Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  And so they walked until they came to a tavern, where Nick called for dinner and a chamber, all of the best, and pressed a golden noble into the host’s palm, whereat the goodman stared and said such a coin would buy his whole house and all his ale, and still he’d not have coin to change it. And Nick, flushed with gold and lust, told him to keep all as a gift upon the giver’s wedding day. Whereat Peasecod blushed and cast down her eyes as any decent bride, though the goodman saw she wore no ring and her legs and feet were bare and mired from the road. Yet he gave them of his best, both meat and drink, and put them to bed in his finest chamber, with a fire in the grate because gold is gold, and a rose upon the pillow because he remembered what it was to be young.

  The door being closed and latched, Nicholas took Peasecod in his arms and drank of her mouth as ’twere a well and he dying of thirst. And then he bore her to the bed and laid her down and began to unlace her gown that he might see her naked. But she said unto him, “Stay, Nicholas Cantier, and leave me my modesty yet a while. But do thou off thy clothes, and I vow thou shalt not lack for pleasure.”

  Then young Nick gnawed his lip and pondered in himself whether taking off her clothes by force would be saying her nay—some part of which showed in his face, for she took his hand to her mouth and tickled the palm with her tongue, all the while looking roguishly upon him, so that he smiled upon her and let her do her will, which was to strip his doublet and shirt from him, to run her fingers and her tongue across his chest, to lap and pinch at his nipples until he gasped, to stroke and tease him, and finally to release his rod and take it in her hand and then into her mouth. Poor Nick, who had never dreamed of such tricks, was like to die of ecstasy. He twisted his hands in her long hair as pleasure came upon him like an annealing fire, and then he lay spent, with Peasecod’s head upon his bosom, and all her dark hair spread across his belly like a blanket of silk.

  After a while she raised herself, and with great tenderness kissed him upon the mouth and said, “I have no regret of this bargain, my heart, whatever follows after.”

  And from his drowsy state he answered her, “Why, what should follow after but joy and content and perchance a babe to dandle upon my knee?”

  She smiled and said, “What indeed? Come, discover me,” and lay back upon the pillow and opened her arms to him.

  For a little while, he was content to kiss and toy with lips and neck, and let her body be. But soon he tired of this game, the need once again growing upon him to uncover her secret places and to plumb their mysteries. He put his hand beneath her skirts, stroking her thigh that was smooth as pearl and quivered under his touch as it drew near to that mossy dell he had long dreamed of. With quickening breath, he felt springing hair, and then his fingers encountered an obstruction, a wand or rod, smooth as the thigh, but rigid, and burning hot. In his shock, he squeezed it, and Peasecod gave a moan, whereupon Nick would have withdrawn his hand, and that right speedily, had not his faerie lover gasped, “Wilt thou now nay-say me?”

  Nick groaned and squeezed again. The rod he held pulsed, and his own yard stirred in ready sympathy. Nick raised himself on his elbow and looked down into Peasecod’s face—wherein warred lust and fear, man and woman—and thought, not altogether clearly, upon his answer. Words might turn like snakes to bite their tails, and Nick was of no mind to be misunderstood. For answer then, he tightened his grip upon those fair and ruddy jewels that Peasecod brought to his marriage-portion, and so wrought with them that the eyes rolled back in his lover’s head, and he expired upon a sigh. Yet rose he again at Nick’s insistent kissing, and threw off his skirts and stays and his smock of fine linen to show his body, slender and hard as Nick’s own, yet smooth and fair as any lady’s that bathes in ass’s milk and honey. And so they sported night-long until the rising sun blew pure gold leaf upon their tumbled bed, where they lay entwined and, for the moment, spent.

  “I were well served if thou shouldst cast me out, once the four-and-twenty hours are past,” said Peasecod mournfully.

  “And what would be the good of that?” asked Nick.

  “More good than if I stayed with thee, a thing nor man nor woman, nor human nor faerie kind.”

