Quillifer

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

he afternoon featured another excursion on the lake, with music and a barge on which cavorted a group of girl-children dressed as water nymphs. I did not want to think about water nymphs and did not go onto the water, but again I saw Berlauda and Broughton together in the swan-boat, and I remarked that Broughton’s wife and father-in-law were not in evidence. Perhaps, I thought, they had surrendered to the inevitable, and were making plans to extort as much from the Throne as possible in order to permit a divorce.

While I was contemplating these complexities of love, I saw Amalie walking past the hedges into one of the gardens, and I followed, pretending not to know she was there. The garden was formally laid out, in its center the worn statue of an old man or venerable god, so eroded that he seemed all gaping black eyes and hollowed-out beard. The flowers were brown and dead, and the avenues lined with fallen leaves that crackled beneath my boots. I affected to be surprised by the presence of a marchioness in this place, all in a gown of pure black with a tall collar that rose to her chin, and I took off my cap and “louted low,” as the saying is. A cool breeze floated past, and autumn leaves rained down from the trees and skittered along the gravel walks.

“Goodman Quillifer,” she said, “you are much discussed.”

“Pleasantly, I hope.” I straightened and put on my cap.

She frowned. “I thought the business of the pudding was overdone. That joke has grown stale.”

“I’ll forgo any more jokes about puddings.”

“Be advised that you should.” She stepped near, and I restrained my desire to put my arms around her. I saw that she wore the pearl pendant I had given her on the gold link girdle, as I wore its dark twin. She touched her chin with the tip of her closed fan.

“Yet it is said that you distinguished yourself in the hunt.”

“I did well enough.” I looked at her. “Yet I hope some other manner of hunting will prove more lucky for me.”

She looked at me from her long eyes. “What manner is that?”

“I hope to track you to your den, my lady.”

She flashed her little white teeth. “I would bite you if you did.” She let fall her fan. “But your hunt would fail. The guest rooms are crowded, and I share a room with my two maids. We would not be alone.”

I fell into step with her. “A few days ago, we speculated on the possibility of taking a ride out-of-doors,” I said. “It is a fine day, and perhaps we might find a mossy nook in the forest.”

“Too many eyes,” she said.

“Tonight, then, after the play?” I paused by the corroded old statue, and turned to face her. “We could meet here. I could bring blankets and a flask with a warming beverage.”

She smiled and touched my arm with her fan. “I will not say no, but I can make no promises.”

Other people came into the garden then, and Amalie and I parted. I procured blankets and a flask of brandy, which I rolled up and hid beneath a bench in a shadowed part of the garden.

That night we again ate out-of-doors, this time by torchlight, a great venison feast that had been cooking all afternoon. But before the food was served, a harp was struck, while a flute played low, muttering tones, and as that music played, into the U of the tables came the wood-woses, the wild men of the forest, who presented the heads of the stags slain that morning. The wild men were covered all in hair, with great thickets of beard, and spun into sight in a slow circular dance, carrying the heads on wooden platters. In their midst was their master, a Green Man whose foliage and viridian paint did not quite conceal the tall, angular form of the actor Blackwell.

The greatest head was dubbed the Stag Royal, the antlers were twined with tinsel of gold leaf, and a gold crown was placed upon its head. The head was so large that it was borne by two of the wild men, who first came to me, where I was seated with the Chancellery’s lawyers, and bowed to show me the head—one that I recognized even without viewing the triangular wound in its forehead. Then the woses carried the Stag Royal to the Queen, knelt, and then placed the head as a centerpiece at the high table. After which the wild men, still accompanied by the harp, did their slow revolving dance until they vanished from sight. I saw Blackwell’s intelligent eyes looking at me from behind his curtain of leaves, and he gave me little wink and nod in acknowledgment of my triumph.

Pride blazed up in me like a firework, and I received toasts and congratulations from many in that large, splendid company.

Servants came in, bearing platters of food. There were dishes of roast venison, venison stewed with vegetables and herbs, venison breaded and fried, venison backstrap wrapped in bacon and broiled. There were sweet sauces composed of cherry and apricot, plum and raspberry. Venison pie was presented, at the high table with pastry sculptures of harts and does. Several varieties were presented each of venison soup, venison patties, and venison sausage. There were kidneys seared, or deviled along with the liver, or fried and doused with sherry and mustard. The deer hearts were cut up, marinated in sweet vinegar, fried, and served on greens. The liver was fried with butter, bacon, parsley, onions, and rosemary, or mixed with venison to make the large meatballs called “faggots.” The tongue was roasted and served sliced thin on salad or braised and served on simnel bread with gravy.

With the venison was served the traditional frumenty, done in a dozen different ways, both sweet and savory.

I supped vastly, as I felt I deserved, and then we watched Blackwell’s new play premiered on the outdoor stage. A chill wind was rising, and the autumn air was cool enough that I wished that I’d worn the blankets instead of hiding them in the garden.

Again Blackwell opened the program with a poem in praise of the Queen, neither better nor worse nor less flattering than the last. And then the troop of wild men, shorn of their hairy suits and beards and transformed into mere actors, came onto the stage.

