Undermajordomo Minor (12 page)

L
ucy recognized his taking solace in giving up; he was familiar with the comfort which existed in the acceptance of failure. In turning back from his own pain and fear, he had experienced some stripe of validation; for these feelings were justified, after all, and his leaving was necessary, and wise. Despite this, the Baron's letter conjured in him a shame which eclipsed these other emotions, and so he did not strike out for the station as planned, but removed the cape from his valise and walked back down the hill, and to the village. As he knocked on Klara's door, he could feel his heartbeat in his hands. She answered; she was alone. He passed her the cape and told her, “You can't marry Adolphus.”

Her face was so pale, and she looked at the cape with such superlative sadness.

“Why,” she asked.

“Because of the fact that I love you.”

Lucy said these words and he watched as Klara's sadness drifted away, her eyes brightening in pulses, and now she was beguiling again. Stepping closer, she reached up and kissed Lucy on the mouth, lightly, and again, on the neck. She retreated into the shanty and Lucy followed after. He watched as she shed her coat and put the cape on, standing before the mirror, as before, and admiring herself. “Yes, hello,” she said, “and who is this young lady?
She looks so happy, doesn't she? I wonder what's got into her. Perhaps she's heard some good news. Perhaps she's heard just what she wanted to hear.” She was swiveling back and forth, smiling at herself. “Oh, but she
does
look happy, doesn't she? Well, let's see how long it lasts, shall we?”

T
he recent turn of events instilled in Lucy an unheralded emotion which he couldn't at the start identify but which he eventually decided was euphoria. And it was in this state that he begot a plan or a strategy, one which he recognized as inspired but also humanely necessary, so that upon returning to his room the next white-lighted morning he threw himself into the task of realizing it, toiling with pen and paper for long hours until his hand was cramped and stiff, that he might get his words to sit just so.

Lucy wrote a letter to the Baroness Von Aux. He introduced himself, describing his position at the castle, and then imparted his opinion in respects to the mental state of the Baron. For, in spite of the dire and unmistakably darkened tone of the Baron's letters, Lucy thought the Baroness was likely unaware of her husband's true condition, and that, if she became conscious of it, and if she possessed any remnant of affection for the man, then she would surely respond in one manner or the other. Well, Lucy was no scholar, and had never before undertaken such a task as this, attempting to transform the fates of others using naked language alone. It was a tedious business, he decided, and he felt no envy of the learned men and women of the world for whom composition was their stock-in-trade. The following morning, upon rereading his work for the hundredth time, he declared the missive sound, and slipped it into the envelope alongside the Baron's daily offering.

All the time he had been writing this letter, and as he set out to deliver it, Lucy was filled with a righteous feverishness; for he knew the deed was correct, and essential. But then something peculiar occurred, which was that the moment the letter was snatched from his hand, the moment his plan was enacted, and had ceased existing in thought alone, now he was visited by a premonition, presented as divine truth, which was that he had just made a significant and imminently consequential mistake. He stood on the platform awhile, wondering about this, becoming fearful of it. Once the train rolled out of sight, then did he push the feeling away, banishing it, for he had other and more pressing, pleasing considerations. Turning his back on the station, he struck out for the village. Smoke was pouring from Klara's chimney. Lucy began to run.

T
he days were growing warmer, and Adolphus was away on his campaign. Lucy and Klara took hours-long afternoon walks through the forest, their fingers twining together. They spoke of small things; or of things which seemed small when spoken but which afterward remained fixed in Lucy's mind. One day Klara commented that when the snow melted away, the exposed grasses looked like the fur of a newborn foal or calf.

“But the earth is not an animal,” Lucy said.

“Yes it is,” Klara told him, and she gripped his fingers ever tighter.

N
ow Lucy was spending his nights in Klara's bed. He found it in his ability to make her laugh, and this was so pleasing to him that he sometimes overdid it, and the next day she would complain of a tender stomach. Typically he awoke at dawn, while she and Memel still slept, and repaired to the castle. His suit had arrived from Listen, and his flesh was greatly contented as he eased into this dashing ensemble each morning.

Rose sometimes accompanied him on his rounds, but just as often she would loiter at the door of the shanty as he was leaving, and he knew this meant she wished to stay behind, to play with her brothers and sisters and mother. Whenever this happened, Lucy felt a mild betrayal; but Rose was too large to rest in his pocket any longer, and he knew he had to allot her a life apart from his own.