  “As to the latter, I cannot tell, but as to the former, I say that thou art both, and I the richer for thy doubleness. Wait,” said Nick, and scrambled from the bed and opened his pack and took out a blank ring of copper and his block of pitch and his small steel tools. And he worked the ring into the pitch and, within a brace of minutes, had incised upon it a pea-vine from which you might pick peas in season, so like nature was the work. And returning to the bed where Peasecod lay watching, slipped it upon his left hand.

  Peasecod turned the ring upon his finger, wondering. “Thou dost not hate me, then, for that I tricked and cozened thee?”

  Nick smiled and drew his hand down his lover’s flank, taut ivory to his touch, and said, “There are some hours yet left, I think, to the term of my bond. Art thou so eager, love, to become dumb stone that thou must be asking me questions that beg to be answered ‘No?’ Know then, that I rejoice in being thy cony, and only wish that thou mayst catch me as often as may be, if all thy practices be as pleasant as this by which thou hast bound me to thee.”

  And so they rose and made their ways to Oxford town, where Nicholas made such wise use of his faerie gold and his faerie commission as to keep his faerie lover in comfort all the days of their lives.

  Sacred Harp

  The first time I heard shape-note singing, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was in an old church in Cambridge, Presbyterian, I think, during a rainstorm. In a moment of weakness, I’d promised a friend I’d go hold her hand—she was trying to get out more—and didn’t feel I could let her stick. But I was feeling pretty crabby about sloshing my car through Harvard Square and finding a place to park and listening to a bunch of old folkies pretending they were Psalmodists. I was not being a lady about it, and Harriet had just told me she wished she’d never asked me to come. Then the singing started. I didn’t understand quite what I was hearing, but when the music started to rise, I rose with it, and stayed there for two solid hours.

  Harriet decided she liked Cajun dancing better, but I went back to that church every week until I was leading hymns regularly. When I moved away from Boston, I sat in on every choir I could find, all types, all styles. And when I fetched up here, I finally did what I’d wanted to do since the first time I’d led a hymn. I started a choir of my own.

  A choir of my own. Listen to me. You’d think it was the Robert Shaw Chorale instead of a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs barely able to tell Fa from Sol. Still, it’s mine. I founded it, and I’m the chairman. Our weekly singing is Monday night at seven sharp. People with kids complain that it’s a little late for them, but I can’t get here from work any earlier, not and get set up, so I just tell them that they’ll have to come early. This isn’t a social club, it’s a Sacred Harp choir, and all I really want out of life is for it to be a decent one. A better job and a steady relationship would be nice, too, but I’ll settle for a decent choir.

  This Monday night is typical. I show up at 6:45, wishing that I’d had more time to work out my list of hymns. I like singings to have a shape to them, to build musically and even thematically. Since it’s traditional to let other people lead hymns of their choosing, I don’t have complete control, but I do what I can.

  So I’ve hardly gotten my coat off and taken out the Xeroxed hymns I’ve found in a nineteenth century hymnal when Morton comes up to me, looking sheepish. Morton’s a sweet guy, if not very interesting—fortyish, scraggly, given to red plaid flannel shirts and playing with his beard.

  “Um,” he says. “I brought a friend. Hope you don’t mind. Jess, this is Gretchen, who started all this. She’s our, um, chairman.”

  What an idiot. He knows he’s supposed to call me the night before if he wants to bring someone along so I can tell him no. Now there’s a woman I’ve never seen before standing in front of me with her han
d held out, expecting me to smile and welcome her to our happy little family. I ostentatiously juggle my hymnal and my Xeroxes and she lets her hand drop.

  Whoever she is, she isn’t Morton’s girlfriend. She’s short and chunky and plain—not homely, plain, like whole wheat bread. She’s wearing denim overalls and a cracked brown leather bomber jacket and her hair is cut really, really short. It’s a bad haircut—well, mine is too; you can’t get a good haircut around here—but this is a particular kind of bad haircut I haven’t seen since I left Cambridge. There aren’t many wommyn living in this neck of the woods, if you know what I mean.

  “What do you sing?” I ask, praying she won’t say alto. We’re overburdened with altos.

  “Morton tells me I’m a treble.”

  It’s not a voice you’d expect to come out of a face like hers: a real girl’s voice, light and sweet. She grins at me.

