The Eyes of the Dragon

76

Eventually Dennis got over his fright of being Thomas’s butler. After all, Thomas ignored him almost completely, except to sometimes berate him for forgetting to put out his shoes (usually Thomas himself had left his shoes somewhere else, then forgotten where) or to insist Dennis have a glass of wine with him. The wine always made Dennis feel sick to his stomach, although he had come to enjoy a wee drop of bundle-gin in the evenings. He drank it nonetheless. He did not need his good old Da’ around to tell him one did not refuse to drink with the King when asked. And sometimes, usually when he was drunk, Thomas would forbid Dennis to go home but insist that he spend the night in Thomas’s apartments instead. Dennis supposed-and rightly-that these were nights on which Thomas simply felt too lonely to bear his own solitary company. He would give long, besotted, rambling sermons on how difficult it was to be King, how he was trying to do the best job he could and be fair, and how everyone hated him for some reason or other just the same. Thomas often wept during these sermons, or laughed wildly at nothing, but usually he just fell asleep half-way through some mangled defense of one tax or another. Some-times he staggered off to his bed, and Dennis could sleep on the couch. More often, Thomas fell asleep-or passed out-on the couch, and Dennis made his uncomfortable bed on the cooling hearth. It was perhaps the strangest existence any King’s butler had ever known, but, of course, it seemed normal enough to Dennis because it was all he had ever known.

Thomas mostly ignoring him was one thing. Flagg ignoring him was another, even more important thing. Flagg had, in fact, entirely dismissed Dennis’s part in his scheme to send Peter to the Needle. Dennis had been no more than a tool to him-a tool which had served its purpose and could be put aside. If he had thought of Dennis, it would have seemed to him that the tool had been well rewarded: Dennis was the King’s butler, after all.

But on an early winter’s night in the year when Peter was twenty-one and Thomas sixteen, a night when Peter’s thin rope was finally nearing completion, Dennis saw something which changed everything-and it is with the thing Dennis saw that cold night that I must begin to narrate the final events in my tale.