“Don’t mention it,” he said, and meant it in all possible ways.
I changed quickly. The suit was a perfect fit. Garnet had completed the outfit with suitable hose, boots, jewelry, and a tastefully discreet codpiece. I felt like an impostor at first, but I walked up and down a few times and practiced holding one arm crooked while the other hand rested on the pommel of my sword, and the role started to feel more natural. I began to walk slower and straighter, with my head back and my lips curled in a self-satisfied sneer. Soon I was bowing fractionally, practicing delicate little smiles and applauding with two fingers of my right hand against the palm of my left. Garnet rolled his eyes.
“It’s just a suit,” he said. “You’re not supposed to change your entire identity.”
“Rubbish,” I said, admiring myself in a pocket mirror. “I am what I look like. Enter Viscount William, courtier, poet, sophisticate, and lover. This is going to be fun.”
And indeed it was. For a while.
SCENE XVI A Fly in the Ointment
It was, as you might imagine, a glittering affair. The entire court, serving maids, footmen, and nobles, counselors, and the king himself, were all turned out as if panache, elegance, and looking like they had been rolled in something very sticky and then pelted with jewelry would save them from the goblin hordes. As they filed formally into the banquet hall, each one seemed more dazzling than the last, each vying to outsparkle the polished crystal of the great chandeliers with their gold and diamonds. Each wore a paper-thin veil of humility over self- satisfaction verging on smugness, and each dropped their witty words like a king on a balcony casting rubies into the outstretched hands of the peasants below. In seconds the hall was buzzing like some insane beehive, all poetry and studied laughter, clever songs and felt-lined applause. And in the middle of it all, dressed to kill and brandishing his rapier wit and disarming charm, was Sir William Hawthorne.
Well, let’s face it, if there’s one thing I can do, it’s fake pretty much anything. More to the point, what passed for wit and wisdom here was pretty obviously the usual recycled courtly twaddle about beauty, truth, taste, etcetera, and if I couldn’t fake that by now I wasn’t the duplicitous cad I prided myself on being. I had heard it all before and I was sure I could match the best of them. Pretty sure, anyway.
Now, there may be a handful of people out there who live for bad love poetry and dressing up as lovelorn and unfeasibly wealthy shepherdesses, but I’m banking that they’re few and far between, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the wonderful costumes and the wonderful speeches and the wonderful songs and the wonderful smiles that were smiled so wonderfully at the wonderful poems. To those few of you who thrive on this kind of saccharine and overpolished pigs’ offal, my apologies. Here, then, are the salient facts, unadorned by satin and pearls.
First: Will Hawthorne, looking like someone’s terribly debonair great aunt, makes his entrance into the king’s banquet hall to a general raising of the collective eyebrow. “How handsome!” they remark. “How stylish!” “Could this be,” they wonder among themselves, “the same degenerate hog’s turd of an Outsider who sullied our court only days ago?”
Second: Will sparkles. Not satisfied with merely looking impressive, he opens his store of golden words and charms his hearers dumb. Rarely have such wit and poise, such timing and ease, been so impeccably combined. This man could break wind loudly and his audience would swear they had never heard anything more wryly apposite all season. Such a man cannot fail to win the hearts and admiration of the entire court.
Third: Will spectacularly fails to win the hearts and minds of the entire court, and is forcibly ejected as if he is some slimy form of pond life which was accidentally tracked in on the sole of someone’s boot.
In retrospect, it started out far too well. With my history, I should have anticipated calamity looming overhead like a thirty-pound hammer, but foresight, hindsight, and any other kind of sight which doesn’t originate in the very second in which I exist is something of a mystery to me. The thirty-pound hammer (augmented by murderous-looking spikes) hovered just long enough for me to start feeling comfortable, and then pounded me through the floor.
But enough of these ominous metaphors. I woke at about five o’clock the following morning. The banquet and its subsequent revelries had been over for about three hours, though I had been absent from them rather longer. I had been curled up in the drafty corner of one of the palace’s anterooms, sleeping fitfully, when the toe of Garnet’s boot prodded me imperiously. As I gazed wretchedly up at him and his iron-faced sister, the whole miserable affair gradually came swimming back to me.
“Get up,” said Garnet, more exhausted than angry. “We’ve been looking for you for ages. Get up and we’ll get you to bed.”
I stirred vaguely, but my legs were not interested. I paused to consider the drool and vomit that had stained the front of my new suit while they looked at each other and sighed. At first, Renthrette refused to help, but eventually Garnet persuaded her to brace me up, and between them they dragged me half-senseless to my room. There they maneuvered me onto my bed, where I lay on my side, wheezing and hacking the thin, foul-smelling remnants of whatever had been in my stomach into a tin basin. Once, I tried to sit up, but the room tossed and spun as if I was bound to the sail-less mast of some storm-wracked ship. I retched something that looked liked orange oatmeal onto the pillow and my gut contracted as if my entire midriff had been clamped into a vice. My eyes watered with pain and my open mouth strained, voiding nothing but air in a long, agonizing gasp. Pleasant, eh? When the nausea subsided I collapsed back onto the bed, my eyes shut against the lamplight and the humiliation. And in this blissful condition, I passed the rest of the night.
Now, this was not the first time I had been a little the worse for wear after an evening’s carousal, but it was, I think, the first time that I had passed into this miserable state without the slightest idea how it had happened. One minute I had been the life and soul of the party, sipping some flavorless fruit drink while bantering to the admiration of all; the next I had been launching the partially digested remains of my dinner over someone in lemon velvet. My lyrical depiction of the pangs of love went into a hideously rapid decline, and before I knew what was happening, I was trying to organize some kind of impromptu orgy using language that would have made the most experienced harlot blanch. But how this all came about, I could not say.
Garnet and Renthrette, naturally, just assumed that I had let the side down by drinking beyond my limit. Now, I know for a fact that I could drink either of those two under several tables and go on to perform every role in several full-length plays without dropping a line. Moreover, everyone had been drinking the same yellowish muck as I had, and I would go before the highest authority on earth and swear that I had had no more than two glasses of the treacherous filth. In fact, I knew that many of those about me, including the stoically sober Renthrette, had had a good deal more than me, so engrossed was I with my courtly patter. I suspected foul play and said so, but Garnet would have none of it.
“Someone doctored your drink?” he exclaimed, his anger now showing through his disbelief. “Why would anyone do that? These are not the kind of degenerates you used to spend your time with.”
“I’m not a degenerate,” I muttered unconvincingly.
“Really?” barked Garnet with nasty hilarity. “So you’re just a normal, civilized person, are you? And normal, civilized people always end the evening by announcing that Lord Gaspar, the chief justice of the land, couldn’t fill his own codpiece.”
“I didn’t do that,” I said, hopefully.
“Yes, you did,” Garnet exploded. “You said that you bet there was nothing in there but old stockings, and that if his wife went home with you instead she’d get to see, and I quote, ‘the one that got away.’ ”
“I did not say that,” I said bleakly, my voice muffled by the rancid pillow.
“Yes, you did,” said Renthrette, leaping into the fray. “In fact, you went on for a full five minutes about your bait and tackle, about eels and fishing poles, about how once she ‘nets this one’ she’ll never mess with minnows again, and every other stupid, degraded fishing image you could come up with, all the while rubbing yourself against her and leering until everyone in the room. .”
“Everyone!” agreed Garnet.
“. . was staring at you in horrified silence,” she concluded. “You only stopped when Lord Gaspar and Viscount Vallacin physically moved you away. And then you started drunkenly swinging at them and calling them a ‘pack of poncey-assed nancy boys who dressed like girls.’ It was only their honor and decency that stopped them from