  “Yeah. I’ve always wanted to sound like Tallulah Bankhead, but I hate the taste of scotch, and cigarettes make me sick.”

  I’m replaying her last comment. “Morton tells you? Haven’t you done this before?”

  “Nope,” she says cheerfully. “Sacred Harp Virgin, that’s me. Ignorant but willing, all the way up to high ‘C.’”

  “Great,” I say. Morton winces—he’s a sensitive soul. “Listen. I’m not in the business of teaching shape-note singing. It’s taken me years to get these people marginally up to scratch, and I don’t want them thrown off by someone who doesn’t know the music.” I turn to Morton, who is looking more and more like a Suffering Christ in plaid flannel. “You know the rules, Morton. Since she’s here, she can sit and follow in the hymnal, but she can’t sing.”

  “She reads music,” Morton says.

  “I’ve taken solfeggio classes,” the woman says helpfully.

  The clock on the wall tells me it’s 6:55. Out of the corner of my eye, I see April and Ben and the Barnabys waiting to get my attention. “I don’t have time for this,” I say. “Get Melissa to explain shape notes to you—she’s in the back row, braids, Fair Isle sweater. First sour note I hear, you shut up for the rest of the evening. Capisce?”

  For some reason, this makes her grin like a five-year-old. Her teeth are very even. “Capisco,” she says, and heads off toward Melissa, Morton gloomily in tow.

  April and Ben hand me a wad of hymn slips. It’s a system I’ve invented. Everyone who wants to lead a hymn writes its number and their name on a piece of paper for me to call out. It cuts down on arguments and bad programming.

  “OK, people, listen up.” Everybody pipes down. “Last call for slips. I’ve got two left over from last week. Rebecca, the third hymn’s yours. When you’re all in your places, we’ll warm up.”

  In two, three minutes, they’re all seated with their hymnals in their laps and their eyes on me; all except Morton’s friend, who’s whispering with Melissa.

  “Jess,” I say sweetly, pulling her name from random access memory. “We’re going to do a couple of scales, and then ‘The Young Convert’ on page twenty-four. The way this works, we sing the notes together first—Fa, Sol, La, Mi and so forth—and then the words to the verses. Until you learn the names of the shapes, sing la la la.” Melissa rolls her eyes, but Jess just looks extra interested. Bitch, I think, and raise the pitch-pipe to my lips.

  “From Fa,” I say, and we’re off, ragged on the first two notes, melding into a solid unison by the end of the scale. They rise with me from Fa to Sol to La to Fa, climbing steps of shape and sound, seeing the notes as we sing them, just as B. F. White and E. J. King intended, triangle to oval to square to triangle. The sound doesn’t stink for cold voices in a cold church hall. I lead them through a few simple exercises. I’ve got a good voice for leading, if I say so myself. It’s got a pretty limited range—sometimes the alto line gets too high for me, and I have to double whatever part is below it for a note or two. But it’s strong and clear and well-supported. We finish up “The Young Convert’s” “wonder, wonder, wonder” exactly on key.

  “Not bad,” I say. “Albion, fifty-two. ‘Come, ye that love the Lord.’”

  I always start with a simple, quiet piece, not too high in the treble, not too low in the bass. Five minutes of scales isn’t really adequate warm-up for any kind of singing, but we’ve only got the damn hall for two and a half hours, a half hour of which is wasted on juice and cookies and sweeping up afterwards. It’s astonishing how much mess forty people can make in two hours.

  Anyway. The purpose of the first piece is to tell me what color the chorus is going to be tonight. I have this theory, see, that voices are like colors. You know how a single color can have a bunch of hues or tints? Yellow, for instance, can be pale and acid, or soft and buttery, or bright and clear, or rich and golden. So can voices. That’s why a chorus is like a painting. As every discrete voice blends with the voices around it, note by note, brushstroke by brushstroke, they build up layers of color into a coherent picture, a recognizable melody. Some choruses I’ve heard paint Rembrandts; some paint Titians or Turners or Monets. Mine paints Warhols. On bad nights, it’s more like finger-painting, and even on good nights, they tend toward acid greens and neon yellows, Pepto-Bismol pinks and electric blues. I’m trying to bring us up to Grandma Moses.

