It sounded like something he should say, after all, all done up in ancient armor and carrying a sword. "You've been dead a long time," she said.
"Almost the longest of all. Superbia, we said. That's the wrong kind of pride; that's being puffed up and too important and not really seeing things right. And there's exemplum. That's a thing you do because the world needs it, like setting up something for people to look at, a little marker, to say Marcus Regulus stood here."
"And what if no one sees it? What good is it then, if I never get out of here? There's being brave and being stupid."
He shook his head very calmly. "An exemplum is an exemplum even if no one sees it. They're just markers, where someone was."
"Look outside, old ghost. The sun's going out and the world's dying."
"Still," he said, "exempla last. . . because there's nothing anyone can do to erase them."
"What, like old stones?"
"No. Just moments. Moments are the important thing. Not every moment, but more than some think."
"Well," she said, perplexed and bothered. "Well, that's all very well for men who go around fighting ancient wars, but I don't fight anyone. I don't like violence at all, and I'll do what I can for Tom but I'm not brave and there's a limit."
"Where, Bettine?"
"The next time Richard asks me, that's where. I want out of here."
He looked sad.
"Stop that," she snapped. "I suppose you think you're superior."
"No."
"I'm just a girl who has to live and they can take my job away and I can end up outside the walls starving, that's what could happen to me."
"Yes, sometimes exempla just aren't quick. Mine would have been. And I failed it."
"You're a soldier. I'm a woman."
"Don't you think about honor at all, Bettine?"
"You're out of date. I stopped being a virgin when I was thirteen."
"No. Honor, Bettine."
"I'll bet you were some kind of hero, weren't you, some old war hero?"
"Oh no, Bettine. I wasn't. I ran away. That's why I'm the psychopomp. Because the old Tower's a terrible place; and a good many of the dead do break down as they die. There were others who could have taken the job: the children come first, usually, just to get the prisoners used to the idea of ghosts, but I come at the last. . . because I know what it is to be afraid, and what it is to want to run. I'm an Atilius Regulus, and there were heroes in my house, oh, there was a great one. . . I could tell you the story. I will, someday. But in the same family there was myself, and they were never so noble after me. exemplum had something to do with it. I wish I could have left a better one. It came on me so quickly. . . a moment; one lives all one's life to be ready for moments when they come. I used to tell myself, you know, that if mine had just—crept up slowly, then I should have thought it out; I always did think. But I've seen so much, so very much, and I know human beings, and do you know. . . quick or slow in coming, it was what I was that made the difference, thinking or not; and I just wasn't then what I am now."
"Dead," she said vengefully.
He laughed silently. "And eons wiser." Then his face went sober. "O Bettine, courage comes from being ready whenever the moment comes, not with the mind. . . I don't think anyone ever is. But what you are. . . can be ready."
"What happened to you?"
"I was an officer, you understand. . ." He gestured at the armor he wore. "And when the Britons got over the rampart. . . I ran, and took all my unit with me—I didn't think what I was doing; I was getting clear. But a wise old centurion met me coming his way and ran me through right there. The men stopped running then and put the enemy back over the wall, indeed they did. And a lot of men were saved and discipline held. So I was an exemplum, after all; even if I was someone else's. It hurt. I don't mean the wound—those never do quite the way you think, I can tell you that—but I mean really hurt, so that it was a long long time before I came out in the open again—after the Tower got to be a prison. After I saw so many lives pass here. Then I decided I should come out. May I touch you?"
She drew back, bumped the chair, shivered. "That's not how you. . . ?"
"Oh no. I don't take lives. May I touch you?"
She nodded mistrustingly, kept her eyes wide open as he drifted nearer and a braceletted hand came toward her face, beringed and masculine and only slightly transparent. It was like a breath of cool wind, and his young face grew wistful. Because she was beautiful, she thought, with a little rush of pride, and he was young and very handsome and very long dead.
She wondered. . . .
