Hope and the Patient Man

by Mike Reeves-McMillan

  “Yes, you did,” her father said. “So… you say he’s a gentle man? Has he…” He looked away from her, clearly embarrassed. “Has he… pressed you at all, for… has he, um, taken liberties of any kind, ah, with, with your person?”

  “Father!” said Hope.

  “Well, I have to ask.”

  “No, he has not. Quite the opposite, if anything. He is a perfect gentleman,” she said, with Realmgold-like dignity.

  “Oh, good. Well, Hope, you know, not every man is like that.”

  “I do know that, yes.”

  “And in fact…” he rubbed the back of his neck, “um, in my youth, ah…” he appeared to be fascinated by something out of the frame.

  “You took liberties with Mother’s person?”

  “You could put it like that, yes.”

  “I don’t imagine she took that well.”

  “No.”

  “Oh,” said Hope. “That explains rather a lot. Though not why you became oathbound.”

  “Well, as to that… um, do you know the date of our oathbond ceremony?”

  “No, I don’t. You never celebrated it.”

  “Quite. Well, it was the first of Late Growing One in the year 522.”

  Hope’s birthday was the fifth of Late Fallow One, 523. She did the standard calculation of five half-seasons, a shift-cycle and a shift-round in her head, and came up with the approximate date of her conception: the twelfth of Late Sowing Two. About 70 days prior to her parents’ ceremony.

  “I see,” she said. “That explains even more. Including why Mother has always seemed to resent me.” Her stomach sank and tightened.

  “Yes,” said her father, very quietly.

  “Well,” said Hope. “That’s given me rather a lot to think about. Thank you, Father.”

  “I’m sorry, Hope.”

  “I’m sorry too. But at least… Well, I have some prospect of improving on your history.”

  “I don’t see how you could do worse.”

  “No. I… I need to go now.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Take care, Hope.”

  “You too,” she said, and broke the sympathy between the devices.

  Bucket had gone out — his hat was missing — and Dignified and Rosie were working on adjacent benches in a thick silence. Hope walked home, stumbling every so often as she turned over the new information again and again.

  She remembered her first time with Faithful. He had got her drunk and then pressed her, over her objections, saying that he loved her and that if she loved him she would let him. She had given in. Was that how it was with Father and Mother? It was hard to imagine weak, worried Father talking Mother into anything she didn’t want to do, but perhaps they had changed. Perhaps she had become angry, and he had become weak and worried, since then. Perhaps he had got her so drunk she couldn’t say no.

  I am the result of a loveless union, she thought. Well, she had always known that, more or less. My mother resents me because she never wanted me. Again, not really that new an idea, more a confirmation than anything.

  So why did she feel so hollow and unanchored?

  She lay on her bed when she got home and had a cry. She cried at the fall of a leaf since hitting her head, it was like her tear valve had broken and was leaking at the slightest thing. When she finished, her head felt stuffed with rags and she couldn’t concentrate enough even to get up and fetch her papers, let alone work on them. She lay there, her thoughts going round and round in a whirlpool of doubts and fears.

  Eventually, she slept, and woke groggy and itchy. Washing her face and eating and drinking gave her enough alertness to fiddle with some papers, but she made little progress on her article. Her mind kept lurching back to the pit that had opened in her image of her own life.

  Chapter Twelve: A Friend for Rosie

  Bucket met Briar for lunch near her office. “How are you, Bucket?” she asked.

  “Well enough in myself,” he said. “But I’m worried about the Master. Well, more about Mistress Rosie, actually.” He laid out the situation as he’d explained it to Hope.

  “We wondered if you could talk to her,” he said. “You’re good at that.”

  Briar smiled and nodded to acknowledge the compliment. “When does she work until?” she asked.

  “Until I make her stop, usually. Late. You know what the Master’s like.”

  “I do. So if I dropped in around dinner time, I might be able to invite her?”

  “I suppose. Would you?”

