Tess of the Road

by Rachel Hartman

  “This rain should melt the snow by tomorrow,” said Tess, adjusting her backside. “Come with me to the gala.”

  “In my second-best doublet?” said Josquin teasingly.

  “Ah, but you’re the better-looking man, so it’s only fair,” said Tess.

  The next evening found them both climbing the hill to the Academy.

  The night was blustery and wet, but the halls of knowledge were full of warmth and light. Luminaries of Segoshi society—nobles, socialites, intellectuals, financiers—had come to toast the mysterious, dashing, and romantic Tes’puco and his important discovery.

  Josquin spotted twenty people he knew almost immediately. He set to socializing, leaving Tess to her own devices, and ended up near the hearth, talking earnestly to a pale, slender woman with graypox scars on her cheeks and hands. Tess smiled a little; Will would never have spoken to someone who looked like that.

  Tess squared her shoulders and accepted praise from all quarters. Basked in it. Glowed with it. If it had been warm water, she’d have bathed in it; if it had been wine, she’d have grown embarrassingly drunk.

  In fact, this newfound fame was not so different from wine. As much as she enjoyed praise and grew heady with it, it was never enough. There was some chasm in her heart demanding to be filled, but filling it with praise was like dumping gravel down Anathuthia’s sinkhole; the more they poured in, the clearer it became that praise was unequal to the task. Tess found herself approaching clusters of people, impatient for them to realize who she was and applaud her for it. She would hint appallingly—“You’ve heard about my discovery, I’m sure”—and await her reward like a beggar, hand held out.

  She didn’t like seeing herself do this, and yet she seemed unable to stop.

  If someone called her discovery remarkable, she fretted that they hadn’t said stupendous. If stupendous, why not earthshaking or paradigm-shifting? A dozen people might hang upon her every word as she told the story again, but if a single one turned away, her heart followed and she couldn’t bear it. She found herself pursuing one fellow, crying, “Am I boring you, sir?”

  The man, a magistrate, florid-cheeked and wearing a ruff, looked boggled. “Forgive me, Master Tes’puco. Only I wanted some pudding, and I’ve already heard your story twice.”

  Tess, embarrassed, went back for more sweets herself.

  She found her mind wandering after that. What she really wanted, she began to feel, was to be back in that cavern, gazing upon Anathuthia once more. That moment had meant something; all this was a pale shadow. The praise of the world could not compare.

  The torte turned bitter in her mouth, and she set it aside. She was done here. She would say her goodbyes to the masters of the Academy, find Josquin, and go.

  She was approaching Master Pashfloria when a shout froze her in her tracks. “Charlatan!”

  Tess turned to see who was speaking. A space had opened up in the crowd, and there, at the far end of the hall, stood Emmanuele, who’d doubted her story before. “Tes’puco, you fraud, I accuse you!” he cried for everyone to hear. “You are not who you claim to be. I followed him home last time, Masters. He lives with a seamstress in Crewel Ramble.”

  “You might benefit from a mistress yourself, ’Manuele,” someone cried.

  Everyone laughed, and the young man turned crimson. Tess’s heart banged against her ribs. “What are you accusing me of?” she asked. “Living among embroiderers is not a crime.”

  “You are the embroiderer!” cried Emmanuele, triumphant. “In more than one sense of the word. Tes’puco is a seamstress, gentlemen, and she has embroidered this tale to fool us.”

  Tess felt stripped bare, as if everyone were staring through her clothes. “I—I confess my name is not Tes’puco,” she stammered. She felt Josquin’s eyes upon her. “But you must have assumed that? Stupid-head? It had to be a nickname.” No one spoke; the room had gone stony and cold. Tess’s voice barely filled the emptiness: “I work as an embroiderer because I need to earn my keep. And I am a woman. Thank Heaven your finest scholar solved that mystery.”

  Masters, dignitaries, people of quality were glaring at her. “What difference does this trivia make?” Tess pleaded.

