by Alan Gordon
“You watched her, you filthy, perverted dog,” accused Sylvie.
“I watched her, Domina,” he said. “And more than watched in time.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“There came a night, as she lay pinned to her scarlet sheets by yet another fat, sweaty merchant, that I thought I saw her look directly at me. She smiled, and I caught my breath. For that brief instant, I felt the pain leave my body. It was miraculous.”
“Blasphemy!” cried Sylvie.
“Old servant of whores, let me tell my story,” he said. “I must tell it now, or I may never tell it again.”
“Please, Sylvie, we need to hear this,” I urged her. “Pray, senhor, continue.”
“When her last customer had left, when the lanterns had been doused and the front door closed and barred, when the women on either side had collapsed into snores, she came to the window and looked out. ‘Senhor,’ she whispered. ‘Can you hear me?’ ‘Oc, I can,’ I whispered back. ‘Can you see me?’ she asked. ‘I can, and I make no apology for it,’ I said. ‘I ask none,’ she said. ‘I know who you are, and what you have suffered for Christ’s sake. I have long known you were watching me. It is our secret, senhor, one that thrills me more than any man may do.’
“Well, there was a pretty thing,” he said. “All the time I thought I was watching her unsuspected, and she knew. She had left the shutters open—for me. She had screamed her passions into the night—for me. And now, we were speaking without pretense.
“’Senhor,’ she said. ‘Will you show your face to me? Your true face.’ ‘It is not a face that bears showing,’ I replied. ‘It is a twisted, ugly thing, and not deserving of view by one so fair.’ ‘But I would look upon it,’ she said. ‘I hear your voice, and I feel the man behind it, underneath the cursed skin. Let me see it.’
“I stepped into the moonlight and showed her,” he said. “Waited for her to scream, or laugh, or worse, express pity. But she did none of those things. Do you know what she did?”
“Tell us,” I said.
“She said, ‘You are beautiful, senhor.’ Beautiful! Me, a twisted, scabrous, misshapen remnant of a man, and she called me beautiful. ‘It is cruel of you to mock me, lady,’ I said to her. She said, ‘I do not mock. You have watched over me like a guardian angel, although I deserve none. You look at me, and you do not judge. You do not condemn.’ ‘I look, lady, because that is all I ever shall do,’ I said. ‘You think me better than I am. I look because I would touch, but touching would only cause us both untold agonies.’”
I glanced over at Sylvie. She was now looking directly at the screen, still with the kerchief pressed to her face.
“She smiled at me. ‘Tell me how you would touch me,’ she said. ‘Tell me, and I will tell you how I would touch you.’ She let her gown fall away and stood in all her beauty at the window. I did the same. And we made love. We were fifty feet apart, but I have never felt closer to anyone in my life.
“It became our evening ritual, our whispered encounters. Her way of letting me know that she had survived the degradations visited upon her body by men, mine of letting her know that I had survived the degradations visited upon my body by Fate. It made her feel safe. It made me feel whole.” He started to weep.
“We were both deceived,” he said. “She is gone, and all of my pain is returned threefold. I could not save her.”
Sylvie was weeping now, the kerchief moving to her eyes. I thought about poor Julie, spending her best years in a bordel, a blur of bestial men in rut. I saw her through Montazin’s eyes, saw her come alive for the first time, and I wept for her death, and for the loss of her life, which happened long before her death. There we sat, the three of us. The only people in the world who still cared enough about Julie to weep for her a few days after the rest of the world had forgotten her. But I still had a task to accomplish.
“The night she was killed,” I said. “Did you see it happen?”
“No,” he said. “I wish that I had. I would have staggered across with what’s left of my strength and strangled that bastard myself.”
“But your evening encounter?”
“Happened as it always did. I watched her with that man with the fancy cloak. He had her wearing it at one point. Just the cloak, of course, nothing else, and she swirled around the room with it like a conjurer’s demoness. I watched as she teased, then struck, and then surrendered to him. Then he fell asleep, and she came to her window and I to mine, and we made love and whispered to each other. ‘My angel,’ she cried out. And when we were done, she lay in bed by the slumbering drunk, and I watched over her until her eyes closed. Then mine closed as well. It was the clamor the next morning that awoke me.”
“You never told anyone of this?” I asked.
“No one,” he said. “No, wait. I confessed it to Father Bonadona.”
“The priest at Saint Agnes?”
“Oc. He comes here once a week. Not the holiest of men, but he’s trying. Said that if Jesus could sit with lepers, then so could he.”
“He puts us to shame,” I said. “Senhor, I cannot be for you what La Rossa was, but if it will ease your pain, I will visit you.”
“I would like that more than I can say, Domina Fool,” he said. “Thank you for listening to me today.”
“Thank you, senhor.”
We left him there, and I walked with Sylvie back to the bordel.
“That was nothing but a twisted fantasy,” she said. “A sick man’s sick mind, wanting a woman he could never have. Wanting any woman.”
“Do you really think that, having heard him?” I asked her. “You see how his window faced hers. Is it so difficult to believe that of him? Of Julie?”
