by Gisèle Baxter (with apologies to Shirley Jackson)
Revised Introduction (Spring 2002): These vignettes form my first attempt at Alternative Gormenghast fiction, and were only very briefly posted to the Gormenghast Castle website's discussion group, after the publication of the first part of my major story, or Magnus Opus (pardon the pun, if you can). My departure point here is the series' infamous attic scene in the last episode (indeed, this story is based entirely on the BBC series refunctioning of the characters); it ends differently here, with Fuchsia giving in to Steerpike's advances, and Steerpike losing self-possession in the process. The same first law of romantic fiction as in my other Gormenghast story applies here as well, only he leaves before she wakes up, fearing discovery. Titus is, shall we say, not quite so lucky as in the series closer, but almost lucky enough, and Steerpike survives the young earl's attempt to dispatch him. I just didn't bother with the troublesome issue of whether the guard would bother to search for the body. Oh well, bring out the violins: this one is bad. Not as cringeworthy as that Star Trek story written in my teens with a cultural director aboard the Klingon ship, and not nearly as bad as the story written in my very early adolescence about a girl who meets Alice Cooper at the shopping mall, but lower your standards in entering. The characters are all as they appear in the series. There are a few minor inventions. Explanations are provided of gaps I didn't get around to filling before I began the next story. One note on technique: to detach myself enough from what I was doing so I wouldn't feel I was just using series characters without thought, I sometimes simply refer to them by pronoun, or by function, e.g. the doctor. The very first draft was entirely from Fuchsia's point of view, hence the excerpts from her journal.
She had no idea where this stairwell led to, only that she could see a faint blue light at the top, which must mean a door or a window, and she could hear rain. Dragging herself and all her sodden garments up painfully, she half crawled her way to what proved to be a landing where the staircase turned and went further up into this tower. The landing was dark; the light came from a narrow window set high up in the wall. She blinked to force her eyes to adjust to the lack of light, and tried to catch her breath as she pushed her long veil of wet hair back from her face and wrung some of the water from her skirt. Then she realized she could hear some other breathing, and she froze; keeping perfectly still, she stared into the darkness until her vision was clear enough to let her see a figure propped against the wall in the darkest part of the landing, behind the turn of the stone staircase. The impulse to scream got caught in her throat, and her failure to do so kept her focused, so that details emerged: the pallor of a face and neck and collar against dark clothing, eyes that were fixed on hers with a fierce terror.
Fuchsia drew herself up carefully. Steerpike's gaze remained locked on hers, moving up with her. She realized now that other than this hard terror in his expression and the way he had one arm clenched across his chest, the vitality had gone out of him. He was immobile and she was perfectly safe and for that reason he was frightened of her. She hesitated, and cautiously approached him, and he made one effort to get his free hand to the hilt of his dagger but failed and let the arm collapse back against the wall. She crouched down beside him, and saw that where his arm was held against his chest, the sleeve was soaked in blood, and his shirt by now was more red than white.
He had almost no voice left, but managed in a hoarse whisper, all the while maintaining his fierce gaze, "Don't say you saw me."
"I had no idea what happened to you," said Fuchsia. "I woke up and you were gone."
"They would have found me there."
"I would have protected you; I had that right. And they seem to have found you anyway."
His mouth twisted suddenly, something between a smile and a grimace. She gently placed her hand against the side of his face and he broke his stare and closed his eyes. He was very cold to the touch and was trembling violently. Fuchsia tried to move his arm away from his chest, and realized he was trying to control the bleeding: so he did want to live, even though he found it increasingly difficult to keep the degree of pressure needed, or even to keep his eyes open. She hesitated, then started tearing long strips from one of her muslin underskirts.
"We need to move from here," she said quietly, not at all sure he could hear her but determined that she had to explain this. "I need to take you somewhere warmer and drier than this. You need to move your arm so I can have a look at your injury and I have to try to bandage it without taking off your coat; it's too cold. You also need to stay awake. I might have to hurt you in doing this but I'm not trying to and I don't want to. Do you understand?"
His head moved slightly in what might have been a nod.
