Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Well, my child, that shouldn’t take long, now should it. Shall I help you set up the pieces?”

  She shook her head, all eagerness, and set them up herself. He let her move first, and she sent one of her maids out into the world. The Marshal moved, and then she again, letting her horsemen jump where it was right to go, and her marshals move to stop an advance, and so on, until suddenly her father was staring at her with a kind of fire in his eyes. She looked back at the board, not to miss anything. He moved again, slowly, watching her. She moved. “Check,” she said, as she had heard him say. “And mate.”

  And then she really looked up, excited and proud, only to see that fire burning in his eyes. And she knew it for what it was. Cold wrath. She had done something wrong, terribly wrong.

  “Who taught you?” he said in his gravest voice, the one that could not be disobeyed.

  She thought frantically. Who had taught her but he, himself. “I watched you, Father.” And then without thinking she said words that were not quite true, that were not really at all true but would nonetheless save her from those eyes. “It is one of the games you played with your friend, father. I just remembered your moves.”

  It was true she had remembered the moves, every move either player had made all evening, and though her game had not been the same game as any her father and his friend had played, the claim was the only thing that would help her. The fire in his eyes damped down to a dull glow.

  “This game is not for children,” he said. “In future when I play it with my friends, you stay with your mother.”

  Previously, Genevieve had believed she loved her father, for loving and honoring one’s father was a Godly duty, something the visiting scrutator covered in detail.

  “You would do anything for your father, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, scrutator.”

  “Your father is the wisest of men, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes, scrutator.”

  After her birthday, however, she knew she did not love him, and she was careful to cross her fingers whenever the scrutator used the word love. Years later, she came to wonder if her mother had ever loved him, whether her loins had ever twitched for the Marshal.

  Barbara said her loins had been twitching since she was eleven. Barbara sometimes leaned from her window and flirted with the commoner boys beyond the wall. Genevieve thought this unseemly behavior might have something to do with Barbara’s being a bourgeoise; rich, but a bourgeoise. Barbara sang naughty songs in the showers, even when she was punished for it, and though Genevieve fought against the temptation, she adored Barbara. She envied Barbara’s daring attitudes and her highly individual style. She loved Barbara’s sense of humor and quick wit and flashes of intimate perception, though she was careful not to let her admiration show. Any hint that a girl might be too fond of one of her friends provoked the scrutator, and the Marshal would be much offended to think she could possibly prefer any other role to the frugal, complex, and thankless one that he, God, and the covenants had bestowed upon her.

  Like Genevieve, Viscountess Glorieta and Lady Carlotta were provincial nobility, sister-twins and only children of Lord Ahmenaj, Earl of Bliggen, a county in the province of Barfezi. Glorieta was a bit the taller. Carlotta was a lot curvier. They both had the light brown hair, the hazel eyes, and the creamy skin and curly, laughing mouths shared by all the Ahmenaj family. The twins were destined for the elder sons of the Count’s neighbor, Lord Blufeld, Earl of Halfmore. Their weddings would consolidate the two holdings into an enormous estate, which both the Amenaj and the Blufeld families very much desired.

  “Though it is troublesome being a dynastic game piece,” Carlotta had once said. “Move here, move there, take that piece, jump, jump, take that piece. And at the end, I suppose I get a Viscountess’s tiara as a booby prize, and so what!”

  “At least you have a foreseeable future,” Genevieve remarked. “You’ve said yourself you rather like Tomas. And Glorieta really likes Willum. And you love your father’s estate, and this way you’ll remain attached to it.”

  Carlotta made a face. “The trouble is that we both really like Willum, but Glorieta, being two minutes elder, picked him and left me Tomas, who definitely suffers by comparison, and besides, attached is not a word I would have chosen. It makes me sound like part of the livestock.”

  Which she was, of course, though everyone forbore saying so. All the students were like livestock, even Barbara, for twitch though she would, her father and the Tribunal would have the last word. Unless she eloped, of course. Eloping was scandalous, but it did happen and, knowing Barbara, she might well do it, no matter how uncovenantly it was.

