The soirees were more staid than a gala, but less formal than a dinner. A few dozen well-groomed men and primly arrayed women, apparently all strangers, would be in attendance. There was always a gregarious, tireless host, who did not so much mingle as stir the room. And there was little for her to do but sit around and nod and smile and glance wistfully at the piano. There was always a piano, and without fail, it was abused by a parade of unshy amateurs and tone-deaf flirts. It was torture. If any one of them sat down at the upright piano in the Blue Tattoo public house, they would’ve been booed into a weeping pulp.
Before each evening began, Mr. Fossor ritualistically repeated thorough directions of how she must conduct herself. She had to wait to be approached by the other guests. She wasn’t to mention her grave circumstance or make any reference to her tragedy unless asked directly. Fossor would broach the subject of her need when appropriate; Marya only had to be charming and to appear deserving of attention and assistance. “They are, my dear, very discrete people. The Talents are extremely generous, but they think charity crass. They prefer patronage.” He emphasized the word with a wag of his jowls.
Marya was a little offended by Fossor’s lack of faith in her social polish, but being generally ignorant of this society, she imagined there were probably a few points of etiquette with which she was unacquainted. “And, please, please, my dear, do not converse with any of the other young ladies. Their families are very protective, and will be nervous at how an… exotically grown young woman like yourself might influence their sisters and daughters. I know it is ridiculous, but it will save me from having to smooth many feathers if you will just keep to yourself.”
Exotically grown. He made her sound like a white stoat, or a nugget of amber, or a desert lemon tree. Marya couldn’t imagine a more dreary and counterproductive way to conduct herself at a party. But she dutifully kept his council. At least, she did for several nights.
The first few evenings, she’d felt a little confused by the gatherings. She smiled and nodded herself dizzy, and was generally ignored by everyone. She spent most of the evening eating finger sandwiches and sipping sherry or champagne. She entertained herself by privately inventing stories for the coiffed men dressed in all manner of suits, some courtly, some military, and some comically roguish. She’d never seen so many frilled collars. Every now and then, Mr. Fossor would appear with a captain or courtesan in tow, and Marya, understanding that these were members of the Coterie of Talents, would grace them with what she believed was sparkling banter. Yet, each time, her new acquaintances quickly found a reason to excuse themselves, leaving her alone with Fossor, whose jowls stood on either side of his frown like grim bookends.
It was hard not to be offended; she could only conclude she was doing something wrong, though she couldn’t imagine what.
After several evenings of feeling like the appendix of the party, she asked the exasperated Mr. Horace Fossor what she should do differently. In the corner of a conservatory, while a piano was haltingly plunked at by a young man who possessed more humor than talent, Fossor replied in a whisper, “I’m having trouble getting any interest in your circumstance, my dear. It can’t be helped, I suppose. You just naturally blend in.”
“What did you expect? You won’t even let me strike up a conversation. It is hardly my fault your parties are so dreadful. If I smile any more my cheeks will shatter,” Marya said in a whisper that ran hoarse.
“Is that really the limit of your charm? I thought you were more ingenious than that,” Fossor replied sourly, taking a pinch of snuff. He did not excuse himself when he sneezed. She began to worry that he would soon tire of trifling with her predicament and move on to other affairs, other charities. She doubted she could afford a better retainer, and did not doubt she would have to return the dress, which seemed her passport to these affairs.
“Let me make a direct appeal, Mr. Fossor. Perhaps a forthright request will be met with more...”
“Out of the question. If I’m caught with a begging woman on my elbow, I’ll be ruined for a hundred years. You don’t know who these men are. Believe me, they aren’t interested in pitiable creatures, in panhandlers and lepers. They are interested in souls that may yet be redeemed. No, obviously I’ve made a mistake...” A round of tepid applause interrupted them as the amateur’s playing faltered to a full stop. “I will make an excuse for us and we will leave,” he said stoically. He didn’t give her time to argue before turning away.
