"Well ... yes ... I've never been to school, but I always thought conformity was insisted upon."
"They insisted but I resisted. Their punishments were punitive and depended solely on a lad's aversion to expulsion, which for me was the goal. All my disruptive and incorrigible behavior is secondary to the point, however. The greatest trouble derived from those very things I named—my family's title and fortune. By my eighth year I owned more self-assured arrogance and conceit than a king—I suppose I saw myself as such. Condescending to obey the headmasters was far, far, beneath me—they were, after all, according to the rigid hierarchy of the English class system and an eight-year-old's mistaken notion of the world, considerably beneath my station, rank, and title, 'Not fit,' I told my mother, to polish my boots, yet alone instruct me.'"
"Oh, my," Juliet said, staring at him, effortlessly replacing the handsome face with an eight-year-old version of pride and arrogance, the idea not surprising to her somehow, and yet—
"Aye, I try now but fail to imagine how hard that would be to stomach in an eight-year-old. I was—to put it bluntly—an unmitigated terror. One has only to imagine a lad with a loving and doting parent, an army of servants at his beck and call, not just a nursery but an entire floor filled with toys and diversions for my amusement. By the time I was eight, I had not just a horse but one of the finest stables in England. My parents did manage to impart a great love and respect for the creatures, at least those with four legs, these horses particularly. I don't remember the exact incident, my mother tells me the story. Apparently I was finding fault with one of my grooms for a minor infraction. My mother overheard me as she passed in the garden, overheard me telling a grown man that he was, 'a dim-witted imbecile, who would henceforth refrain from soiling my horses with his hands.' And to this day, she says it was even less the outrage of what I said but the way I said it: as if the poor man was not just a pathetic imbecile but a soul hardly classified as a person, a creature not worth a second of my contemplation except as he elicited my scorn."
Leif and Gayle chuckled at the idea, never having heard this part before, and Garrett sighed with a bemused, though strangely sad, smile as he thought of the boy he had once been. "Ah, Leif, how can you laugh? Imagine if Gayle did that, if you had realized too late the monster you had made of your own flesh and blood?"
"I'd like to think I would be as smart as your mother, Garrett, but I'm afraid I'd just have kept boxing his ears. Though, God knows, Gayle has always been only the pride of my life."
Juliet wanted to know: "Well, what did your mother do?"
"Juliet, she sent me away, and where she sent me reflects on my mother's infallible character as well as her wisdom. She was horrified by me, this tyrant created not just by our title and fortune but probably more by the extremities of my particular character. I won't go into the details of how she forced me but she did; she took from me my natural position as her son, took my title and my fortune, and for four years she indentured me to an impoverished Welsh family, the Merrills, a family of seven who carved the barest living from an isolated area in the northernmost region of England. With no way to contact my family, I was forced to stay there. The adjustment was hard. For four years I knew these people's poverty, I knew the backbreaking toil of the fields from dawn to sunset, how it felt not just to go without shoes or a coat in winter but the torment of being without decent food most of the time."
Juliet kept perfectly still, mesmerized and quite speechless at hearing this story. "Aye, love," Garrett said, seeing her expression, "I was humbled. I cannot begin to tell you how, except that I remember that first cold winter when John's back left him crippled. Dear God, I was frightened. The family would soon perish, I knew, and I began having terrifying nightmares of death and burial, nightmares in which I would see Mary, the mother, crying as one of her children was laid to the ground. Ah Mary, sweet, kindhearted Mary," he said in a soft, saddened voice, "whose goodness and simplicity were still new and strange to me ..."
