Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “I have explored it,” she said. “Prior to choosing it as my place of residence for a time. I have a little house on the hill, there, up the Street of Immaculate Intentions. Perhaps you will visit me there.”

  “Perhaps, madam,” I murmured.

  “Captain! Ho, captain!” The call came from the pier, slightly below us and to our right. Captain Karon craned his neck to see the person waving her flowered umbrella at him. I had not seen her approach, though she was worth the seeing now she had arrived, a full-bodied and bright-haired woman, skin glowing ivory in the creamy shadow of her highly domed parasol. Her voice was softly rounded, an amorous moo, so solid and smoothly finished a sound that it seemed to writhe itself toward his welcoming ear, probably tickling all the way down as it demanded attention.

  “Mrs. Gallimar!” he shouted in return, taking off his gold-bedecked cap and stumping toward the gangway where passengers were already clotting up like ants on a mango, waiting to disembark. Captain Karon slid behind the barrier and down the gangway to meet the lady on the pier. This was no doubt the lady he had mentioned to me—and to everyone—so frequently during the voyage.

  She spoke clearly, making no effort to avoid being overheard. “Oh, Dear Captain Karney. Here you are again, but so late!” She tapped him on his chest with an extended forefinger, the finger bending backwards like that of an oriental dancer, flexible as cable, as she looked up at him through fringed eyelashes with an expression of admiring coquetry. “I expected you weeks ago.” Her voice lowed, like that of an amorous bovine; it sinuated like a snake—a veritable cow-python of a voice.

  The captain flushed and shifted from foot to foot, as though aware of a sudden warmth in various parts of his anatomy. I wagered idly to myself that Mrs. Gallimar, with her smooth skin and her smell like a garden full of flowers, had that effect on most males. “We’re right on time,” he objected. “Not even a day late.”

  “Oh, but I was so eager!” She tapped him again, smiling up at him with wide and innocent eyes. I knew those eyes. Candy had had such eyes. Such eyes made a practice both of flirtiness and of not noticing men’s response to it. It was a way of telling them not to presume upon what seemed to even the most iron-groined among them to be unmistakeably sexual signals. This contradictory manner probably left most men as it left Old Karney now, opening and closing his hands helplessly and with a distinct shortness of breath. Mrs. Gallimar was, not to be too vulgar about it, a tease. I had seen teases in the twentieth. I put my hand up to hide a knowing smile as she cooed at him. “I’m going with you when you leave!”

  He was dumbfounded. His doubt showed in his face, for the lady nodded her head, slowly and emphatically, signifying that he had not misunderstood her in the slightest. “I have to go upriver, Captain. To Novabella.”

  “Novabella?” He could not help his faint grimace nor I my start of slight surprise. From what I had been told, it was not a town for the likes of Mrs. Gallimar. Novabella, in the crew’s opinion, was not a town for anybody much.

  “The Viceroy is sending me,” Mrs. Gallimar confessed. “It seems there’s a gallivant eating the people there, and I’m to take a provisional permit.”

  “A permit?” he breathed, as though he could not believe it.

  “I know it’s hard to credit, but a permit it is.” She nodded, her lips pursed in a serious and childlike expression, her eyes saying that though one could hardly believe it still it was true.

  “A permit,” he said again, trying the consistency of the words to see if there was anything believeable in them. During the days of our voyage the matter of permits had come up more than once. Permits, I had been told, were mythical creatures, less common than gallivants. There were bodies lying unburied for generations in Chinanga, for want of permits. There were bastard great grandchildren of couples who had hoped to marry but had not, for lack of permits. To obtain a permit! Ah, what had happened to occasion this?

  “How many people has the gallivant eaten?” the captain asked.

  Mrs. Gallimar burrowed in her tiny purse, digging a chipmunk tunnel through the contents, bringing out a tiny leather covered notebook with a mother-of-pearl pencil at one side, leafing through it reflectively to find her notes. “Two children,” she said sadly. “And at least one adult person. And it has bitten the left buttock and part of a breast off a woman married to someone important.” She shook her head as though wondering at the novelty of it as she put the notebook away once more.

  “But a permit!” the captain said, still in awe.