From Fuchsia's Journal:
We live in an obscure part of the south wing of the castle. No one knows we're here; perhaps they really do believe we're dead. Part of the corridor leading here has collapsed, but there's a way you can crawl through it and when we decided to live here that's how we got back and forth from the places where we scavenged what we have. I've become a good scavenger: never thought I had it in me, but I'm small enough to get through tiny spaces and to creep along unnoticed, and I have good night eyes, which is a family trait. I even scavenged the clothes I wear on these expeditions: a dark shirt and trousers, soft-soled shoes. I'd never thought of boys' clothes in terms of the sheer freedom of movement they offer; sometimes I think I'd like to dress like this all the time, but I have my rank and my domestic responsibilities, and so I have three reasonably undamaged dresses here, and I've been teaching myself how to do fine sewing so I can repair them properly. Since the main room of our apartment faces south, we get the sun, and after the floods subsided I spread the dresses out on the stone floor and let them dry. Some of the more delicate material faded; some even disintegrated. Deflated and uninhabited, they made me think of corpses, or of ghosts.
At first he wouldn't talk to me. When I finally convinced him we had to move from where I found him, the trip took hours because he was bleeding heavily and had to stop often, and I am neither tall nor strong enough to support even his weight. We also had to climb a long flight of dark stairs to get above the water, and it had been so long since I had been to this part of the castle that I had no idea even if we'd be able to get the door open. But whoever had been here last had left the heavy wooden door unlocked and slightly ajar. The large, low-ceilinged room was virtually empty, and moss was growing on the walls, but there were some old tapestries and carpets rolled up against one wall, some tarnished brass bowls, and a stone grate, and I could with his knife cut branches of ivy from the outside walls of the castle and strike a flint and burn them. I made the fire, spread one of the carpets beside it, and got him to lie down on it just before he passed out.
I managed to get him out of his sodden jacket and shirt and stared at the wound below his collarbone with considerable horror but also a numbing sense of unreality that actually let me think things through. I had to stop the bleeding and keep the wound clean, or he would go into shock and his heart would stop, or he would develop blood poisoning. So I tore up the underskirt of my dress to make bandages, and filled the brass bowls with rainwater. He did develop a high fever, and I sat up all night with him, alternately mopping his face and neck with wet cloths or trying to keep the bandages clean. After the fever broke, he slept for what seemed like days, covered with the softest of the carpets. Meanwhile I washed his shirt and spread it on the floor to dry, then began my foraging, and hung an old tapestry over the window so no one would see our fire. When he had slept enough, he put on his dry clothes, making serious but mostly futile efforts to press out the wrinkles and brush off the worst of the stains from his jacket. And he sat, for hours at a time, on a small rug in the darkest corner of the room, staring at nothing, never looking at me, never saying anything. The numbing shock broke, and I sat in my own corner for as many hours and cried and cried, until I was doubled over, coiled up, my face boiled red, almost ill and exhausted into unconsciousness. I had no idea what I was crying over, just as he probably had no idea what he was staring at. I suppose we were waiting for someone to find us. It never occured to us to leave the castle; we'd have been too visible. And where would we have gone?
I hated the dark turbulent skies; they made me think of winter. But at last I woke up one morning and my face was warm and my eyelids were glaring red; I was lying on my back on a motheaten and very dusty cushion, almost below the window, and under the fringe of the tapestry the sky was glowing. I stood up and carefully lifted an edge of the tapestry to look out at a brilliant day, with fine fresh air and the birds my mother loves calling from the forest. I realized I had finally cried myself out: there was no more point. This made me feel very weary and old, and my bloodshot eyes ached in the brilliance. What now? I wondered. I could go back. They would do nothing to me, and he would have to stay here, I suppose, but I would keep that secret and maybe from time to time I could come and visit. It's not really a matter of forgiveness or vengeance. I stretched my arms as high above my head as I could and squeezed my eyes shut tightly, then opened them abruptly and the glare did not hurt so much.
Although I thought he was asleep (it was still early), when I turned back towards the room I saw that he was sitting up, with his head propped against the wall, staring expressionlessly along the floor, away from the window. I had approached him often enough when I knew he was asleep or unconscious, to put a blanket over him, or a flask of water beside him. Now I did so when he was awake, and I felt no particular fear. I dropped into a crouch beside him and very gingerly, very tentatively put my hands on his shoulders. He flinched, but didn't blink or turn around, and he felt like stone, he was so tense. This is what I felt like to him, I told myself, and I was always permitted to resist but I wished more people in my life had just crushed me in their arms and made me feel safe so I would know how to do it. He sat with his knees drawn up and his arms folded on top of them. Still cautiously, I pushed my hands down his chest, under his jacket, over the bandages, and I drew him back against me. After flinching again, he closed his eyes and put his hands on the floor, hesitated, then brought them up to rest lightly on my arms. I rested my cheek on the top of his head.
