With the rider who brought supplies and took the girl away, I sent a message to Lord Hawley, that the mistress was delivered of a dead child, and what were we to do now? For my contract with him had only specified up to the birth, but now that the bab was gone, could not some other woman, without midwifing skills, be brought to the task of guarding my lady? For though I could use the good money he was paying, I felt a fraud here now, when there were plenty of childered women in my own village to whom I could be truly useful, rather than playing nursemaid here.
For answer he sent money, money extra upon what he had promised, as if the death of the bab had been my doing and he wanted to show me favor for it. And he bid me stay on, while they sorted themselves out at court about this state of affairs. I could see them there in their ruffs and robes, around their glasses of foreign wine, discussing: ought they to humiliate the lady with further exile, or ought they allow her back, instead to be constantly reminded of her sullied state by the faces and gestures of others?
And so I stayed nursemaid. Although there were only the two of us now, I kept to my contracted behavior and did not keep company with my prisoner, but only attended her health as long as that was necessary, and made and brought her meals, emptied her chamber pot, and tended her small fire. I was under orders to speak to her only when spoken to, and to resist any attempt she might make to engage me in conversation, but had I obeyed them we would have passed our days entirely in silence, so to save my own sanity I kept to my practice after the birth of greeting the lady when I entered, and she would always greet me back, so that we began each day with my asserting that she was a lady and hers that I was Joan Vinegar, which otherwise we might well have forgot, there being nothing much else to remind us.
A month and a half we lived together, the lady and me in our silences, the mountain wastes around us. The lord’s man came with his foodstuffs and more money, with no accompanying message. He told me all the gossip of court, sitting there eating bread and some of the cheese and wine that he himself had supplied, and truly it was as if he spoke of animals in a menagerie, so strange were their behaviors, so high-colored and passionate. He filled the tower-room with his noise and his uniform. I was so glad when he went and left us in peace again that I worried for myself, that I was turning like that one upstairs, entirely satisfied with nothing, with watching the endless parade of my own thoughts through my head.
I stood, with the man’s meal-crumbs at the far end of the table, and a cabbage like a great pale-green head at the near, and the gold scattered beside it that I could not spend, for how much longer yet he had not said. She was silent upstairs. She had maintained her silence so thoroughly while the man was here, he might have thought me a hermit, hired only to do my prayers and observances for sake of the queen’s health, not to attend any other human business. And none of this made sense, not the gold, or the cabbage, or the smell of the wine-dregs from the cup, or the disturbance his cheerful voice had wrought on the air of the usually silent room, but all flew apart in my senses like sparrows shooed from a seeded field, in all directions, to all quite different refuges.
My lady’s womb ceased its emissions from the birth, and paused awhile dry. Then came a day when she requested cloths for her monthly blood. I wondered, as I brought them, then later as I washed them, whether this was good or bad, this return to normal health. Would Hawley have preferred—would he have showered me with yet more gold?—if she had died in expelling her child, or thereafter from some fever of childbed? Had I been supposed to understand that she was not to return alive from this exile? Had I failed in an unstated duty?
“Well, she is as good as dead,” I said to myself, rinsing the scrubbed cloth and watching the pink cloud dissipate down the stream. “If you ask me.”
Dreams began to trouble me. Often I dreamed of the dead child. Sometimes he lived, and made wise dreamish utterance that carried no sense when I repeated it to myself in the morning. Sometimes he died, or fell to pieces as he came out of his mother, or changed to a plant or a fleeing animal on emerging, but always these dreams were filled with the scent of him, maddening, unplaceable, all flowers and fruits combining, so strong it seemed still to linger in the room even after I woke, and slept again, and woke again in the morning, so tantalizing that several times I hunted on my hands and knees in the meadow around the cottage for the blossom that might be the source, that I might carry it about with me and tantalize myself further with the scent.
