“Why do you know of Mistress Garret?” I asked the girl.
She flushed, and her gaze met mine with guilt. “We… Christine wished to see her.”
This brought Gaston’s gaze to her as well.
“Not for… anything,” Agnes stammered quickly. “Because… we should not. It was one of our outings dressed as boys. Christine had heard whisper of her, of Mistress Garret, that she was a witch, and she wished to see her. The woman saw we were girls the moment she laid eyes on us, but I do not think that required witchery. She asked if she could do anything for us, and when we said no, she looked Christine in the eye and said she hoped she would never see her again, and then she looked at me and said there were things she could teach me. Christine was quite upset over the incident.”
I thought Mistress Garret sounded ever more intriguing. “Did you return?”
Agnes shook her head sadly. “I was afraid and… I was not sure what she could teach me. I had heard… She was handsome, but as old as my mother, and…”
“You heard she entertained ladies?” I asked
“Nay, nay, men,” she blurted. “And I knew that was not a thing I wished to learn, and I was afraid of witchery.”
“She could probably teach you herbs and remedies,” Gaston said. “It is not witchcraft. You should know better.”
Agnes cringed. “Is that why you are going to see her?”
I thanked the Gods for their providing such a likely excuse and the word aye was almost to my lips when Gaston blurted, “Non.” I cursed myself for pausing to thank entities that possessed a perverse sense of humor, and regarded my matelot with surprise. He had realized his error and was now as flushed as the girl. She was studying us intently. Gaston cursed, sighed, shrugged, and turned away.
I sighed. “Gaston wishes to have me instruct him in the ways of women and their pleasure, prior to his marrying Christine. And… we heard Mistress Garret might be amenable to being the model for such instruction.”
“Oh,” she breathed. Her gaze darted from one to the other of us and then to the puppy in her lap. “You can teach that?”
“Aye,” I sighed. “I am an accomplished instructor in the matter.”
“Oh. Does Christine know?” she asked without coyness.
“Nay,” I said quickly. “And she must not.”
Agnes flinched and became defensive. “I would not tell, and it is not as if she speaks to me now, anyway.”
“Good,” I said, and snatched the map from her. Gaston had sagged against the wall again, this time in mortification. I took his hand and towed him out the door and into the rain, which seemed to have no intention of abating.
As we entered the dark and muddy street, I cursed my stupidity in not perusing the map at length. I led us in what I felt was the correct direction, until I at last spied a lantern beneath an eave. I held the damp parchment close to the light and memorized what I could before the ink soaked away. Soon after, we paused in an alleyway, just outside a lamp above a door I hoped was Mistress Garret’s. Our stopping there had more to do with a garden tucked in beside the small building than Theodore’s map.
“What if she is not alone?” Gaston hissed.
His Horse had emerged as we tromped here through the mud and muck, and in the face of its opposition, my meager enthusiasm for the endeavor had dwindled considerably.
“Most courtesans douse the light outside their door if they are engaged,” I said with little surety.
“What if she does not know that?” he asked.
“Then pray to the Gods she has the good sense not to answer the door,” I sighed.
She did answer the door, and I knew at once she was the woman we sought. She was handsome and had surely been a beauty in her youth. Now the lines on her face spoke of laughter and a quiet dignity. Her thickly coiled hair was straw-colored like mine, and streaked with silver. She was thinner than I had expected; there was nothing plump about her, and I thought that a relief, as I would not want Gaston to contend with sagging flesh. She greeted us with a knowing look in her gray eyes and welcomed us in from the rain.
The small room in which we found ourselves was filled with shelves of drying plants, pots and vials. There was a table in the center and a seemingly clean bed along the wall.
“Mistress Garret, I assume. We were recommended to you by an old business associate,” I said carefully.
She nodded and looked us over. Her gaze was speculative on me; and concerned when she regarded Gaston, who had turned his attention to the plants beside him and seemed quite intent on ignoring her.
“I serve many needs,” she said smoothly. “What might yours be?” she asked me.
“My… friend is to be married and he wishes to learn of women prior to his wedding night,” I said.
She nodded and regarded Gaston anew with a small quirk to her lip. “I can see to that.”
“He wishes for me to be present,” I said.
Her small smile fled. “Are you confused about the matter, too?” she asked.
“Nay,” I said quickly.
She awarded me a look that I could interpret in no other manner than patronizing, and my heart hardened toward her considerably.
“I’ll instruct him if he’s to learn anything here,” she said. “I don’t do two at a time. You can pay extra to watch, or you can wait outside. If you don’t want to stand in the rain, there’s a tavern ’round the corner, or you can bring him back another night.”
Though her words were much as I had expected, I was still disappointed and I knew not how to counter her.
“Is this used to stop bleeding?” Gaston asked as he plucked a root off a shelf. His Horse was now deeply hidden behind his physician’s mask, and I could but smile.
She started, and turned to him with a frown.
“He is a physician,” I supplied.
“Aye,” she told Gaston.
“How is it used?” he asked.
Her frown became perplexed, and then she crossed her arms. “Are you going to buy it?”