"Warmth," he said, his face very near and his dark eyes very beautiful. "I had gone into my melancholy again. . . in all these last long centuries, that there was no more for me to do, no souls for me to meet, no special one who believed, no one at all. I thought it was all done. Are there more who still believe?"
"Yes," she said. And started, for there were Anne and Essex holding hands within the brickwork or behind it or somewhere; and other shadowy figures. The children were there, and a man who looked very wet, with a slight reek of alcohol, and more and more and more, shadows which went from brocades to metals to leather to furs and strange helmets.
"Go away," she cried at that flood, and fled back, overturning the tray and crowding into the corner. "Get out of here. I'm not going to die. I'm not brave and I'm not going to. Let someone else do the dying. I don't want to die."
They murmured softly and faded; and there came a touch at her cheek like a cool breeze.
"Go away!" she shrieked, and she was left with only the echoes. "I'm going mad," she said then to herself, and dropped into the chair and bowed her head into her hands. When she finally went to bed she sat fully dressed in the corner and kept the lights on.
Breakfast came, and she bathed and dressed, and read her book, which began to come to its empty and happy ending. She threw it aside, because her life was not coming out that way, and she kept thinking of Tom, and crying, not sobs, just a patient slow leaking of tears, which made her makeup run and kept her eyes swollen. She was not powerful. She had lost all illusion of that. She just wanted out of this alive, and to live and to forget it. She tried again to use the phone and she could not figure out the keyboard which she thought might give her access to someone, if she knew anything about such systems, and she did not.
For the first time she became convinced that she was in danger of dying here, and that instead, Tom was going to, and she would be in a way responsible. She was no one, no one against all the anger that swirled about her. She was quite, quite helpless; and not brave at all, and nothing in her life had ever prepared her to be. She thought back to days when she was a child, and in school, and all kinds of knowledge had been laid out in front of her. She had found it useless. . . which it was, to a ten-year-old girl who thought she had the world all neatly wrapped around her finger. Who thought at that age that she knew all the things that were important, that if she went on pleasing others that the world would always be all right.
Besides, the past was about dead people and she liked living ones; and learning about science was learning that the world was in the process of ending, and there was no cheer in that. She wanted to be Bettine Maunfry who had all that she would ever need. Never think, never think about days too far ahead, or things too far to either side, or understand things, which made it necessary to decide, and prepare.
Moments. She had never wanted to imagine such moments would come. There was no time she could have looked down the long currents of her life, which had not been so long after all, and when she could have predicted that Bettine Maunfry would have gotten herself into a situation like this. People were supposed to take care of her. There had always been someone to take care of her. That was what it was being female and beautiful and young. It was just not supposed to happen this way.
Tom, she thought. O Tom, now what do I do, what am I supposed to do?
But of course the doing was hers.
; To him.
She had no idea what her horoscope or his was on this date, but she thought that it must be disaster, and she fingered the little fishes which she wore still in her decolletage for His Honor Richard Collier to see.
And she waited, to bend as she had learned to bend; only. . . she began to think with the versatility of the old Bettine. . . never give up an advantage. Never.
She went in and washed her face and put on her makeup again, and stopped her crying and repaired all the subtle damages of her tears.
She dressed in her handsomest dress and waited.
And toward sundown the call came.
"Bettine," His Honor said. "Have you thought better of it, Bettine?"
She came and faced the screen and stood there with her lips quivering and her chin trembling because weakness worked for those who knew how to use it.
"I might," she said.
"There's no 'might' about it, Bettine," said Richard Collier, his broad face suffused with red. "Either you do or you don't."
"When you're here," she said, "when you come here and see me yourself, I'll tell you."
"Before I come."
"No," she said, letting the tremor become very visible. "I'm afraid , Richard; I'm afraid. If you'll come here and take me out of here yourself, I promise I'll tell you anything I know, which isn't much, but I'll tell you. I'll give you his name, but he's not involved with anything besides that he had a silly infatuation and I was lonely. But I won't tell anything if you don't come and get me out of here. This has gone far enough, Richard. I'm frightened. Bring me home."
