Tess of the Road

by Rachel Hartman

  Jacomo made a horsy sound through his lips. “I have it on good authority that you played the harlot to Lord Morney and half the lads at St. Bert’s.”

  “Lies,” she said. She downed the last of her cup, relieved. He knew half-truths at most. Rumor had rendered the tale plausibly deniable; resemblance to real persons, living or dead, was coincidental. Tess set her cup on the floor; she caught a brief glimpse of the scene beyond the screen and averted her gaze. “Where do you get your inaccurate gossip?” she said.

  “I drink at the Mallet and Mullet,” he said, and this time Tess flinched. He couldn’t have seen her there; it had been almost three years.

  Jacomo smirked, malice written on his florid face. “Sometimes I drink with Harald Fjargard and Roger Ivy. They tell amusing stories about one Therese Belgioso. Don’t deny that’s you; I’m not an idiot, and you’re no mistress of disguise.”

  Tess’s mouth went bone dry, and suddenly she was at the Mallet and Mullet again—in Will’s room above the kitchens, the floor strewn with books and clothes. There is giggling coming from behind the privacy screen. Will leaps out of bed to find Harald and Roger—his best mates—hiding behind it. He spreads his arms and lets them take in his nakedness. “Happy now? May it be the last thing you ever see!”

  He swats the pair with his shirt and they flee, laughing.

  Tessie weeps disconsolately, mortified that they’ve seen her, seen all. Will comes back to bed, gathers her on his lap, says, “It gladdens my heart to see you weeping. Do you know why, little bird? You’re the same shy, innocent girl I first met, so modest and pure.” He kisses her bare shoulder. “You are still a virgin in your heart, my little bird, my wife!”

  Tess forced her mind back to the present, reeling and nauseated; she longed to crawl into a hole and die. She could only keep her eyes fixed on the floor, her skirts, or Jacomo’s black-clad knee.

  She was not going to play Roger Ivy to her sister’s wedding night.

  The student-priest studied her expression as if examining a vase for cracks. “That hit a nerve, I see,” he said. “Is your conscience bothering you, ‘Maid’ Dombegh?”

  His sarcasm and self-satisfaction felt like another layer of filth on her skin. “Is this how you spend your time at seminary?” Tess said through her teeth. “Getting the dirt on everyone?”

  “It passes the time,” he said stiffly, raising his chin so it was merely doubled, not tripled.

  “You’re going to be a terrible priest,” she said, clenching her hands in her lap.

  He leaned in, grinning, his teeth small and precise in his round face. “Maybe. But at least I’m not a dirty whor—”

  Her fist was in motion before she even registered his words, as if her body had made the decision without her, certain she’d approve. And she did approve, in principle, though in practice the collision with Jacomo’s nose hurt her knuckles.

  He leaped up, blood gushing down his chin and running into the channels of his white ruff.

  The treacherous bench gave way at last and pitched Tess onto her back. She battled her farthingale down and wrested herself back to sitting just in time to see Jeanne, her face pale and her eyes enormous, clutching a bedsheet to her bosom, peek around the edge of the screen.

  That night, Tess dreamed.

  Drunk as she was, she would not ordinarily have remembered her dreams, but this was unusually vivid. She discovered (in dreamland) that her left foot was wrapped in filthy bandages; she could not remember why. When she unwrapped them, it turned out the bandages had been keeping her foot bound to her leg, and that without them the foot was completely unattached. It lay there on the pile of bandages, inert.

  How long had her foot been separated from the rest of her? How had it happened, and how could she have forgotten?

  She’d cut her own foot off with a cleaver. She remembered doing it, now that she thought it over, but what a thing to forget! It must have been the most terrifying moment of her life, the moment she realized it had to be done and that she would go through with it. It must have hurt (she couldn’t remember, but logically it must have). How had she found the courage and the will to bring the knife down?

  She spent the rest of the dream trying to recapture that feeling—the definiteness, the surety and determination. The commitment. When you decide to cut off your own foot, there can be no hesitation; it’s one swift, decisive blow or a lifetime of mangled regrets. She had done it, though. She had been that strong, if only once.