Upon completing his work, Lucy would change back into his old suit and sheepskin cap and return to the village. Some nights he and Klara would socialize with Memel and Mewe; some nights they were alone. Time passed in this way, and life was but one comfort after another. It was all so natural. Later, and Lucy would wonder how many days this phase had been made of.

A
week of ceaseless rain, this followed by baking heat, and all at once it was spring, and the chirping insects trilled in the valley. Lucy and Klara lay in the tall grasses above the village. He was leaning back on his elbows, a sleepy expression on his face. Klara was curled at his side, watching the daffodils bowing to the ground when a bee would light upon them. She put her hand on Lucy's bare stomach and he looked down at her.

“Have you ever done that with anyone else?” he asked.

She nodded. “Have you?”

He nodded. Stroking her hair, he asked her what to do about Adolphus.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Do you want me to fight him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She wasn't certain how to put it. “It would be unwise.”

“You think he would win, you mean?”

She touched his face. “Yes.”

“I suppose he would, after all.”

“You mustn't ever try.”

“I don't know that I'll have a choice, when he comes back.”

She shook her head. “I'll speak with him. He'll be hurt. But he's not a bad man.”

Lucy thought of it. “What does he want, exactly?” he said.

“To be a hero,” Klara said. “That's actually all.”

“And what are you meant to do?”

“I believe I'm meant to coo.”

Lucy laughed. He said, “I feel I
could
fight him, though, do you know? I'd only have to think of you two, together, like this.”

Klara sat up, startled. “Adolphus and I . . . It never came to that. And I'm not sorry, either.”

Lucy experienced a great relief, this followed by a greater curiosity, which he wished to ignore, but could not, and so did not. “Who was it, then, if not Adolphus?”

“It was only once,” said Klara. “And it didn't mean anything.” She lay back down. “I'll tell you about it, if you really want to know.”

“I really want to know.”

“All right, then.”

by the Strange Eastern Stranger,

Godless Corrupter

I
t was the way the stranger had looked at Klara, as though she were something to be consumed—something that would be. No one had ever looked at her like that before, and it was troubling in several ways, the foremost being that she liked it, or some part of her did. He entered the village in his tottering cart in the early afternoon; his arrival represented diversion at a slack hour and the villagers assembled to gawk and wonder, asking every question which came into their minds: Where had he come from? Why had he left? Where was he going? What was awaiting him there? They were after the news of the world, and the road-weary vagabond fielded these and other queries patiently but without enthusiasm. A lull revealed itself and he removed his hat, asking if he might stay overnight in the village, to rest and replenish his supplies; when his wish was granted, he returned his hat to his head, grinning a grin that Klara identified as devoutly impure. As if intuiting her recognition, he jerked his head to locate her in the crowd, staring levelly and with something more than boldness; and as he was handsome in that dark and brooding way which certain impressionable young women find irresistible, she discovered she couldn't look away from him, and she became afraid in a manner she couldn't pinpoint or define.

Climbing down from his cart, the stranger moved through the crowd, and to Klara. He wore a dirty jerkin with nothing underneath; his bare arms were wiry and hairless and deeply tanned. He
had a gold tooth and was missing the lower half of his left ear, and when he took up her hand she began shivering, tremors rippling up her back and to the shoulder. He kissed her across her knuckles. She looked down at the cool spot where his lips had met her skin, and this was the end for Klara. It was as good as done.

She spent the rest of the afternoon in perpetual movement, running non-pressing errands and paying visits to people she did not much care to see, just so long as she wasn't alone with her thoughts, or with the stranger himself. Fearful he would come to her in bed, she made Mewe sleep beside her. When the stranger didn't come, she couldn't understand why this bothered her so, as though they'd had a plan to meet and he'd broken it. In the morning she awoke early and made her way to the well to wash her face. In passing the stranger's covered cart, she cleared her throat. Laying out her soap and towel on the well wall, she washed, and waited. After a time she heard a rustle of grass behind her, and she smiled, but didn't turn around; when something bristly pressed against her leg she drew back, gasping—but it was only Memel's dog arching against her, and she laughed at herself. When she was finished rinsing the soap from her face, she reached for the towel but it was no longer there.