I woke very suddenly from one of these dreams, and lay frightened in the night, washes of color flowering forth onto the darkness with the surprise of the wakening to my heart and blood. My hearing was gone so sensitive, if one of my grandchildren had turned over in his sleep back home, I think I would have heard it. Outside a thud sounded, and another, earthen, and then another; a horse was about, not ridden by anyone, but perhaps it had pulled itself loose when tied to browse, and now wandered this unfruitful forest and had come upon our meadow in its hunger.
When I had tamed my heart and breath, I left my bed and quietly opened the cottage door, to see whether the animal was wild or of some worth. I dare say I had it in mind how useful a horse would be, if it were broken and not too grand, how I might add interest to my dreary life here with excursions, with discoveries of towns within a day’s ride of the tower. I might spend a little of my gold there; I might converse with sellers and wives. Figures and goods and landscapes flowed across my imaginings, as I stepped out into the cold night, into the glare of the stars, the staring of the moon.
The air was thick with the flower-scent of the dead boy-child—such a warm, summery smell, here in autumn’s chills and dyings! The horse stood white—a stallion, he was—against the dark forest. He was down the slope from the tower. He had raised his head and seemed to gaze at the upper window.
“Perhaps you are too splendid,” I whispered, but I fetched the rope anyway, and tied a slip-loop. Then across the meadow I crept, stepping not much faster than a tree steps, so as not to frighten the horse away.
At a certain point my breathing quieted and the night breeze eased to where the low noise issuing from my lady’s window reached me. That rooted me to the meadow-ground more firmly, her near-inhuman singing, her crooning, broken now and then with grunts and gutturals, something like triumphant laughter.
I have often been thought a witch myself, with my ugly looks and my childbedding, but I tell you, I have never evoked any such magic as shivered under that fine horse’s moonlit hide, as streamed off it in the night, fainting me with its scent and eluding my eye with its blown blooms and shining threads. And I have never cast such a spell as trailed out that window on my mistress’s, my charge’s, song, if song it were. It turned my bones to sugar ice, I tell you, my mind to sweet syrup and my breath to perfume.
And then among her singing another sound intruded, with no voice to it, no magic, no song. It was an earthly sound and an earthy: stone scraped on stone, heavily, and surreptitious somehow.
Then I knew what she was about, with her mad singing, with her green-tipped baby, with her caring so little for the shame of the queen’s name and family. And I ran—more, I flew—across the meadow grasses and around to the tower door. I must be quiet, or she would hurry and be gone before I reached her; I must be quick!
I took the prison-room key from under its stone and managed to open the tower door silently. I sped up the stairs, put the key in the lock and turned it, with its usual squeaks and resistance. From inside, loud now, undisguised, came the grinding, the push, of stone on stone.
“My lady!” I forced the stiff key around.
More grinding. Then, and as I flung myself into the room, the stone the girl had loosened from the arrow-slot—months of labor in the night, it would have taken her!—thudded down into the meadow at the foot of the tower.
“My lady, no!”
She darkened the hole with her body, for the moments it took me to cross the room. My fingertip brushed the hem of her nightgown. Then moonlight an
d starlight whitened my reaching hand.
“Madam!” I screamed to the waiting horse, but through my scream I heard the impact of the lady below, the crack of breaking bone.
“Madam, no! What have you done?”
I pressed myself to the arrow-slot, peering down. The horse stepped up the grass, and I gasped. He bore a fine long spiraling horn on his brow, like some animals of Africa, anteloupes and such. I could smell him, the sweet ferocious flower-and-fruitishness of him, so powerfully that I was not surprised—I did not gasp again—when my lady appeared, walking across the meadow, not limping as she ought, or nursing any injury that I could see. And when she embraced him, he bowing his head to hold her slight body against his breast, and crooking his knee to further enclose her, the rightness and the joy of it caught me in belly and groin, like a birth-pain and a love pang together, and I drank of the sight as they each seemed to be drinking of the other, through their skins, through his coat and her clothing, from the warmth they pressed into being between them.
