The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp (Alfred Kropp 1)

She looked away then. I could have kicked myself for mentioning her father. For once she was actually talking to me as if I were a halfway normal person.

“I guess it would be tough for you to forgive me,” I said. “I can’t seem to, no matter how hard I try.”

“You should have left me to die,” she said. “It would be better. Why didn’t you leave me to die?” She began to cry.

I had apologized, but that only made it worse for her. I was beginning to think that was my special gift: taking something bad and making it worse. I tried to hold her hand while she cried, but she turned away from me. I could save her life but not her broken heart.

After Natalia left, I felt really bad, the worst I’d felt since this whole thing with the Sword started. You would think the prospect of saving six billion lives might make me feel better, but it didn’t. I could save the world, but it wouldn’t bring Uncle Farrell back. It wouldn’t bring my father back.

Or Bennacio. I kept seeing him fall, the way he raised his arms and just let Mogart run him through. Why hadn’t Bennacio fought? He could have lunged forward and tackled Mogart by the knees. Why had he just given up like that? How was that keeping his precious vow? I was pretty sore at him for that. If he hadn’t quit, I wouldn’t have ended up with the Sword, he would be alive, and Natalia’s heart would not be broken.

A shadow fell into the room but I hardly noticed it. I just wanted it all to go away. The hospital, London, my memories, me.

The shadow came closer and I heard her ask softly, “Alfred, why are you crying?”

I said, “It works on everybody but me, Natalia. I can heal everybody but myself.”

She sat in the wooden chair beside the bed. She had changed into a long red cloak over a g

ray dress with one of those soft, high collars, and her earrings were fat diamonds about the size of green olives. Her reddish gold hair was loose and flowed over her shoulders. She looked like some medieval princess, beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Seeing her dressed like that, I realized Natalia was leaving.

“You are forgetting something,” she said.

“I can’t forget anything,” I said. “That’s the problem.”

“You are forgetting you saved the world.”

I didn’t say anything. I wondered why she had come back, but at the same time I knew why, though I couldn’t put it into words.

Then she did. “I’m leaving, Alfred.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“Don’t.”

“I must.” She drew a deep breath. She was sitting very straight in the chair.

“But before I go,” she went on, “I wanted to pay homage to the master.”

She looked down at my snotty face.

“I’m not the master of anything,” I said.

“Alfred,” she answered softly. “Like my father, I have waited a very long time for your coming. My father would tell me stories of our ancestor Bedivere, how he betrayed the king by refusing his command to return the Sword to the waters from which it rose. I would spend hours imagining what the master would be like. Tall, handsome, brave, honest, chaste, modest, the knight of all knights—in short, everything that I believed my father to be.” She looked sideways at me, clearly not the guy she had pictured as the master of the Sword. “In fact, when I was still very young I told him that he might be the master, that perhaps it was his destiny to claim the Sword as his own, a fitting end to Bedivere’s shame.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me of the prophecy Merlin made before he departed the world of men, that the master would not come until the last male heir to the house of Bedivere had perished. My father believed that prophecy, Alfred. He believed it because he believed in the justice of it. It was the price we would pay for Bedivere’s failure, our atonement for his sin.”

I thought of Bennacio kneeling before Mogart, and I understood then why he had spread his arms in that way, as if saying, Here I am. Here I am.

“Oh, jeez,” I said. “Like I didn’t feel bad enough, Natalia. What am I supposed to do, huh? What do you want me to do? I was just, you know, helping out my uncle. I didn’t know my father and I sure didn’t know I had stolen the Sword of Kings for a black knight or an agent of darkness or whatever he was. I mean, what rational person believes in all this stuff, Merlin and King Arthur and magic swords and angels and prophecies—who believes in that kind of stuff these days? I don’t know what you want from me, Natalia. Can you tell me what I’m supposed to do? Somebody better tell me and they better do it quick, because I’m just about at the end of my rope here.”

She came to the bed, and her hair fell over my face. She whispered, “He is at peace, Alfred. His dream is fulfilled, and he is at peace. Now you be at peace.”

Then she kissed me on the forehead, and her hair was like the walls of a cathedral around me, a sanctuary, and she murmured into my ear, “Be at peace, Master Alfred.”