He stared at her, frowning. "If I come over there and you change your mind, Bettine, you can forget any favors you think I owe you. I won't be played with. You understand me, girl?"
She nodded.
"All right," he said. "You'll tell me his name, and you'll be thinking up any other detail that might explain how he could have gotten to that office, and you do it tonight. I'm sure there's some sense in that pretty head, there's a girl. You just think about it, Bettine, and you think hard, and where you want to be. Home, with all the comforts. . . or where you are, which isn't comfortable at all, is it, Bettine?"
"No," she said, crying. She shook her head. "No. It's not comfortable, Richard."
"See you in the morning, Bettine. And you can pack, if you have the right name."
"Richard—" But he had winked out, and she leaned there against the wall shivering, with her hands made into fists and the feeling that she was very small indeed. She did not want to be in the Tower another night, did not want to face the ghosts, who would stare at her with sad eyes and talk to her about honor, about things that were not for Bettine Maunfry.
I'm sorry, she thought for them. I won't be staying and dying here after all.
But Tom would. That thought depressed her enormously. She felt somehow responsible, and that was a serious burden, more serious than anything she had ever gotten herself into except the time she had thought for ten days that she was pregnant. Maybe Tom would—lie to them; maybe Tom would try to tell them she was somehow to blame in something which was not her fault.
That frightened her. But Tom loved her. He truly did. Tom would not hurt her by anything he would say, being a man, and braver, and motivated by some vaguely different drives, which had to do with pride and being strong, qualities which she had avoided afl her life.
She went through the day's routines, such of the day as was left, and packed all but her dress that Richard said matched her eyes. She put that one on, to sit up all the night, because she was determined that Richard should not surprise her looking other than beautiful, and it would be like him to try that mean trick. She would simply sleep sitting up and keep her skirts from wrinkling, all propped with pillows: that way she could both be beautiful and get some sleep.
And she kept the lights on because of the ghosts, who were going to feel cheated.
Had he really died that way, she wondered of the Roman, the young Roman, who talked about battles from forgotten ages. Had he really died that way or did he only make it up to make her listen to him? She thought about battles which might have been fought right where this building stood, all the many, many ages. And the lights faded.
The children came, grave and sober, Edward and then Richard, who stood and stared with liquid, disapproving eyes. "I'm sorry," she said shortly. "I'm going to be leaving." The others then, Anne and Robert, Anne with her heart-shaped face and dark hair and lovely manners, Essex tall and elegant, neither looking at her quite the way she expected— not disapproving, more as if they had swallowed secrets. "It was politics after all," asked Anne, "wasn't it, Bettine?"
"Maybe it was," she said shortly, hating to be proved wrong. "But what's that to me? I'm still getting out of here."
"What if your lover accuses you?" asked Essex. "Loves do end."
"He won't," she said. "He wouldn't. He's not likely to."
"Exemplum," said a mournful voice. "O Bettine, is this yours?"
"Shut up," she told Marc. He was hardest to face, because his sad, dark gaze seemed to expect something special of her. She was instantly sorry to have been rude; he looked as if his heart was breaking. He wavered, and she saw him covered in dust, the armor split, and bloody, and tears washing down his face. She put her hands to her face, horrified.
"You've hurt him," said Anne. "We go back to the worst moment when we're hurt like that."
"O Marc," she said, "I'm sorry. I don't want to hurt you. But I want to be alive, you understand. . . can't you remember that? Wouldn't you have traded anything for that? And you had so much. . . when the sun was young and everything was new. O Marc, do you blame me?"
"There is only one question," he said, his eyes melting-sad. "It's your moment, Bettine. Your moment."
"Well, I'm not like you; I never was; never will be. What good is being right and dead? And what's right? Who's to know? It's all relative. Tom's not that wonderful, I'll have you to know. And neither's Richard. And a girl gets along the best she can."
