And now I think I have to talk about Aspern Grayling, even though his story isn’t a part of the Legend of Lily the Silent. But it is a large part of the story of Arcadia, and of the problems facing her now. He is a large part of the problems facing me now. The main one: how to avoid the approaching, seemingly inevitable civil war. Or, rather, if that war is inevitable as everyone now, beaten down, seems to feel, how to move us past it with the least amount of harm, and the most amount of hope.
That is my problem as queen, you know. And everything for me, as it was finally for Lily, is about my problem as queen. The happiness of daily life wasn’t left to either of us; what was left was the task of restoring the possibility of that happiness for others. Not that I’m complaining. I do rather relish the idea of being a Hero, with the goal of making a polity where no one else has to be one. I inherited this one role from my mother: the Hero who does not, cannot, believe in the ultimate good of Heroism. Very amusing, if only there was someone other than her (and Star) to share the joke.
But to return to Aspern. I have often found it striking that the two most aristocratic figures in Arcadia, Professors Devindra Vale and Aspern Grayling, both come from the poorest and most obscure parts of their own lands. Devindra, of course, came from the Marsh People of Megalopolis, where she never knew her own father, and Aspern (who was born, truth to tell, simple Andy Dawkins, though his mother’s father was a Grayling) was the cherished son of a cheerful, feckless, hardscrabble farm family in one of the trailer settlements in the mountains above Eopolis.
It is funny to see the two of them now, though I say that in all fondness. It is a marvel to watch them debate, the two most intensely active, highly tuned minds that I know—Devindra the taller of the two, ramrod straight, with her silvered black hair under her favorite turquoise and ruby turban, her curved brown nose like a hawk’s beak, and her poor arthritic fingers clutching her walking stick. How she looks like the descendant of the greatest of foreign queens! Her mother, Tilly, was a washerwoman and who knows what else when the pennies from such scanty work ran out. But Devindra, her daughter, has always looked the part of a noblewoman intent on duty, piety, the care of her family and her goddesses. Her family, in this case, means all of those at Otterbridge University, which she founded at my mother’s wish. It’s Otterbridge University that is Devindra’s real child. Which explains, maybe, why Merope, her actual daughter, hates her and hates what the colleges making up the university have done. And who hates me, the enthusiastic patron of those colleges, who has never done Merope any harm.
But Merope doesn’t hate Aspern Grayling. Far from it. Unsurprising, maybe, for he, with his pale, parchment-fine skin, and his blue-veined hands and pale turquoise eyes and his pale fading cornsilk hair, and his long thin nose that twitches at every smell, he has certainly seduced enough people, men and women, in his time. He is remarkable, Aspern, though he calls himself my greatest enemy, and though he is the determined opponent of any wish I might have for what he has always called, not ‘the commons’ as we do in Arcadia, but the ‘common people.’ Always with a sneer that reminds me, strangely, of Rowena Pomfret, a woman he never met except in the Megalopolitan tabloids he must have read furiously in his youth.
He hated my mother. I remember that. I remember the cold look of fury on his face whenever he saw her, whenever he watched her patiently untangle old laws and mingle them with new, whenever she gave audience to Arcadians he considered well beneath him, let alone her, whenever she settled disputes peacefully, according to rules of fairness rather than power. I was only seven years old, but I knew he hated her. And I clung to Devindra, who loved her, and I even clung to Merope (oh, mistake!) because she was my own age and belonged, I thought, as much to her mother as I did myself.
It was only when I was older, when I was first princess, and then queen, that I saw the truth about that. Watching Grayling and Devindra debate the future of Arcadia before an increasingly anxious audience over the years, I began to see the widening fissure between the two sides, the two visions.
Both were an aristocratic vision, at bottom, if we define aristocratic as caring little for possessions, even for life, beyond the service they can give to the values of honor, courtesy, dignity. But Devindra’s aristocracy is always of the mind, always inclusive, always striving to bring in more and more, whether people, or experiences, or ideas. Aspern Grayling’s aristocracy is one based on power, on a bedrock belief that some are more worthy than others, more meant to rule, that anything else is chaos, base anarchy, dissolution…death. By death, he never means the Death that Lily knew, and that I met later, but a death formed by his distorted image of his own life, an imaginary adversary to defeat, something…someone…to triumph over, as in his world view everything must triumph or be defeated, with no middle ground. There is no living in harmony with Death, no partnership or even truce possible to Aspern. It is always kill Death or be killed. It is either triumph or be left humiliated, worthless, in defeat.
It is a ruthless worldview. It is a view I can’t accept, and Grayling counts this refusal as my great weakness, proving my feminine unfitness to rule. To Grayling, it is the harshness of the view that proves its truth.
This is sentimentality to me, of the worst kind. And there we have our disagreement, Grayling’s and mine.
But I’ve run even farther ahead of myself than I had meant. I need now to go back to my mother’s story.