“She never loved anyone,” said Sylvie. “She was not capable of it.”
“We are all capable of it,” I said. “Maybe the only man she could love was one she knew could never touch her. Maybe that’s why she felt safe with him.”
“We will never know, will we?” said Sylvie. “She’s dead.”
“But not by Baudoin’s hand,” I said. “And if she was killed because of something in her own life, then I need to find out more about that life. Which means you have to tell me about it.”
A bell rang in the distance. She looked in the direction of the church, then back to me.
“I must go to Mass,” she said. “I will make my confession there. Come see me this afternoon. I will be tending the garden in back.”
“Thank you, Sylvie,” I said, taking her hand.
She was startled at the touch. She snatched it back and ran inside the house.
I walked back to the city, thinking about what I had heard. Poor Senhor Montazin. To find a kind of love after love no longer seemed possible, and to have it cruelly taken away. Yet he…
Someone was following me. Someone large and male, without making pretense of concealment. That bothered me. Someone only wanting to know my whereabouts and wanderings would have stayed back and let me lead him to my next location. But this man lacked any such subtlety.
All around me, people were going about their daily business. I walked among them like I was one of them and looked about for escape routes. I saw a nice twisty alley off the Montardy Square that suited my purposes. I took a deep breath and turned in, starting to run.
Then I was shoved from behind, sending me off balance into a wall. Before I could turn, someone seized both my wrists.
“Don’t get the chance to rough up women the way I like to anymore,” said a hoarse voice.
It was Carlos, the guard from the bordel.
“What do you want?” I cried, struggling to break free.
“Better keep quiet, lady, or I’ll break your arms, one at a time.”
I stomped at his instep, but he shifted quickly to avoid it.
“You have to stay away from now on, do you hear me?” he growled. “No more nosy questions. And just so you learn the lesson real well—“
He twisted my arms behind my back. I ga
sped in pain. He started groping my body until he found my dagger.
“Thought so,” he said, taking it and sliding it into his belt. “Treacherous little bitch like you is bound to have a knife somewhere. I was told to rough you up, but it’s up to me how I was going to do it. I got something in mind for you. Don’t like being made a fool of like that, getting knocked down by a woman.”
“You leave my mother alone!” came a voice from behind us.
He turned, still gripping me. I looked over my shoulder. There was Helga, the fierceness on her face undercut by the fact that she was holding a rag doll in one hand. Her voice, for all the threat contained in it, sounded like a ten-year-old’s.
“Oh, it’s the little girl,” laughed Carlos. “I’m betting you still might be big enough for me to play with when I’m done with your mama.”
“I’ll stop you,” said Helga. “I’ll hit you with my dolly.”
Carlos guffawed, then forced me down to my knees in front of him and leaned over me. “Go ahead,” he jeered.
She grabbed a leg of the doll in each hand, stepped forward, reared back, and swung it hard. Its head smacked into Carlos’s jaw with a resounding clunk, and he staggered back into the wall, his grip on my arms loosening. He looked at Helga, dazed.
“If being beaten by a grown woman is bad,” said Helga as she walked toward him, “just think how much worse it is to lose to a little girl.”
She swung again, and the doll’s head crashed into Carlos’s temple. His eyes rolled up and he sagged to the ground. I shook my wrists until the feeling returned, then felt his neck for a pulse.
“Is he dead?” asked Helga.
“No,” I said.
She raised the doll for another blow.
“No,” I said again.
“Even after what he did?”
“Even after what he did.”
I took my dagger from his belt and slipped it back up my sleeve.
“Let me see’ that,” I said, holding my hand out for the doll.
She gave it to me. I felt the head. Inside was a round chunk of something heavy and metallic.
“Iron?” I asked.
She nodded.
“From where?”
“From a blacksmith,” she said. “By the stables.”
“Of course,” I sighed. “This isn’t the doll that Theo gave you for Christmas.”
“Of course not,” she said, offended. “That’s my special doll. That’s the one I play with. I made this one up for just in case.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, handing it back to her.
“What about him?”
“He’s too heavy to drag. We’ll just leave him. People will think he’s a drunk sleeping it off.”
We slipped down the alley without being observed.
“How long were you following me?” I asked when we emerged onto the street.
“I woke up when I heard you moving around,” she said. “By the time I had my clothes on, you were out the door. But I figured out where you were going.”
“How?”
“I remembered you wanted to catch Sylvie alone. That early in the morning, it could only mean the market. So, I went in that direction until I saw you.”
“I never marked you following,” I said.
“Really? You really didn’t?” she said, nearly bursting with pride.
“How much did you hear?”
“Nothing in the market,” she said. “And I stayed outside the leper house. I didn’t want to climb the walls. I listened to you talk to Sylvie in front of the bordel. I waited until you left. I was going to tail you until you got home, but then I saw Carlos going after you, and I didn’t like the look of that.”
“How long after I left the bordel did Carlos follow me?”
“Almost right away,” she said. “But he didn’t come from the bordel. He was waiting for you across the road.”
