The Gentleman with the Golden Lion

By the time House Badger had been counted, Aldous Torven knew which fortunes had risen, which sons had disappointed, and which gentleman had borrowed a cane for the evening.

Menagerie Hall encouraged this sort of reading. Its gas branches threw a respectful shine upon the long tables and a less respectful one upon worn cuffs. Each gentleman rested his cane where it might be seen. Stags thrust antlers over chair backs. Boars crouched among empty glasses. The foxes had been polished until their wooden eyes looked wet. A gentleman might replace a cracked shaft or commission a finer carving, but the animal remained. It announced the House that answered for his debts, received his vote, buried him, and called him a gentleman at all.

Aldous’s heron had gone smooth beneath the pad of his thumb. He had carried it for fifty-three years.

At the lectern, the master of the roll called each House in the same grave tone, as if summoning beasts out of scripture. Canes lifted; numbers were entered; small failures of attendance acquired the dignity of ink. Aldous liked the roll better than he admitted. It made belonging sound like arithmetic.

The doors opened during House Otter.

The latecomer did not pause to apologize. He walked down the center aisle in a worn tall black top hat and dark formal layers too various to have been purchased together. Brown hair, wavy and shoulder-length, pressed untidily against his collar. A broad moustache hid any uncertainty in his mouth, while round blue-tinted lenses hid nearly everything else. He wore gloves despite the warmth.

In his right hand he carried a wooden cane topped by a lion covered in bright gold leaf.

The master stopped with his finger on the roll. One gentleman laughed, alone and high. Elsewhere a chair leg struck the floor. The silence that followed was not astonishment exactly. Astonishment had more room in it. This was the sound of two hundred men discovering that they had all remembered the same forbidden thing.

The stranger reached the empty space before the lectern.

“House Lion,” he said.

He gave Lion its old household shape, lingering on the first part and almost losing the second.

“You have swallowed the end of it,” Aldous said under his breath.

The stranger turned at once.

So did the master of the roll.

“There is no House Lion,” the master said. His courtesy was flawless again. “You have been misdirected, sir.”

“Not by the porter. He saw the cane and couldn’t decide whether one bars a gentleman before or after asking his House.”

That produced three scattered laughs and an angry demand from the boar table. The stranger glanced neither way. Up close, the gold had plainly been rubbed darker around the lion’s nostrils in an attempt at age. A theatrical object. A dangerous one.

“House Lion was extinguished,” the master said.

“Then someone has used too much ink.”

The room stirred. Several canes came upright, not as weapons—no gentleman would have confessed to such a thing—but in readiness for whatever name propriety might give the next few minutes.

The master descended from the lectern. “You will accompany me.”

“Will I be put on the roll?”

“You will accompany me. Mr. Torven, I should value your assistance.”

Aldous kept his face still. “I cannot imagine why.”

“Your face has already assisted.”

The master offered the side door with an open palm. The stranger went first. As Aldous followed, he heard the master order the clerk to proceed with House Otter. The clerk tried. Not one response came at the proper place.

The side room was intended for disagreements too expensive to be heard. Its green baize door shut tightly; its decanters were full; its chairs were narrow enough to discourage settlement. Aldous remained standing. The stranger did likewise, though the master pointedly took the chair nearest the bellpull.

“Your cane,” Aldous said.

The stranger shifted it behind his leg. “I haven’t offered it.”

“Then hold it nearer the lamp. If I meant to seize it, I should not first improve the light.”

After a moment, the lion came forward.

The carving was competent but overworked. Little crescents from a new gouge remained inside the mane. The gold leaf had settled into the cuts but not yet acquired the soft dirt of handling. Where the glove gripped the shaft, fresh varnish released a faint resinous sweetness.

“Eleven weeks,” Aldous said.

The stranger’s brows moved behind the blue glass. “That’s uncomfortably close.”

“Ten, perhaps. The distressing of the nose cost you credibility.”

“I told the carver it would.”

Aldous turned the lion toward the lamp. Its left ear was too long, with a small notch cut across the tip. The grain beneath ran straight and sound; the defect was deliberate.

“And this ear?”

Rafe’s gloved hand closed more firmly around the shaft. “He copied the drawing.”

“Then he copied an error.”

“So he said.”

The master extended his hand. “Then you concede it is counterfeit.”

“I concede it’s new. I never called it a relic.”

“You entered the gathering under a dead device.”

“A carving is not a birth record,” the stranger said. “Your porter proved that for me.”

