Around them is all manner of noise: laughter, shrieks of shock and delight, howls of terror from children who pretend to mislike strangeness, gasps from women and guffaws from men. The carnival is small, but takes up more space than it seems it should. Everything is rich and colourful, if a little worn in places; a maelstrom of movement and light, hue and shadow. The Parsifals pass stalls packed with impossible amounts of things: bottles of perfume and potions, tonics and tisanes; scarves and dresses, cheaply and sloppily made, but bright and pretty, items poor girls would be perfectly happy with if given as gifts by otherwise inattentive suitors. Cordelia wonders if Merry’s ever received such things from the boy on the front stoop.
There are stands with sweet-smelling soaps, and flowers carved so finely the wood might be paper. Some merchants offer knives designed to deliver injury and cutlery for meals, plates of metal brightly polished. There are pots and pans, tobacco and cigars, pipes of ivory and horn and stone. One hawker shows jewellery she claims has magical properties, made by the hands of the finest jewel-smiths trained, she so swears, by those who once lived in the city of Cwen’s Reach before the Great Fall of the Citadel—such women could have coaxed the sun and moon into something more lovely if they’d but taken the notion. Another stall has only boxes, but all manner of them, made of materials imaginable and otherwise: ceramic, glass, bone, quartz, skin (not animal), hair, silk, all stiffened and held in shape by strange means. This’un, promises the salesman, is made of naught but breath and wishes. Cordelia examines it as closely as she is allowed, but remains certain it’s simply extremely thin-blown glass.
They pass from the merchants to the showfolk, and this is where the wonders are.
On a slapdash stage is a boy, a youth really, of middling height with blond curls, whose face is not his own. He remakes it at will into imagined creations or does a fair imitation of someone in the crowd—male or female—which is never quite right and guarantees a laugh. His cerulean velvet frock coat is very fine, embroidery creeping across the lapels: leaves in green, cherries or apples in red, creatures that begin as birds but flow into beasts, all picked out in silver that catches the winter sun whenever it peeks from behind the clouds.
Elsewhere is a man who juggles stone spheres in a three ball cascade. At the end of each circuit in the air, one of the rocks becomes a bird which flies into the sky, wings flashing with quartz, then returns to settle in a basket at the man’s feet so he may reach in for new material. On another platform a woman swallows glowing coals, then spews forth great gouts of fire as if it is nothing out of the ordinary; beside her an old man drinks water from a bucket then farts out cubes of ice that clatter from his trouser legs and onto the stage. Yet another has two young women, scandalously under-clad in the cold, their breath steaming around their heads like dragons’ exhalations; they throw frayed-looking ropes upwards, which become still and stiff and remain where they are put. The young women smirk at the observers and shinny their way up the strands, the sequins and fringes of their tiny frocks waving at the crowd as the girls reach a particular height and then evaporate, becoming pale mists of pink and purple.
“Oh! Fairy floss! Mama?” Torben is the one who shrieks, but Victoria’s expression is equally avid.
“Don’t spoil your dinner,” Cordelia says automatically, but reaches into her reticule and pulls forth bits of coin. “Henry, you’re in charge. Not too much.”
Her eldest child gives a sweet smile and leads his siblings off to where two middle-aged women, their white aprons stained with the bright food colours they add to the candy cobwebs they make apparently from air. She senses Merry standing beside her, fidgeting as if unsure whether to follow the children or not; Henry is at that in-between age where he is being given more responsibility, but the bounds of it are as yet uncertain.
“Merry?” says Cordelia
“Yes, Mrs Parsifal?”
“Merry, are you happy here? With us, I mean, in Lodellan.” The scene she witnessed this morning coupled with her own concerns about the girl’s behaviour in past months, have sat heavy on Cordelia’s mind. The girl gives her a blank sort of look. “I only ask because you’ve seemed out of sorts lately. If I can help in anyway, tell me.”
The girl’s lips open and close but no sound comes.