“I didn’t pick him up until I reached the gate,” I said as we reached our house.
“Always be on guard,” she reminded me.
“Lesson learned, Apprentice,” I said. “Have I thanked you for coming to my aid?”
“It was fun,” she said. “First time I’ve gotten to play with my new doll.”
Theo and Portia were not at home, but there was a note on the table: Gone to see Hugo.
“Let’s go meet them,” I said.
“You can’t go out looking like that,” she pointed out.
“Why not?”
“You look too normal. Everyone will think something bad happened.”
“Good point,” I said.
I went to change into my makeup and motley, grabbed my gear, and rejoined her.
“Better?” I asked.
“Much better,” she said.
* * *
Theo was sitting at our usual table at the Yellow Dwarf. Portia was scooting around the tavern, gabbling with the few customers who had nothing better to do in the morning.
“Is she still too young for ale?” Theo asked me as I came up.
“I should think so,” I said, sitting next to him.
“Good,” he said, filling our cups. “That means there is more for the rest of us. Where have you been?”
“To market,” I said. “Would you like some grapes?”
Portia came running up at the sound of my voice and climbed into my lap. “Gwape?” she asked.
I gave her some, and she started cramming them into her mouth.
“One at a time, dear,” I admonished her; then I turned to see Theo and Helga, their cheeks bulging with a handful of grapes each, their eyes bugging out wildly in an effort to make each other laugh.
“It will be a miracle if you survive your upbringing,” I said to Portia, who was giggling at the sight.
“Did you bring back anything else?” asked my husband after swallowing.
“Bread, information, and an attack,” I said.
“Tell me,” he said.
When I was done, he turned to Helga and said, “Show me.”
She handed him the doll, and he inspected it critically.
“Did you learn this at the Guild?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. “I thought of it on my own.”
“Clever girl,” he said. “You’ve invented a new trick. I am going to put this in my next report to Father Gerald. Helga’s Doll.”
“They’ll name it after me?”
“It’s your invention,” he said, handing it back to her.
“How lovely,” she sighed.
“Is there anything in Guildlore named after you?” I asked him.
“There’s a song about a cow,” he said.
“Oh, I know that one,” said Helga, wrinkling her nose. “It’s disgusting.”
“Now, let me understand how all of this started,” said Theo. “You got up before dawn to intercept Sylvie because you wanted to find out more about La Rossa.”
“About Julie,” I corrected him.
“About a whore who has been working out of a bordel since who knows when,” said Theo. “Why do you think she matters in any of this?”
“Because she was killed,” I said.
“But that was because of Baudoin,” he said.
“So you say,” I said. “But I say you are wrong.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on me saying it,” I said. “And because you have yet to come up with a better explanation.”
“I could give you one why it isn’t her,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“Whatever reason to kill her that exists in the world you believe in has existed long before now,” he argued. “Yet she didn’t actually get murdered until Baudoin showed up in that bordel. Therefore, it was because of him.”
“I refuse to accept any explanation that is based upon the logic of a fool,” I said.
“And I refuse to accept any explanation that is based upon the intuition of a woman,” he said.
“You mean the logic of a woman,
” I said.
“There is no such thing,” he said.
“Oh, now you’ve done it,” I growled. “You’ve raised my hackles.”
“Is that what those are?” he asked, inspecting my neck critically. “Do you really think you are on the right path?”
“I must be,” I said. “I received the tender ministrations of Carlos as a result.”
“Probably because the Abbess was angry that you were delaying her breakfast by making Sylvie late.”
“Has anyone tried to kill you lately?”
“I do have a mysterious follower,” he pointed out.
“Hardly amounts to the same thing. Have you accomplished anything today?”
“Hugo, a question for you,” called Theo.
Our host came over to join us.
“I’m looking for some vintage gossip,” said Theo. “Rare and refined, from the very upper echelons of society going back forty years.”
“Llora de Bretanha, if you’re feeling brave enough,” said Hugo.
“Who is she?”
“She was one of the great beauties of her day,” said Hugo. “She was also one of the cleverest. Raimon the Fifth used to run through mistresses and discard them within a month or two, but she hung on for quite a while. He had to set her up for life to get rid of her.”
“Set her up how?”
“Nice house in town, and enough properties outside to maintain her in style.”
“I should have been a count’s mistress,” I said. “Much better pay than being a jester.”
“But why must I be brave?” asked Theo.
“Sometimes a great beauty of the day forgets that the day has passed,” said Hugo. “She has fallen out of favor with current society, but she refuses to accept it. Or believe it. I hear that she can be—aggressive.”
“Oh, this I want to see,” said Helga.
“You won’t see her, little one,” said Hugo. “Or you either, Domina. She will only receive men.”
“How old is she now?” asked Theo.
“I would guess somewhere in her early sixties,” said Hugo. “Then I shall pay her a visit this very morning,” declared Theo.
“Guard your virtue,” I said.
“Never had any to guard,” he replied. “Here is my challenge, wife. I wager that my investigation will bear fruit before yours.”