Aldous disliked the pleasure the man took in this. It was not the pleasure of a claimant nearing victory. It was the exhausted satisfaction of someone whose badly explained plan had, against expectation, completed its first step.

“Your name,” Aldous said.

“Rafe Irlow.”

“And the name of the person who made this?”

“No.”

“The address at which you are staying?”

“Also no.”

“Mr. Irlow,” the master said, “you are not in a position to refuse ordinary questions.”

Rafe glanced toward the baize door. Beyond it, the roll had resumed in a murmur, broken now and then by a voice too loud. “I came so every House would see the lion. I didn’t come so every House could find my lodging.”

“There are penalties for false representation.”

“There were penalties last time too, I hear.”

The master rose. “I will give you five minutes to reconsider surrendering the cane. Mr. Torven, discover what he wants.”

“You presume I can.”

“You corrected his pronunciation.”

The door closed behind him.

For a while Rafe and Aldous listened to the muffled call of animals through the wall. Aldous could distinguish the responses without hearing the names. Foxes answered separately. Hounds struck their cane tips once upon the floor. Herons waited half a beat, an affectation old enough to pass for tradition.

Rafe removed his hat and spectacles. His hair sprang outward where the brim had held it. “My grandmother says the second part was hardly sounded.”

“Your grandmother is wrong.”

“There. She said her brother would do that. Correct first, wonder later.”

The word brother entered the room and made everything in it badly placed. Aldous set both hands on his heron. The old carving fitted them. He had been ill for most of his first winter with the Herons, and the gentleman who became his father had slept in a chair beside him, night after night, waking at every cough. Gratitude was not a fraudulent history. Love did not become false merely because another love had been cut away before it.

“How old is your grandmother?”

“She told me not to start with arithmetic.”

“A sensible precaution for a weak invention.”

“She also said you’d insult the invention instead of answering it. I thought she meant the cane.”

Rafe reached inside his coat. Aldous’s grip tightened, absurdly, on a bird made of ash wood. What emerged was a folded sheet, handled so often its corners had gone soft.

“She remembers a younger brother,” Rafe said. The rehearsal had left his voice. He spoke faster now and looked down too much. “He was taken out through the scullery because the front steps were full. He had one glove. He’d hidden the other one somewhere and wouldn’t say. He used to sit under the dining table when guests came, but only at the end nearest the windows, because—”

“There were no windows at that end.”

Rafe stopped.

“The windows faced the garden. The end nearest them was where our father sat. No child could have hidden there without losing skin from his knees.”

“She said the garden end.”

“Then you said it wrongly.”

“I said I’m poor at this.”

“You did not.”

“I am saying it now.”

Aldous looked away. On the sideboard, three clean glasses stood beneath an engraving of Menagerie Hall. He had attended forty-six gatherings beneath this roof. There had once been a gap in the roll after House Lark and before House Mole. The clerk no longer paused there.

“Suppose I knew such a child,” he said. “What does your grandmother expect?”

“To know whether he lived.”

“Nothing else?”

“Plenty else. She didn’t trust me to ask it all tonight.”

“She trusted you to invade this gathering in a gilded costume.”

Rafe looked down at his black coat. “Only the cane is gilded. This costume has debts.”

The laugh escaped Aldous before he could stop it, no more than breath catching at the wrong edge. Rafe heard. His shoulders lowered a fraction.

Aldous recovered himself. “If a surviving relation can be traced, I can arrange assistance. Quietly. A house, if needed. An annuity. There are districts where the old matter would mean nothing.”

“You haven’t asked what she needs.”

“One begins with practical security.”

“She has a house.”

“Then money without conditions.”

“Money for what?”

“For silence,” Aldous said, because he was suddenly too tired to disguise the answer as protection.

Rafe folded the sheet along the wrong crease. “At least that’s shorter.”

From the hall came a burst of applause, excessive and brief. Aldous pictured the clerk pretending that the evening had recovered.

“If the Houses learn where she is,” Aldous said, “they will examine her. They will send lawyers, antiquarians, physicians. They will measure every scar against a docket. If she fails to remember one date correctly, they will call all the rest an appetite. I am trying to prevent that.”

“So am I. That’s why you don’t get her name yet.”

“Yet?”

Rafe opened the paper again. “Which of the children broke the blue washbasin?”

“There was no blue washbasin.”

“I knew this one.” Rafe searched the page with a gloved finger. “It was white. The soap left a blue ring.”

