Wilful Impropriety (48 page)

Though he had more than a bit of experience trailing a person without being noticed, he could see the moment, on her face, when Ingrid knew first that someone was following her. Sam imagined that, given the secret she had to protect, her senses had long ago become habitually keen in this way.

And so he also saw when she made herself ready, shifting in a way he knew meant she was gripping the handle of her dagger firmly and letting the flat of its blade rest gently under her sleeve. He watched as her other hand gripped a less graceful sachet of herbs with a handful of small rocks nestled inside them, ready in her jacket, so either hand could answer whatever danger might approach her.

At this point, he felt it might be best to make himself known, and coughed quietly before he approached and reached her side.

“Ah,” she said, “only Sam,” and let her hands release their hidden weaponry, seemingly ignorant of the expression of dismay which passed quickly over him at this pronouncement. She might at least have been a bit pleased, he thought, though on reflection realized that perhaps relief and trust were the same, for her.

“I knew where you’d be going,” he said. “If you’d rather go alone—”

“No,” she said, perhaps just a bit quickly, and his heart lifted again. “Come along, you can help me with the boards. They do keep trying to keep us out.”

•   •   •

The abandoned chapel, set far back in the wilder parts of the dismal cemetery, had indeed been boarded over once again, but not with much enthusiasm, as if the laborers felt unsure about their task. It was one matter to miss a sermon now and then, but another one entirely to box up a house of God like an oversized wooden rockinghorse bound for the shelves of a private gallery in some posh mother’s attic—besides which, they’d been sent out to do it enough times now that it had become a kind of game, which Sam suspected they had reasons of their own for playing.

And so, some distantly heard call to grace summoned from the workers’ hearts, or perhaps just a packet of wages too late too often, made it easy for Sam and Ingrid to pry out a loose or rusted nail or three and make a spot big enough to clamber through. He went through first, because it was a trousers day—otherwise, Ingrid would have done so, though Sam suspected neither of them would ever be able to define the terms of this silent agreement between them.

As he expected, first there was an imminence of bats disturbed from their slumber—Sam could think of them no other way but that, as some fabulous single creature with many parts looming up above them, all around them, and then departing through the rough window they had made. All in a tidy column, Sam thought, each knowing where the other was, like humans in a queue, only with wings.

Together in the moldy chapel, which had been stripped bare of pews and altar until the only signs remaining of its former holy purpose were crumbling saints painted on stone in lurid tones, having all this while been falling slowly down the walls in pebbles and chunks. Sam couldn’t tell the Marys from the Margarets, but he recognized an ikon of St. Lucy, because of the eyes, or rather the absence of eyes, or rather the presence of eyes but held out on a tray just as neatly as they had once been set into a face.

“Horrible,” Ingrid remarked, following Sam’s gaze. “And they say we are the deviant ones.”

“Jyoti would see it differently,” he said, loyally, or perhaps charitably, or both.

“Yes, but she sees everything differently.” Ingrid stepped over fallen boards and rocks until she stood at the chapel’s center, and looked at him as if expecting something, though nothing else in her eyes told him what it might be.

So Sam followed, and stood beside her, and then moved a little closer, and found she did not move away. They shared a long moment of silence, enjoying it together after the day’s hard work and noisy evening, and then—

A beam of the drifting evening light, as they will do, happened to bounce upon a remaining shard of glass in a high broken window, just at the very moment he was reaching to touch her hand—bare of its glove, which she’d torn on a nail and then stripped and dropped outside into the bracken like trash in the gutter.

Thoughtlessly, horribly wasteful
, he told himself, and wanted her regardless—or even more, and let his hand keep moving toward her own. Then the sun intervened, and her attention was brought back to the moment and caught, and her hand drew back as if he’d been pressing a viper or hot coal toward it.

“I—I apologize—” he stammered, but before he could make even more of a fool of himself, she reached out with her own hands and took both of his in them, then pulled him as close as he’d longed to be to her for so many years.

“You should,” she whispered in his ear, even as she drew him closer still, even though pressing their bodies together meant that if he hadn’t already known her secret, he surely would have guessed it then. “You certainly left me wondering long enough.”

He would have laughed, but quickly found his lips were otherwise occupied by an even more pleasurable activity, as he needed no more encouragement than that to lean up and let them brush against hers, at last.

•   •   •

The unnamed committee of outcasts and undesirables who fancied themselves renegade artists met again the next day, and again the numbers had somehow swelled to what seemed surely like twenty or so people milling through the former shop. In Sam’s mind it was theirs, though each one of them called it “ours.” Our command post, our hideout, Our Gallery. They said it as often as they could in as many ways, delighting themselves each time, though Sam found it totemic, a kind of witchery. They wanted the truth to emerge by collective insistence.

Arguing happily in little crowds, which shifted and reformed with each passing resolution, none of them seemed aware of their own futility.
Theirs
, thought Sam, who felt she’d had enough of the trousers and could trust the group now to allow her the frock and wig for this evening’s increasingly organized session of planning. Theirs, but not hers at all anymore, though certainly
ours
, if she stayed.

She knew that she would stay. She saw Ingrid, as unattached to any of their clumps as herself, drifting through the space not as if it were empty, but full instead of different people, in different kinds of clothes.

As Sam watched her, she could almost see them herself—up close, as she never had, rather than from a distance in the street, or as a portrait on a wall. Glittering, hands and throats heavy with the weight of priceless jewels—the women would be graceful and the men resolute, standing just as stiffly in one place as their wives would flow dynamically through the room, one distant day.

Then Ingrid saw Sam too, saw that she was seeing both near her and through her eyes, and this was almost as extraordinary as the moment itself.