A wind blew, and there was a stirring among the others, an intaken breath. Essex caught at Anne's slim form, and the children withdrew to Anne's skirts. "It's her," said young Edward. "She's come."
Only Marc refused the panic which took the others; bright again, he moved with military precision to one side, cast a look back through the impeding wall where a tiny figure advanced.
"She didn't die here," he said quietly. "But she has many ties to this place. She is one of the queens, Bettine, a great one. And very seldom does she
come out." "For me?"
"Because you are one of the last, perhaps."
She shook her head, looked again in bewilderment as Anne and Robert and young Richard bowed; and Edward inclined his head. Marc only touched his heart and stepped further aside. "Marc," Bettine protested, not wanting to lose him, the one she trusted.
"Well," said the visitor, a voice like the snap of ice. She seemed less woman than small monument, in a red and gold gown covered with embroideries and pearls, and ropes of pearls and pearls in crisp red hair; she had a pinched face out of which two eyes stared like living cinder. "Well?"
Bettine bowed like the others; she thought she ought. The Queen paced slowly, diverted herself for a look at Essex, and a slow nod at Anne. "Well."
"My daughter," said Anne. "The first Elizabeth."
"Indeed," said the Queen. "And Marc, good evening. Marc, how do you fare? And the young princes. Quite a stir, my dear, indeed quite a stir you've made. I have my spies; no need to reiterate."
"I'm not dying," she said. "You're all mistaken. I've told them I'm not dying. I'm going back to Richard."
The Queen looked at Essex, offered her hand. Essex kissed it, held it, smiled wryly. "Didn't you once say something of the kind?" asked the Queen.
"He did," said Anne. "It was, after all, your mistake, daughter."
"At the time," said Elizabeth. "But it was very stupid of you, Robert, to have relied on old lovers as messenger
s."
Essex shrugged, smiled again. "If not that year, the next. We were doomed to disagree."
"Of course," Elizabeth said. "There's love and there's power; and we all three wanted that, didn't we? And you . ." Again that burning look turned on Bettine. "What sort are you? Not a holder. A seeker after power?"
"Neither one. I'm the Lord Mayor's girl and I'm going home."
"The Lord Mayor's girl." Elizabeth snorted. "The Lord Mayor's girl. I have spies, I tell you; all London's haunted. I've asked questions. The fellow gulled you, this Tom Ash. Ah, he himself is nothing; he works for others. He needs the numbers, that's all, for which he's paid. And with that list in others' hands your precious Lord Mayor's in dire trouble. Revolution, my dear, the fall of princes. Are you so blind? Your Lord Mayor's none so secure, tyrant that he is. . . if not this group of men, this year, then others, next. They'll have him; London town's never cared for despots, crowned or plain. Not even in its old age has it grown soft-witted. Just patient."
"I don't want to hear any of it. Tom loved me, that's all. Whatever he's involved in. . ."
Elizabeth laughed. "I was born to power. Was it accident? Ask my mother here what she paid. Ask Robert here what he paid to try for mine, and how I held it all the same. . . no hard feelings, none. But do you think your Lord Mayor gained his by accident? You move in dark waters, with your eyes shut. You've wanted power all your life, and you thought there was an easy way. But you don't have it, because you don't understand what you want. If they gave you all of London on a platter, you'd see only the baubles. You'd look for some other hands to put the real power in; you're helpless. You've trained all your life to be, I'll warrant. I know the type. Bettine. What name is that? Abbreviated and diminished. E-liz-a-beth is our name, in fine round tones. You're tall; you try to seem otherwise. You dress to please everyone else; I pleased Elizabeth, and others copied me. If I was fond, it was that I liked men, but by all reason, I never handed my crown to one, no. However painful the decision. . . however many the self-serving ministers urging me this way and that, I did my own thinking; yes, Essex, even with you. Of course I'd hesitate, of course let the ministers urge me, of course I'd grieve—I'm not unhuman—but at the same time they could seem heartless and I merciful. And the deed got done, didn't it, Robert?"
The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh Page 6