"Well, I remember the point where the nightmare would come true. I was starving and bone tired, facing the awful dark of the night when the children would wake for want of food, knowing they, like their poor mother, could not last many days longer without. I suppose I saw, without ever thinking on it, that it would be easier to die myself than to witness Mary's grief. So I left. That night I walked twenty miles in the snow with cloth wrappings around my feet to reach our nearest neighbor, where I begged for just enough to keep death from our small house. I was told that nothing would be given to a beggar, that I had to work for my food. I remember working twelve hours fixing a roof, then the doors on their barn, feeding their animals and cleaning the stalls, collapsing twice with a need for sleep more intense than the hunger. And oh, love, I remember my joy when the man finally handed me my pay: a basket that had six puny potatoes, half a bread loaf, and a small slab of pork fat. For in that basket was the power over death. Life for five small children. And I knew a gratitude then that made me drop to my knees on the snow-covered ground and kiss that poor, bewildered farmer's feet."
Juliet did not at first understand why the room was blurring as she stared at him, until his hand came to her face. She covered his hand with hers and for one long moment she held its warmth against her cheek, because for that moment it was the hand of a young boy who was cold and starving and frightened, yet a boy who was given God's own will to travel a hard road on a dark winter night to discover, finally, God's mercy. As if this hand were a precious thing, she set it carefully on the table and rose, the revelation of who Garrett really was brought a shake of her head as she left the room.
For a long while no one spoke. Leif, too, could only wonder. He only knew this part of Garrett's life from Lady Evelyn, who had a completely different version. In order to survive it, she had arranged that she should hear no news of her son or his hardships for the duration, no matter what, with the single exception of a threat to his life. So it was, until the day his four-year tenure was up and she saw for herself what this most desperate move had reaped.
Garrett was changed beyond her wildest dreams. John Merrill had died the second winter, leaving the entire family's welfare on Garrett's young shoulders. Had Evelyn known, Garrett would have been removed immediately. She had known her son was inventive and sharp, but it was hard to believe a boy had changed this poor family's circumstances in so many ways. He invented a small mechanical windmill device, one that allowed for irrigation of the fields, so that half the day didn't have to be spent in watering the crops; he was then able to almost double the output of the soil, experimenting with and finally deciding on a combination of fish and manure as the best fertilizer; he built a better plow; he won a number of county races at various fairs, finally accumulating enough to purchase a better plow horse; he had the queer idea that chickens were so stupid that a light shining at night would trick them into making more eggs, and he was right. The list of Garrett's deeds was endless, and finally included a new, larger house he had built for the mother that very last spring ....
To this day, Garrett still took care of what he considered his second family. The mother lived at his family's London residence. Garrett made certain each girl married well—to one of his own people—while her two sons managed his properties.
Garrett got up and walked over to the bookcase, examining the titles as if he might choose one. The movement broke Gayle's silent contemplation and made him say, "Garrett, go to her."
He shook his head. "I can't court her openly, Gayle; it would be a disaster. She has been hurt badly, and God knows, it takes time and patience to earn a wounded creature's trust: two things I am not known to have in any great degree. I want so badly to hurt her no more, and yet—" He stopped, shook his head and said, "Dear God, I am in trouble. . . ."
Sitting on the sofa, Juliet only pretended to read the book in her hands. Gayle and Garrett argued a point, a point she found terrifying.
Gayle pounded the table where Garrett sat peering through the s
cope. "Why? Why is it the more something rots and decays, the more they come?"
"Most of them feast on dead flesh."
"Aye, but how do they find it? If they have no eyes, do they fly through the air until a scent draws them to it?"
Her large blue eyes widened a fraction. She stared into the empty space of the air, half expecting to see the little horrors flying toward her. They were invisible, though—
"Maybe." Garrett discussed the monsters calmly. "I can't help but suspect they are born on it. That rotting flesh gives them birth—" Garrett stared at the little beasties, gathering and swarming in ever-increasing numbers on the tiny piece of rotting meat. "Gayle, look. Here's one we havent seen before. Long, with dozens of little legs."
Oh my! Juliet swallowed, her gaze riveted to the spot with a wide-eyed look of horror and fascination. Dozens of little legs-
He got up to let Gayle have a look.
