Undermajordomo Minor (7 page)

I
t had just gone six o'clock as Lucy ambled down the hill before the castle. The winter sun had dipped below the mountain, and the village wore the properties of night prematurely. The cold stung at his ears and he pulled his hat down to cover them. As he walked past the shuttered stalls in the marketplace, a half-dozen children assembled behind him, stepping in a clutching cluster to observe him and wonder at his arrival. They were giddy to be stalking the newcomer, and while there was an element of danger to this adventure, they themselves knew, in the way children know such things, that Lucy was not a bad man. Still, when he spun about to greet them, they scattered in individual directions, each one shrieking ecstatically. Lucy blushed at the attention but also felt happy, even proud in a way, as though he had been formally announced.

Passing Mewe's shanty, he noticed the window was ajar, and he paused to peer inside. Mewe sat at an uneven table, playing cards fanned out in his hands. His face bore the penitent look of one who has just been caught cheating, because he had just been. Across from Mewe was a young woman, and she was very pretty indeed, if the truth would be known. In point of fact she was more than pretty: she was exquisite.

She was his age, Lucy supposed, or slightly younger. She wore her abundant brown hair stacked atop her head, exposing a delicate jawline angling into a long, tapered neck. The silhouette of
her face was backlit by candles, and he could see no flaws about her, not an angle out of place, as though she were a marble figurine crafted by the sure hand of a master wishing only to share an ideal of the purest beauty. Her comeliness was counteracted by the state of her coat, a shapeless, sack-like thing with cuffs gone thin to the point of fraying. But she herself was so very lovely to behold that Lucy wouldn't have looked away for the world; he couldn't have. Her black eyes flashed in the stuttering flamelight as she chided her playmate.

“Why do you do it, Mewe?”

“I don't know why. It's like an itch that must be scratched.”

“But it isn't any fun for me when you cheat.”

“No?”

“How could it be?”

“I should think it might be exciting for you.”

“And why would you think that?”

“It follows some manner of logic.”

“Would you like me to do the same to you?”

“I suppose I wouldn't, actually.”

She snatched up the cards from his hand, shuffling these into the deck. “Even if you win, you lose, don't you understand?”

“I don't know about
that,
” Mewe said.

She ceased shuffling. “Will you or won't you stop it?”

Mewe put on a brave face. “I will try.”

A days-old puppy, black in color, clambered onto the table and arched against an earthen jar sitting between Mewe and his enchanting guest. When the jar toppled, Mewe righted it automatically and dragged the puppy from the table to his lap. The girl dealt the cards and they resumed play, and Lucy had the feeling he was watching a painting come to life; there was something enduring about the scenario, something timeless and vividly evocative, and this appealed to him in a sweetly sad way. The spell was broken when Mewe spied him at the window and said, “Oh, hello, there.” The girl turned to look, and when her and Lucy's eyes met
he was filled with a shameful panic, and he spun away, huddling at Memel's door, his heart knocking against his throat.

“Who was that?” he heard the girl ask.

“Lucy's his name. We met him on the train. He's at the castle, now. Gone after Mr. Broom.”

She paused. “Is he nice?”

“He seems it. But who can say? Perhaps he's a scoundrel in hiding.”

The girl softly laughed, then was silent. Lucy heard the scrape of her chair, and now she appeared at the window. She stood mere feet from Lucy but owing to the darkness had no idea of his proximity. She was pondering some distant thought, a lonely one, according to her expression; when she shut the window and drew the curtain, Lucy stood awhile in the snow, feeling foolish and trembly.

He turned and knocked on Memel's door. Memel answered with a puppy in his hand, this likewise black, but with white boots.

“Did you take my pipe?” Lucy asked.

“Yes,” said Memel.

“Can I have it back, please?”

Memel left and returned with the pipe.

“Thank you,” said Lucy.

“You're welcome.” Memel nodded to the castle. “How are you settling in?”

“Fine.”

“What have you had for your supper?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I don't know if I am.”

“Shall we find out?”

Memel ushered him into the shanty.

T
he front room of Memel's home brought to mind an animal's burrow. The floor was dirt, and the air smelled of roots and spices. The walls were made from tin scrap of varying degrees of corrosion, and they shuddered in the wind. But it was not an unpleasant space: a copper cauldron hung in the fireplace, its fat, rounded bottom licked by flames, and oil lamps throwing off a honey-colored light lined the rafters in neatly pegged rows. Lucy sat beneath these at a low-standing table. There was a litter of puppies roaming about, yipping and knocking things over and pouncing on one another; the exhausted mother lay on the floor beside the table, stomach bagged, dead to the world. “Poor Mama,” said Memel. “She's had just about enough.” He nudged her with his foot and she retired to one of two small back rooms, with the puppies following after. Memel removed the cauldron from the fire and set it in the center of the table to cool. Tilting back his head, he shouted, “Mewe!”