“The soap was violet. Your grandmother broke it by climbing onto the stand for sugared almonds. She told everyone I had done it.”

“She says you pushed her.”

“I was five. She was eleven and built like a cupboard.”

Rafe stared. Then he looked at the paper. “She isn’t built like a cupboard now.”

The sentence struck more cleanly than any proof. Aldous saw a girl with one thick plait lifting him bodily away from a pantry shelf. He saw the washstand list beneath her bare foot, the white basin descending with majestic slowness, and the violet seam of soap along the broken china. He had not remembered her face. The strength in her arms came back entire.

Rafe was watching him, but suspicion had not left his mouth. “That story might have traveled.”

“To whom?”

“I don’t know. That’s the difficulty. When an elderly gentleman answers everything too neatly, one ought to ask what he wants.”

“I have answered nothing neatly. There was no blue basin, the soap was not blue, and I did not push her.”

“That is almost word for word what she said you’d say.”

“Then she has spent seventy years improving a lie.”

Rafe made an annoyed sound and tipped the golden lion toward him. “Then tell me why the ear is wrong.”

“I already have. Your drawing was poor.”

“Hers,” Rafe said. “The carver copied my grandmother’s drawing. She said her brother would know what it copied.”

He opened the folded sheet all the way. On the inner face, among Rafe’s cramped notes and cross-outs, an uncertain pencil lion stretched across one crease. Its left ear was long and nicked. Its tail ended abruptly above the rear paw.

The old dining table had possessed a thick cross brace beneath the garden end. His sister had lain beside him there during a tiresome winter dinner and scratched a lion into the wood with a stolen fruit knife. A knot had dragged the blade upward, lengthening one ear. The nick was her failed attempt to shorten it. Aldous had called it a rabbit until she stuffed his mouth with sugared almonds to stop him laughing. The tail remained unfinished because footsteps had crossed the carpet overhead.

“The tail should stop before the paw,” Aldous said.

Rafe rotated the cane. Beneath the gilt mane and theatrical shine, the carved tail stopped at precisely that place.

“She wasn’t certain about the almonds,” Rafe said. “She thought they might have been plum stones.”

“Plum stones were hidden in the blue vase.”

The lion was not an old object. It was an old mistake, remade and carried through the front doors for him. His sister had lived long enough to draw it for her grandson. Aldous knew then who sat across from him, though he still did not know what to do with him.

The master returned before Aldous found a sentence he could bear to use. He closed the door with greater care than before.

“The official abstract is unequivocal,” he said. “The adult Lion gentlemen were condemned, most sentences were carried out, the House properties were forfeited, and the recognized line was extinguished. This person’s cane must be surrendered. If he refuses, I shall identify him publicly as an impostor and have him removed.”

“What happened to the children?” Rafe asked.

“The abstract concerns the House.”

“Children are generally found in houses.”

The master did not reward this. His gaze remained on Aldous.

Aldous knew the rest of the language. It had been used around him until it became the clean interior wall of his life. Male minors had been placed under the sponsorship of sound Houses. Their names had been regularized. Women and girls, having no standing in the roll, had been dispersed among relations, institutions, and approved households. Later clerks recorded no Lion gentlemen. Therefore House Lion was extinct.

Therefore a sister could live while every document declared her family dead.

“The cane is newly made,” Aldous said.

The master inclined his head, relieved.

“So that isn’t evidence of fraud.”

The relief vanished.

Rafe rose too quickly and knocked his chair against the wall. “You believe me?”

“I believe your grandmother remembers a disagreeable little boy.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“It is as much as I presently know.”

The master laid one hand on the bellpull. “Mr. Torven.”

Aldous looked at the heron between his hands. At seven, he had awakened from fever with a new surname being spoken tenderly beside the bed. No one had put a weapon to him. No one had needed to. His former name had disappeared by ink, patience, gifts, correction, and the terrible good fortune of being loved by those who benefited from its loss.

“My name is Aldous Torven,” he said. His voice was steady until the next word. “Before that, my sister called me Tuppy.”

Rafe sat down again without finding the chair properly. One gloved hand caught its back.

The master released the cord. “This is not the place for distress to become testimony.”

“No,” Aldous said. “This room was selected precisely because no one outside it need hear.”

“Consider House Heron.”

“I have considered House Heron every day of my life.”

Rafe looked between them. “Did they know?”

