encroaching softness. I need a new morning routine: clean teeth, wash face, check heart for signs of dry rot. Replace it with good mahogany planking, as we did the
It is half past ten, and there’s still an underglow to the sky. The Cliffsenders boast that on Midsummer midnight you can read without a candle, or play a game of ball, if the ball is white.
I sit on the cliffs, but even here I am not far enough removed from the Midsummer festivities. Why do people do it, having guests to stay for a whole week? First you have to endure the washing of draperies and airing of beds and beating of carpets (all of which had seemed more than clean enough to me). Then you have to endure the hideous chatter of the ladies and gentlemen and their maids and valets; and even beg Cook for a barrel of dried beef for the Folk on this feast day.
You can never get far enough away. Sounds from the Masquerade Ball drift across the lawn. Arching streamers of violin music, the rumble of distant talking and laughter, a happy scream. Someone won at cards, or had her dress trod on, or was kissed!
I stood out from the others earlier tonight when I entered the Ballroom in my Samson costume. Yes, I dressed as Samson, he of the long hair. We are a little alike, he and I, for our hair sets us apart. His gave him strength, and mine — well, it is inconvenient that it grows two inches each night, but it is one of my secret powers. Not for anything would I give it up.
My white tunic was very plain among the jesters and their bells, the wizards and their staffs, the fairies and their jewels, fragile shoulders rising from beds of ribbon and gauze. But my costume hid more secrets than theirs. So did my hair, which I’ve grown to my chin and colored with a walnut stain. I seem to be wearing a wig. No one would guess it’s mine. I like to be fooling them all.
Midsummer Eve is my birthday, and there is one disappointment that has come with turning sixteen. I seem to be starting to grow. I can wear the tunic and still be thought a boy, but not for long, perhaps. Not for long.
I slipped round the edges of the crowd, avoiding the crystal chandeliers, whose hundreds of candles were already dripping hot wax. Poor Mrs. Bains. I knew her armies had spent hours polishing the Ballroom floor with beeswax and cleaning the chandeliers until each crystal was beautifully radiant.
A footman handed me a glass. Tiny lines of bubbles streamed through pale liquid. The fiddle cried out in a language that everyone but I understood. Like pieces of a kaleidoscope, the ladies and gentlemen fell into patterns of color on the Ballroom floor.
I slipped out the French doors; dancing is not for me. The indoors and out-of-doors were all mixed together. Armfuls of ivory roses bloomed everywhere inside the Manor; outside, an immense Oriental carpet suffocated the lawn — or so I heard the gardeners complain. On it stood a long buffet table, at which Mrs. Bains was counting bottles of champagne in a hollow ice-swan.
I stood on the lawn, between two worlds, watching the dance. Behind me, a couple of gardener lads argued about how to lay the Midsummer bonfire. Before me, the squares in the Ballroom fragmented, the ladies and gentlemen flowing into separate lines, then swirling themselves together with hooked elbows and clasped hands. It is traditional for the host and hostess to dress only as themselves: Sir Edward, never deviating from his black and white, Lady Alicia in rubies and gold satin.
Behind me, the gardener lads stood on step stools, lighting lanterns in globes of silver paper. Before me appeared Finian, a neat and careful dancer, his red cap bobbing above the others.
Now Finian, that wasn’t a very good idea, was it? To dress as a Cliffsend fisherman! It will cast your mother into melancholy; it will irritate Sir Edward, who like his cousin, Lord Merton, wants to mold you into a copy of himself.
Behind me, the voices of the gardener lads faded away. Before me, the fisherman danced with a young lady dressed as the Tragic Queen, the one who wanted always to be eating cake. What can she be thinking? Even if I were still Corinna, and even if I had golden hair and liked to dress in spangled gauze, I’d never masquerade as someone who let them chop off her head.
Before me, the dancers relaxed into a crowd again. Finian handed a glass to his spangled partner.
I took a sip from my own. It was cold, and not very sweet.
Then Finian raised his glass.
Why can I not forget the picture he made, a mountain of white canvas, pale liquid glowing against bronzed skin?
I left the lawn then for the cliffs, and here I am, all my earlier fizz evaporated. I just had another sip. The champagne is warm and flat. My first champagne, and on my sixteenth birthday, too. It is not as I imagined.
Taffy lies beside me, keeping me company. He is arthritic and I am stiff, and neither of us is much for dancing and crowds.
There is a lump of desolation beneath the bony dip at my throat. It is no bigger than a coin, this spot, a peculiarly small place to hold so large a feeling. I try to shove it to some deeper region, but there it sticks, a fragile skin-thickness from the outside world.
Taffy rests his nose on my foot and sighs.
It’s almost midnight. The dancers have spilled onto the lawn. I must join them now; it’s time to light the bonfire. And then I’ll go back to being the Folk Keeper of Marblehaugh Park. That is what I am, and I can’t pretend to be Samson or anyone else.
9
It is the gloves I remember best, elegant gloves of all colors, scattered on the ground. What a strange tumbled garden of lilac, primrose, and jonquil. And I remember, too, the naked, glittering fingers wrapped around unlit torches.
“Folk for the darkness!” cried Sir Edward, approaching the unlit bonfire with a burning taper. “Humans for the light!”
“Folk for the darkness!” echoed the crowd. “Humans for the light!” The skeleton pile of sticks burst into flame. “Ah!” The crowd fluttered around like moths.
Sir Edward again. “The first light goes to Lady Alicia!”
Again, the echo. “The first light . . . Lady Alicia!”
Someone pressed a torch into my hand, but I am no moth and stood back. Lady Alicia touched her torch to the bonfire. She seemed more fire than flesh as she broke off from the crowd, a torch-star floating round the Manor. One by one, the jesters, queens, and wizards dipped their torches in the flames and fell into a blazing orbit behind her.
I hung back until only Sir Edward and I stood before the fire. “Off you go, little Samson, and don’t you fall.”
That was just like Sir Edward, attending always to the business of the estate, organizing a mass of fire into a tight ring around the Manor in order to trap the mischief of the Folk in the Caverns.
I dipped my torch into the flames. “Do not fall!” I told myself, for any break diminishes the circle’s power, and I joined the fiery constellation.
I usually despise crowds, all that senseless jostle and laughter, but now there was only the rustle of silk, the whisper of velvet. How could it be that I didn’t even stumble? I flowed into that silent, blazing stream, running faster, now faster still — me, the slow after-thought of a star!
The crowd was dissolving into shrieks and laughter when I rounded the last wing of the Manor. Sir Edward and I stood a little apart from the others, watching them toss their torches into the flames; and when the clamor had organized itself into a chant, he tapped my shoulder and said, “They’re calling for you.”
“For me?” The words came clear, but not their meaning.