Marya described to Ogier in some detail the sudden gall she felt. She knew she had just been summarily dismissed by her champion, ignoble as he surely was, and would be soon left begging. Her decorum had its limits, and in truth, her pride had been pricked at the suggestion that she was too drab a personality to catch anyone’s attention. She decided that if she were to be cast from the aristocratic bosom, she would at least make a scene of her exit.
No one in the room took any notice of her smoothing her skirts under her as she lowered herself onto the piano bench, or her momentary petrification at the prospect of playing publicly after weeks of not practicing and with no sheet music to guide her. The only song that came to mind was an old sailor’s ballad, a romantic lament that was popular at the Blue Tattoo. It was, she was sure, horribly suited to the refined tastes of her audience, but with little choice and a new impish indifference, she dove into her performance with such force and volume that a gentleman who had been leaning on the piano leapt into his drink as if he’d been burned.
Her voice rang over her fierce playing like a bell in a storm. She abandoned her emotions entirely to the tragic lyrics that described the drowning of a young fisherman and his despondent widow’s suicide. She played through the gasps and the smattering of boos; she closed her eyes and sang herself to the brink, sang herself home to the cottage she shared with Tom, dear Tom, sang until his sincere, unsmiling face appeared before her and her heart broke.
Exhausted, she concluded with a drum of bass notes that fell upon a silenced crowd.
When she opened her eyes, a man with a close-cropped blond beard sat on the bench beside her, studying her profile closely. “You play like a deer runs: with terrified grace.”
Before she could reply, Fossor was at her elbow, though he seemed more aware of the man at her side than her. “An unusual performance, madam,” he said.
“Oh? I was trying so hard to blend in,” she replied, enjoying Fossor’s uncomfortable squirming. Fossor was about to offer a rejoinder when she turned her back to him and began a closer inspection of the man at her hip. He was richly dressed in a gray wool suit, and his face was handsome though his cheeks still carried a little of their youthful fullness. The beard seemed a means of compensation. “And you, sir, did you find my playing unusual?”
“You meant it to be unusual. You are proud of your strangeness,” he said with an intelligent smile, though he seemed a little overly impressed with himself.
“It is better to be pleased by one’s own distastefulness than to please another man’s tastes,” she said, eliciting an unguarded laugh from her new acquaintance.
“Marvelous! Mr. Fossor, you must introduce me to this charming hedonist.”
She spent the remainder of the evening conversing with the bearded young aristocrat, under the watchful eye of Mr. Fossor. She was careful to not directly mention her bad fortune or her lost husband, but still dropped discrete hints that she was not without care or need. For his part, he seemed sympathetic to her cause, vague though it was, saying that he was always willing to help a friend.
After they had taken their leave from the party, Fossor expressed his enthusiasm for the man that had occupied himself with her. “He is enormously important, a veritable prince. And he seems very keen on you. I think he is willing to help.”
Marya took this as some comfort, though she was still bothered by what seemed a byzantine process. Why were they all behaving like coquets? The man had been evasive about his own background, keeping even his name a secret. Surely local cus
toms couldn’t require the omission of one’s own name! “What is his name?”
“Be patient, my dear. He is famous and famously private, though I’m sure he will be more open with you in the very near future.”
All this Marya confided in Ogier the next morning while she sat for him.
And the morning after that, which would prove to be the last time Ogier ever saw her, she returned again with more stories about the mysterious aristocrat who she called the Count. “I call him that because it bothers him. And I don’t see why I should be easy on such a smug young man.” She had attended another party, a more exclusive one, and the Count had renewed his fascination with her, devoting most of his time to trading quips with her, with teasing her, with elaborating on the virtues of one sherry vintage over another. The remainder of the attendees seemed annoyed by her monopoly. The Count, oblivious to the scowls of the other young ladies, insisted that she play another song for them, insisted that she take a turn on the veranda with him, and finally insisted that she confide in him her greatest wish.
Overcome with relief to have at last arrived at the point of all their flirtations, Marya said, “I have lost my husband, and I need your help if I’m ever going to find him.”