"You should go," he said, in a very tired, flat, dull voice. "They won't do anything to you."
"They could," I said, and my voice sounded strange, tiny and fragile.
"They won't. Your mother won't let them."
"And what would you do?"
He drew a deep breath and considered this; his eyes opened partly and resumed their distant gaze. "I don't know," he said.
His hair smelled of stale water, but then mine must have as well, my hair that hung now like a limp black veil. I decided to have a look at the dressing, which I very carefully cut away from his shoulder with the point of his knife, while he watched with a reasonable amount of focus. For the first time there was no blood on the gauze and while the wound was still red and tender, the scar was beginning to form and seemed uninfected. I washed it, then wrapped it in another length of my underskirt.
As I worked, I said without looking up, "If I go back, and I'm not ill or injured or mad, they'll know something happened."
"So your forgiveness or protection might come at a price."
I wished his voice weren't so toneless and lifeless, but I nodded, and my hands shook as I tied the ends of the fabric and tore off the unravelling threads.
"Would you tell them where to find me?" he asked. "I can't get far. Not for a while, anyway."
"Is that too tight?" I wondered, steadying my hands on my knees and still not looking up.
"No; you did a good job. Hanging around with the doctor must have rubbed off on you. But you haven't answered my question."
"How dare you even ask it," I said in my unfamiliar tiny voice, and for the first time in my life felt no impulse to cry or scream or hit someone; I looked up with my eyes wide open and we stared at each other, expressionlessly but for the first time in days both wide awake and conscious.
"And what if they try to make you tell? Lock you up till you do so? Put you out of the castle in winter?"
I felt a lifeline snap, a hard brittle sound, somewhere inside me, and I said simply, "I'm not going back to them."
"We can't stay in this room forever."
This I knew; we had run out of the food I'd brought, and would need a more reliable source of water and fuel. "How well do you know this part of the castle?" I asked.
"Probably as well as you do. It's never interested me; there's nothing here but old rooms that haven't been used for centuries."
"It's the oldest part."
He pushed himself up cautiously; he had lost a lot of blood and seemed very pale and thin. But he buttoned his shirt carefully, up to the neck, searched his pockets without success for a comb, then smoothed his hair back with one hand. He pulled back the tapestry, pushed open the window, and rested his elbows on the broad ledge. I stood beside him and followed suit, absently tugging at bits of moss and ivy. The wind was still damp, but fresh.
"It does have the merit, anyway, of not looking back over the castle," he said at length of the view, and my mouth twitched at this, as if I wanted to smile. He scratched out a few loose chips from the ledge with his thumbnail and experimentally tossed them out, to see how far away they would fall, then he went on, "And what do you see as our immediate priorities in staying here?"
I cleared my throat; I refused to look at him; I felt I would laugh. "Food, water and fuel," I said as seriously as I could.
"And you know how to get all that."
"I realize it means stealing, if that's what you're after."
He turned to examining frayed threads on the cuffs of his jacket. "And you think I'll recover completely?"
I covered my face with my hands; it was awful.
"Because," he said, and I did feel him looking at me, "if I were to die soon, and you chose to stay with me till then, I would of course be grateful though with a few provisions and your silence I could look after myself. But if you stayed, then you could, maybe in a few weeks, go back: say nothing, or tell them the truth, for what could they do to you then?"
My shoulders began to heave. He would have no idea what to do; he would think I was going mad with grief, and maybe I was, but I wanted to laugh, I wanted to roll on the floor hysterically. Finally, I flung myself back against the nearest wall with as much impact as I could, and I managed to choke out, "You are not going to die: do you understand? You just feel horrible because you've lost a lot of blood and you've had a fever. And if you live another ninety years I won't go back to them, all right? I chose this and I am perfectly capable of living with the decision."
Hitting the wall and the effort of speaking broke the compulsion to laugh, and I put a hand on his arm and said softly, "I am sorry. You must have thought I'd gone mad." He shook his head almost imperceptibly, then returned his gaze out the window, and he had his hands clenched on the rough ledge, grinding his knuckles into the stone. I leaned over so that he had to look at me again, and stroked his face gently, letting my fingertips move over the dreadful scars, then back through his hair, and he closed his eyes but made no effort to stop me, and I said in the same soft even voice I could trust now, "When I woke up with you, I wished I could have really seen you fifteen years ago."
