Page 72 of Gwen and Art Are Not in Love

‘He’s in the library,’ Gwen said. ‘Under heavy guard. He was with me most of the day.’

‘Ah,’ said Arthur, feeling disappointed for a moment before rallying. ‘Right. No matter! We’ll go without him.’

‘Go where? Wait … Arthur,’ Gwen said slowly. ‘Are you wearing two hats?’ Arthur was; he swept the first off with a flourish. ‘Whyare you wearing two hats?’

‘They call me Little Arthur Two-Hats,’ he said.

‘No they don’t.’

‘No, they don’t,’ Arthur agreed, pressing one into Gwen’s hands. ‘But that’s because one of them is for you.’

‘When you notice a flaw in security during a time of heightened peril,’ Gwen said, crossing her arms, ‘you tell the Captain of the Guard. You make sure nobody else can utilise it. Youdo notexploit said security flaw as a means to …party.’

‘You make a good point,’ Arthur said diplomatically. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not actually in the market for good points, so – shut up and put your moustache on.’

Gwen would have pressed this further but for two things: the first was that the attacker in the royal wing had been conclusively determined a deeply unfortunate one-off, a point that Lord Stafford had been making repeatedly and at length since the incident in question. The second – which she never would have admitted aloud to Arthur – was that since his arrival at Camelot she had found herself falling prey to a creeping dissatisfaction with many aspects of her life.

Her mother had sat her down at breakfast – on herbirthday, no less – to tell her that the date for the wedding had been set for the end of the summer, and had proceeded to lay out plans for a packed schedule of meetings, fittings andmind-numbing conversations about the guest list and which meats they should serve at the feast. All semblance of her usual schedule would be thrown entirely out of the window, her days filled to the brim with other people making plans for her and talking over her and pokingat her, with absolutely no room for whatshemight want – namely, time to sit in a quiet room by herself or to slip away and see Bridget.

As she listened to the queen, something inside her had finally snapped. It must have been a key part of her brain that looked after all of her more sensible faculties, because Arthur’s terrible plan for the evening actually seemed quite appealing.

As a result, they were goingout.

It was, apparently, still possible to escape the keep by means of climbing down the outer wall, as long as the initial portion of the climb was done at great speed between guard patrols. Sidney had done reconnaissance to perfect the timing. Gwen thought that, on the whole, it shouldn’t have been quite so easy for Arthur to convince her and Agnes to dress in some of Arthur’s clothes, adhere false moustaches to their top lips and shimmy out of the window to their almost certain doom.

‘Whose hair is this?’ Gwen said as she dubiously inspected the moustache in question. ‘Did you pick it up off the ground?’

Arthur flashed her a grin. ‘Don’t worry. It’s Lucifer’s.’

In truth, Gwen thought that almost nothing could survive the ferocity of Arthur’s energy when he turned it against other people’s wills; given another half an hour ofarguing when he was this fired up, he probably could have convinced her that the whole thing had been her idea in the first place.

The climb went surprisingly smoothly. Sidney had fashioned a very basic sort of rope ladder, which he knotted expertly to a pillar in Gwen’s room so that she and Agnes were spared the true perils of mountaineering, and then removed for his own descent. They were waved through the castle gates, nobody particularly caring who they were due to the fact that they were going rather than coming.

As soon as they were on the main road into the city it became a little too real; Gwen felt slightly sick with panic, and started muttering an almost constant stream of regrets –Oh my God, we’re going to get caught, we’re going to die, we’re going to get caughtanddie– until Sidney handed her a bottle of something and told her to take a nip of it to fortify her nerves. It tasted like she was being scoured by fire from the inside out.

‘You shouldn’t make a habit of that, you know,’ Arthur said, as Sidney took the bottle back from her.

‘A thief knows a thief as a wolf knows a wolf,’ said Agnes, and everybody turned to look at her. She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s something my mother used to say.’

‘Am I the thief, in this scenario?’ Arthur enquired with mild interest. ‘Or am I the wolf?’

‘You’re the man with the suspected alcohol problem,’ said Gwen.

‘Christ, not that again. I’m not drinking tonight, am I? Bone dry. Practically a saint.’

The closer they got to the city proper, the busier itbecame. There were street hawkers selling what they claimed were genuine pieces of knightly armour, scavenged from the tournament; crowds of drunkards, overflowing out of the taverns and into the squares, which were packed; children rushing about underfoot, selling blackened buns and bone whistles and small bundles of dried flowers. Gwen realised once again with a rush of embarrassment that despite living in Camelot for most of her life, she had never reallyseenit; on parade days, or when the royal party left the castle en masse to travel to a nearby city or noble estate, the streets were cleared before they arrived. She had never seen what her father’s people actuallydidwhen they hadn’t been told to stand up straight, comb their hair and not come within twenty feet of a member of the royal family; it involved a lot more spitting than Gwen could have imagined, but a lot more chatter and life and laughter, too.

‘Walk more like a man,’ Arthur said to Gwen, jostling her with his elbow. She had his hat pulled down low over her face, and despite the fact that they were the same height, his tunic felt all wrong on her, tight across her stomach and loose about the shoulders.

‘I don’t know how to do that,’ Gwen replied through gritted teeth, narrowly dodging a pile of vomit that had collected on the cobblestones. ‘Surely men don’t all walk alike.’

‘Just walk like you own the street,’ Sidney advised.

‘I practicallydoown the street,’ Gwen said.

‘Fair point,’ said Sidney.

‘Walk like you don’t care where your limbs are,’ Agnes said, doing a much better job of it than Gwen. ‘As if it’s ofno consequence to you where they end up. Like this. See? Swing them about. And you should act, at all times, as if your crotch is a burden.’