“Aye,” Gaston said with annoyance. “And what other concoctions do you recommend to ease a woman in childbirth, and why?”
She regarded him in perplexed silence for a moment before looking at me askance and coloring ever so slightly. “I must apologize. When you said you wished for him to learn of women, I misunderstood.”
I smiled.
We were soon seated at the table with wine, while she taught Gaston a great deal about what herbs treated various women’s ailments. I soon began to think waiting in the tavern around the corner might be a good idea.
When we at last departed, she had more coin than I imagined she usually earned in a night, and we had oilcloth-wrapped packages of assorted roots and leaves. We ran home through the rain in silence. It was too dark for me to read his expression, and he did not seem to want to gaze upon me.
We found everyone had retired for the night, and whether Striker and Pete had returned I did not know. Gaston led us into Sarah’s office, and found paper and quill to make notes and labels for his purchases. He ignored me, so while he was thus engaged, I slipped upstairs and peered at Vivian’s door. There was light showing through the slats. I knocked quietly and received no answer, so I opened the door a little until I could spy her sleeping in her bed. I waited until I was sure she was indeed sleeping and not merely pretending to do so. With a sigh of relief, I closed the door.
There was light streaming from Christine’s room as well, and I wondered if she could not sleep or if she also felt the need to sleep with a lamp.
Gaston had not completed his notes by the time I returned, so I sat in the other chair and waited.
At last he stopped his furious scribbling. He pushed the packages around on the desk a bit and fiddled with the quill. “I cannot,” he said at last without looking at me.
“With her perhaps,” I said. “I was not pleased with her, either.”
He shook his head. “Non, her terms were unacceptable, but… It was not
that alone.”
I smiled. “She was not as arousing as Christine could be even to the dead, so do not…”
“Non,” he said quickly. “It was not her. The thought of… entering her… I… my cock found interest even in that with her. But…” He snapped the quill he had been fidgeting with in an accidental nervous gesture, and gazed at it forlornly.
I went to kneel before him so that I could gaze up at his face. He met mine with guilty eyes.
“You know you can tell me anything,” I murmured.
“It is akin to the thoughts I called horrible concerning you,” he whispered.
I nodded as understanding suffused me. “Has all this exhumed some dark place where you buried things concerning that night and your sister?”
He nodded and gave a little sigh, and then as much to my relief as it was a show of his, he relaxed and opened his hands to lay them upon mine. I entwined our fingers and squeezed reassuringly.
He took another deep breath. “When she said she would not allow you to stay, my Horse became quite angry, and yet I was filled with fear that you would leave me with her and something horrible would happen to me – and thus I wished to throw her down upon the bed and take her anyway, with you there to protect me, because I was… gripped with this hatred of her, that she was another woman out to harm me, and… I wanted to take what we came there for, and prove that they had no power over me, and… All I could do was concentrate on the herbs and what they meant and it passed, or… I was able to don a mask and calm my Horse and…” He sighed and gazed at me with pleading eyes.
“My love, I am so very proud of you,” I murmured.
He frowned.
“I did not see it, my love,” I said with pride, “neither did she. For all that, you handled yourself very well indeed.”
“Is how I ride the animal truly more important than what it wishes to do?” he asked earnestly.
“When it involves others, oui,” I sighed. “And… provided you did not act on it, is what it wanted to do so very evil when it still remembers how you were wronged and has nothing to compare it to?”
“Perhaps not,” he said doubtfully. “And perhaps, you are correct and I am seeing a new pocket of pus from the old wound,” he said with more surety.
“Now that it has been discovered, we must drain and treat it, non?” I said gently.
He nodded resolutely. “But Will, I cannot with Christine. She is… a thousand madmen in the bushes. I will panic and buck and not be able to ride myself without you… or even with you,” he added sadly, and tears filled his eyes. “I am too mad to be the heir my father needs, even with all this control I now have. And I feel guilt that I should be concerned with that in the face of your renouncing. I should be able to walk away from mine for you just as you have done.”
“Oh, hush, my love.” I brushed the tears from his cheeks. “The circumstances are different and you know it. You are tying yourself in knots.”
He nodded. “Oui, it is all a tangled mess. It is as much a Gordian Knot as my impotence was.”
“And we cut that free,” I said. “We will sort this one out, too.”
“But that is it, Will,” he said with new tears. “I do not wish to solve this one. I have you. I should not need them.”
I understood, but I knew he was viewing it incorrectly. “This is not about you or me, or rather, us. This is about a wound you carry. We must heal it, or now that it is festered it will spread its rot and it will harm us. I do not doubt your love for me. I do not doubt your devotion. And this is not about your madness per se, or pleasing your father. If you are still wounded from that night in another manner, then it must be healed.”
“How?” he asked with exasperation. “I look at them, and I want them, and I cannot trust them, and they will spook me such that I trample them.”
“All of them?”
“Any that give rise to my lust,” he spat.
“My sister?”
He froze and glared at me. “Will, she is your sister.”
“Oui, she is my sister,” I said gently. “As Gabriella was your sister; and Sarah has led one of our friends astray and…”
He cursed and looked away. “Oui. All of them,” he said bitterly.