  “I know.” She nodded, seeming to admit the weirdness of it, the notion that a permit even in the abstract would be strange enough without having one in the absolute to deal with.

  “So you’ll be coming along,” he breathed.

  “I’ll be coming. As well as Colonel Esquivar, just in from the jungle, going to hunt the gallivant. And Mirabeau, the chaperone.”

  “Aha,” said the Captain. “That’s it! They’ve found one!”

  Mrs. Gallimar nodded. “I think so. What else would move the Viceroy to issue a permit? They must have found one.”

  I shifted my position to get the sun out of my eyes, deciding in that moment that I wished to be introduced to Mrs. Gallimar. With the old woman trailing behind me, I went to the gangway and, with a barely audible “excuse me,” slid behind the barrier as Captain Karon had done.

  “Well, well be leaving tomorrow,” the captain was saying as I, we, approached. “Or maybe the day after that. As soon as we can discharge the cargo.”

  I smiled at the captain. He bowed in my direction. I asked to be introduced to the lovely lady of whom I had heard so many fascinating things. For a moment Mrs. Gallimar’s hand rested in my own as the captain mumbled, “Mrs. Gallimar, Lady Wellingford. Lady Wellingford, Mrs. Gallimar.” The old woman behind me said, “Ahem,” and the captain began again. “Mrs. Gallimar, Senora Carabosse; Senora Carabosse, Mrs. Gallimar.”

  The old woman’s name brought me up short. Surely I had heard it before. Surely I had seen that name somewhere.

  I was given no time for reflection. Mrs. Gallimar expressed a belief that meeting me was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to her. Her eyes ate at me with tiny glances, she nibbled at me with her ears, almost twitching at every word I uttered. She wondered if I had breakfasted, and when I told her I had not, she invited me to accompany her to her house, for if the Stugos Queen was to leave soon, she would need to see to her packing. She left the captain with a last titillating stroke of her fingers along his arm, and we sauntered up the cobbled street down which she had come, back to the gentle amenities of a little pink house set behind a sheltering wall on the south side of the Street of Immaculate Intentions. Behind us the old woman stumped along, disconsolate, watching me as though she were a fish and I a fly. When Mrs. Gallimar and I went into Mrs. Gallimar’s house, Senora Carabosse went on up the street, glancing at me over her shoulder.

  While breakfast was being prepared, we sipped passion fruit juice as Mrs. Gallimar toyed with a pet ocelot. The ocelot had been a gift from Colonel Esquivar himself, Mrs. Gallimar remarked, seemingly to the ocelot. The colonel had recently recovered from being poisoned by his wife, the Viceroy’s sister, monstrous Malisunde, who was a notoriously inefficient poisoner. It was said the colonel had more to fear from his mistress, the Viceroy’s wife, despicable and fecund Flatulina, who had threatened to batter him to death and would ho doubt be aided in the attempt by the elder half-dozen of the colonel’s numerous bastards. Such a fate had been long predicted. It would scarcely come as a surprise, even to the colonel himself. Did I think such an end was likely?

  Unprepared for her including me in the conversation she had been having with her pet, I took a moment to reply that I had not really considered the matter.

  She went on to say that very shortly the Viceroy’s palace would make the formal announcement of the hunt for the gallivant. Everyone would begin to wonder, just as the captain had, why the Viceroy would have iss
ued the permit at all. By nightfall there was not a creature in Nacifia who would not guess that the people of Novabella had found the virgin. The one everyone had been hunting for. So Mrs. Gallimar told herself and the ocelot, while the ocelot watched me and I watched both of them, listening.

  “The virgin?” I asked. Something within me trembled, as a glass will quiver, in resonance with a distant bell.

  “A virgin with a difference,” she replied almost in a whisper. “The Viceroy has been seeking one for a very long time.”

  “A virgin with a difference? What difference would that be?”

  “One wonders, doesn’t one. One has all kinds of strange ideas.”

  Her softly voiced ruminations were interrupted by the arrival of breakfast, brought in by the two maids, Dulce and Delice, upon a wheeled table and set in the large bay window overlooking the garden. I smelled muffins and my mouth watered. We sat at either side of the table to confront a platter of tiny delicious sausages and breakfast breads oozing with fruit.

