“She made the marmalade too,” Paul said. “With oranges from our own arboretum.”
“She’ll chew it up and spit it in your mouth if you ask,” Stanley broke in. He had started eating before Lorraine was even finished talking to Jesus, and he didn’t look up from his plate. “Like a mummy bird with her chicks. She loves that stuff.”
Paul give Stanley a hard look. “Second warning, Stan,” he said. “Three’s the charm. If you’ve forgotten how to behave in company, I’ll give you a sharp reminder. Never doubt it.”
“Oh, I believe you, Paul,” Stanley answered him. “I know you’re a man of your word.”
“Anyway,” Lorraine said, with maybe not quite so much cheer as before, “we’d ask that you give us the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure we’ll all be good friends in no time. And that starts with trust. Mutual trust. Please break bread with us. And afterwards, we’ll see what we’ll see.”
I wasn’t so sure yet about the good friends part, but I was all in favour of the breaking bread. It was sitting right in front of me, and I could feel the warm coming off of it. It looked like it had a good crust too. Besides that, there was butter, a plate of cheeses and slices of tomato covered over in sweet-smelling leaves that I never come across before. Oh, and also a pot with the stuff Paul called marmalade in it, and a little wooden spoon to scoop it out with. It seemed to be a kind of orange-coloured jam. I didn’t know what the fruit might be, for it didn’t have the scent of peach or quince. As well as water to drink, there was milk and spiced tea. Everything smelled so good it was making my mouth water.
Lorraine seen me looking round-eyed at it all, and laughed again. “Well, dig in,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder and giving it a shake. “We don’t stand on ceremony here, hon.”
We et the food. Well, not all of us did. Me and Cup and Ursala, being about halfway starved, went in like needles. I don’t think I even stopped to breathe until I’d et up three slices of bread, covered so thick with butter and that orange-coloured jam that it spilled over the edges. Paul and Lorraine just watched, with their hands resting flat on the table, Lorraine smiling on us all like Dandrake at the last sup.
Stanley filled up quick and after that just picked at his food. He kept looking at me and then at Ursala, turn about, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“Is there something on my face?” I asked at last. I know that sounds like a come-along to a fight, but I didn’t mean it as one. It was just so strange the way he was staring.
Stanley pointed at my head, then waved his hand around in a circle. “Yeah, there is. Way too much melanin.” He give a short laugh.
“Too much what?” I said.
“Melanin. In your skin. It’s maladaptive, way up here in the north. I was wondering how many million years of evolution it would take to get you looking like normal people.”
“That’s enough,” Paul said sharply.
Lorraine shaked her head and give us a sorrowing look. “You’ll have to forgive my son. Growing up way out here, his experience of the world has been very limited. That’s no excuse for bad manners though, and he’s going to apologise right now. Aren’t you, Stan?”
“Am I?” Stanley said. Paul pushed his chair back like he was about to stand. “Okay, yes, it looks like I am. I’m sorry I drew attention to your pigmentation. That’s a very personal thing, and I swear I won’t mention it again. Even if you change colour really suddenly.”
“I think it would be best, Stan,” Paul said, “if you held your tongue entirely for the remainder of this conversation. Our guests have come from a long way away. If you listen to them instead of spouting inanities, you might learn something.”
He didn’t learn nothing for the next few minutes though, because the three of us went right back to eating and didn’t have a word to say. I was still wondering why the boy was so surprised by the colour of my skin. Skin could be any colour, almost. Then I gun to question how many people there was on this ship, and how long he had been here. Maybe Paul and Lorraine was all the people he knowed. That would be a sad thing – like as if someone lived his whole life in the Underhold.
“The signal we were following,” Ursala said after a while, “claimed to be – or to be speaking for – something called the Sword of Albion. Is that who you are?”
Paul Banner shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you can’t ask that,” he said. “It’s completely meaningless when you put it in those words.”
“Is it? Why?”
Ursala was asking the question to all three of them, but Stanley didn’t even look up. He was chipping at the wood of that beautiful table with the handle of a spoon.
“It’s like asking someone if they’re the concept of freedom, or the human spirit, or Ingland itself,” Lorraine said, smiling again. She lifted up her hand towards the statue I told you about that was standing out at the end of the room like there was one chair too few at the table. “Sword of Albion is many things to many people. A movement and an idea. An aspiration and a principle.”
“It’s also the name of this ship,” Stanley said, rolling his eyes. “That might be relevant.”
Lorraine nodded. “Yes, it is. But the context is important too.”
“Ah,” Ursala said. “I see.”
“I don’t,” muttered Cup. “Is that a yes or a no?”
“I think we’ve been invited to take our pick,” Ursala said. She set her knife down on her trencher, like she was done with the meal and the conversation both.
But Lorraine kept on talking, with that same warm smile on her face, like there wasn’t no quarrel here nor no need for one. “So that must have been quite a voyage,” she said. “Deep waters. A fog as thick as cheese. And that was the first time any of you had been in a boat, I’m guessing?”
“We’ve been in plenty of boats,” Cup said. She was fierce proud of her skills in sailing and fishing. “This was the first time we’d been in charge of one, but we knowed what we was doing.”
“Which was why you were sinking when we saw you, I guess,” Stanley said, not looking up from his plate. “Takes a stone-cold expert to scuttle a ship like that. It’s not something a random idiot could do.” Cup give him a hard stare. I think she was about a half an inch away from leaning across the table and smacking him in the head.
Before that could happen, Lorraine stood up. “I think it’s about time for Stanley’s treatment,” she said. “We won’t be long. Come along, Stanley.”
The boy just stared at her and kept on sitting where he was. A change come over him. Up to then, it was like everything that was going on here was kind of a joke to him, and he was only just hiding a smile. But the treatment, whatever it was, wasn’t no joke at all. He was struck hard by it, and couldn’t hide his dismay. “I wouldn’t want to keep you from entertaining our new guests, Lee,” he said. “I could bear to miss it this once.”
“No,” Lorraine said. “You couldn’t.” She held out her hand, just exactly the same way she done for me. And Stanley took it, though I could see in his face he wished like anything he didn’t have to. He got to his feet.