She held and held him, around his great neck, her fingers in his mane; she murmured into him, and rubbed her cheek on the nap of him and kissed him; she reached along his shoulder and the muscles there, holding him to her, and no further proof was needed than that embrace, and the sight of her lifted face, and the scent in my nostrils of all that lived and burgeoned, that the two of them were lovers and had loved, that the little green-tipped boy had been issue of this animal and this maiden, that the carbuncle on the boy’s brow had been the first formings towards his own horn, that I had been witness to magic and marvels. The world, indeed, was a vaster and much mysteriouser place than queens and god-men would have us believe.
My mistress led the horse to the tree-stump I used for chopping kindling on. She mounted him from there, and rode him away. I shook my head and clutched my breast to see them, so nobly did he move, and so balanced was her seat to his movement—they were almost the one creature, it was clear to me.
And then they were gone. There was nothing below but night-lit meadow, giving onto black forest. Above, stars sang out blindly in the square of air where my lady had removed the stone. The prison-room was empty; the door yawned; the window gaped. Everything felt loose, or broken. The sweetness slipped out of the air, leaving only the smell of the dead fire, and of cold stone.
I left the door ajar, from some strange notion that my lady might return, and require to imprison herself again. I walked down the stairs I had so lately flown up. Slowly I crossed the lower room to the other gaping door, and stepped out into the meadow. Brightly colorless, it was, under the moonlight, the grass like gray straw, the few late flowers leaning or drooping asleep.
I rounded the tower. There she was, her head broken on the fallen stone. I scarce could believe my eyes. I scarce could propel myself forward, surprise had frozen so thickly around the base of my spine, where all the impulses to walk begin, all the volitions.
“My lady, my lady!” I fell to my knees rather than knelt to them. How little she was, and fine, and pale! How much more delicate-crafted are noble ladies, aren’t they?, than us countrywomen all muscled for fieldwork and family life! But even my thick skull could not have prevailed against that stone, and from that height. Blood had trickled from her eye-corner, and her nose and mouth, and poured through her hair; now she seemed glued blackly to the stone, staring to the forest, watching herself ride away.
This is the end of my story. I told a different one to Lord Hawley when I walked out of the mountains, and bought myself a strong little bay mare to ride to the palace and give my information. My lord—I had not seen him in person before—was small, and his furs and silks and chains and puffed-out sleeves made him seem as wide as he was tall. He listened to my tale most interestedly, and then he released me from my contract, paying it out in full though I had four months to serve yet, and adding to that amount the sum I had paid for the mare, and double the sum I had outlaid for bed and food to visit him, so that I should not arrive home at all out of pocket. He gave me a guard to protect me and my moneys all the way to Steeping Dingle; that guard, in time, was to marry my youngest, little Ruth, and sire me four grandsons and three granddaughters.
I had no reason to complain of my treatment by the queen’s house; every royal man gave me full courtesy and respect. And though I was sworn to secrecy over the whole affair, the fact that I had had royal dealings, as evidenced by my return with the guard, did much for my standing, and from that time on I made a tidier living bringing out babies than all the other good-women combined, in my village and throughout the surrounding country.
The book never existed and yet Bethany remembered it, which was good for a gasp or two and certainly pertained to the matter at hand—but its real function was to propel her headlong into a thrilling and probably life-threatening adventure . . .
FRUMPY LITTLE BEAT GIRL
PETER ATKINS
“They don’t make hats like that anymore,” says Mr. Slater.
Jesus. Five minutes in and first thing out of his mouth. Bethany looks up from her book and through the windshield to see what the hell he’s talking about.
There’s a pedestrian, a Hispanic guy, crossing in front of the Lexus. He’s in no particular hurry about it, and he doesn’t need to be. The light they’re stuck at, the one at San Fernando and Brand, can take three minutes even in a good mood and, at eight-thirty in the morning, you can usually count on it being pissy.
“Sure they do,” Bethany says, meaning the hat.
“No,” Mr. Slater says, his head moving to watch the man reach the sidewalk and turn to wait, like them, for the northbound green. Bethany hears the pleasure, the admiration, in his voice. “They make things that look like it, maybe,” he says. “But that’s period.”