“The gentleman who raised me knew what name I arrived with. He also kept me alive. I will not make him a monster for your convenience.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“You were about to.”

“I was about to ask why you never looked for her.”

Aldous had an answer ready: he had been told there was no one left. It was true for the first years and useless for all the years after.

“Later,” he said, “I was occupied with being grateful.”

Rafe’s mouth tightened under the moustache. “She will dislike that answer.”

“So do I.”

The master gave the hall door a brief glance. Formula had served him all evening, but formula required the participants to remain in their assigned categories. “If you leave now, Mr. Torven, you will be absent when House Heron is called for the vote.”

“Count me absent.”

“That isn’t the question she sent,” Rafe said.

Aldous turned on him. “Your grandmother appears to have sent a hamper of questions.”

“One, really. The others were to make sure it was you answering.” Rafe lifted the lion between them. “She said if you knew her lion, I was to ask whether you’d answer the roll.”

“House Lion has no roll.”

“Not as Lion. As yourself. Where they can hear.”

The master reached for the bellpull again. “No personal declaration will be permitted in the gathering.”

The gold ear was foolishly long in the lamplight. Aldous’s sister had made a public scandal carry a message no House could read for her. An annuity offered in this room would answer it with silence.

“Do not count me absent,” Aldous said.

Rafe’s grip shifted on the cane. “Is that a yes?”

“That is me answering badly. You may report it as such.”

“And him?” the master said.

Aldous turned to Rafe. He could not authenticate the lion. He could not summon a dead House with a word. “Mr. Irlow is not an impostor. His cane is a recent advertisement, in deplorable taste. His descent is his own affair, and mine.”

“Mine first,” Rafe said.

“Yes. Evidently.”

Aldous opened the baize door.

Rafe gathered the folded sheet and his spectacles, put on his hat, and followed.

The gathering had ceased pretending to continue. Gentlemen stood behind chairs or crowded the aisles, animal heads showing between black coats like a second, less disciplined audience. The clerk waited with his pen lifted. No one cheered when Aldous entered. A few men turned away. One called for the lion to be broken; another demanded to hear the claim. Most watched with the careful hunger of people preparing to say later that they had seen very little.

Aldous took his hat from the attendant but did not put it on. He walked instead to the lectern, his heron cane striking its familiar measure on the floor. Rafe stopped near the side door, the golden lion held close against his leg.

“Rafe Irlow’s cane is eleven weeks old,” Aldous said. His public voice arrived out of habit, elegant and almost useless. He made himself continue. “His grandmother is my elder sister. I was seven when I was removed from House Lion and given the name Torven. House Lion remains extinct. We did not all die.”

The first demand was for the woman’s name. The second was for papers. Someone at the boar table called Aldous senile; a Heron answered with an oath and then looked embarrassed to have done it. No agreement gathered beneath the noise.

“You will have neither name nor address,” Aldous said. “You wished to know whether this gentleman’s claim was fraudulent. It is not.”

The master stepped beside him. “The roll has no provision for such a declaration.”

“Then it need not provide for it. I have said it. Proceed.”

Rafe had moved nearer during the uproar. “She allowed you three sentences.”

“The first was very short.”

“I’ll explain that you counted it by weight.”

Aldous looked at the long-eared lion. “Tell her the egg was soft.”

Rafe lost his quick answer. “What egg?”

Wet wool and sulphur returned to Aldous with the smell of the lamp gas. His sister’s large hand had squeezed his shoulder while her other pushed food into his coat because he had refused breakfast.

“The one she put in my pocket when they took me through the scullery. It broke before the gate. She put a twist of salt in the other pocket, as though that improved matters.”

Rafe searched the unfolded sheet. His moustache shifted. “She says it was hard-boiled.”

“Your grandmother has never admitted fault while a witness remained alive.”

Rafe laughed, short and startled. He put on his blue spectacles. “I’ll tell her you answered the roll and complained about breakfast.”

“In that order.”

Rafe tucked the paper inside his coat and crossed the hall alone. The gentlemen in his path withdrew just far enough to let the golden lion pass. No one asked him to surrender it again.

Aldous went to the Heron table. The gentleman on his right moved the decanter out of reach. The gentleman on his left stared fixedly at his own cuffs. Aldous set his hat beneath his chair and rested both hands on the smooth neck of his heron.

The master returned to the lectern. “House Heron.”

After its customary half beat, the Heron canes rose. Aldous’s old cane rose with them. The clerk counted it there and proceeded to House Ibex.