The Count clasped her hands in his own finely gloved hands and immediately agreed. “I will find your husband.”
“Oh, that is wonderful! Wonderful! I was beginning to think...” She trailed off to stop herself from gushing. Their hands, his held over hers like oyster shells about a pearl, leapt joyfully.
To Marya’s great delight, the Count promised to produce her husband the following evening.
“Mr. Ogier,” Marya said that final day in his company, “I will be reunited with Tom this evening, if the Count has half the influence he pretends to.” She, again dressed in her pretty powder blue dress, came around Ogier’s easel to observe the fruit of a week’s labor. Ogier pronounced it finished, though he still felt he needed to tinker with the orchid leaves that periscoped over her pale shoulder. She examined herself only briefly before bursting into pealing laughter.
Understandably distraught, Ogier cringed before her as if he had been slapped.
“No, no, it is beautiful. A masterpiece! I was only thinking what Tom will say when I show him how I’ve spent the interim of our honeymoon. And I will show him. I must!” She laughed again. “Please, let me bring him by tomorrow.”
Ogier looked nervous; the eventuality of showing a married man his undressed wife hadn’t occurred to him. “I hope he has your sense of humor.”
“Absolutely not, but he is the most reasonable man alive. He will accept it as a fact, a strange and complex fact, but a fact nonetheless. He will understand it was this exercise that helped me survive until we were rejoined.”
“Then I’ll look forward to the introduction,” Ogier said, rallying his confidence.
Marya pulled the painter from his chair and embraced him with sisterly vigor. A contented smile pinked her cheeks. “You have saved me. I will never forget it. And it is a wonderful painting. I wish I could see all the world so. You have such a romantic eye.”
When she did not return the next morning, Ogier took it as a good sign: perhaps she had been reunited with her recently betrothed, and in the natural course of the morning, had thought better about exposing her husband (and herself) to the exact means of her survival. He could hardly blame her. Still, Ogier couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. She had been such a liberating, encouraging presence. She had been good for him. Though as he examined his painting of her figure, he had to admit the effort was flawed. His infatuation with her character had colored his recreation of her: he had captured the ideal but not the woman. This struck him as poetic: she had sat without pretense, and he, without meaning to, had made her appear vain.
Ogier was deliberating whether he should undertake a revision from memory, a risky prospect to say the least, when a young, bearded man interrupted his meditation by bursting onto the rooftop.
He was dressed in an unusual riding outfit, complete with stiff collar and puckered breeches. A red leather belt held the long holster of a pistol with a gold-plated grip. He was closely followed by two others, less richly dressed, each with squared shoulders and sabers swinging at their hips. By Marya’s descriptions of him, Ogier recognized the young man as her mysterious Count. They barged into his terrace apartment as if invited. Ogier did not think he should tell them they were not.
“You are Ogier,” the Count said without a note of question in his voice. “I have come for the painting you recently completed. Ah, here it is,” he said and positioned himself before the portrait Ogier had been recently critiquing. The paint still gleamed. “I’ll be honest, I expected much worse. This is absolutely an adequate likeness, Mr. Ogier. Congratulations. I will pay you ten mina for it; twice what it’s worth, surely.”
Baffled by the Count’s appearance in his home, Ogier didn’t immediately grasp the implication of his presence. “Why are you here?”
“Well, when Marya told me how you’d taken advantage of her destitution, my first instinct was to have you killed.” His hand dropped to the gold butt of his gun, and for an electrified moment, Ogier believed he would be shot where he stood. “Preying on young women to satisfy some carnal urge is really quite loathsome, Mr. Ogier.” The Count moved his hand from his pistol to open his collar a little. He leaned into the painting, his back to the painter, whose eyes darted toward the two men blocking his escape. “But then, a man loathes most what he reviles in himself.” Now he turned toward Ogier with a lecherous sneer, and everything became clear to him. “It’s no use fighting who we are.”
“You haven’t found her husband at all,” Ogier said.