Cordelia is aware she’s starting to feel foolish, which makes her annoyed at herself; her tone is clipped as she asks, “Do you need new things? New tools for your work? New things for you personally? Would you like to take a trip somewhere, perhaps to learn from the Master Seamstresses of Mistinguett’s Lace, or somewhere else? We would be happy to send you, to pay your expenses . . . or do you . . . do you perhaps wish to leave us? Find a position elsewhere?”
“Whyever would I want to leave? Whyever would I want to leave you and my aunt and the kiddies?” Merry’s pale hazel eyes fill with tears, as if she’s astonished that Cordelia has asked. As if she’s not considered the idea herself, not even once. And then, with dread, “Do you want rid of me, Mrs Parsifal?”
“Oh no!” Cordelia’s distress is sharp, high-pitched. “I hope you never leave us! Even if you marry, I hope you’ll stay with us, Merry.” She grasp the other’s hands, feels the calluses and places where needles and pins have left their mark over the years. “I only want you to be happy, Merry, and I feel as if you’ve not been. Never think I want you to leave or that I’m trying to get shot of you. Let us say no more of it, but you must promise to tell me if you think of anything that will make you happier?”
Merry nods, sniffs back her tears. Cordelia gives her a little push towards where Victoria and Henry are bickering over who gets which hue of floss. “Kindly deal with them, Merry.”
The girl moves away. Cordelia takes a deep breath and rolls her shoulders to loosen the tension gathered there; she lacked the courage to ask about the boy. She closes her eyes for a moment, and another and another, only opening them when a voice grabs her attention.
“Difficult when there are so many paths in front of you.”
Cordelia looks around, finds a woman to her left, tending a cart. The flat surfaces are stacked with candles every colour of the rainbow. The woman sits in front of it, on a low stool by a small fire, over which is suspended a pot. The woman holds a long white strand of what looks like string and every few seconds she dips it into the contents of the pot. With each immersion, the string comes out thicker, the blue of it intensifying.
Wax and wick, Cordelia realises. The woman is a tallow-wife, a candle-maker.
“Pardon?” Cordelia steps closer to watch the work.
“So many choices for you and yours at this moment. Who can know which is the right one?” says the woman pleasantly. She’s got a cloud of ashen hair with small silver charms and favours woven through it; there are bells which give a tiny but clear peel when she sits up, stretching her back and allowing the candle a few moments for the latest layer to dry.
“My, what patience you must have.” Cordelia looks at the range of the woman’s wares, thinks they would be lovely in the sitting room and on the dining table for formal dinners with the Agnews and the Considines. “I’d never be able to wait for so long.”
“Ah, we never know what we can do until need forces it upon us. What will you have, mistress?”
“The jade and the lavender, please,” she says reaching into her purse, but the woman is shaking her head, her mouth pulled in a sad smile.
“Ah, they’re not for the likes of you, the green and purple. The green is for fertility and I doubt you need that, and the purple’s to make a woman cautious, but you’re too far gone for that, my dear. There’s blue to lift a heart, yellow to bring light into a life, and the reds make passion blaze. But you . . . best to take the black, they’ll do what needs doing, they’ll find out the darkness at the heart of your path.”
Cordelia’s hands begin to shake. What does this woman know of her? She doesn’t appear to offer a threat, but her words imply she wishes Cordelia ill . . . or believes it will bef
all her. She is about to ask what is meant by the unpleasant words the old woman had uttered, when Victoria’s voice carries clear to her: “Mama! Mama!” Primed for fear, prepared for the worst, Cordelia looks up, desperately searching for her children, but sees them precisely where they were, eating the coloured floss, Merry watching over them like a hawk, while a man stands beside Henry, speaking earnestly with him.
It takes a moment for Cordelia to recognise him. Mr Farringdale. Edvard’s factotum, a man of many talents who acts (as his own father did, rather less successfully, for Edvard’s father) as a mix of legal advisor, accountant, and personal secretary. Not, as Cordelia’s momentary panic would have her believe, someone new, a stranger, a peril; the candle-maker has her at sixes and sevens.