"When we were both young and beautiful?"
"That's not what I meant."
"I know what you meant. Would anything have changed? You were just a child then."
"So were you."
"I never was. I never really was. And don't stay to make amends. I don't want any amends made to me, and will make none myself. When I woke up with you, the only thing that occured to me was that we were both far closer to death than ever in our lives."
But I persisted, and though he kept his eyes closed and his hands were bleeding on the ledge, his mouth twitched slightly against my hand as it passed. Then he abruptly turned back into the room and surveyed it critically.
"Right then," he said after a long stretch of observation. "We need quite a lot if we're to manage here. Do you have anything I could write a list on? If not, put paper and ink into your priorities. How much can you remember?"
"Quite a lot, actually," I said confidently.
"And how well do you know the castle?"
This I was less confident about, but I said, "Well enough."
"No you don't. It doesn't matter: if I'm not going to die, then obviously in a few days I should be sufficiently recovered to do a lot of this scavenging myself. But we do need a few things for now, so you need to find and break into the stores, which means you need to know your way to the kitchens. I can direct you by landmarks you do know but wait until it's dark. The water supply should extend to here but the pipes might be walled up depending how much of this part has been built over. I'll check on that. I'll need a lot of paper, as much as you can carry; I might have a pen about me but I doubt it, so get several pens and ink. I need to be able to draw maps. I very badly need painkillers of some sort but if you could get a bottle of brandy that would do. Oh, and soap. And a razor. That should be enough for now."
I retained this perfect sense of calm because I knew the risk was so great this was almost unreal. He would have a much clearer sense of the specific risks, and offered me his dagger, which I took in my hands and turned over and over, then returned it to him. "I'd only end up injuring myself," I said, and then I added, looking very hard at him, "I should be back in a day at the most. Will you be here?"
He said nothing for a moment, then replied very quietly, "Yes, of course."
I got back at about dusk on the following day, puffing under the weight of my burden, grimy in my perpsiration-soaked motley garments, my hair tied back from my forehead with a striped rag. The door was unbolted and I pushed it open as I dragged the bulging velvet sack inside. He sat under the window, against the opposite wall, and his hand went reflexively towards his dagger, but I said clearly: "I'm alone. You have to try to trust me more than that."
"Did anyone see you? Did you talk to anyone?"
I shook my head. He pushed the dagger back into place, closed his eyes and drew a long breath, then winced sharply. I dropped down in front of him and lightly stroked his forehead; he seemed to have regained a mild fever. Carefully opening his jacket and shirt, I checked the dressing, which was still clean. He drew ends of my hair forward over my shoulders and examined my new clothes with some perplexity, especially since he recognized their general type.
"Where's your dress?" he wondered.
I tugged over the heavy velvet sack, which looked more like the voluminous skirt it once was when I untied it. I brought out reams of clean paper, pens and ink, bars of soap, candles and matches, all the other provisions, presenting them like trophies of a hunt. Then I brought out from one of my pockets the little glass bottle of pills.
"I know my way around a little better than you assumed," I said. "Be careful with these; I only know they're painkillers. Try taking one and see what happens."
I shook one into his hand and got him a flask of water. He swallowed carefully, then resumed his examination of my hair, finally untying the striped rag and letting it fall forward. I let him draw my face towards him between his hands, and closed my eyes as he kissed me. He did so just once, and lightly, but fully on the mouth, then he said to me very softly, with my face still between his hands, "Not now. I'm not strong enough. I'm still afraid of bleeding inside. See, I can say I'm afraid to you. But soon. If you stay with me."
"Why do you keep asking if I will?" I demanded.
"Because I can't understand why you would."
**********
The doctor had taken to riding around the castle grounds in good weather, and on the winter morning that marked the festival of the Lake, profoundly wished he were doing so. The sky was bright if not clear, and there was a crust of snow on the grass, in which he made patterns with his shoes when no one was looking, because he liked to hear the crunch. Except for the parts that required some sort of response, and hence attention, he tuned out and watched the various people gathered. One among the carvers kept drawing his attention. She (though it was difficult to determine the gender beyond a shadow) had exceptionally good posture and stood calmly, talking to no one, staring at or rather into the lake. She wore a knee-length quilted coat and tall, very sturdy suede boots; most of her was muffled in a couple of broad fringed shawls of some dark homespun fibre. From beneath one of these, another fringe of dark hair that seemed to extend well past her back was just visible.