  “Of course. I remember what it’s like to not know anyone. You want to come along?”

  “She might not talk if I’m there,” said the gnome.

  “How about I turn up and invite you, and you say no, but suggest that she goes instead?”

  “That sounds like it might work. She’s innocent as a moth, she won’t think for a moment that we might have planned it.”

  “Good.”

  Sure enough, Rosie seemed to suspect nothing when Briar asked her to dinner instead of Bucket, though she did take a little convincing.

  “Don’t worry, Mistress,” said Bucket, “I’ll vouch for her, you won’t end up on the plate.” He grinned, and so did Briar, and Rosie, after an uncertain look between them, agreed.

  Briar took her to the nearest decent sit-down eatery, a place called Cedarwood which was, indeed, built and furnished entirely out of cedar.

  “So,” said Briar, when they had ordered, “how are you settling in?”

  “Oh,” said Rosie, “all right.”

  “Really? I know Dignified can’t be easy to work for.”

  Rosie’s mouth set. “He’s a very brilliant man.”

  “Indeed he is,” said Briar in the calming tone she used when someone she was negotiating with started to get aggressive. “And I admire his ethics.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He’s an inspiration to me, actually, part of why I decided to work for the freedom of the gnomes. How are you getting on with the gnomes, by the way?”

  “Oh, the gnomes are very friendly. Especially Mister Bucket. Though they have some odd prejudices about women and machinery.”

  “Yes, Hope’s told me.”

  “You look very like her, you know,” said Rosie.

  “So people tell us.”

  “Oh, you do. Are you cousins?”

  “No relation at all, as far as we know. We met completely by chance. Have you heard the story?” Briar leaned in conspiratorially and dropped her voice, glancing about, and Rosie automatically copied her. “No,” she said.

  “She and I were seeing the same man. We didn’t know until Hope burst in on him and me unexpectedly.”

  “That’s awful!” said Rosie, blushing scarlet.

  “I know. Hope cursed him.”

  “She did what?”

  “Cursed the weasel, so that his little weasel was no good to him, if you know what I mean.”

  Rosie looked lost.

  “She made him impotent,” Briar clarified, but that didn’t clear up Rosie’s expression. “She… made him incapable of performing. Sexually.”

  Rosie blushed again, though Briar suspected the older woman still had only an approximate idea of what she was talking about. Didn’t these High Silvers teach their children about this stuff? “Anyway,” she continued aloud, “the university authorities made her take it off. Against regulations to use magic on another student without their permission. She got in a lot of trouble for it. But one good thing came of it, at least, we met each other and decided we were friends.”

  “You just decided?”

  “More like realised. Have you ever met anyone and felt that you just fit in with them, even with all their differences?”

  “No,” said Rosie quietly. “Well… perhaps.”

  “Recently?” said Briar. Rosie nodded.

  “Would that be Dignified, by any chance?” said Briar, having noticed her defence of him earlier.

  She nodded again, not meeting Briar’s eye.
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br />   “I see. But according to Bucket, you’re not getting on very well at the moment.”

  “Bucket said that?” Rosie, startled, looked Briar in the face again.

  “Yes. He’s worried.”

  “Well… Dignified is hard to get to know.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I mean, we talk, but it’s all about mathematics and mechanics. In Dwarvish. And I’d really like to know him better, but I don’t know how.”

  “As a person, or as a man?”

  “I beg pardon?”

  “Do you want to be his friend, or… more than that?”

  Rosie’s blush was all the answer Briar needed.

  “I see,” she said, thinking, it’s true, then, there’s someone for everyone. “Well, I think the first thing you need is a more experienced woman friend who you can confide in, who can give you hints about what to do.” She looked around theatrically, then pointed to herself. “Oh, here’s one.”

  “You’d do that for me?” said Rosie in a small voice.

  “Why not?”

  “You hardly know me.”

  Briar gestured that aside. “I’m fond of Dignified, in an odd way, and very fond of Mister Bucket. I’d do it for them, even if I didn’t know you at all. And you seem like someone who would be good for him.”