  As we sat down, I asked, “Have you lived in Nacifia long?”

  “As long as one does,” she replied. “Sometimes that seems very long indeed.” She gave me tea.

  “You know, I should suppose, almost everyone?”

  “Oh, my dear Lady Wellingford, not almost but definitely everyone. Some better than others, of course, but yes, everyone. Each last wee babe, each tottering elder. And why not? Hasn’t there been time enough to know them all?” She passed the tiny buttered muffins, and I took several.

  “Does the name Elladine mean anything to you? Elladine of Ylles?” The muffins were spread with sweet butter which clung to the tongue like a lover’s kiss. Why was I thinking of lover’s kisses?

  She thought, furrowing her brow delightfully. “What time-of-life person are we speaking of. Would she be a young-appearing woman?”

  I nodded. Elladine would surely be a young woman. Did fairies ever grow old?

  “Her appearance?”

  “Ah,” I murmured. “Very lovely. Very lovely indeed. Rather like me around the eyes.”

  She examined my eyes, shaking her head firmly. “No, my dear Lady Wellingford. There is no one like you around the eyes in all of Nacifia. I could not be mistaken about that.”

  I sighed. She passed the marmalade. We went on to speak of other things. She told me while in Nacifia I must see the cathedral, the marketplace, the clownery.

  Our enjoyment was interrupted by a firm knock at the door. A moment later, the caller was announced: Licencee of the Bureau of Public Morals, Chaperone First Class, Roland Mirabeau.

  Mrs. Gallimar composed her face into an expression of dignified pleasure and rose to greet her guest. He entered, bowing, and stood up to reveal a face which would not have disgraced a classic sculpture. He had stature and presence, a curly moustache and eyes that glittered. I was introduced. He bowed again. He took Mrs. Gallimar’s hand and expressed his compliments. Mrs. Gallimar seemed unstimulated by this encounter, and I wondered why.

  She signaled to Delice that another chair should be brought to the table and a third place laid.

  “Senor Mirabeau,” she began.

  “Roland,” he instructed with a polished smile, which was only very slightly peremptory, as he took a cup of tea. “Though we have not seen one another for a time, lovely Mrs. Gallimar, still, we are acquainted.”

  “Roland,” she began again, returning his smile with one of her own. I knew that smile. Captain Karon had described that smile, the smile flirtatious, which had been known to conquer whole regiments of men while they were merely marching past.

  The chaperone assumed an appropriately spellbound expression, but the mechanics of this process were as entirely visible to me as they were to Mrs. Gallimar. Though the face before us went through a series of calculated adjustments indicating enchantment, its owner was not, in fact, enchanted. Mrs. Gallimar recognized this fact as quickly as I did. Her mood changed, and with it her manner. The smile flirtatious was tucked away. “This gallivant,” she said in a businesslike voice, “seems to be causing a good deal of trouble.”

  The chaperone sat back in his chair and said calmly, “Indeed.”

  “It must have been very difficult for them to obtain even a provisional permit,” she said.

  “Undoubtedly the people of Novabella offered a sufficient inducement,” the chaperone replied, accepting her offer of a cuscumbre muffin. “As you and I both know they must have done, Mrs. Gallimar. Let us not trifle with one another. I have come to inquire what your part in all this may be.”

  “I am to convey the permit to Novabella,” she said. “Prior to providing it to the Gallivant Committee, I am to ascertain that all is as it has been represented. The Viceroy wishes me to do so.”

  “Is there some doubt that the gallivant has indeed eaten the children it is said to have eaten?” he asked innocently. “If so, how will you be able to tell whether they met their fates by being eaten rather than by some other equally dismembering cause?”

  “There is no doubt about the beast. As to the other matter, I will ask questions,” she said. “The Viceroy trusts me to come to the truth of the matter. I am confident of my abilities in this regard. Still, you may expect to be paid your proper fee.”

  “Oh,” he said casually, biting into a bit of brown bread, “The fee is the least of the matter. It distresses me that the Viceroy does not think me capable of ascertaining what I am sure you are also being sent to ascertain, Mrs. Gallimar. He wants to make doubly sure that she’s truly a virgin, doesn’t he.”

