. "Why did none of Baar's friends come to his rescue up there in the garden?" I asked Miela. "Surely there must have been many of them about."
I gripped her with my hands, fumbling to catch her wrists, but before I could succeed she toppled forward and fell partly over me. I heard Miela give a cry of fright. I struggled free and raised myself up to a half-sitting position. Baar's wife lay beside me dead, with the slave woman's knife buried to the hilt in her back.
She stumbled to one side against Baar's wife, who was standing there, and the other woman, with a sharp imprecation, struck her full in the breast. Neither of them saw the look she gave as she shuffled away, carrying the infants; but I did. It was a look of the most intense hatred, born and nourished, I realized, by long ill-treatment.
"Your commands shall be obeyed, my husband," she said quietly. I felt again that sudden sense of helplessness as I saw her leave. "Be careful, Miela. Order every one in the castle to the roof. Here! Tell the queen before you go. Send every one up there with me. The mob may come in. We'll make our stand up there." I understood Baar's plot better now.
"To Baar's house they are taking us, I think. It is on the marshland below." Miela spoke without fear of our captors understanding the English words. We took advantage of this until after a moment we were roughly ordered to be quiet. Lua, we thought, must have been taken away before we arrived; we would find her at Baar's house when we arrived there.
Thus did my chief of police explain satisfactorily to himself, and with great protestations of loyalty to his trust, how it came about that he and his men did nothing while their king was being murdered and another put in his place. Recriminations seemed useless. He stood bowing and scraping before me, eager only to obey my slightest wish. "Tell him, Miela, how Baar's men captured Lua.
"There was no light-ray here then." Miela nodded. "It was what Baar's men had told them to say, I think." "And then what happened to the police?" "Then they left their posts about the city. Some fled; others went back and reported what they had heard." "And it never occurred to any of them to come up here and try to stop the disturbance? Curious policemen, these!"
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