Mewe's muffled voice came through the wall, from his own shanty. “What?”

“Is Klara with you?”

“Yes.”

“Is she still angry at me?”

Lucy could hear the girl named Klara murmuring, but couldn't decipher her words.

“She says she's not,” Mewe called.

“And do you believe her?”

“Yes, I think I do.”

“And you? Are you still angry?”

“Not at all.”

“Will you please come and eat with us, then?”

A pause; more murmuring. “Who is ‘us'?” Mewe asked.

“Lucy has come to visit. The lad from the train?”

“Yes, he was spying on us a moment ago.”

Memel looked at Lucy with a questioning glance. Lucy shook his head. “I was only passing by,” he whispered.

“He claims not to have been spying, Mewe.”

“Oh? And what would he call it, then?”

“Passing by, is how he describes it.”

Yet more murmuring. Mewe said, “Ask him for us, please, if he believes one must be in motion to be passing?”

Lucy admitted that yes, he supposed one did have to be, and Memel restated this.

“Well, then,” Mewe continued, “how does he explain the fact of his being stationary at my window?”

Memel raised his eyebrows. “Were you stationary, Lucy?”

“Perhaps I lingered for a moment.”

“Now he is calling it a momentary lingering,” Memel said.

“I see,” said Mewe. Murmuring. “We would like to know, then, just what is the difference between the two?”

Lucy thought he could hear some restrained laughter coming from Klara. To Memel he said, “Spying suggests a hope to come by private information. My intentions were much simpler.”

Memel digested, then repeated the words, which precipitated further hushed discussion between Mewe and Klara. At last the former said, “Would Lucy describe himself, then, as idly curious?”

Lucy was now certain he could hear both Klara and Mewe stifling their amusement.

“Well?” Memel asked, who was smiling.

“I think that would be fair,” said Lucy.

“It would be fair, he says,” Memel said.

For a time, Lucy could not hear any further chatter from next door. Finally it was Klara who spoke. “Give us a moment to finish our game, Father,” she said.

S
tew's too hot yet, anyway,” Memel said, peering into the cauldron. He stepped away from the table and invited Lucy into his room, a drab cube with no window or furnishings save for a straw mattress on the ground and a wood crate doubling as a bedside table. The puppies lay in a heap in the corner, feeding off their mother, who regarded Memel and Lucy with a look beyond concern. Memel leaned down and stroked her with a gentle hand, his face drawn with worry. “They're going to kill her.” Cocking his head, he asked, “Would you like a puppy, Lucy?”

“Oh, no, thank you.”

“You're certain?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said, “this simply won't do.” He picked up the puppy with white boots and left the room. An uneasy feeling visited Lucy; he followed Memel and found him standing at a water barrel beside the front door, his arm submerged to the elbow. “If the mother dies, then they all will,” he said, regarding the black water with a look of grave determination. Long moments passed, and when he slipped his arm from the water, there was nothing in his hand. He returned to his room and re-emerged with another puppy, making once more for the barrel. Why this was being carried out in Lucy's presence, and just prior to eating, Lucy could not fathom. Whatever the reason, he felt impelled to intervene. When he spoke, he was not motivated by any one thought or combination of words, but in
response to a kind of pain, much in the way one involuntarily cries out after being injured:

“Stop it,” he said. “If it's come to this, then I'll take him.”

Memel came nearer and deposited the puppy in Lucy's palm. “Her,” he said, and moved to the table to ladle out the stew.

The puppy was the runtess of the pack. Sleekly black, her head tottered creakily, as though she were feebly aged. She peered up at Lucy and opened her mouth but no sound came out; lowering her head, she closed her eyes and Lucy tucked her into the breast pocket of his coat. Her snout pushed proud of this, her tiny jaws ajar. Lucy rubbed the fuzz above her nose and she licked his fingertip, which prompted a flutter in his stomach. There is an instance of import when one experiences the conception of love, he realized. It was as though you had been waiting for it all along; as if you'd known it was approaching, and so when it arrives you reach out to greet it with an innate familiarity. Behind him, Memel said, “All right, Lucy, the stew is cooled.”

When Lucy turned to face the table he gave a start, for Klara and Mewe had snuck in and were sitting upright, hands laid flat before them, a portrait of obedience but for the hint of mirth clinging to their lips. Lucy suspected their sneaking in was a prank played on him, some bit of mischief for his benefit or at his expense. It was harmless enough, as pranks went; but why did his face burn so as he sat down? Klara, spoon in fist, covered her face and silently shuddered; Mewe produced a series of discreet snorts. Memel, sitting, took note of their good humor but had no inkling of its origin. He leaned forward on his elbows and asked hopefully,

“Is there a joke?”