The Nymph was a success. Blackwell had taken the small incidents of my story and stretched them along for two hours, adding pairs of young lovers and sub-stories and clowns and japes and song. The appearances of the nymph were accompanied by an otherworldly duet of harp and lute, and by some manner of lighting effect that seemed to cause the very air to shimmer, a sign that the action had entered a magical realm. I almost forgot that the nymph was a young boy, and I almost forgot that I had known that nymph, and gazed into those leaf-green eyes, and myself stood on the brink of that preternatural domaine. Afterward came the abbreviated gigue with its bawdy jokes restrained in the royal presence.

I applauded with the rest and then hastened through the cold wind to my lodgings for my old tweed overcoat, which I brought with me to the garden, where I retrieved my bundle and waited for Amalie. I stood in the lee of the wind by the old statue and watched high clouds scud across the stars, and when the wind blew cold up my neck, I reached for the bottle of brandy and took a swallow of its fire.

“Your whore will not come,” said Orlanda. “Did you think she would venture into the freezing cold merely to couple with the likes of you?”

I turned and gazed with rising terror into the blazing emerald eyes of the goddess. Her gown was green and glittered with gemstones, rubies and garnets nestled in her hair, a carcanet of gold and girasol wrapped her throat, and fury was plain on her face. She glowed in the night with an otherworldly luminescence that put to shame the stage lights that had shimmered over the play’s occult realm.

“I had not thought you so low as to have me mocked in this way,” said she, “played by some squeaking Orlanda-boy in the posture of a comic flirt and jade.”

Though fear rooted me to the spot, I managed to free my tongue from paralysis. “Lady,” I said, “I did not make the play.”

“Nay, but you inspired it. You spoke with that yew-stave of a playwright.”

“If you know that,” said I, “you also know that I told him not to write that story.”

“What I know,” said Orlanda, “is that your words are sundered from the desires of your inward self. I know that you are false, that your heart is filled with mockery, and that this production was nothing but a sneaking coup de Quillifer at my expense.”

“I have never mocked you,” I said. “I have never spoken of you with disrespect. I posed merely a hypothetical question to an old man who claimed knowledge of worlds not his own. The playwright overheard, and his imagination did the rest.”

“And yet,” said Orlanda, “I see myself portrayed on stage as a giddy, thoughtless, lovesick object of scorn, and when I ask to myself the question, Who is responsible for this outrage?, there is but one name that rises to my thoughts.” She took a step closer and surveyed me from a distance of only a few inches. I could breathe in the loamy scent of her hair, taste the rosemary savor of her breath, feel her angry warmth prickling my skin.

“Is this the life for which you rejected my love?” she demanded. “Failing to find office or favor? Amusing your betters by playing the clownish Pudding-Man at court? Abusing the Queen’s commissions by selling them? Becoming the toy of some indolent, slinking, sloe-eyed bitch who loves you not, and who carries another man’s child?” She snarled. “Is this your triumph, Quillifer?”

“I have been here but a few weeks,” I pointed out, feebly perhaps. My mind had begun to thrash its way out of the clutches of surprise and terror, and I frowned at her. “You seem to know a great deal about my life. Have you been spying on me?”

“I do not spy,” she said, and in her anger she hissed the word. “But I am aware of you. To have you thus in my mind is not something I chose, and I assure you it is a condition far less pleasant for me than for you.”

I straightened. “Since I last saw you, I have accomplished most of the tasks that carried me away from you—”

She laughed. “Your vast and important worldly errands are complete, and now you beg me to take you? I tell you that I do not make such offers a second time!”

“I don’t ask you to repeat your offer,” said I. “But I will repeat mine. I ask you to join me here. In the capital, or anywhere else in the wide world, so it be in the world. I owe you my freedom, and I owe you my fortune, and I would share these both with you.”

That offer struck her to silence, and so I continued. “You say that you are aware of me, and of my actions here—and if you are so aware, you may as well be here in your person. We can live here in the world, and in the embrace of enchantment both.” I reached out to take her hands. “Will you not stay here with me?”

She snatched her hands away. “I will not aid you in your futile ambitions!” she said. “I will not join you in the stink and mire and folly of the court! I am not one of your foolish females to be so charmed and cozened!”

“How else then may I serve you?” I asked. “I have said there is one thing I will not do, but I will do aught else.”

The green eyes narrowed. “I am aware of you,” she said. “Perhaps it is time you become aware of me.”

And then she disappeared into the shadows, as if she had stepped from one world into the next, and left me alone in the garden, my teeth chattering with fear and with the cold. Her disappearance, silent and sinister, was more ominous than if she had vanished in a clap of thunder.

Become aware of me. It was a promise that was enough to strike the heart. I took another mouthful of the brandy as a gust swirled falling leaves around me, and sent them skittering along the gravel walks.

Amalie would not come, not in this cold. I did not doubt Orlanda’s word on that matter. I picked up my bundle and carried it toward the lodge, expecting at any moment for Orlanda or some other wight to lunge at me from out of the hedges. But nothing moved, nothing but a torrent of leaves, and as I neared the lodge I saw the lights blazing, and merriment and music sounding from within.

I paused before the door that led to the guests’ wing, where I had my lodging with the actors, and as if on the wind, I heard Orlanda’s voice.

“There will be knives.”