  Until that time came, however, they would continue as they had done since they were children: subduing predispositions toward unseemly behavior; dancing and exercising to acquire posture and grace; practicing manners and conversation, which, since women weren’t supposed to have opinions, was mostly how to get other people to talk about themselves while expressing admiration that sounded sincere. Lessons were interspersed with short trips to orchestral concerts or village festivals, to couturiers for new clothes in spring and fall, and by increasingly frequent visits from the scrutators and doctors.

  Genevieve could never decide which visits were more embarrassing, the ones devoted to her soul or the ones devoted to her body. Though both the scrutator—a man, of course—and the off-worlder doctor—a woman, of course—tried to be gentle, all that intimate probing was humiliating. Still, one had to be both pure of soul and a certifiably fertile lactator if one was to make a good marriage. Only children born and nursed at home could inherit. With such a well-recognized goal, nothing could be left to chance.

  “I think I’ll sneak out and get pregnant,” said Barbara, angrily. “That’ll prove I’m fertile all right.”

  “That’ll prove you right back home.” Glorieta grinned. “Locked up in an attic by your papa.”

  “Spending all your days eating moldy bread and brackish water,” said Carlotta reprovingly.

  Though Barbara had Genevieve’s total sympathy, Genevieve stayed at the fringe of this badinage. Whenever other girls engaged in joking give and take, Genevieve felt herself backing away, pulling a kind of membrane around herself that separated herself from them. Though the other girls never seemed to notice, sometimes Genevieve felt the curtain between her and others was thick as a quilt. They were different somehow. Or she was. Not that she blamed them or herself for being different. Differences were part of existence. Everyone was different in some way, but Genevieve was different in several. She had had a mother who seemed quite unlike other people’s mothers. She had a nose which was certainly unlike other people’s noses. And, unlike her friends, who were actually quite involved with what they were doing and feeling, Genevieve experienced life as a kind of drama, a play, something staged and unreal, a continuing fantasy.

  The usual daily play she called “Mrs. Blessingham’s School.” The school itself was the setting, and the teachers and other students were the cast. They all knew their lines without any discernable prompting, including silly and playful talk that Genevieve could never think up on her own. Though she was occasionally required to say a few words or perform a brief scene, she was always red with embarrassment, during and after. Even the assignment of a tiny part, a walk-on as it were, made her anxious that her performance would be stilted and unbelievable, or that she would do something that seemed perfectly all right at the moment, which would then turn out to be the wrong thing: like knowing something one wasn’t supposed to know; or solving a puzzle too quickly; or saying the absolutely wrong thing! Only as an onlooker did she feel truly easy.

  In addition to the “Blessingham’s School” play, there were others she watched regularly: “The Ahmenaj Dynasty,” which was about Glorieta and Carlotta; the “Chronicles of Barbara,” which was naughty; and of course “Langmarsh House, or The Life of Dustin, Lord Marshal.” Occasionally episodes of the other plays were played concurrently with �
�Blessingham’s,” intermixing confusingly with one another and greatly adding to the cast of characters, the scenery, and the complexity of the plot.

  Through it all, Genevieve remained determined not to have a noticeable role, not even when she herself was dragged onto the stage. “Mrs. Blessingham’s School” was a play written by others. “Lord Marshal” was no doubt written by himself. She had had no hand in either of them. Nothing she might do could influence the plots in the least. She refused to be responsible for them.

  Over the years she had developed a technique for dealing with those occasions when reality threatened to encroach: she would find a corner where she could sit quietly and visualize herself as a siren-lizard, many of which swarmed through the trees around the school. Trees burgeoned, sap flowed from some deep and mysterious source below, life trickled out into every twig, enlivening the entire organism, but the sirens did not know or care. They merely fluttered from branch to branch, flashing their scaled wings in the sun like rainbow mirrors, dependent upon the tree but unconnected to it. Whenever the scrutator came to talk about her soul, Genevieve visualized her soul as a small, invisible siren-lizard, without any dangerous thoughts or emotions, flitting through the tree of life while it waited to be taken away into paradise. She was, so to speak, required to flash her wings, but she was determined to stay unconnected for several reasons, not least of which involved what Mrs. Blessingham called her “talent.”