Isambard Farringdale has been in the Parsifals’ lives for so long they can barely remember a time when the short, dapper man was not there. As she watches, he hands Henry a leather-bound journal, Torben a model ship, then turns to Victoria and offers a doll; not one of the rag moppets suspended from various stall roofs and marquee support poles, or sat in the forks of trees. No, this is a porcelain treat with auburn curls and creamy kaolin clay skin, a dress of red and purple in satin and lace. Cordelia sees tiny black leather shoes with silver buckles peek out from beneath the hem as her daughter takes the doll with a delighted squeal. Cordelia says under her breath, “How kind.”
“Come now, mistress, take ’em as a gift.” The old woman’s voice intrudes. “I don’t often give my wares away. Only when there’s need.” In the woman’s voice there is bitter amusement and sadness and Cordelia cannot think why. She only knows she wishes to be elsewhere.
“Thank you, but no,” mutters Cordelia.
“Mark my words, there’s fire and water and air coming for you, mistress!” But the woman sounds resigned now, as if she’s done her best and a refusal is not her fault.
Cordelia moves away from the tallow-wife and stumbles towards her children. Unnerved by the candle-maker’s words, her steps are less assured than she would like. She wonders if the woman makes more money from scaring people than her selling her candles, fleecing the gullible. Does she double as a fortune-teller or is her portrayal of a distraught prophet of doom merely part of her sales technique? What can that woman know of Cordelia and her life, her family, her future? Cordelia fixes a smile and holds her hand out so that Mr Farringdale might bend gallantly over it and press his thin lips to the cool kid of her gloves.
Although Edvard is some twenty years her senior, Cordelia has never truly felt the age difference, never thought of him as an old man, until tonight. In their shared bed with all its hangings and posts, high firm mattress and fine snowy linens, he is propped against pillows, a book in his nightgown-covered lap, eyes closed as if asleep. She regards him in the dressing table mirror as she brushes her hair, applies night-cream, and she can see from the rise and fall of his chest that he is still awake. That his breath has not yet settled into a rhythm of which he himself is unaware, yet she knows well from the hours she’s watched him sleep and dream.
His features have not relaxed despite the shuttered lids; they remain taut, the muscles standing at attention. His brow is lined, the fine skin beneath his eyes dark and thin and dry; his lips, rough when he kissed her cheek earlier, are peeling as if from sunburn. Patches of grey have infiltrated the ruddy brown locks she loves so. He is a man under a burden, she decides, and though she does not know what it is, equally she does know he will not tell her.
Her husband’s firm beliefs are as affected by change as the path of the sun around the Earth, which is to say not at all. Edvard holds that a marriage has two participants, two spheres of influence, and the captain of one shall never set a hand to the tiller of the other. In all their time together he has never confided anything to do with Business (and it is always Business, not merely business) to his wife. The responsibility for making money, ensuring they are financially secure, is his, and an entirely unsuitable thing for her to learn about; in his endeavour he is helped by Mr Farringdale. Her task is to tend their home and raise their children, ably assisted by Mrs B. In this way and this way alone does their partnership function.
When Cordelia was younger and braver, wilder, she tried on a few occasions to adjust his attitude. She’d reminded him, when they were first married, how her parents had given her charge of dealing with the buyers who came to the Singing Vine Vineyard as soon as she’d turned thirteen. How her presence and charm had ensured greater sales every year. She bid him remember that was how they met, that his order for the SV Rouge Felix was the largest there’d ever been. Edvard, far from convinced, had spent days voicing his disapproval of her father for allowing a child—and a girl-child at that!—to be exposed to commerce in such a fashion.
Cordelia let the matter drop, let his umbrage subside, learned to quietly do what she was allowed. Then, just after the birth of Henry, thinking that surely her husband would soften since she’d provided his heir, she tried to cajole Edvard into teaching her about import and export, the ships and their ventures, all the ins and outs of their shares in the Antiphon Trading Company in far-flung Breakwater. He’d refused, gently at first, citing her fragility. She, annoyed, pointed out that as she’d had the fortitude to push his gigantic son through a very tiny fundamental hole, she was certain she could weather the rigours of buying and selling. He’d been so offended by the coarseness that he’d refused to speak with her for a week and, only after she’d apologised in floods of tears, had he relented.