  Tonight, we’re almost there. They drag the tempo, of course: all choruses drag slow pieces. But the sound I’m part of is deeper and wider than I’ve heard before, as if someone’s added burnt umber to everything. When we come to the end, everyone looks at each other and smiles.

  “One hundred and ninety-six,” I say, and lead them through the notes. “Alabama” is a simple fuging tune, with one lonely staggered entrance. The singers start out fine and strong on “Angels in shining order stand,” and then things fall apart. The basses muff “Those happy spirits,” and the trebles straggle after, throwing off the tenors and completely flummoxing the altos, who come in strong and pure at entirely the wrong moment. Everybody flounders on for a measure or so, then falls apart into nervous giggles.

  “You,” I say. “Jess. That’s it.”

  Melissa frowns. “That’s not fair, Gretchen. It wasn’t her fault. We all miscounted it. She’s holding up the pitch.”

  The treble section nods vigorously. “Please let her sing, Gretchen,” says Alice. “She’s really good.”

  “Listen,” says Jess, “I don’t want to make trouble. Gretchen’s the chairman. She says I shut up, I shut up. No problem.” Closing her hymnal, she folds her hands on top of it. Superior bitch. I’m damned if I’m going to let her take the moral high ground on me.

  “That’s right,” I say. “When I say shut up, you shut up. Did anyone hear me say shut up?”

  Melissa glares at me; April and Betsy, embarrassed, stare at the floor; Mary and Gwen exchange looks; Jess simply opens her book. I ignore them all and call the next hymn.

  “Gretchen? Gretchen.” Rebecca’s waving over in the altos. “You said the third hymn was mine. I didn’t get to lead last week.”

  She’s pouting—she’s got that kind of face—and the pout deepens as I explain that we need to do one that works before I let anyone else lead. “Before break, I promise, Rebecca. But you want it to sound good, don’t you, not like the hash we just made of ‘Alabama’?” She nods unhappily, and during “Mission” single-voicedly pulls the altos down a quarter-tone. The next two hymns aren’t much better. The singers manage to stay pretty much on-pitch, but the sound remains muddy and off-focus. I finally let Rebecca lead “New Lebanon” just before break, by which time she’s so twitchy she can hardly keep the parts together, and brings in the tenors a full measure early on a perfectly straightforward fugue. At this point, she bursts into tears and runs off toward the bathroom, leaving everyone a choice between stopping and limping through the rest of the hymn the best they can. They choose to limp, which shows guts if not good judgment, and then it’s over at last and they all make a grand rush for the stage, where April and Morton have set out cartons of O.J. and packages of Oreos,
with hard candy and Fisherman’s Friends for those whose throats need soothing. The usual break-time buzz of conversation is muted tonight, and nobody hangs around to ask me if I’m going to any concerts this weekend or whether I’ve heard the new Hilliard CD. I can’t really blame them. I’m not exactly Miss Congeniality, even when I’m in a good mood.

  I’m busy axing all the complicated hymns from my program when someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s Melissa, looking as determined and grim as a middle-aged woman with pink plastic rabbits on her braids is capable of looking.

  “Listen, Gretchen. Rebecca’s in the bathroom crying her eyes out and saying she’s going to quit. Joshua’s beside himself, and Zach says the stress is beginning to get to him. We’re amateurs, Gretchen—we’re in this because we want to get together and have fun once a week, not because we want a recording contract.”

  She delivers this speech all in one breath, as if she’s afraid she’ll forget a point if she slows down. When she’s done, she glares at me, daring me to lose my temper. Which I can’t do, no matter how much I want to, because a bad choir is better than no choir, and no choir is what I’ll have if my singers all decide to take up a less demanding hobby. So I swallow all the things that come to my mind about amateurs in general and oversensitive crybabies and New-Age wimps in particular, and I say, “You want me to talk to Rebecca?”

  “No,” says Melissa. “I think I’ve got her calmed down. Just lighten up, will you? And try to remember that I’m on your side.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”