I cast about for how I might make it easier for him. “My love, we stand in the light. These are merely shadows from the cave. They cannot live in the light. We can just look at them. They cannot reach us and they are not real… If you do not act upon them, then they are not real: they are just shadows and they hurt no one, not even you.”
I watched him think on it, and I thought on Pete’s words about a man’s actions being the measure of madness, and then I mused on all we had told the Marquis, and that moment of giddy joy when I had first felt that perhaps we were sane and the world was mad. I felt it to be true even more strongly, now. Tonight it did not make me giddy, though; it merely made my heart ache. I was moved to embrace the only person I felt I would ever stand beside.
“What?” he whispered as he held me in return.
“You are not alone,” I murmured. “And neither am I. And the world is mad, not us.”
He gave a brief bark of pained amusement and held me tighter. “If this is sanity, then the world is a very dark and scary place.”
I chuckled into his shoulder. “Have we not established that?” Then I added somberly as the thought struck me, “Are we not the get of it? Has it not made us as we are?”
He pushed me away enough to gaze upon my face with a frown. “Non, it has given us the wounds we carry, you are correct; but it did not make us, any more than our fathers did.”
I smiled, both at his sentiment, and that he was in sufficient possession of himself to think it.
“Let us sleep on this,” I whispered.
He nodded and sighed, and pulled me into his arms again. In time, we gathered his new herbs and retreated to the stable. There we doffed our damp and muddy finery, and cuddled together beneath the blanket, to retreat even further from the world into a womb that held only love, light, and warmth.
In the morning it still rained, and I wondered at it. Rain for days was not unheard of in the winter months, but it was usually a thing the Gods reserved for autumn, and thus another reason we avoided Port Royal in the storm season. I supposed we should be thankful there was no gale; but as the downpour had not abated enough to allow the sun to shine, it was becoming as cold as I could remember the West Indies being, short of a true storm.
We huddled in our hammock, venturing out only to relieve ourselves and procure water and bacon from Sam – who was happily holed up in the warm cookhouse. We told him to have Henrietta take food up to Vivian and returned to bed. Gaston seemed quite content to remain in my arms beneath the blanket and nowhere else, even though Sam had graciously offered a place by the only hearth the house possessed. My matelot seemed to be possessed of the mood I had the day before, and I could think of no reason we truly needed to brave the wet and mud: Jamaica and Vivian would be fed and cared for, and even Bella had her fat puppies dug deep in the straw beneath her: we need only see to ourselves for a time.
We told stories of the coldest we had ever been, and considered purchasing another blanket or going in search of a brazier; but for the most part, we dozed and made love. When Gaston was awake and not engaged with me carnally, he was contemplative and not inclined to speak. I let him have his silence, knowing he had much to think about for which I could not offer answers. I concocted a dozen plans for getting rid of Christine, and ruminated on whether my fancies were wishful thinking about things I thought inevitable – both his marriage to her and the need for her to be gotten rid of, if it should come to pass. And I considered whether the marriage could be avoided and how, and whether that was born of selfish desire – or love for my matelot and an intrinsic understanding of his needs and frailties. I at last concluded that I did not wish for him to marry her; but that it was a decision he must make for himself; and if he did marry her, she would have to be sent
to France with his father as soon as possible – with or, most likely, without, a child in her belly.
Our retreat and reverie was inevitably disturbed by a knock upon the doorframe. At my call, the visitor announced herself to be Agnes.
“Come in if it will not disturb you,” I called, “but we are naked and beneath a blanket and not inclined to dress.”
“I am well with that,” she said, and escaped the rain to sit in the straw huddled beneath a blanket of her own.
Bella nosed her proffered hand, but seemed disinclined to offer up a puppy from their warm nest, and Agnes did not attempt to dig one out.
“Is anyone about?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Everyone has stayed in their rooms. Well, some came down to break the fast, and the Marquis and Mister Rucker are discussing something in the dining room with their feet by a brazier, but beyond that, all is quiet.”
“Did Pete and Striker come home last night?” I asked.
She nodded and toyed with straw and did not meet my gaze.
“Are you wandering about the house from boredom, or did you come here for a reason?” I asked.
Her wide mouth formed a grim line. “A reason. How did it go with Mistress Garret? Did Gaston learn all he needed of women?”
Gaston tensed behind me, but I chuckled. “He learned a great deal of women, aye.”
“Such that he needs no more lessons?” she said, her long fingers burrowing in the straw.
I abandoned my humor. “Not necessarily. Why?”
“Well…” she said to the straw. “I was thinking that… The pleasuring of women is a thing I would do well to learn of, and perhaps…” She flushed. “I should determine whether I am truly confused about matters of men and women and what I favor, and…” She counted off another point on her fingers. “As you have said I need not marry, then I need not maintain my maidenhead, and…” She sighed and counted off another finger. “Many feel that a girl in my situation has already provided such service to her… patrons.”
Gaston swore very quietly behind me and planted his forehead between my shoulder blades.
“Um…” I managed to say while questioning whether the Gods were beneficent or cruel. “Are you suggesting you serve as a model for Gaston’s instruction?”
Treasure Page 40