Her parents, when discussing dowry terms with Edvard, had frequently praised her biddable nature: Cordelia has the habit of good behaviour, they would say, though they did not mention she’d learned it through hours locked in a cupboard, with belt-stripes across her backside. She found in obedience a form of camouflage, and she’d taken refuge in it as soon as she’d discovered her husband to be no more flexible than her parents. Apart from the occasional moments of rebellion, which never lasted too long, she’d done her best to behave as a dutiful wife. Her mask was so effective that she managed to convince even herself, forgetting for long periods who she was, what she’d wanted.
In some ways the habit has stood her in good stead as far as a contented marriage was concerned, although it has blinded her to other matters, and given her a firm conviction that her abilities are limited, her capacity for suffering and pain minimal, and her resilience non-existent. She tells herself she does not resent Edvard for she made the choice to let the less docile aspects of herself go, to bury the knowledge of her own strength and resource. To let them wither, if not die. She could have fought, certainly, until their life together was a scorched earth; she could have won if she wished, but she made the decision to be submissive and that at least was her choice alone. Cordelia is nothing if not fair-minded.
“Are you all right, my love?” she asks quietly. He startles, as if he’d forgotten she was there, jerks his knees so the book in his lap falls, and stifles a curse. In the looking glass she sees the pages in brief flashes, numbers and columns, until the ledger hits the thick carpet with almost a sigh. There is a flare of annoyance on her husband’s face, then he laughs and his eyes light up. He swings his legs off the bed, fine ankles on display, and bends to retrieve the tome, which he tucks into the top drawer of his bedside table.
“Of course, my dearest. Just mulling over some figures.” He crosses the room to stand behind her, his hand caressing her waves of hair, smiling at the reflection of her green, green eyes. She smiles back, thinks how handsome he still is, and he slides his other hand over her shoulder, down to cup her breast, leans in to whisper, “Come to bed, my good wife.”
Afterwards, when she knows he is sleeping, when she recognises the tiny catch that presages the loud snoring she has learned to block out, she rises, sweat cooling rapidly on her naked form even with the fire blazing in the hearth. She quietly extracts the ledger from the drawer. It’s curiosity more than anything, a tiny rebellion; but she doesn’t understand what sh
e sees. So many digits, neat and tidy, most in black but some in precise red, which come more and more frequently the closer she gets to the last pages. All those ciphers so conscientiously written in Mr Farringdale’s tight little script. She shakes her head, thinking with a small grief that she has left it too long to learn these things, has let her mind atrophy, let too much of her intellect run out with the breast milk she’s given generously to their three children. Too much energy put into selecting weekly menus and daily dresses, planning parties, running a household.
Cordelia returns the book, careful to make sure it’s in the exact position she found it. Her mind may feel stagnant, but she is no fool.
In Cordelia’s dreams, Bethany is small, so small, nothing but a little girl, her parents’ late bliss. The child she’d bade farewell to when she left Singing Vine to marry. The child she hardly knew, for such little folk are barely formed before they are five; the fifteen year age gap made her sister a beloved stranger, someone for whom she had affection as a result of obligation rather than any great knowledge of who Bethany truly was.
Cordelia conjures a time she knows only from Bethany’s occasional tales, stories sobbed after waking from nightmares. Of the time when the Blight came, traipsed in on the boot of some traveller, or dropped from the beak or shit of some bird flying from one land to the next. How it came mattered not at all; that it happened is all that mattered. She dreams of parents who, she tells herself, are not the ones she knew, not the people who shared their good fortune with those who wandered, footsore and starved, from one place to another; whose prosperity enriched the town huddled at the foot of the hills upon which Singing Vine was set. She dreams of a man and woman who’d become thin and malnourished, their mouths sunken where teeth had fallen out, bellies swollen with hunger, hair falling in clumps as despair made its home in their hearts.
A Feast of Sorrows, Stories Page 23