  “Ah, but we must consider seriously,” said Master Pashfloria, rising upon the dais. “A master of the Academy, even an honorary one, must exemplify the philosophical virtues in every endeavor, and the greatest of these is truth.”

  “The rest of my story is true,” cried Tess, fury finding foothold in her heart.

  “We don’t even know your real name,” said Pashfloria, ignoring her question and making a gesture that apparently called forth the muscle. Two guards approached Tess from the back of the room. “How can we trust anything you say? Gentlemen, I should never have let things get this far without looking into this ne’er-do-well’s background.”

  “The Monastery of Santi Prudia!” Tess cried, trying to shake off the guards. She could only free herself from one at a time. “Frai Moldi and the abbot will tell you I was there!”

  “I’ve spoken to Frai Moldi via thnik,” said Emmanuele, eyes glinting as he revealed this final triumph. “He was quite clear that a fellow monk, one Brother Jacomo, was there when the monastery collapsed, not an impostor calling herself Tes’puco. Frai Moldi also denied the existence of any such serpent. Master Pashfloria, I think more research is warranted, and I would like to offer up my substantial expertise—”

  The guards had been pulling Tess’s arms; she stopped resisting and let them lead her outside. She couldn’t make sense of any of this. Nothing Emmanuele had said should have been enough to get her thrown out of the Academy, not unless Master Pashfloria simply wanted an excuse to publicly discredit her.

  Of course he did. He wanted someone to go after the serpent and “harness” it, whatever that was supposed to mean. If Tess objected to this plan, no one would credit her now. It was tidier this way.

  For all the good it would do them. There was surely no harnessing Anathuthia.

  Tess waited at the bottom of the steps—not daring to stand upon the scientific virtues—for Josquin to come clanking out after her. His chair was very slow on stairs.

  “I’m not going to say I told you so,” he began.

  Tess raised her shoulders and let them drop despairingly. “You cannot imagine how often I’ve been told so. So, so, so. And still I pigheadedly do things my own way.”

  The rain was mixed with snow. Tess stomped down the hill, slowly for Josquin’s sake, her arm linked through his. She grew damper and colder as the wet soaked through every part of her (except her feet, thanks to the miracle of good boots).

  “I probably wouldn’t have listened to me, either,” said Josquin as they neared home. “There are lessons we can only learn by falling. But, Tes’puco, I do think Tess Dombegh is good enough to be the hero of her own story, for what it’s worth.”

  Good enough. He’d inadvertently chosen exactly the right words. “Tess was a mess,” she said, sleet beading on her lashes. “I haven’t wanted to be Tess since I left home. Nine months.”

  Nine months, she suddenly realized, was as good a time as any to be born.

  They were shivering when they arrived home. Tess followed Josquin to his room, expecting to help him with his bath as usual, but he beat her to the boiler and, even though it was hard for him to maneuver behind it, he stoked the fire.

  “Er,” said Tess, in some confusion. “I would have done that.”

  “You’re so cold your lips are purple,” said Josquin, “and you’ve had a terrible night. I think it’s your turn for the bath. I can wait out in the kitchen. Or not.”

  She felt too much; her heart seemed ready to burst. “Stay,” she said.

  Josquin held her gaze, and some understanding bridged the gap between them. This time there would be no conscientious hesitations, no head-butting or spr
inging of traps. This time was the time, was now, nobody careening unstuck through the past.

  “I gently remind you that your patron Saint, Rebecca, left her basket under the bed,” said Josquin, checking the temperature gauge. He opened the tap while she fetched it, and when she’d picked her poison (so to speak), he drew Tess to him and wrapped his arms around her middle.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, and kissed him.

  Tess began unbuttoning his second-best doublet while Josquin undid the one she was wearing. There were so many buttons, so many fidgeting fingers. She felt herself released from confinement, felt the shiver-soft touch of Josquin’s competent hands upon her long-suppressed breasts. She was reminded of the infant Dozerius, his mouth fluttering soft as moth wings against her skin, and for a moment she worried that she was still too full of pain, that her body held too much history to be present in the present. But Josquin kissed her again and she was there, alive to every singing nerve ending, to his touch like gentle rain upon the neglected, drought-racked earth.