  Sunlight made her eyelids flutter, and she rolled over irritably, not wanting to wake up. She was just on the verge of recapturing the feeling, how she had brought the cleaver down unflinchingly, how she had been tragic and mighty, and in that moment how her bones had chipped and shattered, but it was all done in an instant.

  Severed.

  Her eyes popped open, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was. Tangled in bedclothes, she lay sideways across a strange bed, her head half lolling off one edge. Above her the ceiling swam with cherubs, and for a nightmarish moment she thought she was back at her grandmother’s house, in the room where Dozerius had been born.

  She flailed about, panicking, until she was half sitting up. The room swirled around her, and her stomach churned within her.

  This was not that room. There were no cobwebs, no midwives, no empty cradle in the corner. She didn’t know this room at all. She flopped back, relieved, but her stomach was still apoplectic. She rolled slowly, then more urgently, scanning the floor for the inevitable chamber pot, found it, vomited.

  Ye Saints, she’d been drunk. She had not quite achieved sobriety yet.

  She rolled onto her back, wiping her mouth on a corner of the sheet, able to contemplate the cherubs with a bit more composure. They frolicked on puffy clouds, chasing each other. She scanned their faces again and again, until she realized she was looking for Dozerius. She wasn’t going to find him. She felt ashamed to have hoped.

  In fact, she couldn’t remember what he’d looked like, exactly. Red. Squished. Like a wizened old man fashioned out of ham. These cherubs, insofar as they were babies at all, were much older, milk-plump and smiling, with curling hair. She despised them for it.

  Tess rubbed her eyes hard with the heels of her hands until spots danced in her vision, and then she pried herself out of bed. She had the shadow of a headache, and it was going to get worse.

  She used the chamber pot, feeling slightly sorry for whoever had to clean it later. For all she knew, it was her. She was in her linen chemise; her farthingale gown had been dumped unceremoniously on the floor beside the wardrobe. It was too complicated to put back on, and it was all full of regrets (she was slowly recollecting the pieces of these: Countess Margarethe, Heinrigh, and something else she couldn’t find yet). She opened the wardrobe and found nothing but a man’s short houppelande in brown. Good enough. It would cover what she wanted covered. She pulled it over her chemise as an improvised dressing gown, staggered across to the door of the room, and pulled it open.

  She didn’t recognize the corridor. This was not Cragmarog Castle. This was nowhere she had ever been before.

  As if on cue, a trickle of harpsichord notes reached her ears. It was like a trail of bread crumbs through the house, and she knew whom it must lead to. She followed the spidery music up the dim, carpeted hallway, down a curving stair, and into a high-ceilinged chamber with tall windows full of morning sun.

  No, more like noonday sun.

  Seraphina, in pale, loose morning robes, sat at the instrument with the bench well back to accommodate her belly. Her brown hair, darker than Tess’s, curled over her shoulder in a plait; her face, rounded with pregnancy weight, shone like the moon. She flicked her dark eyes toward Tess but did not break tempo. Closer to the empty fireplace was a round table with one dirty place setting and one clean, the remains of breakfast. Tess went straight over, poured herse
lf a cup of tea, and gulped it down.

  “Help yourself,” said Seraphina, too late. “If you want something hot, I’ll ring Anna.”

  Tess’s tea was lukewarm and bitter. It might have set the tone for Tess’s reply: “Where are we, and why did you drag me here?”

  “This is the Queen’s summer home, Ranleigh Cottage,” said Seraphina, pausing her playing to pick up a charcoal pencil and jot some notes on the page in front of her.

  Summer home must be the royal family’s code for “place to hide pregnancies.” Tess had heard the name Ranleigh Cottage, anyway; Seraphina had been living here for two months and would stay on until she gave birth.

  Tess glanced at the thick Zibou carpet, the satin drapes and ornate furnishings. Maybe it was a cottage by a queen’s standards, but not by anyone else’s.

  “As for why,” Seraphina continued, letting the last word stretch as if she intended to let the question be her answer, “I’m going to guess you have some idea.”