At the dispersal, the doctor found himself working his way around the periphery of the crowd, past the inevitable banquet table, intending to make for the stables but invariably finding himself, whenever he glanced towards the carvers, looking for the dark-haired, exquisitely poised young woman. Why, he had no idea. Something to do with her seeming not to belong.
Through much of his ride, he mulled over this fixation, although he also managed to enjoy the crisp morning. And then he saw her again, riding towards the forest via an unusual and circuitous route. He calculated the distance towards her, veered off his planned course, and galloped until he could call out, with innocent good cheer, "Lovely morning for a ride, I must say!"
Her response was not unexpected; she took off at full gallop into the forest. Undaunted, the doctor took off after her.
She had taken quite naturally to riding, despite her only instruction being a series of complicated drawings with annotated directions. However, she had never had to maintain a fast gallop and navigate the forest paths, and so the inevitable happened: the horse shied at a pile of brush and deftly threw her over it, sending her rolling down a mossy but not overly steep embankment while it stood watching. The doctor eased his mount into a canter, and tethered it to a tree far enough from hers, whose nose he stroked as he passed. He clambered unathletically over the brush, snagging his coat and scratching his face and hands, then edged down the embankment to where she lay in a heap of shawls and hair.
"Here now, I only wanted to say good morning; this is a far too drastic response," he said, noting that her position didn't suggest neck or back trauma of too severe a degree. He dropped to a crouch, breathing clouds of steam into the cold air, and gently seized her shoulder to roll her over.
But she rolled over abruptly, dagger drawn reflexively.
The doctor's heart and lungs and breath all froze in the moment it took for his eyes, peering over the rims of fogged spectacles, to lock with hers, wide and glaring with terror. Then the world righted itself and he sat back and exhaled.
"My God," he murmured.
She struggled to get her own breath back as her terrified face contorted itself into something like the beginning of a scream, then she dropped the dagger and flung herself at him, into his arms, and he held her as he would hold his own prodigal child if he had had one, while she clung to him sobbing out years' worth of hysterical tears, and he wept for all their losses but especially for the loss of her, whom he had loved. When she had worn herself out, she drew back and stared at him, wiping her face with her sleeve. He gave her a handkerchief.
"I should ask at this point if you're injured," he said, with a little smile he could not suppress though his own face was wet.
She shook her head. "I felt as if I'd broken every bone in my body, but the brush broke my fall and it wasn't a bad landing with all these leaves. I'm afraid I'm not a very good rider yet."
"Are you a ghost?" the doctor wondered. "Or am I projecting onto you my own fall: am I, after all, dead?"
"You're not dead," she replied, and she reached out a hand to stroke his face, and bent forward to kiss him lightly on the mouth. "You're not at all dead. And neither am I."
"May I ask any question at all?"
"There are things you can ask. Others you can't: like where I am and why I went."
"Are you all right? Are you safe?"
She smiled her broad mad smile. "Yes, and yes."
The doctor hesitated, almost frowned, then took her hands firmly in his. "And are you happy?"
"It's not an issue. I wasn't happy." She suddenly grew very serious. "Will you say you saw me?"
He shook his head. "If you don't want to be found, I won't let you be. I wish you would let me see you from time to time, because now that I know you're alive, I will worry about you."
"I wish I could," she said earnestly.
Something had gnawed at the doctor since she had kissed him; part of him had adored the impulse, the kind gesture towards his greying soul, while part of him had realized there was nothing tentative or awkward in the gesture. She knew how to do this. Perhaps she had gone to the carvers; there were outlanders further out beyond the forest, the children of exiles, and perhaps after running away, she had found a man among them. She was still young, and had an undeniable if unconventional sort of beauty, and that incredible poise: she was exquisite in ways she had never been. But those scenarios would please him, and he did not feel pleased; he still felt something gnawing.
"But you would be betraying a trust," he suggested kindly.
