The young woman smiled, unspeaking, nodding once. Oh, but she was beautiful. But then, so was I.
“Now.” Mrs. Gallimar smiled again, licentiously. “We need to ascertain that you are as represented …”
“No,” Roland announced, firmly. “It is not necessary to do anything at all. The young woman is as represented. As a registered chaperone, I can tell.”
Mrs. Gallimar stared at him, unbelieving. He took her firmly by one arm and drew her away. “I can tell, Mrs. Gallimar. By the smell alone. She smells like a six-year-old child after a bath.”
Mrs. Gallimar sniffed. “She may, in fact, just have bathed.”
“I assure you, I cannot be misled.”
“She may have used scent.”
“There is no such perfume. She is as she is, Mrs. Gallimar. I know it!” And he turned to confront the young woman who sat looking at him with a lively and precocious interest. “My nose cannot be misled!” It was obvious he believed it was so, and yet this young person was looking at him with unmistakeably sexual interest. “She is a virgin, and with a difference,” he murmured abstractedly, turning and looking straight into my face with an expression both of doubt and anxiety. I knew he was wondering whether he was indeed the best person to protect that virginity all the way back to Nacifia.
* * *
“Tell me about her,” he demanded from Emilia and Domenico, when we were all sitting in the Sandifor courtyard.
“She says she was married to a duke. She got tired of being married to him and left him to go home. Something interrupted her journey to or from, at that time or some other, and she ended up in the jungle. She says she has the feeling she was there for a very long time. The natives picked her up and brought her here. That’s as far as we’ve got.”
Roland stared at Emilia in disbelief. “This is all you know? But you’ve had her for days!”
“She talks a great deal. I can tell you all about the duke, and his sisters, and where they lived. She puts in a lot of detail.”
“You haven’t tried to hurry her any?” Mrs. Gallimar asked.
“Madam. Senor Mirabeau,” Domenico interrupted, “perhaps things are different in Nacifia. Perhaps there are many interesting events in Nacifia. Not here. Things are dull in Novabella. We examine what we can see of Baskarone through our telescopes. We eat. We take a nap. We go down and stare at the river, wondering whether it will rise or fall. We see the little boats from Abaddon, and we fervently hope they will keep their distance, or, at worst, try to sell us fruit or monkeys from the jungle. We eat something else. We wait for Captain Karon to arrive with something new in the cargo. We play cards. We grow frightfully … how shall I say? Pococurante. You understand what I am saying?”
“Bored,” murmured Roland, who had told me he was very familiar with the feeling.
“Exactly. Anything new, any new tale, new jest, new trick, new dress—anything new is delightful to us. Why would we hasten it away? We have let her take her time, tell the tale in her own way.”
I wondered how much my mother remembered. How had she come to be lost in the jungle of Chinanga? How long had she been there?
“You have not heard the end of her story?” I asked.
Domenico shook his head. “There may be no end to it. Better if we are left with a little still between our teeth to chew upon after she is gone.”
While the others went on talking, Constanzia and I went back to visit the virgin. She welcomed us as she might have welcomed any fairly interesting strangers. Seeing her face, even younger looking than my own, I suffered from doubt and fear that she might reject me when I told her who I was.
“Since my arrival,” she confided to us, “I have been asking what country I have come to, but aside from telling me the name of the place, the people here are remarkably evasive. What is it about Chinanga that occasions such restraint?”
“They are ashamed of their origins,” said Constanzia with a blush.
My mother regarded her with the liveliest interest. Without thinking, I said I felt no origin, however lowly, should shame a population for more than a generation or two. Constanzia shook her head at me.
“There has been only one generation, Lady Wellingford. I believe that Ambrosius Pomposus, father of Chinanga, must have been a warlock who traveled in far and wondrous places, only to fall under the spell of his own memories, his recollections of tropical lands full of languor and splendor and luxuriant vegetation, full of incestuous entanglements and erotic desires, a place in which time seemed damped in its passage. He determined to create such a land of his own, so laid claim to this milieu along the eternal rivers and created in it, Chinanga!” She gestured widely, signifying all and everything, a great, inclusive gesture which stopped only at the farthest reaches of her fingertips.
“How do you know this?” asked Elladine.
“She read about it in Pomposus’s book,” I replied, to Constanzia’s amazement. She had indeed read it there, though she still did not understand what she had read. “Though Pomposus may have been only a writer, not a warlock. Writers, too, can create such places.”
“I see,” breathed Mama.
I went on, “I believe Constanzia has also read that Chinanga is to remain changeless until the Viceroy, while in the company of a virgin with a difference and after the celebration of a certain rite which Constanzia has not yet been able to translate, decides differently.”
“I see,” said Elladine, who did indeed see, turning to the girl. “Your father wishes to change the country? A revolution, perhaps?”
“A devolution, I believe,” whispered Constanzia, coming away from the windows as though suddenly aware of ears which might be pricked at those windows. “He wishes to attain mastery over Baskarone. He speaks of
