She simply wanted to wear it after I had.
“This dress will be yours,” I said. “When the time comes. If you still want it.”
“Of course I’ll want it,” she said. “But Father would never let me.”
“Ever since the journey, you’ve tied Father around your little finger. The dress is yours.” I paused. “Jesse arrived today, didn’t he?”
Silky blushed deeply, but she only said, “Well, you invited him.” She paused. “You really think someday I’ll wear the dress?”
“Yes,” I said. “But don’t grow up too fast.”
Silky smiled. I reached for my robe for the Ceremonial Bath, and the wrapper fell open.
“Your scar.”
“It’ll never go away, Silky.”
“You’re still perfect.”
“The journey marked us.”
And she was unusually quiet for a while.
Violet, again my witness, now a year older and as far from a groom as ever, led me to the Ceremonial Bath. When I burst out of the water to the surface, there was applause, and, as I made my way to the skin artists, the witnesses began snacking on little lavender tea cakes and lemon drop tarts.
I thought of my trip to the quiet country and of speaking to my mother. This was all very different—bustle and hurry and talk and ceremony. Lots of ceremony.
I wondered how my groom was faring.
Silky talked more about the flowers as the skin artist drew intricate patterns on my hands and up my arms and across my chest and throat. It came to me that Silky was nervous too. The whole ceremony was all too much like the wedding to Leth.
The soft brushes tickled, and I pulled my hand away from the skin artist who was working on my wrist.
“Sensitive skin,” said Silky. Then she put something in my hand. It was a little lavender tea cake.
“If you get that down your front,” she said, “or if you have sticky hands at the ceremony, I will not be pleased.”
“It’s going to be all right, Silky,” I said.
“Look at the blush roses,” she said. “I’ve never seen any so fresh or so plentiful at any wedding. Not any.”
“He grows them on his land.”
“He doesn’t have any land.”
I laughed. “He has enough,” I said.
“I was going to put some wild roses in your bouquet—the way I did when Leth was the groom—but he had already done it.”
“Show me.”
Silky handed me the bouquet, and I touched the wild roses with my fingertips. The skin artist had finished, and she packed up her brushes and pots of ink. She seemed happier than she had been at my last wedding.
“Thank you, Scilla,” said Silky.
“A magnificent job,” I said.
We both knew the skin artists. They were the most celebrated artists in Arcadia; their work was exquisite. And then, without warning, I was overwhelmed by the past.
So much death.
Someone was tuning an instrument outside the preparation tent. The bard had arrived. Renn wouldn’t be singing; he and Niamh and Jesse were guests of honor.
Charmian, Niamh had told me, had reluctantly settled into her new Arcadian home in the west.
The bard was now in tune and had started a quiet ballad. I went to the tent opening, looked out and found myself staring at Bard Fallon.
Silky followed my gaze. “Father found him,” she said. “He was singing for pennies. Father’s going to pay him a lot to do the wedding festivities.”
“There isn’t enough money in the world to repay him for saving us from Garth,” I said.
“He wanted to play for free,” said Silky.
Bard Fallon looked up from his playing, met my eye and smiled. Technically he was overstepping his station even by looking me squarely in the face, but, given our adventures, we were on even footing. Or, more accurately, I was in his debt. And the rules and ceremonies that so enforced the divisions between high and low were changing. I had already spoken with the heads of some of the more oppressive Houses; I knew their nasty secrets now, and caste lines were beginning to blur. There would be more to come. Much more.
Then Silky was at my side again, pulling me away from the tent opening.
“It’s time to do your hair,” she said. “Or you’re going to leave your groom waiting about an hour with the merger officials and the Arbitrators, and you know he’ll hate that.”
“He will,” I agreed. “I wonder what he thinks about all this.”
This, apparently, was finally too much for Silky.
She pulled me to a chair, pushed me down into it, and shooed away the honor girls, the hair-wreath maker, the comfit maker waiting for me to taste her samples, the two extra personal maids, the seamstress, my father’s legal advisor, my own legal advisor, even Silky’s legal advisor—all there to make sure that not an inch of land ended up in the wrong hands. She found two stylists engaged in brief sexual congress behind a screen, and she shooed them out, too. Not much could shock Silky anymore.
She faced me, an arm on each side of the chair.
“Do you want to marry him?”
There it was. Bold and plain and clear.
“There’s nothing more I want in the world.”
“You’re a Great Lady, Angel,” she said. “Your dowry is a nice chunk of Arcadia, and if you wanted—“
“Don’t go there, Silky.”
“You’re a Great Lady,” she said. “There. I said it again. You could play the part a little more.”
“Let me see your toes.”
“What?”
“Your toes.”
She had had them painted in three shades—cherry, plum and sunshine—and the designs announced that she was a Lady of a Great House, and single, but of a status that meant that marrying her probably wasn’t even worth dreaming about.
“It took hours,” she said, “and I loved every minute. I wanted to celebrate your wedding, Angel. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I love your toes, Silky,” I said. “And you more than deserve the pleasure they give you. It’s not the same for me.”
“Why not?” she pushed at the chair with each word.
“I’m damaged, Silky,” I said. “You’re young, and you’re bright and fair and wonderful, and you heal fast. I’m one of those stupid little maimed songbirds you used to pull away from the cat and try to nurse to health.”
Silky looked deeply unhappy.
“Some of them did all right,” she said. “Keet the Robling was all right.”
“Keet was a deeply troubled Robling.”
“You just have to get through today.” She curled up and sat at my feet.
“You know better,” I said. I lifted my eyes.
