I had only been gone a little time! A few weeks in Chinanga! A few weeks in Ylles! Whence came this protruding skeleton, this skull beneath the wrinkled skin? Whence came this hoary hair, this hip-stiff walk, this pale reflection of beauty gone, beauty done, beauty over! I screamed, I think. It was as though I had found a snake in my bed, a spider crouched upon my food, a monstrous devourer slinking close at my back, death, worse than death, for with death it is done soon and over, but with this, with this, I was still alive to know of it.
Panic and tears and wailing. I came to myself later to find the kettle steaming over the fire, the lid dancing upon the roiling waters, a jolly clangor which seemed to say so you’re getting old, you’re old, you’re old. So what? Hills are old and getting older, rocks are older than that, stars are older still, so what?
“So it’s gone!”, I cried, half in pain, half in fury. “My youth, my beauty, gone. I didn’t even use it up and it’s gone! I didn’t have time to waste it, time to taste it, time to glory in it, and it’s gone! Here I am all sunk-cheeked, droopy-chested, flat-butted, and it’s gone.”
Bingity-bangety went the lid. You’re half a fairy, aren’t you? You’ve learned magic haven’t you? What does it matter how old you are?
What did it matter? If I chose to use enchantment, no one would know it but me. Was there a difference if no one knew it but me? Oh, yes, I cried to myself. Oh, yes. There was more weeping, more howling, coming to myself at last with my hands buried in my filthy hair.
Old or not, I could not bear the dirt on me. I filled the tub and stripped the rags away. When I got them off, I recognized what they were: the remnants of the dress I had worn when I left Wellingford. A simple kirtle of fine wool. I had stood on the sandspit in Chinanga in that gown. I had traveled to the wall of Baskarone in that gown. I had met the ambassador in that gown. Evidently I had also grown old in that gown. It was gone. Only tatters.
I heard a voice singing.
“Beauty and rag tag and motley are twins.
When the one’s gone then the other begins.”
Oh, Fenoderee! How could you be so unkind! I looked around for him, but he was not there.
Chunks of soap lay on the shelf beside the copper. Cook had learned how to make it from some Teutonic connection of his, from tallow and ashes and a lengthy stirring. The aunts had been dead set against soap in the bath, thinking it fit only for the washing of filthy clothes, but water and scented oils alone would do nothing for my hair. I washed it, combed it, washed it again. The body was filthy, too. Not “my” body. It did not look or feel like “my” body. When I was done, I pulled the plug from the drain, then filled the tub again from the kettle and the well, lying in it to soak myself until I felt able to go oh.
When I was clean, I fed the body. The body, though not at all familiar, was not as bad as I had feared, only very bony and ugly, like photographs I had seen in the twentieth of starvation victims or one of those unfortunate women with anorexia. Whatever I had been eating in Ylles, or thought I had been eating, whatever I had consumed in Chinanga, it had not been sufficient to sustain a half-mortal person. I felt my breast, feeling a warmth there, as though something simmered gently inside. Being half-starved had not injured what I carried.
Damn, I said to myself, Carabosse should have known!
None of my clothing would fit. Aunt Lavvy had been, was, very thin, as I recalled. Wrapped in a sheet from the linen store beside the bathroom, I went upstairs once more to Aunt Lavender’s room. I found the kirtle she had used to ride in, plus several more, all of very plain stuff, with full sleeves to show the tightly buttoned sleeves of the underbodice. Aunt Lavvy’s underbodices were all the color of dirt or excrement. Mama’s underbodices, in the attic, were of prettier colors: madder red, and dark indigo blue, saffron yellow, and hollyhock root, which is a pale blue. They were soft enough that their fullness did not matter. Thieving through other closets, I took Aunt Terror’s new cote-hardie, and Aunt Basil’s surcote, which was almost new. I had never worn a wimple and veil, but it seemed a good time to start. Particularly inasmuch as the soap had left my hair as wild as a lion’s mane. I found some clean headdresses in Aunt Marj’s room, along with a leatherbound box in which everything could be packed. I thought of using the boots to take me to Wellingford from where I stood, inside Westfaire, but the thought of what all those thorns might do to me en passant, as it were, dissuaded me. The boots might take me without injury, but sapiens nihil affirmat quod non probat, as Father Raymond used to say, and God knows I didn’t know for sure. So I went out into the lake, naked as celery, with the box teetering on top of my head, dried myself off on the shore, and assembled myself as best I might.
