What He Actually Saw

"Why can't we go outside anymore?" the dauphin asked him one afternoon, plainly, the way children ask questions too large for the answer they'll receive.

Antoine had no good answer, and found himself, to his own surprise, giving the boy a longer and gentler one than duty strictly required. "Things have changed, for a while. Your father will explain it better than I can."

"He tries. I don't think even he understands all of it."

Antoine said nothing to that, because there wasn't a safe reply available to him, and because some part of him suspected the boy was entirely correct.

"You spend too long talking to that child," the older guardsman said, more than once. "Duty's duty. You're not here to comfort him."

"I'm not comforting him. I'm answering a question he asked me directly."

"You didn't have to answer it at all."

Antoine didn't argue the point, because arguing it would have required explaining something he hadn't fully worked out himself: that he still believed, entirely, in the cause that had put this family behind these walls, and that believing it hadn't made it any easier to watch a frightened child ask a question no one could answer honestly.

He watched the queen, one evening, holding her own composure together in front of her children with a visible effort that reminded him, uncomfortably, of his own mother managing bad news the same way when Antoine was a boy, the same careful performance of calm for the sake of children too young to be trusted with the actual size of the trouble.

"I still believe in what we're doing here," he told the older guardsman, finally, one night when the silence between them had gone on long enough that something needed saying. "I haven't changed my mind about any of that."

"Then why do you look like a man arguing with himself half the time?"

"Because I can believe the cause is just and still find it hard to watch, some days, exactly what the cause is costing the specific people in front of me. Those aren't the same question, whatever you think they are."

The older guardsman had no answer for that, and Antoine didn't press him for one. He went on performing his duty exactly as required, correct and unwavering in every particular his post demanded, and he went on, too, giving a frightened boy a few minutes more conversation than duty strictly asked of him, and answering a queen's quiet courtesy with courtesy of his own: small things, none of them large enough to compromise anything, all of them the only answer Antoine ever found to a tension he carried, unresolved, through the remainder of his service and considerably longer after it.