  Mrs. Gallimar flushed, only slightly. “Perhaps the Viceroy felt that … well, a woman would be better qualified.”

  “Nonsense,” he said crisply. “Any graduate of the Bureau of Public Morals Institute of Chaperonage is quite capable of knowing on the instant whether One is or One is not.”

  “Perhaps he is sending me, dear Roland, to keep her company on the return voyage.” Mrs. Gallimar pouted prettily and cast her eyes toward her tiny shoes. There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence.

  “Is it permitted to ask,” I inquired, “what sort of difference this virgin is to display?”

  Roland’s perfect lips lifted slightly away from his white teeth. “Difference, dear Lady Wellingford. How can one define difference. The virgin is to have it, else she will not do. Were she lovely as the dawn and pure as the spring rain, I would still find nothing there of interest to me unless there is also difference.”

  The words set up that odd resonance once more. Something I had heard. Something I had seen. Where had I, myself, encountered reference to a virgin with a difference?

  So musing, I almost missed Mrs. Gallimar’s grumpy response to the chaperone’s comment. “I quite understand,” she said.

  I felt that I, too, was beginning to understand. Roland Mirabeau was unmoved by women, by any ordinary woman, by any except an extraordinary woman. Mrs. Gallimar knew this, though her customary manner had caused her to overlook it for a few moments. Roland was, in fact, unteaseable, therefore of little interest to her.

  He took another bite of brown bread. “We can hope she is as represented, Mrs. Gallimar. If she is, I will know it.” He snapped up the last bite with a click of his teeth and a quick lick at his lips. “Since our departure is imminent, I will take my leave, lovely Mrs. Gallimar, in order to put my baggage in order and assure that it is properly stowed.”

  He bowed himself away from us both, murmuring, “Lady Wellingford, such a delight,” while Mrs. Gallimar sat unsmiling and annoyed. I thought as I made my own farewells that for a woman of Mrs. Gallimar’s disposition Roland Mirabeau would not be an amusing companion on a lengthy voyage.

  [“I had hoped to get to know her,” I said to Israfel We sat across from one another in my house on the Street of Immaculate Intentions. We were drinking tea.

  “She looks at you and is afraid,” he replied. “She senses your interest in her and is put off by it. Your acquaintance is too new. You have offered her your frie
ndship too soon.”

  “I shall persevere,” I told him severely. “Too soon or not, she will need me.”]

  18

  Aboard the Stugos Queen, I put on my cloak and went into Nacifia to see all those things Mrs. Gallimar had recommended I see. If we left upon the morrow, there might be no other opportunity to investigate the city.

  I went first to the Cathedral of Helpful Amphibians, which was beautiful, outside and in. Though the materials were not ones Gaudi could have used, the place reminded me somewhat of pictures I had seen in the twentieth of a Gaudi cathedral. I sat down near one of the pillars, crystal carved into the likeness of a jet of water, leaping toward the sky. The whole cathedral was a fountain in stone. It was lit from high green windows with a dim, liquescent light, and in the side chapels statues of the helpful creatures sprawled or lay or climbed, each after its own nature.

  I took off my cloak for coolness sake when I sat down. It was not long thereafter that I was surprised by a voice behind me saying, “Is there anything I can do for you, daughter, or are you merely sightseeing?”

  “Ah … Father,” I murmured, turning about so I could see him. “Sightseeing. Yes.”

  “You’re the lady rescued from the sandbank,” he smiled at me as he came to sit beside me. “What do you think of our cathedral.”

  “It’s very beautiful,” I said honestly.

  He nodded in agreement, beaming at the pillars.

  “At home,” I said, struggling for truth without complication. “At home we would think it strange to dedicate a cathedral to … ah … amphibians.”

  He seemed slightly startled. “What would you dedicate a cathedral to?”

  “A martyr, perhaps,” I suggested. “An angel?”

  “Were they made by the Creator?” he asked.

  I nodded that they were.

  “Well, so are these,” he said with some asperity, gesturing around him. “Are some parts of creation more worthy than others in your homeland?”

  I told him yes, that in my homeland (thinking of the twentieth and twenty-first) only humans were worthy of anything at all. All else was disposable.