Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  Someone breathed out deeply beside her. “It’s good to have one’s house to oneself again,” said Rupert from where he stood at her elbow in the doorway, arms folded comfortably across his chest.

  Margaret gathered up her black skirts and moved off the step. “Almost,” she said, turning to blink up through the rain at him. His eye fell on her: a horrible gaze from a god’s horrible height. “I am still here.”

  He said nothing, though even through the greyness of the air she could see the barb had stung. In a moment he stirred, leaned forward a fraction, and touched her cheek with one outstretched finger. She felt the warm pressure of it against her chilled skin, but though all her sullen pride yearned to jerk away, she made herself suffer under it until, apparently satisfied, Rupert withdrew his hand. Without a word, without another glance, Margaret turned and left him on the doorstep.

  It was quiet and warm-smelling in the barn. The building ran the length of the north stable yard wall and had a big door cut into the middle of its south face; on either end the haying doors were cut into the stable yard walls, and these were open too. Standing in the dark blue-amber interior of the barn, Margaret looked from side to side, catching the square misty images of the paddock outside. The muffled, sleepy sound of horses came to her through the many partitions.

  There was something comforting in the simple, brute presence of the animals. She left the doorway and moved along the rows of stalls, peering through the gloom at the many name-plates by the boxes. She caught a glimpse of her own palfrey but the horse was half-dozing and she did not stop to wake it. With her tartan pulled over her head, she left the stable overhang and emerged into the paddock where the wind was blowing in fitful gusts and the scent of winter was strong.

  She was looking out and over the gentle swell of the paddock; the bodies of those horses at grass shifted in and out of the mists and once, from far off, she heard one give a kind of liberated whinny that rang hollow in the dale. The border-hedges of blackthorn, holly, and barberry were mingled in the distance into a dark, spiked wall that cut off the paddock from the road and from the neighbouring fields. Through a gap in the low-growing, tangled trees she could see a grey glimpse of the river valley, very pale as though seen through an aged mirror; and on the far side of that lifted the Marius Hills, detached from everything and looking down iron-sombre over all. It occurred to her that she could hear only the horse and the wind and the swish of the wind in the grass: those hills looked down on no mill towns or shrieking, puffing trains. A great hush was all around her, the quiet of a spacious and unbroken farmland. This quiet, at least, did not feel as if it were about to erupt into a scream at any moment.

  A new sound startled her. The rasp of iron over stone broke her concentration and she looked round to see the old walnut stable-hand, his gnarled body bent double, working with a hoe in a messy patch of garden. He had an enormous wheel-barrow parked outside the little wattle fence, a wheel-barrow Margaret was not sure the old man could possibly lift, let alone push, and it was filled to the brim with dead leaves. As she watched, the old man stuck his hoe into the earth and turned aside, picked up an armful of the damp, smelly leaves, and threw it broad-cast over the garden plot, all the while grunting and grumbling to himself like a pig that is truffle-hunting.

  Margaret moved closer, watching with detached interest as the man worked. If he noticed her standing outside the wattle fence he did not let on, but continued to throw down dead leaves—leaves of oak and hazel, hornbeam, red flame-shaped leaves of alder, hawthorn and blackthorn—and stamp them thick and close as if his life depended on it.

  “Why do you do that?” she asked at last.

  The old man breathed deeply and straightened, and she realized that he must have been rather tall in his youth, and big of build; but time, and hard work, and the sun had wrinkled and shrivelled and burnt him into the little walnut thing he was now. He looked at her out of his wrinkled, brown, walnut face, his eyes like sloe-berries, and he seemed not cross, as she would have expected, but slow and patient and cheerfully grumbling—which, being English, was a thing she could understand.

  “Every year, nigh on fifty years, I knowed this plot o’ garden,” he said in a voice that had been rich once, but had been wrinkled walnut-wise along with the rest of him, “I covered it up in leaves for winter.” He tapped the ground with one beaten leather boot. “Keeps ’em warm, hmm?”