  We build history every day, anew.

  The rest of her cold, damp clothing fell away. The tub filled, and Josquin let her climb in first while he finished undressing, giving her a few minutes to enjoy the hottest water alone.

  She worried that she’d fall apart, as she’d done under Dulsia’s hands.

  But as she entered the water, she found to her surprise that her parts had taken on new meanings. These were the shoulders that had carried Griss to Mother Philomela; these, the arms that had broken clods and turned hay. The hand that had held Frai Moldi’s. The callused feet that had carried her across the border into a new set of stories.

  She was Tess of the Road, bathing in rivers, relishing the water’s rush between her thighs.

  Warmth entered her heart, which had been as alone as the Most Alone beneath the earth.

  She still held sorrows, but she was not made of them. Her life was not a tragedy.

  It was history, and it was hers.

  When she had thawed, Josquin joined her, swinging his legs together over the side and lowering himself slowly. She caught him in her arms and kissed him again, and together they were broken/unbroken. All/nothing. And any chasms left between were swiftly bridged.

  * * *

  The Academy was behind her now, done and gone, and she felt like she’d been freed of a terrible burden. Now she could be nowhere but here, no-when but now, no one but Tess. The sun came out and glittered upon the surface of the freshly fallen snow, and Tess felt every bit as clean and new.

  She embroidered with joy. She accompanied Josquin to market, and to his Brotherhood of Heralds meetings; she helped him cook and fetched wood and water. She kept Gaida company in the evenings. And at night, even though she insisted upon maintaining the charade of going to bed in her own room, she would creep downstairs and sleep in Josquin’s arms.

  She asked Josquin about all of his girlfriends, in part because she was curious, in part because she was building up the courage to talk about Will. She wanted to talk about him; he’d never seemed so distant, as if Josquin’s presence had exorcised him at last, or given her something to take Will’s place. Maybe the past could be past. It gave her hope.

  She asked Josquin about his first time, and got a hilarious story about an inn in the Pinabra where a mother and daughter had competed for his affections. The mother had won. Tess found this shocking, which elicited a gentle laugh. “It was for the best. I knew nothing, and neither did her daughter. We don’t always know what we want the first time out; we certainly don’t know what to expect.”

  “Exactly!” cried Tess, spotting her opening. “I barely knew where anything went, and I was surprised to find myself in the middle of it before I understood what had happened.”

  “You—I’m sorry, what?” said Josquin, apparently befuddled. “Start at the beginning. You slept with…Will, was it? By accident?”

  “I know it sounds absurd,” said Tess confidentially, keeping her tone light. This could be a funny story, maybe, if she told it right.

  “I’d slept with him—just slept, in his arms—a few times, and nothing had happened,” she said merrily. So far so good. “I was staying out so late that sometimes it was easier to nap in his room and go home just at sunrise.”

  “But then one night something did happen,” said Josquin, not smiling.

  Tess tried to be reassuring: “I didn’t intend it to. I was mostly asleep, having had a good deal of ale, and he was behind me, cuddling and kissing my ear, and it was pleasant, but really I wanted to sleep. And then—I’ve never quite known how—all of a sudden I realized something was different, my chemise had worked its way up and he’d slipped in, as it were.”

  It was getting harder to keep her tone jolly. “I didn’t know what I was feeling at first, or where I was feeling it; he’d gone off the map, and anyway it was supposed to hurt the first time. The maidenhead, you know. It’s supposed to break and bleed. Mama told us hers was so thick and strong that Papa couldn’t consummate their marriage until a midwife came and perforated it with a knife. She was sure her daughters would be the same; I’m embarrassed to admit I was counting on it. The pain was supposed to warn me that we’d come too close.

  “Anyway, he was in, like magic. I hardly felt it. Once I realized, I thought, He couldn’t have done it on purpose, we agreed we wouldn’t, he must not realize. I tried to tell him, politely, that he’d gone too far, but his weight was on me then, and my face was squashed into the pillow. I couldn’t get his attention. I swatted at him, but he was behind me and I had no leverage.”