“Why do you hide away from me?” asked the stranger. He was standing at her back, and very close to her. She gazed at the marble-black sphere of the water's surface at the bottom of the telescoping well. Her heart was thumping so violently she felt it might unravel. “I don't trust you,” she said. “You make me feel strangely.”

He put his hands on her hips and turned her around to face him. The towel was resting over his shoulder. “Isn't it somewhat pleasant, though?” he asked.

“I don't know if it is or not,” she said. “It's something like a fever, actually.”

Water was dripping from her hair and nose and chin, and the stranger took up the towel and began drying her. He did this gently and thoroughly, and when he'd finished he wrapped the towel
around her throat and breastbone. She was shivering again, and she asked, in a quavering voice,

“When will you go away from here?”

“Soon. But I'm not ready to go yet.”

“When will you be ready to go?”

He laid his hand on her face. “I will be ready to go after.”

She nearly gasped when he said it. He turned and walked back through the grass and to the village, the dog following in his wake.

In the afternoon she tried another tack, which was to attempt to make friends with the stranger. He was leaving the marketplace and she fell in step with him; in a convivial voice she pointed to his ear and asked, “How did you come to be wounded, sir?”

He looked at her amusedly, as though he was aware of what she was playing at. Tugging at what remained of the ear, he said, “That is a question I can't answer. One morning I woke awash in blood, and it was away.”

“It was severed in your sleep?”

“Yes.”

“By whom?”

“Some enemy or another. No one came forth to claim responsibility.”

How matter-of-fact he was, she thought, as though the incident hadn't been a bother beyond the mess it had made. “What sort of man would do that to you?” she asked.

“Why do you assume it was a man?”

“Oh, but a woman could never do such a thing.”

The stranger became remote, his thoughts gone back in time. Soberly, he said, “I've known them to do worse.”

Klara blushed at this. It made her inexplicably but unmistakably jealous, and she was frustrated by the feeling. When she gathered herself, she asked politely, “Do you have many enemies?”

“As a matter of fact I do.”

“And why is that?”

“I can't think of why. But, they seem to gather wherever I go.”
Now that same impure grin as before grew upon his face. Klara gathered her hands together and rested them atop her hip.

“Why do you smile like that?”

“Like what?”

“That way, there.” She pointed. “It's a smile that hides something.”

“I have nothing to hide from you.”

“Don't you?”

“Well, perhaps I do after all. And good luck finding out what it is!”

The stranger laughed at this, laughed at her, and Klara left him alone once more. She busied herself cleaning the shanty and making dinner preparations, but she couldn't free herself from her thoughts of the man. Mewe came to sleep beside her that night but she sent him away. No matter; the stranger did not appear. In the morning, after breakfast, she sought him out. He was sunning himself in a field of lupine between the village and castle. He smiled at her as she came near. “I don't know how you stand it, living here,” he said. “It's so terribly dull.”

“It is
not
dull.”

“It's consummately dull. It's immaculately dull.”

“I love it,” she said, and she did.

In a humoring tone, he asked, “Tell me, what do you love about it?”

“My father, and my friends. The animals, the rivers. I love the seasons; I think they're just the right length of time, don't you?”

The stranger didn't answer.

Klara said, “I love the fields, there—” She nodded toward the sloping green expanse beyond the castle. The stranger sat up to look.

“What's over the rise?” he asked.

“More of the same.”

“Do you ever go there?”

“Sometimes.”

He looked at her directly. “Will you take me there?”

“But why?”

“Don't you think it's about time we were alone?”

“We're alone now.”

“Alone, but not alone-alone. I want to be alone-alone.”

He stood up and looked over her. He was quite a bit taller than she.

“Will you be alone-alone with me,” he said.

He led Klara away, over the crest of the hill. His hand was callused and gripped hers tightly. She could smell his body, and the fluttering in her stomach was violent to the edge of nausea. She wore no shoes, and watched her feet moving up and back through the grass and flowers. She wasn't precisely sure what she was walking toward but she wouldn't have turned around for the world. Once they were over the rise she tucked her hair behind her ears, looking about for a piece of level ground. Finding one, she pointed. “There.” They walked toward the place.