They shared, across a field of ragged backs—huddled in now quieter, more conspiratorial and above all else more sectarian groups than before—a look which Sam knew meant the same to each of them, a thought unspoken,
They will rise. This wretched lot will rise. We will pull them up, and drag the other ones down, until the reckoning.

•   •   •

They met their third personal conspirator after the third night’s debate—moving together to meet her just at the street’s corner, at the edge of the light cast by the tall gas street lamp on its twisting iron column. They met her there as if they had arranged to do so, though no mention of it had passed between any of them.

Ingrid, Sam, and Jyoti. Two women, one boy—again today, through the cheap stage magic of trousers and hairpins, and putting his shoulders back more. Ingrid had remarked once upon how Sam walked differently as a girl than as a boy—how Sam’s body seemed to have two separate rhythms, side by side, into which it could—or perhaps simply did, without Sam’s willing it—slip on any given morning.

Jyoti, for her part, seemed not indifferent but perhaps entirely unnoticing of how Sam changed sometimes from she to he or back again. She spoke to him now the same as she had yesterday when they met, when Sam’s magic trick was a hand-sewn frock instead. In her regard there was not the slightest flicker of confusion or awareness that anything about Sam had changed.

She sees differently, just as you said
, Sam thought, looking at Ingrid and knowing he could convey this meaning with his eyes.
All the time.

Sam watched as Ingrid, forgetting to guard her face, seemed to wonder at her own mind, decoding such messages in a glance as quick as the shadows flickering through curtains in the windows above them. He knew that Ingrid considered herself more rational than to have such strange thoughts, share such moments with—

“You don’t mind when I’m a girl,” Sam observed mildly.

“Do you have the gift?” Jyoti responded before Ingrid could, rounding upon Sam with an affect almost like anger. “You’ve done that, speaking to thoughts before. You’ve done it with Antoine, only he—”

“Didn’t notice,” said Sam. “Wouldn’t.”

“But we do,” Ingrid said, and Sam felt their unity again where, he now reflected, they had begun building a wall. “So is she right, can you—see people’s minds?”

There was a precarious moment, a sense that Sam might turn and flee, or even attack them—that he was on the cusp between these impulses and did not himself know which one would tip him. Yet balance returned when he laughed, instead, girlishly but with a rattle that went with the trousers.

“I can pretend to, all right,” he said, twinkling all over with some delightful secret and the growing confidence he could share it. “Have done, it’s good for a bit of push. But no, Lady Jyoti, I’ve just a knack for seeing people’s faces, and that can be quite like seeing their minds, if you know the way of it.”

Both women spoke at once.

“The way of—” started Jyoti, just a moment before Ingrid said, “
Lady?
”

•   •   •

The second surprising morning of the week contained rather more pillows than Sam was accustomed to, and indeed than he could recall laying his head down on the night before. Those had been two flat rags on the floor of what had been a shop and was now an impending exhibition, whereas these were plush with down and coated in some impossibly soft fabric which, he decided after a moment’s cautious thought, was the same color as a young salmon seen through the water of a muddy river.

The bed too was surely not the one Sam had occupied for all the nights and early mornings of seven years—that one was also flat, and so familiar that every piece of straw stuffed inside seemed like an old friend saying hello when it poked him in his slumber.

Then he remembered—Jyoti laughing, Ingrid scowling, himself wanting to flee again but instead letting himself be led, at Jyoti’s insistence, to the grand old house he had only suspected was real when he’d let slip the guess of a title. It was the way she carried herself—she
was
surely one of them, but she hadn’t started life that way.

And so, as she assured them her parents were away at one of their other houses, attending to their busy social season, he and Ingrid had found themselves just outside the city after walking for what felt like hours, and probably was, which explained the exhaustion with which Sam fell into what must surely be the most comfortable bed in the world.

From which he was too soon pulled by the clanging of a bell, a summons he followed outside until he found, standing next to a squinting and disheveled Ingrid, a beamingly radiant Jyoti, who told him she’d been sent a wonderful vision in the night by God, and that she’d like very much to introduce them to her horses.

•   •   •

Ingrid seemed to choose not to see it, and Sam wished he didn’t, but it was too starkly clear for his mind to reject. Around Jyoti, the horses were soothed in some uncanny way, and when she left them, they looked after her and shifted restlessly in their stalls. Of course she must visit them often, he thought, but still—the way she glided through the barn, and touched them all, and said their names—it felt like a sacrament, a ritual with more power than its components should have the capacity to produce.

When they had been suitably introduced to what must, Sam slowly realized, be Jyoti’s closest friends, she led them behind the barn to show them the seed of her idea.

It was a carriage, with a quality to it much like her family’s house itself had—so carefully maintained over so much time that for all its glorious worth it seemed nearly ramshackle, a patchwork of aristocratic frugality and the work of some craftsman who cared for his trade in the same way Jyoti cared for her horses.

“Yes,” Ingrid said, instantly, before Sam could even see what was meant by this presentation. “We can adorn it, transform it—for the opening.”

Sam felt uneasy, sure that as permissive as Jyoti’s family might be about their wayward daughter’s wanderings through life, they would draw the line at the use of their property for this particular endeavor. They must know it, too, he thought, looking at his companions, but nevertheless both women looked back at him fiercely, as if defying him to disagree. He wished he’d brought the frock, because he sensed it would have somehow given him better ground to stand on with them in this moment.

As it was, he was outnumbered, and only let himself sigh as he said, “Very well. Then I believe it’s time we paid a visit to Tristan and Antoine.”