“How many people has the gallivant eaten?” the captain asked.
Mrs. Gallimar burrowed in her tiny purse, digging a chipmunk tunnel through the contents, bringing out a tiny leather covered notebook with a mother-of-pearl pencil at one side, leafing through it reflectively to find her notes. “Two children,” she said sadly. “And at least one adult person. And it has bitten the left buttock and part of a breast off a woman married to someone important.” She shook her head as though wondering at the novelty of it as she put the notebook away once more.
“But a permit!” the captain said, still in awe.
“I know.” She nodded, seeming to admit the weirdness of it, the notion that a permit even in the abstract would be strange enough without having one in the absolute to deal with.
“So you’ll be coming along,” he breathed.
“I’ll be coming. As well as Colonel Esquivar, just in from the jungle, going to hunt the gallivant. And Mirabeau, the chaperone.”
“Aha,” said the Captain. “That’s it! They’ve found one!”
Mrs. Gallimar nodded. “I think so. What else would move the Viceroy to issue a permit? They must have found one.”
I shifted my position to get the sun out of my eyes, deciding in that moment that I wished to be introduced to Mrs. Gallimar. With the old woman trailing behind me, I went to the gangway and, with a barely audible “excuse me,” slid behind the barrier as Captain Karon had done.
“Well, we’ll be leaving tomorrow,” the captain was saying as I, we, approached. “Or maybe the day after that. As soon as we can discharge the cargo.”
I smiled at the captain. He bowed in my direction. I asked to be introduced to the lovely lady of whom I had heard so many fascinating things. For a moment Mrs. Gallimar’s hand rested in my own as the captain mumbled, “Mrs. Gallimar, Lady Wellingford. Lady Wellingford, Mrs. Gallimar.” The old woman behind me said, “Ahem,” and the captain began again. “Mrs. Gallimar, Senora Carabosse; Senora Carabosse, Mrs. Gallimar.”
The old woman’s name brought me up short. Surely I had heard it before. Surely I had seen that name somewhere.
I was given no time for reflection. Mrs. Gallimar expressed a belief that meeting me was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to her. Her eyes ate at me with tiny glances, she nibbled at me with her ears, almost twitching at every word I uttered. She wondered if I had breakfasted, and when I told her I had not, she invited me to accompany her to her house, for if the Stugos Queen was to leave soon, she would need to see to her packing. She left the captain with a last titillating stroke of her fingers along his arm, and we sauntered up the cobbled street down which she had come, back to the gentle amenities of a little pink house set behind a sheltering wall on the south side of the Street of Immaculate Intentions. Behind us the old woman stumped along, disconsolate, watching me as though she were a fish and I a fly. When Mrs. Gallimar and I went into Mrs. Gallimar’s house, Senora Carabosse went on up the street, glancing at me over her shoulder.
While breakfast was being prepared, we sipped passion fruit juice as Mrs. Gallimar toyed with a pet ocelot. The ocelot had been a gift from Colonel Esquivar himself, Mrs. Gallimar remarked, seemingly to the ocelot. The colonel had recently recovered from being poisoned by his wife, the Viceroy’s sister, monstrous Malisunde, who was a notoriously inefficient poisoner. It was said the colonel had more to fear from his mistress, the Viceroy’s wife, despicable and fecund Flatulina, who had threatened to batter him to death and would no doubt be aided in the attempt by the elder half-dozen of the colonel’s numerous bastards. Such a fate had been long predicted. It would scarcely come as a surprise, even to the colonel himself. Did I think such an end was likely?
Unprepared for her including me in the conversation she had been having with her pet, I took a moment to reply that I had not really considered the matter.
She went on to say that very shortly the Viceroy’s palace would make the formal announcement of the hunt for the gallivant. Everyone would begin to wonder, just as the captain had, why the Viceroy would have issued the permit at all. By nightfall there was not a creature in Nacifia who would not guess that the people of Novabella had found the virgin. The one everyone had been hunting for. So Mrs. Gallimar told herself and the ocelot, while the ocelot watched me and I watched both of them, listening.
“The virgin?” I asked. Something within me trembled, as a glass will quiver, in resonance with a distant bell.
“A virgin with a difference,” she replied almost in a whisper. “The Viceroy has been seeking one for a very long time.”
“A virgin with a difference? What difference would that be?”
“One wonders, doesn’t one. One has all kinds of strange ideas.”
Her softly voiced ruminations were interrupted by the arrival of breakfast, brought in by the two maids, Dulce and Delice, upon a wheeled table and set in the large bay window overlooking the garden. I smelled muffins and my mouth watered. We sat at either side of the table to confront a platter of tiny delicious sausages and breakfast breads oozing with fruit.
As we sat down, I asked, “Have you lived in Nacifia long?”
“As long as one does,” she replied. “Sometimes that seems very long indeed.” She gave me tea.
“You know, I should suppose, almost everyone?”
“Oh, my dear Lady Wellingford, not almost but definitely everyone. Some better than others, of course, but yes, everyone. Each last wee