He has a point. It’s not only the gray fedora. The pedestrian—elderly but vigorous, his body lean and compact, face like leather but like, you know, good leather—is dressed in a subtly pinstriped black suit that could be new or that could have been really well looked after for decades. There’s a tight quarter-inch of white handkerchief showing above the suit’s breast pocket, and the man wears opinionated shoes.
“Cool,” Bethany says. “Buena Vista Social Club.”
“You think he’s Cuban?” Mr. Slater asks, as if she was being literal. “I mean, like, not Mexican?”
Bethany, no idea, shrugs and smiles. The light changes and Mr. Slater—you know, you really can start calling me David, he’s said more than once but she’s been babysitting for him and his wife since she was fourteen and just can’t get her head around it—moves through the intersection and takes one last look back at the guy. “Check him out,” he says, happy and impressed. “It’s 1958. And it’s never not going to be.”
Gay Michael’s on with a customer when Bethany comes into the bookstore but he takes the time to cover the phone’s mouthpiece and stare pointedly out the plate-glass window as Mr. Slater’s Lexus pulls away into the Glendale traffic. He gives her an eyebrow. “Bethany Lake,” he says, delighted. “You appalling little slut.”
“My neighbor,” she starts to tell him, ready to add that she’d needed a ride because her piece-of-shit Dodge is in the shop again but he’s already back on the phone giving directions.
“Yes, ma’am,” he’s saying, “Michael & Michael. On Brand. Between Wilson and California.” Listens for a moment. “Of course. Consider it held. And it really is in lovely condition. The website pictures don’t do it justice.” Bethany watches him run his hand over the tooled leather binding of the book on the counter in front of him as if he can send the seductive feel of it down the line. It’s an 1827 Paradise Lost, the famous one with the John Martin mezzotints. Bethany catches his eye, points to the curtained annex at the rear of the store, mimes a coffee-cup at her mouth.
She’d figured she’d have to brew a fresh pot but Fat Michael’s already on it; three mugs waiting, OCD-ed into a handle-matching line atop a napkin that’s folded in geometric precision. On a shelf abo
ve the coffee-maker, his iPod is nestled in its cradle-and-mini-speakers set-up and its random shuffle—which Bethany pretends is a radio station with the call-sign K-FMO, for Fat Michael’s Oddities—is playing “Jack the Ripper” by Screaming Lord Sutch. “Is your name Mary Blood?” his Lordship is currently screaming, albeit at low volume; Fat Michael would like to pipe K-FMO through to the store, but Gay Michael’s foot is firmly down on that one. “What are we, fucking Wal-Mart?” is about as far as the conversation ever gets.
“He’s really got a bite on that Milton?” Bethany says, knowing the guys have been asking high four figures. The coffee-maker pings.
“Some sitcom star’s trophy wife,” Fat Michael says, filling Bethany’s mug first and handing it to her, no milk no sugar, just right. “She’s shopping for his birthday. You know, like he can read.”
“None of your customers read, Michael,” she says. “They collect.”
“Hmph,” he says, because he doesn’t like to be reminded, and then, as the next selection comes up on K-FMO, “Oh, listen. It’s your song.”
It so is not her song. It’s a bad novelty record called “Kinky Boots” about how everybody’s wearing, you know, kinky boots. The only boots Bethany owns are a pair of Doc Martens but it wasn’t footwear that had made the boys declare it her song. Couple of months earlier, Gay Michael, bored on a customerless afternoon, had treated her to an appraising look as she was leaning on the counter reading.
“Look at you,” he’d said. “With your jean jacket and your ironic T-shirts.” The one she’d been wearing that day had read Talk Nerdy to Me. “With your Aimee Bender paperbacks and your rah-rah skirts and leggings. You know what you are, Bethany? You’re a frumpy little beat girl.”
Fat Michael had clapped his hands in delight. Sometimes Bethany wondered which of the partners was actually the gay one. “Sweet girls, Street girls, Frumpy little beat girls,” he’d recited, just in case Bethany had missed the reference to the stupid song’s lyrics. She couldn’t be mad at either of them—it was all so obviously coming from a place of affection—but, you know, Jesus Christ. Frumpy little beat girl.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 24