“No,” said Mewe and Klara together.

“There's not a joke?”

“No.”

Memel tried to let it go, but could not: “Oh, tell us the joke, already.” He was genuinely curious; he himself wanted to laugh with the others—he wore a smile on his face, in anticipation of
the introduction of something amusing. But when they offered no explanation, he grimaced, and told Lucy, “This is rude behavior.”

Lucy stared at his stew, waiting for the painful moment to pass. Quietly, he told Memel, “It's something private between them, I suppose.” Klara sat up alertly when he said this, as if she'd been stuck with a pin, and now she scrutinized Lucy for such a length of time that he thought nothing else would do but to face her.

When their eyes met, and held, he felt once again the instance of import, only more powerfully than before. There was in him an actual reverberation, and his blood hurried every which way. He could not intuit what Klara was experiencing, if anything, but there was something in his expression which alarmed her, and she suddenly looked away. When she did this, his heart caught, and he wished to reach out to her, to take up her hand in his own. Now it was her turn to blush, he noticed.

Lucy settled into his supper. The stew was deliciously spicy, so that sweat beaded at his temples under his cap, and his tongue was singed with a pulsing heat. Memel poured him a glass of water but Lucy, recalling what lay at the bottom of the barrel, opted for wine. He only rarely drank alcohol, and it birthed in him a feeling of jauntiness, and he decided he might have some small celebration with himself. By the time he had finished his stew he was working on his third glass, and a confidence or sense of ease settled over him. Mewe and Klara carried on with their private whisperings and gigglings, but Lucy wasn't embarrassed by this; in fact he thought it just that they were devoting these attentions to him. Was he not a funny one, after all? This pale and underfed young stranger with a puppy in his pocket? He made no protest, he took no offense, but began to prepare his pipe, for now he finally had his audience, and they would witness his smoking and wonder at the complexity of his thoughts. Alas, when the sharp smoke jabbed at his naked throat he emitted a single cough which blasted the pipe's contents fully over his head. Memel, Mewe, and Klara found this a glad event; the three of them laughed frankly,
loudly, and for a lengthy period of time. Lucy knew, even while the tobacco was hurtling through the air, that he could never recover from this social blunder; he solemnly returned his pipe to his coat pocket, drained his wine, and poured himself another.

The room was in motion, slowly wheeling, bringing to mind the dizziness he'd experienced when climbing the stairwell to his quarters in the castle—a moderately unsettling yet not entirely displeasing sensation. He removed the puppy from his pocket and laid her on the table, tickling and teasing her. She reared and bit his hand, but she was so slight that this caused no pain, and he laughed at the futility of it. Klara's features were blurred in the woozy candlelight; she was watching Lucy with seeming indifference. And yet she didn't look away, either.

The wine was going down like water, and Lucy had arrived at the point of drunkenness where he couldn't hold a thought. His lips became lazy and his words were slurred; this amused the others, who put any number of questions to him, that they might expose and celebrate his state.

An ugliness took shape in Lucy's mind. It was obvious to him that these people would never welcome him into their society, and that they wanted him around only to make sport of him. When he saw the white-booted puppy peering out from behind the water barrel, he knew he had been tricked by Memel, and this was the final insult. He stood and lurched toward the door, with the others calling after him, their voices choked with cackling, gasping laughter. Memel crossed over, clinging to Lucy's coat and imploring him to stay; Lucy pulled away, stepping clear of the shanty and into an oceanic windstorm which instantly plucked his cap from his head and gobbled it up. Realizing the puppy still was clutched in his hand, Lucy turned, thinking to return it to Memel, but Klara was standing in the doorway with a repentant look on her face and Lucy felt he couldn't meet her again. He tucked the puppy away in his pocket and resumed his uneven snow-marching toward the looming, blacker-than-night castle.

His mood was profoundly resentful as he caromed off the walls of the spiral staircase, bumbling in the dark, hands outstretched like a blind beggar. He had had it in his mind that once he left Bury he would become a second man, and this man would command, if not respect, then at least civility. But here it was much the same, it seemed: he was derided and made to look the fool; the villagers had identified him on the spot as one who could not be considered a serious person. In remembering his departure from the shanty, it occurred to him that Memel had stolen his pipe again. Checking his pocket, he found this to be so, and he paused at the top of the stairs to issue a hissing sound.

He fell into bed, not bothering to undress. The puppy crawled from his pocket and began nosing about under the blankets; Lucy watched the lump creeping toward this and that cavern and crevice. He drifted into uneasy slumber, his dreams descriptive of impossible frustrations, a vanishing doorway here, a never-ending staircase there. This marked the completion of his first day at the castle.