  Genevieve could accept her talent as she did her nose: an annoyance, at best, a grief at worst. Sometimes when it did not manifest itself for some time, she hoped desperately that she had lost it or it had left her, though hope was in vain, for the talent always returned. As it did shortly after her conversation with Carlotta and Glorieta, when Mrs. Blessingham invited Genevieve into her office.

  “Genevieve, I hate to trouble you, but I am concerned about the marriage plans being made for Carlotta and Glorieta.”

  Genevieve felt a deep pang, as though a large bell had rung inside her. She stared at the wall, everything else becoming misty and indistinct. She thought of Willum as she had seen him last at an evening soirée, sitting with Glorieta on the terrace. His eyes—which she had scarcely noticed at the time but now remembered fully—had been full of desire and pain, fear and resolution. She saw shadows shifting, like the library machines on fast forward, shadows of Glorieta, of Willum, of an older man or men, Willum’s father or family perhaps, a shadow of another woman, a young woman whose face she could not see.

  Her eyes gradually cleared, focused, and she saw Mrs. Blessingham sitting at her desk, calmly waiting. “Mrs. Blessingham,” she murmured, “There will be tragedy connected to Willum. He dreads something that will happen, as if he is determined to do some terrible and irrevocable act. I fear ruin will come … to someone close to him.”

  “I’ve had bad feelings about the whole thing. You’re sure?”

  Genevieve gave her a reproachful look. “Oh, ma’am, I can’t say that. I can only tell what comes to me in these …”

  “These certainties.”

  “This one is not clear enough to be a certainty. Most times whatever this is,” she touched her head, flipping her fingers away to show how ephemeral it all was, “this thing in my brain doesn’t explain what it is showing me. Most of the time I think it is off somewhere else, letting me see only scraps.”

  This had been one of the times when she saw bits of scenery, heard bits of conversations, recollected things she had read or overheard or seen that had made no impression at the time. The sound that came with these smatterings was like surf or storm, the undifferentiated noise of hard rain or the crackling of fire, and from this meaningless mosaic an impression emerged, a feeling, a picture, sometimes a voice. Only long practice kept her quiet and passive as this occurred and passed, leaving a sodden exhaustion behind, like a deep drift of autumn leaves wet by rain, icy and clinging, herself buried in them, naked and cold.

  “Describe it to me,” commanded Mrs. Blessingham, though in a gentler voice.

  Genevieve sighed. “I feel that someone dies. I see a body, a young woman. I don’t know whether it’s Carlotta or Glorieta or someone else, but whatever is happening is connected to them. I know Willum is in it, for I see his face. I hear his voice and a baby crying. I smell blood.”

  Whenever people came into her certainties, she could only identify those she already knew. Others were indistinct, almost like manikins, stand-ins for real people. She saw someone doing something without being able to see why it was done, or by whom. Sometimes she would see people she did not recognize at all, but this time she knew it was Willum, that same Willum she had recently seen with Glorieta on the terrace, his face full of fear and longing.

  “You think he will murder her?” asked Mrs. Blessingham.

  “Her, who?” asked Genevieve. “I don’t know who dies. A woman, yes. But I don’t know who. Of course, Glorieta does prefer Willum.”

  “That may be the trouble,” said Mrs. Blessingham. “They both do. In this case, it seems there’s nothing I can do about it. Thank you, Genevieve. We needn’t mention this to the scrutators.”

  “Of course,” she murmured. Of course. Even mother had been quite clear that there were certain things one did not mention to the scrutators. About this particular thing, Mrs. Blessingham was the only one who knew, the only one who asked, the only one who used whatever it was Genevieve could do. How Mrs. Blessingham had known about her talent, Genevieve couldn’t say. She had never inquired, and Mrs. Blessingham had never told her. This was another of the things Genevieve didn’t really want to know. Knowing would mean she had to think about it, plan for it, acknowledge it. She refused to accept it, any of it at all.