  The memories came flooding back to Tess in a rush: she’d broken Jacomo’s nose and ruined Jeanne’s wedding night. The blood rose in Tess’s face, and for a moment she couldn’t speak. Seraphina met her eye from across the room and seemed to glean the questions Tess couldn’t ask, for she folded her hands upon her stomach and said, “Jeanne is fine. She’s married. Your being a violent drunk didn’t nullify that.”

  Tess exhaled and lowered herself shakily into a chair. Her headache was beginning to assert itself. “Am I to be charged with assault?”

  Seraphina’s mouth crimped with amusement. “One would think you were a lawyer’s daughter.” She paused, as if waiting for Tess to laugh, but Tess didn’t find that funny. “It seems there are to be no charges. Lord Richard came vociferously to your defense, claiming Lord Jacomo provoked you. I can only assume he’s been wanting to pop his brother in the nose himself.”

  It was a relief, but not enough of a relief. Tess glanced over the food on offer. Cold toast. Hothouse strawberries. It was all quease-inducing. She stuck with tea, although the second cup brought her to the dregs of the pot. She added milk and gulped it down. “Are Mama and Papa here?” said Tess, setting down her cup and glancing around apprehensively.

  “No, it’s just us,” said her sister, running her fingers across the keyboard again. “I offered to take you on. Everyone else is too angry to speak to you right now.”

  “I see,” said Tess, slouching aggressively and crossing her arms. Of course they’d fob her off on someone else, the way they had when she was pregnant. She was too awful to even look at. “ ‘O miracle-mongering St. Seraphina, won’t you rid us of this troublesome Tess!’ ”

  Seraphina raised her head and stared with big-eyed incredulity. The twins had always called this her “baffled owl face,” not to be confused with her “cogitating owl face” or her “get-out-of-my-room-before-I-bite-you-with-my-terrible-beak owl face.” She was owlish to her core.

  “You haven’t been yourself for some time, Sisi,” said Seraphina. Only Jeanne was allowed to use that name; Tess bristled. “You’ve been unhappy. Everyone is at their wits’ end trying to help you.”

  “Oh, indeed, ‘everyone’ has been trying to help, have they? They’re worried I’m unhappy? They have a funny way of showing it.”

  “They’ve tried to talk to you. If you can’t tell, that may be emblematic of the problem,” said Seraphina, infuriatingly calm as ever. She was half dragon, and it was easy to tell which half. “As soon as anyone brings up the past, you get defensive and shut them out.”

  “What a load of self-serving nonsense!” cried Tess, leaping to her feet and pacing before the empty hearth. “I have set aside any hope or wish or ambition for myself, bent all my purpose toward securing Jeanne her damned husband—so Neddie and Paul might be educated—and in return I am to be packed off to a convent. But no, you say, they’ve been worried about my feelings and want to help. Cack on ice. They could help by giving me some other choice in life!”

  “You had the option to stay on as governess, until you got drunk and punchy. I tried to give you another choice,” said Seraphina, cool as marble, “and you spit on it and sent it back.”

  She meant Countess Margarethe. Tess’s headache seemed suddenly to extend to all her limbs. “I don’t want your pity,” said Tess contemptuously.

  “Well, that’s fortunate, because you don’t have it,” said Seraphina. There was a tartness to her phrasing, but she smiled as she spoke, as if she found Tess’s tantrum vaguely amusing. “I don’t pity you at all.”

  “Because I brought this all on myself?” Tess sneered.

  “Because you’re not as bad off as you imagine,” said Seraphina, marking up her music sheets some more. “You’re seventeen. Your whole life is still before you.”

  Tess wanted to shout at her sister again, wanted to rage and tempest and scream, but her throat had tightened. Her whole life still before her? That was such a lie.

  At seventeen Seraphina had been crossing the Southlands on bold adventures, stopping a war, summoning giants, modestly demurring when called a Saint, and charming the royal cousins. She couldn’t see how blessed she was. She had no idea what it was like to throw away your future in the blink of an eye, to be relegated either to serving her sister or to serving with a sisterhood.

  Seraphina had it easy; she got to live by different rules from everyone else, because she was different. Anytime Tess had protested the unfairness of things—How come Seraphina gets tutors? Why is she allowed to walk to St. Ida’s by herself and I’m not?—Mama had answered, low and fiercely, “Because she’s not like us.”