She looked at him with wide-open eyes, as if he had guessed, and at that moment he realized he had. The doctor frowned, then tried to smile, then frowned again, and said, "Listen to me. Come back. Don't tell me the truth; don't tell me anything. I'll hide you in my house, and we'll come up with a story for your mother. You know that your brother is gone. Well, maybe we'll say you went off to try to find him, how about that? We'll work on it. Just come back to where you're safe, and where you're loved. And in return, as a gesture of good faith, I'll -- " and here the doctor hesitated, and thought to himself, I'll track the bastard down and kill him myself and make sure he's dead, a thought so searingly horrible he had to mop beads of sweat from his forehead even on this frost-heavy morning, then he cleared his throat and went on, "I'll respect this trust of yours. You have no reason to. I can't even imagine how you're managing to live. And what in the world are you doing out here dressed like that?"
Through the first part of this speech she had retained her terrified gaze, and then, gradually, she had begun to smile. Now, still smiling, she said simply, "Scavenging for fuel." There was, in fact, an outlander woman who sold her fuel she herself scavenged from around the carvers' village. She also told fortunes.
"Let's get up and take a walk," the doctor suggested. "Kneeling in the snow is rather hard on aging knees, and I want to see if there is any resulting damage from your having been tossed. Frankly, I want to take you back right now by force if necessary, but I think you've grown up enough to be reasoned with, or you ought to have done, by your age."
She took the doctor's arm and they strayed further into the forest, but keeping close enough to the periphery to see the snowy expanses of lawn between the forest and the castle.
"Well, are you warm enough, wherever you are?" he persisted.
"Yes. You know, I can be reasoned with and I can also look after myself quite well."
"But the assumption is that you'll return to wherever it is."
"No. I could, in fact, go back to my old life." She walked with a slight favouring of her right leg but seemed otherwise quite fine; she had lowered one of her shawls, so that her face and her masses of black hair were visible. And she smiled to herself, then looked quite seriously at the doctor, "But I can't. It's like something that's broken, then repaired. No matter how well, you still know the cracks are there. Have you ever been faced with a moral choice, doctor?"
"Several, my dear," he admitted.
She struggled to find exactly the right way of saying something relatively philosophical. "If only the choices were always straightforward, and weren't both right and wrong, each of them, so that whichever you choose, you know there's some way you have to pay for the wrong part."
"Ah. Are you sure this was a choice you saw, or was it one that was imposed on you, through blackmail or coercion?"
She hesitated, and her voice began very subtly to crack at the edges. "It was mine. I was the only one at the moment who could.... It was a life or death choice. Not my life or death."
"Then it seems to me yours is the only trust available to be betrayed." At this she began to cry again, and he wrapped her in his arms, then continued, "My dear girl, you are completely incapable either of killing someone, or of leaving someone to die. You simply acted in character. But if you're free to leave, why not go? Don't create some artificial debt. You have the right to a better life, and if you don't want the life of the castle, I'll protect you from it."
She shook her head. "I can't. I'm sorry. I don't really cry this much now; I've become quite tough. Come on; I have to go soon but I want to talk to you some more." And so she took his arm again and they continued in a sort of loop back towards where the horses were. "Tell me how everyone is."
"Everyone is as well as you might expect," said the doctor. "Your mother keeps herself busy; the poet is proving to be a reasonable secretary, and he does at least have a pleasant voice and manner about him. He's going to be married, and the countess has actually determined he's to have a quite splendid wedding. My sister's marriage has made my house a lonelier place, but a somewhat safer, quieter one, and I have discovered a couple of the current teaching staff share my enthusiasm for music; we get together fortnightly to practise chamber pieces."
When they reached the point where they had begun, they clung to each other in what both would reluctantly call a farewell.
"And are you treated well?" the doctor asked pointedly.
She nodded firmly.
"May I ask what you do wherever it is you are?" A subtle gesture implied the address was plural.
She hesitated, then she said, "Nothing to worry about."
The doctor was to go on ahead; she would wait ten minutes, then approach the outer dwelling stables, where she would leave her horse, by another route she would not describe. He kissed her forehead, then her hands, and reminded her she always had a friend. As he rode away, he felt her eyes on his back, and in fact she stood and watched him until he rounded the castle wall toward the main gate.
That evening, the doctor attended the banquet traditionally held as part of the Festival of the Lake. The poet-secretary read the lengthy invocation in his pleasantly theatrical voice; his bride to be, the sister of one of the professors, sat at the gentry end of the high table, very shy and awed at being in this position. She was probably about twenty-five, a shy, bookish young woman not yet at home in the more opulent gowns she was now required to wear. After the invocation, there was some music, then at last the meal was served. It was as usual complicated and abundant. Now husbandless and childless, the countess-regent stood both more and less on ceremony. The rituals were adhered to, to the letter, but she saw no problem in requiring a saucer of cream to be brought immediately to a cat that might have strayed in, or letting a bird peck its way along the table. At formal banquets, by way of conversation, she grilled everyone present concerning recent events in their lives and the state of their work. Between these recitations, everyone ate in a state of suspension, aware of every clink of cutlery against china.