I had remembered to bring the looking glass and a comb and I’d taken half a dozen tortoiseshell hairpins from Aunt Lavvy’s cupboard. Mama’s soft linen underbodice clad me almost to my ankles. I chose the one died with madder, soft and faded pink from washing, and buttoned tightly to the wrists and neck. Over that went Aunt Lavvy’s kirtle, made from soft brown wool with a low scooped neck and wide, short sleeves. Buff linen for the wimple and veil, and then Aunt Basil’s black and brown striped wool surcote with red lions embroidered in the corners of the front and back panels. When I was put together, I gave myself a looking over—as best I could with the small looking glass—and saw a bony-faced but passable woman, much too thin, who would be handsome if she put on about twenty pounds. I put on cloak and boots and commanded them to take me and my box to Wellingford.
I did not say “the Dower House.” I said “Wellingford,” and it was to Wellingford the boots delivered me. For a moment, seeing the ruins before me, I thought I had repeated my earlier journey to the abbey. When my eyes had had time to clear, I saw that the place was indeed Wellingford Manor, but that some walls were fallen and others barely standing, that one corner of the roof had partly burned, and that no one lived there anymore. Or perhaps someone did. In the ruined hallway, I saw the embers of a fire and heard a deep voice mumble angrily, as though awakened from slumber. “Boots,” I whispered, “take me to the Dower House.”
One stride brought me to the door. The Dower House stood, and though it had much need of a careful hand, it gave evidence of being occupied. Broken casements sagged crazily on their hinges, paving stones tilted, weeds grew around the door, but there was smoke coming from one of the chimneys and chickens cackled in the kitchenyard. Deo gratias. I put the boots in my pocket, replaced them with a pair of Aunt Marj’s pointed shoes and knocked upon the door.
A voice screamed inside, words I could not make out. Instructions to a servant, perhaps? Abuse hurled at a dog? The door opened to disclose a surly maidservant in a dirty kirtle and filthier apron who stared at me with her mouth half open. It was the hall of a place which had been my home. It did not look like home anymore. There were chicken feathers on the stairs.
“Who is it?” came the screaming voice from somewhere off to my right where the kitchens were. “Who is it?”
Who was it, indeed? Who was I? Not Beauty, wife of Edward, mother of Elladine. I had not thought of using enchantment. I was what I was, someone else, old enough to be an aunt and dressed like one. I borrowed the name of one of Edward’s own aunts, adding Papa’s title for verisimilitude.
“Lady Catherine Monfort, Edward Wellingford’s aunt.”
The slovenly servant trudged away. There were further noises offstage, perhaps a slap, then a door slamming. There were back stairs. Perhaps someone had gone up. After considerable time, someone came down, hand trailing upon the bannister.
“Lady Catherine Monfort?”
She could have been a pretty lady. In her thirties somewhere, rather more late than early. Her hair was red as a bonfire, and her chest as white as chalk. Both owed much to alchemy. Both could have benefitted from washing. Still, the expression on her face was open and concerned.
I nodded politely, wondering who this apparition was. “Come to visit my nephew, Edward.”
“You hadn’t hea
rd!” She reached out her arms toward me with genuine compassion. “Oh, how dreadful. You didn’t know that Edward had died.”
“Died?” I asked stupidly. It had never occurred to me that Naughty Ned could die. Not so soon. Not in such a short time. Sweet man, dead? Is kindness and compassion rewarded so? “Not dead?”
“When the plague returned,” she nodded. “In sixty-one.”
“Year of our Lord,” I murmured, putting out a hand to catch myself.
“Thirteen sixty-one,” she said. “Yes. I am his widow, Lydia. We had only been married a short time when he died. But that was almost six years ago. How could you not have heard?”
“I’ve been away,” I said, wondering where the intervening years had gone. I had left in fifty-one. “Far away. In … the Holy Land.”
“A pilgrim,” she chirruped. “Do come in,” she took my arm. “Oh, what a shock it must be.”
