“Are you taking the child?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” he told me. “My daughter. Mama is very fond of her. So am I. Do not be concerned about her.”
“Does she have a name?” I asked.
He gazed at me abstractedly, trying to think of the name. “Mama named her,” he confessed at last. “After a spring flower that blooms through the snow. I cannot remember at the moment. Of course, she hasn’t been christened yet.”
He sighed, then smiled, without meaning, then said, “There was a man of ours you had an interest in. Father said you had asked after him.”
“Giles,” I said, my mouth falling open.
“He was killed. Someone saw the assault and sent word to my father. It was a group of men assaulted him, while he was riding on our business that day.” He flushed, remembering that day. “Father said you had wanted to know.”
Giles. Dead. Elly. Dead. Edward. Dead. Oh, God in Heaven. All dead. All I had loved. All I had tried to love.
“Where?” I breathed. “Where is he buried?”
“There,” he said, gesturing vaguely eastward. “Where they killed him.”
He left me and rode off with his serving men, still smiling his ineffectual smile, while I wept until there were no more tears. I had brought flowers for Elly’s and Edward’s graves, the roses they both liked. I gripped the bouquet until the thorns sank deep into my hands, knowing it was Giles’s grave my flowers should lie upon.
I went back to the Dower House and got my boots. “Take me wherever it was Giles was set upon,” I said.
And I was there, a weedy sunken spot by the side of an unfamiliar road, marked by a rough wooden cross. There was a man working in the field nearby, and he came to the fence, looking at me curiously.
“I didn’t see you coming on the road,” he said. “Are you looking for the place the fellow died?”
I nodded yes.
He pointed at the cross, at the sunken place. “I buried him there. I was over there, on the far side of the field. I saw him coming along, on his horse. They came out of the woods there, and set upon him. Eight or ten, maybe. Too many for me to fight. I saw his horse run off. I went to the village to get help. When we came back, the horse was there, grazing, and the body of the man. Dreadful cut about, he was. They knew him by his horse, though, for it had the King’s arms upon the saddle.”
I thanked him, and he went back to his work. I laid my flowers on the grave. They were marked with my blood upon their thorns. I sat there for a long time. When night came, I told the boots to take me home.
Perhaps in time I can find a stonecutter to make a monument for Giles. But why? In time even a monument will disappear. I remember the twenty-first and shudder. Why make monuments? Why build beautiful things? Why create anything when Fidipur’s billions will tear them all down.
I don’t know. I have no emotions at all except a sullen anger, which boils away inside me, building up the pressure. I want vengeance against the cause of all this pain. If I had not been pregnant when I came back, I would not have married Edward, I would not have had Elly. If I had not married Edward, I could have had Giles. We could have married, lived together, that ordinary life Carabosse wanted for me.
If I had not married Edward, if he had not had Elly, Edward might not have died, and he certainly wouldn’t have married Lydia. Oh, what Jaybee had done when he raped me was more hurt than even he had planned!
When I left the twentieth—how long ago?—Jaybee was raging about, full of fury that he could not find me to do it all again. If I leave him there, he will do it again, to someone else. He will cause this pain again, generations of it, begetting sorrow as a cloud begets rain. It is not fitting that this should be so. I can do nothing for Elly. I can do nothing for Giles. Edward is gone. All I cared for is gone.
And Jaybee lives to make more sorrow.
Beauty can be disappointed of its children. The worst thing about being a woman is that things can be begot on us, things we do not want, cannot manage, cannot control. We swell to fruition with disasters implanted in us against our wills. We spew out tragedy. And all the disaster and the tragedy, though begot upon us against our volition, is part us. How much, we wonder. How much was me? What could I have changed?
Carabosse says I carry importance within me. A kernel of something incorruptible, no doubt. A seed. Yet one begot upon me without my consent. Can even Carabosse be sure of the harvest? Can this seed grow bitter fruit? Can it be twisted and warped, as my own seed was warped?
And is this, perhaps, what the Dark Lord wants? What Jaybee wanted, whether he knew it or not? To beget horror on innocence? It cannot be borne. It cannot be tolerated. I cannot let it happen again, to anyone.
All my anger focuses upon Jaybee. Even though magic is thin on the ground in the twentieth, my powers will work there, so I believe, even if only weakly, perhaps enough.
Grumpkin is here. And my cloak. And my boots.
[“What’s she doing?” I asked Israfel.
“She’s going back there. Back to the twentieth.”
“Beauty! You mustn’t. Please.…”]
23
January 4, 1993
Wisdom Street
It is not Holy Wisdom, not Hagia Sophia, the street is named for, but William W. Wisdom, who was Manager of Public Works sometime in the forties. Still, I have always liked the name of the street, and seeing it on the sign at the corner gave me a feeling of welcome when