  Envy was such a bitter draft. Tess hated it, but it wasn’t the only part of herself she hated; it could get in line behind everything else. She turned to the table, surreptitiously wiping her eyes, and pretended to take an interest in toast.

  Seraphina pushed back her bench and rose like some antique camel, steadying herself against the instrument with one hand. She waddled toward the table. “You may stay here until you’re ready to face the parental wrath,” she said gently, pulling out the chair opposite Tess. “You won’t be in anyone’s way until the baby comes.”

  “The baby might come tomorrow,” said Tess, picking the crust off her toast.

  Seraphina’s gaze went owlish again, as if she were trying to remember what had happened with Tess’s baby, or trying to gauge the best way to talk about it. Tess smiled mirthlessly. Even Seraphina, for all her brave words, surely had to tiptoe around the subject.

  “I never heard what your birthing was like,” said Seraphina, not tiptoeing in the least. “I hope you’ll tell me—”

  Tess bristled. “I don’t remember it,” she blurted. Seraphina was right that Tess didn’t want to talk. That didn’t make her right.

  Seraphina said, “You don’t have to talk to me. We can avoid each other entirely. Whatever will give you peace and space and time to think. I’ll put off Papa and Anne-Marie; the Little Sisters of St. Loola will wait until you’re ready.”

  Tess squirmed. The inevitable was no less inevitable for its postponement. She was getting what she deserved, but she still felt like lashing out: “You know you always hurt Mama’s feelings by calling her Anne-Marie. You’re so quick to underscore that you’re not one of us.”

  Tess glanced up from her mangled toast. Seraphina wouldn’t look hurt—she was too much the dragon for that—but she grew preternaturally still.

  “You think you’re so superior,” said Tess, hell-bent on being cruel. “Look at you, here in the Queen’s summer palace, ready to bear a bastard’s bastard. You’re no different from me, but nobody would dare to call you whore.”

  Seraphina opened her mouth and closed it again. Her brows drew down as if she were considering the merits of Tess’s argument, weighing that final word against her conscience.

  “Maybe Blessed Jannoula was righ
t,” said Tess. “Maybe you’re a Saint. I guess we’d better let you do whatever you want, just in case.”

  That was below the belt, and Tess knew it. Seraphina’s relationship with St. Jannoula had been painful and complicated, and she hated being called a Saint.

  Still she said nothing.

  “You know who else was a Saint?” cried Tess, pounding a fist on the table. “St. Vitt. And you know what he said about women like you? ‘In this order shall they enter Heaven: first the virgin, whose purity equals that of the final abode; then the chaste widow, who returns to her pure state after her duty is accomplished; and lastly the faithful wife, who of necessity must stain herself with the repeoplement of the world—’ ”

  “Repeoplement is quite an astonishing word,” said Seraphina, quirking a tiny smile.

  “ ‘And who may not enter Heaven?’ ” Tess continued bullheadedly. “ ‘The faithless wife, the unchaste harlot, the craven, shameless whore. For them are the furnaces prepared, for them the long days contemplating woe.’ ”

  “Indeed,” said Seraphina, who seemed to relax in the face of Tess spouting scripture. “You do realize that that positively contradicts St. Loola’s credo: ‘Thou mayest reach Heaven only by the mercy of the fallen.’ If you’re to join the Little Sisters, you may require some adjustment to your theology.”

  “You always do this!” cried Tess, flailing in frustration. “You divert every argument into some irrelevant side stream. I don’t care if St. Vitt’s diction is archaic, and I don’t care if the Little Sisters of St. Loola contradict him—”

  “Yes, yes, you only wanted to call me whore,” said Seraphina, waspishly now. “You’ve done it. Twice. Well done. Are you finished? I have a present for you, but I’m feeling less and less like giving it to you.”

  Seraphina strode over to the harpsichord again, pulled a small wooden chest out from under it, and plunked it down at Tess’s feet. “As your fellow ‘fallen’ woman, I know what it’s like to be the one who doesn’t get married,” said Seraphina, hands on her hips. She tapped the trunk with her toe. “I thought Jeanne shouldn’t be the only one getting gifts today.”