  She looked dubiously at the ugly wet leaves. “My father’s gardener never did such to our gardens.”

  The old, wrinkled, walnut face turned up in a patient, contemptuous smile. “ ’Tain’t for me to interfere,” he said in his slow walnut drawl, “but if ye have mind to see that man again—tush! cain’t call ’im a gardener!—ye might tell ’im otherwise.”

  “Perhaps I will.”

  He picked up his hoe and leaned on it, though she had a feeling he did not need to, and regarded her placidly for a few minutes, seemingly unhurried to return to his work. She lifted one brow artfully and gazed back at him. She had been taught, as all good, well-born girls are taught, to stand with perfect stillness and attention, and to look well while doing it; but this old wrinkled stable-hand, gardener, farm-worker, labourer stood with perfect stillness too—and upon one leg, she realized after a few moments, like a heron, with only the sloe-berry darkness of his eyes winking back and forth as he looked at her face. The gesture was somehow less unnerving than she thought it ought to be.

  “Nah, then,” he said broadly, and sniffed in an oddly deferential kind of way, “ye’s mus’ be the new lass young Mus Rupert has brought home. En’ beg all pardon, but I allus reckoned transplantin’ so foreign never was good for the plant.”

  Margaret quirked a mirthless smile. “On that score I would have to agree with you, Master Gardener.”

  “Ol’ Hobden!” he said, waving one hand. And then he shook his head. “Nigh on sixty years I knowed Marenové ‘Ouse, an’ my father afore that, and ’im father afore that, but never a badder business any of us knowed than young Mus Rupert. ’E don’t take to soil,” he said passionately, as if Margaret would understand. “Got too much acid in ’is veins an’ Lord love ye if ye can get a touch o’ lime into ’is soul. Never a badder business—never a badder business.” He continued to shake his head. “I knowed ’em since they was two, an’ Lord knows why he took t’one and not t’other.”

  It was rainy-silent for a few moments. The horse called again, hollow in the quiet.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Hur!” said old Hobden, quizzically.

  Margaret leaned forward slightly from the waist. “I beg your pardon. You knew who?”

  The man bustled about like a little old bird. He shoved his hoe against the wattle fence and began digging his arms into the earthy mass of leaves that was still in the wheel-barrow. “ ’Tain’t for me to interfere, if ’e ain’t told ye. Dunnos as ’e would, though. Them was allus the light an’ dark sides o’ the moon.” He quirked one grizzled brow and sloe-berry eye at her. “Them was the two of ’em, young Mus Lords of Marenové, nigh over a year apart in age. Funny odd thing how’s close they’d be, an’ how’s allus at hammer an’ tongs with t’other. I allus say, Lord hadn’t taken t’older o’ the two, ’e done right by Marenové ’Ouse.”

  Margaret looked up, squinting against the mizzle that was quickly turning to full rain. The strange bulk of the north tower, alone-seeming among all the rest of the house’s architectural shapes, loomed brooding and forbidding over her. “How did he die?”

  “Not as I knowed anythin’,” said Hobden, “an’ tha’s more than I knowed. All I knowed was they brought ’im ’ome one day like a fish what’s been gutted. Boar, mus likely.” He fell into a soft kind of quiet after his harsh and descriptive explanation, and added a moment later, “Them roses n’er did bloom rightly after that, I swear to ye. Don’t rightly knowed if ‘twas for ’im they un-bloomed or for the sadness in me own fingers.”

  She brought her eyes down from the squat, stup
endous bulk of the tower and followed the line of his waved gesture. The roses, rather splendid, thick, full roses whose age she did not dare to guess, had flung themselves over the stable yard wall and clung to it in a thick mass, dark reddish-green in the gloom, fish-scale shining in the rain—but bud-less and barren. What colour would they be, she wondered, if they were to bloom again? A dormant spark of imagination thought their last bloom ought to have been crimson, and any resurrecting bloom ought to be white as York.