  During the medical examination, the doctor had taken note of Genevieve’s dreamy detachment and had asked many probing questions that Genevieve had tried to answer truthfully while not betraying herself.

  “Can you remember being a child? What is your earliest memory?” the doctor asked, head cocked, hands busy taking notes.

  “I try not to think about when I was little. It makes me sad.”

  “You were how old when your mother died? Eleven? You should remember your mother very well.”

  “I don’t think about her,” whispered Genevieve. “Really, really, I don’t.”

  This was a lie. She remembered her mother often, but the remembered mother was the cellar mother she couldn’t talk about, the mother it was dangerous even to think about! Everything she remembered of the covenantly upstairs mother was implicit in the final scene: the shadowed room, the smell of sickness, though even then it was the cellar mother who had whispered, her voice full of desperate urgency:

  “Remember what I have told you, darling girl. It will be hard and perhaps loathsome to you. I am sure the hard road is the one you must take. Yours may be the last generation, the one for whom all the practices were meant. Oh, I hope so. Remember our times together. Follow your talent. And, my love, listen for word from the sea!”

  Those were her last words to Genevieve. No one else had ever called her darling. She tried to explain to the doctor without explaining. “I’d rather not care about things too much, doctor. When I do, it becomes … troublesome.”

  On hearing this, the doctor frowned. The life expectancy among noblewomen was unaccountably short, and the doctor felt many of them died from this lack of involvement, this separation from life. She was sufficiently concerned that she spoke to Mrs. Blessingham about Genevieve’s detachment.

  “Well, that dreaminess is so typical of dear Genevieve,” said Mrs. Blessingham disarmingly. “Her mother was much the same. Thank you, Doctor.”

  Later she spoke to Genevieve herself. “Is it true you cannot remember your mother?”

  Genevieve started to say yes, remembering in time that this was Mrs. Blessingham, who knew almost everything.

  “No, ma’am. I remember her perfectly well. I just don’t want to talk about her.”

  “Why is that?”

&
nbsp; “Because of what she said when she was dying. She said I was to walk a hard road. She said it might be loathsome.”

  “I see.” Mrs. Blessingham puzzled a moment. “So, since it will be hard and loathsome, you choose to take as little notice of it as possible?”

  Genevieve flushed. Perhaps that was true.

  Mrs. Blessingham, who almost never showed emotion, actually grimaced, as though with pain. “Genevieve, your mother was here. She was schooled here. I was an assistant here in those days, no older than she, and we were friends. It was her dying request of your father that you be sent here, to me. It was she who told me about your talent, for she had it, also.”

  Genevieve gaped, hearing this with a shock of realization. “Oh, Mrs. Blessingham, if she saw my future laid out for me, she must have had it, mustn’t she?”

  Mrs. Blessingham patted Genevieve on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about the doctor, my dear. She simply thinks you should be more involved in life. Well, perhaps the upcoming soirées will amuse you. Your father will be attending some of them, surely.”

  Genevieve’s heart sank. Though marriage was deferred until later, girls became betrothable at twenty, and all students over twenty attended the soirées. Elegant suppers were served; there was dancing or entertainment; and the students were paraded before their parents and potential suitors. Oh, no doubt the Marshal would attend, and Genevieve’s sagging shoulders betrayed her thoughts as she walked away while Mrs. Blessingham silently berated herself for having mentioned him.

  Whether Genevieve loved her father or not, she desperately wanted to please him, as life was infinitely easier when the Marshal was pleased. In this effort she sought Glorieta’s help in deciding what she should wear to the first soirée, which her father was sure to attend.

  “Wear the blue. It makes you look about thirteen. The younger you look, the more indulgent the papa.”

  “I don’t want him to be indulgent, Glory! I just want him to be … satisfied. If he’s satisfied with me he doesn’t … pick at me, and when he picks at me, it’s just … horrible.”