Several years ago, Garrett had been introduced to the curved glass that magnified the world a hundred times so that the invisible world of the little beasties became visible. The microscope had so fascinated him that he had had one of the glasses made, at enormous expense, and now he was one of the dozens of investigators the world over who undertook the arduous task of identifying and charting the hundreds of tiny creatures to be found, and what they were found in. He had just charted his sixty-seventh, after spending half a year cross-checking these little beasties against the list of a Viennese doctor, who in turn would use Garrett's charts to cross-compare with another, and so on. The charting alone was endless, but what often consumed Garrett's and Gayle's conversations were the mysteries the little monsters presented.
The two men talked for some time more until Gayle left for his afternoon duties. Juliet watched Garrett return to the scope, her curiosity becoming a different kind of monster.
What were they doing? What did they see through the scope? These little beasties, things that flew through the air to land on dead flesh and eat it?
Oh, how she would love to look and see these queer things for herself! Once, when he had been called out of the room, she had almost gathered the courage to look down that tube. What stopped her was not the idea of what Garrett might do if he found her—she knew now he had no punitive aspect to his nature—but rather the idea of what she might find. Tiny flesh-eating little creatures . . .
Without making a sound she set the book down and moved behind Garrett, who remained at the table peering into the scope. A smaller wood box of slides sat near a much larger shallow crate filled with the jars, each of these holding various identifiable and unidentifiable horrors. They all looked bad, rotting dead things, but the worst, the very worst, she thought, was the jar with a dead chicken fetus inside. He occasionally looked up to write in his ledger or to replace one slide with another. So lost to his contemplation, it was nearly a half hour later that he became aware of who stood behind him, peering over his shoulder with irrepressible curiosity.
He turned around to find her. Juliet jumped back, her eyes making an anxious circle, a ridiculous pretense to find an excuse for why she stood so close.
Garrett was no longer willing to humor her pretense. "That's it. Come take a look, love. I know you want to."
She hesitated but briefly before stepping forward. Garrett pulled the chair back a bit but made no move to relinquish his seat. He motioned to his lap instead.
Her eyes widened in protest. "Gayle'does not have to sit on your lap when he looks through the scope!"
"For good reason. It would be alarming should I want him there, wouldn't you say? Come, love, you're not tall enough to see by sitting only on the chair."
A close inspection of the height lent this statement some credibility. It never occurred to her that she might stand and look through the scope just fine. Sitting might be a requirement, for all she knew. She would have refused had her curiosity let her but the fact was, she wanted to see, and badly. After finally swallowing her pride and the pretense of indifference, she could hardly see how she could beg out now.
She moved in front of him, and as rigidly as possible she sat upon his leg. Her legs dangled between his, while his hands came to her waist as if to provide balance. Immediately she knew it was a mistake. Her heart greeted the chaste contact with embarrassing eagerness. She closed her eyes, trying to control the sudden tumult as she felt his warmth reach around her, while that ever-so-pleasant scent of his, spices and sea and just him, filled her consciousness, leaving little room for the little beasties, small as they apparently were.
"You're blushing, love."
"Who, me?"
He smiled at this. "No, I was addressing little Vespa. Why, just look at that rosy color reaching the tips of her little whiskers."
So concerned about the effect of his nearness, it took her mind a long minute to catch up with the words, then she blushed more with the realization of the effect of his presence on her thoughts. "It's just so warm in here . . . ." She fanned her face to give some credibility to the comment.
"Aye, very nearly unbearable."
She did not understand what those eyes were saying to her, presenting her with warmth and humor and something else she could make no sense of but thought best not to consider. Oh, this was a mistake—
"Go ahead. Look and tell me what you see."
Apparently he remained unaffected. She should be thankful for the small favor. Leaning over, she peered into the tube, and in the moment it took her eyes to adjust to the changed circumstances her thoughts teeter-tottered. She stared at the most curious sight: tiny round blobs, like splattered rain drops crawling on line-thin legs, crawling everywhere. She watched one crawl right off the side and withdrew with a gasp.