Above Silky’s head, through a crack in the tent, I could see towering black storm clouds on the horizon; they were joined to the earth by a dark, sweeping curtain of rain. I watched as bolts of lightning lit up the inside of the clouds. I had never seen anything like it. A storm as tall as Heaven.
“Look, Silky,” I said. She stood and peered out of the tent.
“You’ll be married before it reaches us.” But she looked a little alarmed.
“Maybe.”
There was a polite scratching at the tent opening. A servant called in— “The hair artist’s here. Havelok.” The servant, obviously curious, peeked into the tent. “He’s here all the way from the other side of Arcadia.”
“Go away,” said Silky. “Go away now.”
The servant left.
Silky, with her fingers, traced the intricate paintings from my hands up to my throat.
“You’re beautiful.”
“I suppose we should get on with getting ready.”
“You want to be rescued again, don’t you, Angel?”
And as I said it, there was a noise at the back of the tent, as if someone were throwing pebbles.
Silky scrambled to her feet. She smiled. And she was sad.
“I think your groom’s going to rescue you anyway,” she said quietly.
Trey slipped into the tent and into my arms. His face had healed more, but only his eyes, green and deep, would ever give away his thoughts. They did so now.
He smelled of wild air and roses.
“I’ll hold them off,” said Silky. But just remember—when you’re done undamaging each other, or whatever you’ve planned (you notice I don’t ask), I’ll be waiting here. Because I go where you go, Angel.”
There were tears in my eyes, but I was giddy with joy. “I’ll be back for you,” I said.
Trey took a wreath of wild roses and put it on my head. I dressed for the road with the clothes I had originally worn into the tent.
“It looks like we’ll be going through a storm,” he said.
“We’ve been through other storms.”
“Bran and Jasmine are at the back,” he said. “Shamble will be our packhorse—I think the stable boy wonders where you got such a plain beast. I didn’t mention you stole him.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’ll be married on my land. By the old forms. We’ll sleep in my bed.”
“I’m not listening,” said Silky.
“We’ll start to heal.”
“Trey,” I said. “You’ve given me my life.”
“We’ll return soon enough,” he said. “But a little more on our terms. And, of course, we need to get Silky.”
Silky was weeping, but I was too excited now for tears.
The enormous number of wedding preparers waited outside the front gate. We stepped out the back, through the rip that Trey had made into this brittle, artificial world, and soon we were on the outside of all of it.
Renn was holding the horses. Jesse and Niamh were by his side.
Silky stood back against the tent, her golden hair acting as a curtain of protection.
“Stall them, and give us half an hour to get away, Silky,” I said.
And Silky ceased weeping.
“Of course,” she said. And she handed me my bouquet of roses.
I turned to Trey, and I realized I had never seen him look so happy.
Now my mind was on the road in front of me. I mounted, as did Trey, and we turned toward the bridge across the stream that marked the property.
The future, at that moment, curled around me.
Trey. And a child. And Silky and Jesse. And later more children, who had names that marked our journeys. Outside, sometimes, a raging summer storm. But inside, the storm stilled. We would grow older, and the world would change, and we would pass through it together. Suddenly Silky laughed, and I realized we wouldn’t be alone. And I understood at last the final word in The Book of Forbidden Wisdom. I understood love.
THE END OF
THE BOOK OF FORBIDDEN WISDOM
And they are gone: aye, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my indefatigable and wise agent, Richard Curtis.
To David Pomerico, my editor, and his assistant, Rebecca Lucash.
To Judith Gelman, patient copyeditor.
To my creative writing professors at Stanford University, including John L’Heureux, the late Albert J. Guerard and the late Robert Stone. I owe a debt of special thanks to Nancy Huddleston Packer, without whom I probably wouldn’t have written either The Book of Forbidden Wisdom or The Garden of Darkness (Ravenstone, 2014).
To my wonderfully supportive colleagues in the English Department at Smith College.
To Mimi—Irene Dorit—a wonderful mother-in-law.
To my late father-in-law, Murray Dorit.
To the memory of my parents, Paul Murray Kendall and Carol Seeger Kendall, both writers who always just assumed I would be too.
To my sister Callie—Caroline Kendall Orszak—to whom this book is dedicated. Thanks for being a superb critic and reader—at the very beginning, and in the home stretch as well.
To Sasha Dorit-Kendall and Gabriel Dorit-Kendall, for their love and support.
Finally, to Rob. For everything.
About the Author
When GILLIAN MURRAY KENDALL was a child, she spent multiple years in England while her father researched his biography of Richard III, and her mother wrote children’s books. She thrived. She had stumbled into a wardrobe, and her enchanted world was England. That sense of belonging-in-the-strange shaped both Gillian’s life and her writing. In the 1980s, the months and months she spent in Africa waiting in lines for kerosene and milk and rice or camping while being circled by annoyed lions was a new normal, while Gillian found the once-familiar Harvard, with its well-stocked grocery stores, alien and unknown. She saw things in a way she could not before. Recently Gillian spent two years in Paris, where learning a new culture, a new strangeness, resulted in the writing of her first book, The Garden of Darkness, and the beginning of The Book of Forbidden Wisdom. Gillian is a Professor at Smith College, where she teaches English literature, primarily Shakespeare. She is married to biologist Robert Dorit and has two sons, Sasha and Gabriel.
You can learn more about Gillian at gilliankendall.org, and follow her on Twitter (@GillianMKendall) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/gillian.kendall1).
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BOOK OF FORBIDDEN WISDOM. Copyright © 2016 by Gillian Murray Kendall. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
EPub Edition MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780062466105
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062466112
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nbsp; Gillian Murray Kendall, The Book of Forbidden Wisdom
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