We went into the little sitting room. It had been my room, with chairs in it, not wainscot chairs against the wall, but real chairs one could move about, with carved arms, made for me by a man who worked for Lord Robert, given me as a wedding gift. They were still there, still with the cushions I had worked when I was pregnant with Elladine. Sadly soiled and worn, those cushions. The fireplace was deep in ashes. Everything was dirty and ragged. Evidently this lady, like my aunts, did not hold with soap.
“His daughter?” I asked. “Little Elly …?”
“Elladine? Oh, she survived, yes indeed. Very healthy child, she was. Is, I should say, though she’s not a child any longer.”
“How old …?”
“Elladine would be what? Sixteen? Seventeen? Hard enough to keep track of my own, such an army of them.”
“Your own?”
“Gloriana, that’s the eldest. Then my oldest son, Harold. Then my second son, Bertram. Then Griselda. Then comes Elladine. Then the two Edward and I had together. Twins. Catherine and young Edward. Your nephew Edward named them. Why, I just thought! Catherine must be named after you?”
I nodded again, feeling lost. Possibly Edward had named his second daughter after his aunt. And possibly the twins were not Edward’s children at all. “You were a widow when you married Edward?”
She threw her arms wide, miming woe. “Twice, now. Oh, it’s very hard to bear. Very hard, Lady Catherine. Lord Robert died early in the year, then Janet and the children. Then the youngest brother, Richard. Then, soon after we were married, Edward himself. All of Wellingford has fallen to me. I’ve the care of all of it to see to, and no one to help!”
If her two sons were older than Elladine, then she should have some help. “Your sons,” I suggested weakly.
“Mere children,” she waved her hand to suggest something inconsiderable. “Striplings. Caring for nothing but gaming and the hunt. Boys. Mere sweet boys.”
“Your daughters?” I suggested, a little more strongly.
“So talented,” she said. “So very musical. And such graceful girls. A little tall, perhaps, but then so is a willow, and nothing is more graceful, moving in the wind.” She mimed wind, swaying at me. “But then, I’m forgetting myself. You must be famished? Thirsty? Weary? I didn’t see your carriage?”
“I rode,” I said. “Hired a horse in … in…”
“East Sawley?” she suggested.
I nodded, inventing. “Two horses and a man to carry my box. Sent them back again.”
And she was dismayed. “Then you plan to stay? Not that you aren’t welcome. Oh, you’re very welcome. It’s just such very short notice.”
I gestured vaguely, signifying that I would make do. “There’s an extra room, surely.”
“A very little one,” she assented. “Over the kitchen.”
It was the warmest room in the house. The one I had used as a nursery after Elly was born. There was a narrow bed in it, as I remembered. Though, after sixteen years…
We got my box. I carried it myself. There seemed to be no one else to carry it. The bed was still there, full of mice. The whole room was very dirty. Why was my whole history one of being given dirty rooms to occupy? “If you’ll send me up a serving maid or two,” I suggested.
“Serving maid,” she said vaguely, as though she should know the word but had forgotten it. “Maid?”
“Women. Who clean rooms, who sweep floors.”
“Oh. Of course. Yes.”
As we had come along the corridor, I had noticed that the little linen room was shut, just as I had left it when I had gone away with the key in my pocket. The key was still in the deep pocket of my cloak where I had thrust it when I left. Though it seemed a wild hope, I went back to the closet and tried the key. Inside were sheets and covers and two clean ticks, and pillow cases and the extra pillows I had made when we killed the geese the last fall I had been in the Dower House. The mice hadn’t been at it, or if they had, the chunks of black hellebore root scattered along the shelves had poisoned them. The cupboard hadn’t been opened in all those years! No one had wanted to break it open; perhaps there had been no locksmith available. Perhaps Lydia had simply been too lazy to bother. The linens still smelled faintly of lavender as I carried sheets and pillows and one of the ticks back to the nursery in time to meet two maids, one of them the girl who had answered the door, the other an older version. Slatterns, both. They regarded me with insolent immobility, jaws moving like cows.
“You will clean this room,” I said quietly. “You will use soap. Scrub the floors. Sweep down the cobwebs. Scrub out the windows. Take that mattress away and bring me clean straw for this one.”