Garrett laughed. "They can't hurt you."
"They're like . . . like-"
"Little insects. Aye. And they are everywhere, on everything-"
Her eyes made a study of his face as she took this in. "Everything? Not everything?"
"Yes. They are on everything that was once alive or growing, on absolutely everything that has moisture in it. Yet I've also found them on things like cloth, knives, wood, just everything. As a matter of fact, I can wipe one of my glass slides clean and actually watch them grow from nothing. Here, look again and see if you can spot one that's starting to split in two."
She looked back. She watched the cluster of perhaps two dozen little creatures until she saw one tearing itself apart. It took about two minutes before it was completely split, and now where one had been, two crawled away. "Oh heavens, it had a ... a child!"
"I don't think so. They come apart fully grown and able, at least as far as we can see. It's just how they multiply. Here love, if you promise not to be frightened, I'll show you something."
Garrett removed a clean slide, wiped it with a wine cloth and placed it under the scope. "Look and tell me what you see."
She did and turned back to him. "Nothing, they're all gone."
Garrett removed the slide and holding it, he reached a hand to her mouth. His gaze filled with humor and that something else she didn't understand as he gently pried her lips open and, to her horror, wet his fingertip with her spit. This he wiped on the clean slate and placed beneath the scope again. "Look what's in your mouth, love."
Garrett waited for her reaction, which was slow in coming indeed as she stared incredulously at the swarms of little beasties crawling on her spit. She withdrew slowly, reaching both her hands to cover her mouth as if to stop any more from getting inside. "I ... I need some water."
Garrett laughed, his eyes filling with understanding. For a week after he had first realized they were in his mouth, he imagined he could feel them there. "It won't get rid of them. They're in the water, too. You see," he gently brought her hands away from her mouth to explain, "they live inside of us, not just in our mouths but also in our flesh and blood. They are like air; they are everywhere. I don't think they do anything—"
"But you said they eat flesh!"
"I th
ink mostly—or noticeably—only when you're dead. They seem to grow fastest on dead things. Which makes me think they're the actual mechanism of decay. Think of them as a natural part of the universe; they have always been here with us. It's only that we don't see them with our eyes."
Another half hour passed as he discussed his different theories, showing her different slides, each slide presenting her with a different form. Soon the little creatures didn't seem nearly as frightening to her, they were, after all, so small— "Here, I'll show you a mold." He reached for the jar with the chicken fetus in it.
Juliet's eyes widened, and without thinking of it, she recoiled from the idea—recoiled into his chest. She turned with a gasp to right herself but he caught her in his arms, cradling her as one holds a small child. He only laughed. Her clothes proved a flimsy barrier to the warmth and sensation he caused in her, renewed and redoubled by the brief absence of her self-consciousness.
Juliet found herself staring into his eyes—absolutely the worst thing she might do according to all the sentimental poets she had read. Yet she could not turn away, as if he had caught her in a strange and magical spell that kept her to his will, making her aware of danger.
"Garrett."
She said his name in a whisper and then forgot why. Time stopped, stretching as he studied her: the uncertainty in her eyes, the darkening blue color there, the dark lashes and the satin arch of her brows, all set against the smooth white skin. Those lips were the opening to desire, a desire he fought now to tame. A single, faint mark, a quarter the size of a button, scarred her cheek, a tiny remnant of a childhood bout with the pox. He brushed his thumb over it, banishing stray wisps of her hair as he did so.
A shiver went through her. She reached her hand to the spot, her confusion plain. She wanted badly to get up, but she was afraid he'd stop her. For reasons not clear to her, she shied from putting him to the test. As if she couldn't bear the thought that he'd force her again, a thing that would upset this fragile truce between them. Yet she could feel her lips tremble with the idea he would kiss her again—"Garrett, Garrett," she whispered in a plea for help. "You're doing it again."
Jennifer Horseman Page 21