During one of these excruciating silences, she turned to the doctor with a frown that was not intended to be angry: "You're being awfully quiet. For once. What's up with you?"
The doctor had been contemplating a thick cream soup with green speckles of parsley floating on top. He had been absently arranging the parsley into concentric circles with the tip of his spoon, and actually had been about to take a mouthful at this enquiry, which required him to slide the spoon back into place, look up, grin deferentially, and say, "Oh, much the usual, your ladyship. Much the usual. An appendectomy this afternoon, after a rather bracing ride this morning, after what I must say was one of the more impressive Festivals of the Lake I can recall: well done all around, and splendid weather besides. My musical colleagues and I are working up a new chamber piece for three viols and harpsichord and hope to begin rehearsals in earnest this weekend."
While the countess digested this report, in the back of his mind the doctor worked over what of the castle he knew: where was she? Or more to the point, where were they? They had to be in the castle. The Outer Dwellers would not have them; they would be too different, would be feared, would be betrayed. Well, for that matter, would be recognized. If they lived farther beyond, among the children of exiles, they might be protected, if they had sufficient resources, which would explain the scavenging, but he could not imagine her surviving in such a place, practically in the elements, even though she was sensibly attired and really a competent rider; her fall had mostly been provoked by her fright. His head began to ache. Part of him wanted to stumble across this hiding place, to remove any question of betrayal from her; he wanted to rescue her. She needed to be rescued, to be restored to a sense of herself. And yet she seemed so serene. Maybe it had been something to her to feel she had saved a life, even the life of an enemy and a traitor. From a purely professional standpoint, he wondered what she had had to do. Perhaps she had good instincts, after all; her mother knew instinctively how to care for animals. He wondered what would happen to him if they discovered him looking for them. Perhaps he would be killed, though he had faith she would not permit that, but how much power did she have in this?
From Fuchsia's Journal:
I arrived back at our distant corner of the south wing towards dusk, which was in mid-afternoon at that time of year. After depositing what I'd brought in the storeroom and carefully relocking it, I gave the signal knock on the main door and waited until I heard the bolts slide out to push. The room was almost dark, and I stood staring at the deepening blue of the sky through the window while he replaced the bolts. I could feel him standing behind me, carefully removing twigs and bits of leaves from my hair. Once I had decided to cut some of my hair back because it's a nuisance this long when I'm crawling through tunnels, and it's the one time since we've been here he's almost been angry with me. He had been writing at the desk under the window, while I wandered around the room, experimentally holding out locks and measuring them with the scissors: neck length, shoulder length. I was about to make the first cut when he grabbed my wrist so hard I screamed, and he hurled the scissors against the opposite wall, and for a second we glared at each other like cats about to fight, then he went and stared out the window for a long time, as if bleaching himself in the harsh light, and he was shaking with the effort to keep his rage down. I sat down against a wall, too shocked to cry, not quite sure what to do, shaking myself, and all my hair felt like an enormous veil of lead lace dropped on me.
Some time later, he crossed the room and crouched down next to me. I reflexively turned away and put my arms up; I wouldn't look at him and I didn't want him to touch me.
"Forgive me," he said. I said nothing. He hesitated, and I could hear him breathing, and finally he added, very softly, "Maybe now you'd like to go."
"Are you asking me to go?" I managed, still not looking at him, still keeping my arms up.
"No. But you might want to now."
I shook my head. I turned around and said impulsively, "I want you. Now."
Some time later, lying half awake, mostly on my side, I watched him smooth out strand after strand, lock after lock of my waist-length black hair, holding it up against the moonlight, and then he spread it like a black silk veil over his face, wrapped it over his neck and around his hands. His own hair he kept cut to precisely the same length all the time, ruthlessly scraped back from his face and tied at the neck with a short length of black ribbon. Mine he carelessly let fall into his mouth as he breathed.
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Copyright 2001-04 by Gisèle Baxter; all rights to original narrative, characters and characterizations reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Last updated 2 August 2003 by G.M. Baxter.