They looked at one another, back at me, challenging me to make them move. Aha. Well and a day.
“Else,” I smiled, “I will summon a dragon to eat you both.” I snapped my fingers and made fire dart at them so that they screamed. It was a fine, hard fire-flight, which told me I was in a time when magic flowed strong.
They had no more sense of how to clean a room than of how to fly. I kept coming back and making them do it over, getting a little angrier each time and they getting a little more frantic at the fire biting them. The whole house was evidence of their slipshod ways, theirs and Lydia’s. As for Lydia, she had gone upstairs to lie about on a disordered bed with her elder daughters and the twins, playing the lute (tunelessly) and singing (less melodiously than Grumpkin had used to howl) and talking of the future. I put on my cloak for a reconnaissance and overheard them from the hallway. Their plans seemed to consist of selling Wellingford and going to London to five on the fruits of that sale. For a moment I struggled with this idea, certain that Elladine was the heir if all the Wellingford brothers were dead. But, of course, she was not. Young Edward was the heir: the six-year-old monster whom I caught torturing a dog in the stables, and whose britches I set alight to teach him better manners. He looked nothing like Edward. Nothing at all. Edward, my poor sweet fish, taken twice on the same hook!
And where was Elladine? Over an indescribably bad dinner, I asked again for my “grandniece.”
“Poor Elladine,” Lydia murmured. “Such an unfortunate name to give a child. Not a Christian name, surely.”
“But where is she?”
“She goes off. On a horse, sometimes. Sometimes afoot. We’re never sure where she is. Poor child. First motherless, then fatherless, I’m sure she’ll be so glad to meet any kin at all.”
“You and Edward were married in … what year?” I asked.
“In the year of the second Death. Almost at once after Robert and Janet died,” she said, “together with Robert’s youngest brother and all their sons. Edward was the heir, and he felt he needed someone to help him maintain the estate. And, of course, I’d been left a widow and desperately needed someone to help me, as well. Four fatherless children to rear, with people dying everywhere, it is no pleasant Maytime to be alone in such circumstance, believe me. Edward most wanted someone to care for Ella. I told him I would maintain his daughter if he would maintain me. It was not a love match, precisely, though I was fond of Edward.?
??
Poor Edward. Destined always to be a husband of convenience. “How did you meet?”
“Janet was my cousin. I was visiting here when the plague struck. Oh, there were many visitors, then. Robert and Janet had taken in half the countryside who were homeless. I remember Janet going on and on about being unable to keep the place clean.”
Which is why the plague had struck Wellingford, I thought. Poor Janet. So charitable. Giving a home to the multitude, with all their fleas.
“Of the Wellingfords, only Edward and Ella were left alive when the dying paused for a time,” Lydia said, leading me into the next room as we heard the maids breaking crockery behind us. She went on to give me the details of the dying, with an unnecessary relish in the recounting, interrupting herself to say, “Ah, here she is!”
A ravishingly beautiful young woman came through the door. Sixteen or seventeen, perhaps. Wild dark hair. Wild dark eyes. A bruise on one cheek. Hands coarse and scratched and black around the nails.
“Elladine, this is your father’s Aunt Catherine,” Lydia said in a kindly tone, edged with some emotion I did not quite understand.
“What would she have here, madam? What’s left?” the girl asked insolently. It was the same tone in which Candy might have said “So?” or “Big deal!” in the twentieth.
Lydia flinched, giving me an apologetic glance. Discipline wasn’t Lydia’s forte either, poor thing. I had yet to find what Lydia’s forte was. Surely she must have had something to recommend her to Edward. Or was he so distraught at all the dying, he had grasped her as he, drowning, might have grasped at a straw? Ah well, if discipline was not her thing, neither were manners my daughter’s.
“Elly, my dear,” I said, kissing my child on her unwelcoming face. “I am your great-aunt, from Ylles, come to visit you.”
She gave me a look to tell me she did not care. Her face was Jaybee’s face, made feminine, made soft, but with broken glass beneath it. Her hand, as she pushed me away, was as hard as his had been. Elladine remained with us only so long as we held her in unwilling conversation, then departed as quickly as she might, and I stared after her, wondering what I could do to make this situation tenable.