  “Do I?” said Rosie, surprised and apparently unconvinced.

  “You’re enough like him to fit, without being so like him that you can’t talk to ordinary people,” said Briar. “I think that’s a good thing.”

  “But… but I’m not attractive.”

  “Who says?”

  At that moment, their food arrived, and Rosie didn’t answer. When plates had been arranged and cutlery deployed, Briar asked, “What do you mean about not being attractive?”

  Rosie sighed. “Mother has been trying for years to push me off on some Gold. We’re not close enough to the line of descent to be counted as Gold class, you know.”

  “Yes, I think Hope mentioned that.”

  “Well, Mother — the money comes from Mother’s side, it’s Father who carries the name — Mother wants grandchildren who are Golds. So she invites these awful men around.”

  “Awful how?”

  “Shallow dandies who only want my money and can’t talk about anything but clothes and the fashionable events they wear them to,” said Rosie. She took a knife to her fish with more force than was strictly necessary. “And they say things. I’ve heard them. I have very good hearing.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Things like, ‘You’d have to be desperate for money, wouldn’t you?’” said Rosie, in a constricted voice. She took a drink of water and appeared to have trouble swallowing it.

  “Oh, that’s cruel. Oh, Rosie.”

  “Well, it’s true. I’m not elegant, like my sister. She’s no great beauty, but at least she’s not… gawky. And all my features are too big, and I can’t do anything with my hair.” Tears stood in Rosie’s eyes.

  Briar put down her knife and took her companion’s hand. “Rosie,” she said, “Dignified doesn’t care about appearances, or money, for that matter.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “Have you looked at him lately?” That got a frown from Rosie, which was an improvement on tears. Briar went on, “No, but seriously, anyone further from a shallow dandy would be impossible to find. And anyway, with a little work we can highlight your best features and give you some more confidence in yourself.”

  “I don’t have any best features.”

  “Of course you do. Eat your meal, now, and don’t worry about anything. Auntie Briar is on the case.”

  Hope, when Briar got home, wasn’t asleep yet, which marked an improvement of sorts. Dark rings still circled her eyes, though (the bruise had faded, at last), and she looked like a different woman from the cheerful one Briar had seen on her return from Gulfport the previous night.

  “Darling, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I talked to my father,” she said. “Apparently I’m part of the reason my parents don’t get on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he avoided giving me the details, but reading between the lines, he pushed her to have sex with him, she got pregnant with me, and… I assume the families made them get oathbound. That’s how it’s usually done in the islands.”

  “Most places,” said Briar. “Oh, but Hope, that’s a problem between them, not you. It’s not like you did anything.”

  “I know. Still, it makes a horrible sense of everything about my childhood.”

  Briar put her hands on her hips. “Hope at Merrybourne,” she said, “you are not going to let your mother’s problems turn into yours. Are you?”

  “Well…”

  “You are not. You have lots of people who love you, not least Patient, and that is what you are going to think about. Not your mother, who, frankly, sounds as if she has more problems than an unplanned pregnancy twenty-four years ago. Right?”

  “Of course, you’re right, Briar. Thanks,” said Hope. “Where were you tonight? New man?”

  “Didn’t Bucket tell you?”

  “I’ve been here all afternoon.”

  Briar filled her friend in on Rosie.

  “Rosie and Dignified?” said Hope. “I can see that, I suppose. If anyone could be with Dignified, it would be someone like her. Funny to think about, though.”

  “I think we should have her round here and talk to her together, help her out a bit.”

  “That’s a kind thought,” said Hope. “Tomorrow?”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll ask her when I go in to the lab.”

  Promptly at the twelfth deep bell on the following evening (she had inherited her respect for other people’s time from her father), Rosie fetched up in front of a smaller, plainer house than she had imagined Mage Hope living in. Of course, the mage was from a servant family, so she didn’t have inherited money, she’d made it all herself. That presumably made a difference. Which would mean that this was the kind of house Rosie could afford to live in, if it wasn’t for her parents. Hmm.