“I have found him,” the Count replied, taking a step back, and bowing for cute effect. “I am he, all but sworn.” Then, returning to the painting, the Count looked to the bottom corner where Ogier’s signature stood in bright black letters. The Count pressed his gloved thumb over the letters, smudging them beyond reading. “I will let you live today because I am trying to be discreet. But if I ever see you again, or hear that you have spoken one word of me or my bride to be, I will do to you bodily what I have done to your signature. I will place my thumb upon you and press down. I hope I’ve been clear.” He removed the stained glove, showing the most pristine set of fingers, white as piano keys. “Take the painting,” he said to one of his men. The conscript saluted, grasped the painting as if it were a howling infant, and carried it out with arms stretched before him. The Count dropped a felt purse on the painter’s table. “You haven’t any sketches of her, have you? No other studies?”
Ogier shook his head vigorously.
“If I hear that you do...” The Count slapped Ogier violently across the face with his stained glove. While Ogier still stood with a round expression of shock on his face, the Count dropped the glove at his feet, turned on his heel, and marched from the terrace.
Chapter Thirteen
“The trade winds climb the Tower along a spiraling, tangled course. Ships do not rise up and down the Tower like plumbs on a line, but rather twist their way up like ivy climbing a tree. ‘Up’ is not at all a straightforward direction.”
- Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, I. XIII
He had not liked her. He did try to, much as any fair-minded educator worth his salt would try, but she seemed determined to be unlikable and to repel his weary patience like the mountain peak repels the exhausted mountaineer. He finally gave in to her incline, and let himself roll down the hill of her unlikableness.
He inherited her from the retiring headmaster, who looked like the very picture of the Old Year, departing with a white beard that was as long as a windsock. Senlin, for his part, looked as much like the New Year personified as he ever would: cheeks still pink and a little plump; eyes polished almost to tears with optimism for the young minds of tomorrow. Mr. Regimond DeSeay, wizened headmaster of fifty-three years and some eleven hundred students, bequeath
ed Senlin the keys to the schoolhouse one sultry summer morning, the inauguration attended only by a pair of clover-fat rabbits hiding by the hedge.
His thoughts already flying to the grand improvements he would make to this hopelessly antiquated shrine of learning, Senlin expected some final piece of sapient advice from the gray headmaster who seemed to be still chewing through the residue of his breakfast, though perhaps he was only warming the machinery of his jaw. DeSeay drew a shuddering breath. Senlin leaned in. DeSeay said, “That Marya Berks is a quizzical little turd. Good luck.”
“Precocious” was perhaps a more accurate (and certainly more generous) way of characterizing the young Miss Berks’ behavior in class. With chin cupped in her hand and elbow propped upon her desk, she seemed every inch the philosopher, an impression that was only compounded by her limpid eyes and crookedly pursed mouth. But if she was a philosopher, it was only a philosophy of the contrary.
She challenged everything he said, his logic, evidence, and authority, with such torturing persistence that Senlin was driven to punishing her on a near daily basis. First he took away her blotter and inkpot, a privilege of upperclassmen, giving her instead the slate and chalk that were the utensils of the novice. Then he assigned her the zinc pail and towel, which must, every night, skate across the blackboard, squelching all evidence of the day’s diagrams. And still she pounded him with insubordinate curiosity: Mightn’t the sun be made out of coal? Is zero really a number or is it more like an abstract letter? If we don’t know who built the Tower of Babel, could it have been built by some other species of animal that has since gone extinct— a species of ingenious beetle, perhaps?
He moved her desk to the front of the class so that the edge of it touched the front edge of his own, but she was not intimidated by the doubling of his attention, and instead took it as an opportunity to criticize the leggy nature of his chalkboard cursive. He turned her desk toward the wall, but she only raised her voice to interject, which made her echo as if she had the tonsils of a giant. None of it seemed to faze her in the slightest. The only thing that changed from day to day was the color of the ribbon lassoed about her hair, which was as ruddy as a maple in autumn.
Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1) Page 22