  This was not a funny story. Tess was feeling it now, as if she were there; she couldn’t bend the tale back toward merry farce, and she couldn’t seem to stop telling it, either. “Maybe I could have given him a bloody nose with the back of my head. Maybe I could have struggled harder and wiggled free somehow.”

  “But you didn’t,” Josquin said quietly.

  Tess shrugged. An old familiar despair, like a leaden blanket, was descending upon her. “There was no point. I was already ruined, and it was my own fault. I’d lost my virginity in the stupidest way imaginable. Making him stop wouldn’t bring it back. I only hoped he’d meant it when he said he wanted to marry me. He surely wouldn’t marry me if I broke his nose.”

  “Tess,” said Josquin, but she wouldn’t meet his eye.

  “I wasn’t mad at him—isn’t that ridiculous? He was just doing what my mother had warned me men do. If anything, I was mad at her, and at my maidenhead. I thought I’d have some warning, that there’d be time to stop him. I didn’t know anything.”

  “Tess,” said Josquin, more urgently. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “You’re wrong,” snapped Tess. “I was in his bed, in my chemise. I knew better.” I earned it, she wanted to add, but her voice stopped working momentarily. “Anyway, it’s not completely true that I didn’t want it. Some part of me wanted it, just not right then. And not like that.”

  “If you’d told him not to,” said Josquin darkly, “then it was—”

  “Please don’t say it,” Tess interrupted. “Please. That’s a terrible word, and even if it’s true, then what? You’ll weep for me, or get angry, and I’ll feel like I have to comfort you, do you see? I can’t even comfort myself.”

  Josquin shook his head, fuming, but held her in silence, and that was truly enough.

  There was more she could have told him. The betrayal of her trust hadn’t even been the most terrible part. Worse was the way Will had answered her sorrow with sophistry, informing her that true purity came from the mind and heart, not the body; that he was her teacher, not just academically but in life, and surely it was best to learn this lesson from someone who loved her; that it was not she who was sullied, but he who was redeemed by her goodness.

  Worst of all was the way she’d stayed with Will for eight more
months, endured more humiliations (of course he’d boasted to all his friends), and learned to absent herself as he took his pleasure with her. She dared not deny him or make him angry, because only the purifying fire of holy matrimony could restore her dignity and virtue.

  And he hadn’t even given her that.

  * * *

  Two and a half months passed, slowly and too fast. Tess’s eighteenth birthday flew by without her telling anyone; she did not like to be reminded that a decision was approaching.

  One day Tess came home from work, clambering through snowdrifts. She blew in with a flurry of flakes to see Josquin turning a capon on a spit. “Your mother’s staying late,” said Tess, kissing his ear as she crossed the room. “That massive beadwork for the Contessa Infanta, the peacock in full feather, is taking forever.”

  “Does she want dinner at the shop?” Josquin called after Tess, who was making a beeline for the back of the house.

  “No,” Tess called back. “Give me a minute, eh? I need the privy.”

  “Do you hold it all day?” he asked laughingly. If he teased her more than that, she didn’t hear. She was in the yard already, the door swinging shut behind her.

  In fact, she did hold it all day. Josquin’s privy was the nicest in Segosh—not counting whatever they used at Palasho Pesavolta—and it was worth a wriggle of discomfort at the end of the day to come home and use it. It had its own commodious house, with a charcoal fire in winter (Tess stoked it morning and evening). St. Blanche the Mechanic had outdone herself; there was hardly any smell. It was still a pit, like every garden privy in town, but everything washed into the storm sewers with the pull of a handle, ingeniously reusing last night’s bathwater.

  It was so marvelous, in fact, that the neighborhood children were always trying to use it. Josquin didn’t mind, as long as they cleared out when he needed it. Today three children were hallooing down the hole, trying to see to the bottom with a lantern. “Hey, shoo,” said Tess, but they paid her no mind. She didn’t have Josquin’s clout—or his intimidating eight-legged chair.