  She found the downstairs door unlocked at this early-evening hour, and discovered that in fact the mage didn’t even have the whole house; it was divided into four flats. Rosie clomped up the stairs in her work boots, and Briar opened the door before she could knock.

  “Come on in,” she said. “Hope’s just out getting a loaf of bread.”

  There were cooking smells, pleasant ones, and a table half-set, and Briar seated her and chatted while she stirred a pot on the stove.

  The door opened, and Hope walked in, her boots silent as always. “They were out of the sourdough,” she said. “Had to get plain rye. Hello, Rosie.”

  Dinner was a kind of stew, a dish with which Rosie had limited experience. Her parents’ cook concentrated mostly on neat, complicated dishes, and stew was neither, certainly not as practiced by Briar. The meat was a little tough, but it was definitely a hearty meal, especially with the heavy rye bread. She sat back uncomfortably full.

  “More?” said Briar.

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” she replied.

  “You sure? You could do with a bit of feeding up.” Briar herself was a healthy… peasant, it was the only word that fit, lawyer or not.

  “Leave her alone, Briar,” said Hope. “Let’s clear away, and then we can get tea and talk.”

  “So,” said Briar, when they sat back down with big mugs of strong tea, “our mission is to get Dignified to notice you. I suggest dressing up as a cogwheel, in the first instance.”

  Rosie shot her a glare. She didn’t like Dignified to be mocked, even by someone as kind as Briar.

  “Only my humour, darling. Sorry.”

  “You’re… fond of him, then?” said Hope.

  “Well,” said Rosie, “I… admire Mister Dignified greatly, it is true.”

  “And what does he think about you?”

  Rosie thought about this. “I honestly don
’t know,” she admitted. “He seems to value me. As a colleague.”

  “That’s not as small a thing as you might think,” said Hope, responding to Briar’s eye-roll. “And he told me he likes her.”

  “When?” asked Rosie, sitting up.

  “After you asked for the job, when I told him,” said Hope.

  “Those were his actual words? ‘I like her’?” said Briar.

  “Near as I can remember.”

  “And does he like many people?”

  “He doesn’t notice many people,” said Hope. “I can’t begin to fathom what goes on inside his head, but if anyone has a chance at romance with him, it would be Rosie.”

  Rosie felt a small, a very small, hopeful warm feeling in her belly at this news.

  “And,” the mage continued, “whatever else you might say about him, Dignified would never lie to you, betray you, or manipulate you. It’s just not in him. He’s the opposite of Faithful.” That confused Rosie; hadn’t she just said that he would never betray someone? How did that make him the opposite of faithful?

  “Well, that’s a good start,” said Briar. “You have, um, better clothes than that?” She gestured at Rosie’s pragmatic working garb. “I seem to remember from the investors’ meeting last year, you were dressed quite fashionably. There was a hat.”

  “My mother,” said Rosie, with some hauteur, “buys me clothes from the best shops.” Her shoulders sagged. “But I still look like a stick in a sack,” she confessed.

  “Briar,” Hope said, “Dignified doesn’t notice…”

  “We’re not doing it for Dignified,” said Briar. “We’re doing it for Rosie. If she doesn’t feel attractive, how’s he going to see her?”

  “Fair point,” Hope conceded.

  “I think we should start with your hair,” said Briar.

  “My hair…” Rosie’s lips worked. “It’s never been… it’s always…”

  “I daresay. I know a herbalist who makes her own shampoos.”

  “Do you?” said Hope, surprised.

  “I do. We don’t all wake up looking gorgeous,” said Briar. “Some of us have to work for it.”

  Hope stuck her tongue out at her friend. Rosie blinked at them both, turning her eyes from one to the other. She had never seen people play at arguing before. Her parents, when they argued, did so with massive dignity, and all her arguments with her siblings were in deadly earnest.