  With a shiver of cold she shook off the notion and turned back to old walnut Hobden. “You seem to have the way about you with plants,” she said, and meant it genuinely.

  He smiled grimly, his mouth a long gash in his wrinkled face. “Sixty-some years’ll teach a body to be plant-wise—and other things, iffen ye listen.”

  Margaret looked on him as a kind of Indian conjuror who mingled a familiar slowness of body and speech that she found comforting. He was no more than a labourer, and an old one at that, but she found herself wandering out to him in the following days, wrapped up in tartans and furs, to sit and read or merely to sit. As beneath her as he was, his quiet, truffle-hunting presence was far more agreeable than Rupert’s. She followed him about the grounds, and came to know the grounds passing well, and listened patiently if uncomprehendingly to the times when Hobden sought to invest her with some knowledge. But for the most part they were silent with each other, withdrawn even when they were together—for even Hobden, old and revered as he was, took off his cap to her and was gruffly polite, and Margaret, ever conscious of protocol, let him do so.

  One night Rupert broke the silence which reigned so supreme and chilly over their suppers by setting down his glass and saying with a marked touch of regret in his tone, “This weather will not last. Soon you will have to give up your walks.”

  The hour was late; Rupert had gone down to his tenant Malbrey’s manor that afternoon and had not got back until dusk. He had come back up the Marenové track, the wild cardinal-coloured clouds of evening rampant and upraised behind him, the shadows turning his horse into a dark ruddy creature that pranced and shivered beneath him as the sparse leaves of the damson trees pranced and shivered in the wind. It was strange how at ease Margaret had felt when he had been away; watching him in his red fury of colour riding up the lane, something in her stomach had clenched again.

  Margaret busied herself with her own wine glass, tipping the liquid gently onto the fore of her tongue to take the delicate, rich taste of the drink. The lights on the glass, in the wine, and on her tiny chain bracelet, dazzled her eyes for a moment.

  Rupert went on. “I am glad to see that you are adjusting well. I suppose that is the English in you.”

  She looked up over the rim of her glass and caught the half-disdaining sneer that lifted his lips from his dog-teeth for a moment.

  “And if you do not have the walks to keep you busy presently, there is the gala that Skander Rime is throwing to occupy your mind…though it is in my mind that you are not a woman to care overmuch for such frivolities.”

  The fractalled images of a party glanced across her mind. Gowns, tunics, ceremonial swords, the distant scream of carriage-horses and the distant trill of music, all bound up in a web of golden light…She set down her glass with a deliberate click. “No?”

  “No. But you will go anyway.”

  His eyes were the paleness of a knife when she looked into them, the paleness and coldness of a knife held almost to her throat. He had given her a great deal of freedom in her walks and rambles about Marenové House, he had removed himself to a distance and given her room to grow accustomed to her new surroundings. Looking back on the past two weeks since Skander had gone back to Lookinglass, she realized what a cool, masterful ploy it had been of Rupert’s to let her wander. Now she had reached the end of her leash, and he was letting her feel the pull of the collar.

  Her eyes narrowed at him.

  “How poorly you have sketched my nature!” she said with a flippant and caustic tone. “I have no objection to balls and parties. What is the point of shining if there is no sky to shine in?”

  There was a warmth in his smile, though the knife was in it as well. “That is my girl.” He got up, not waiting for her to do likewise, and began to walk the length of the room toward the windows, his supper finished, his wine-glass in hand. At such a vantage he appeared well physically, framed between two lit candelabra, dark, tall, clad in a deep moth-wing grey tunic. She might have hated him less had he been homely or a hunchback, but her heart blistered with the heat of her hatred for him because he was chiselled and handsome, like a god of war, and he knew it.

  I despise you, she mouthed the words. Aloud she said, in an altogether new tone, “I have one objection, though.”

  He turned his hawkish profile on her, one brow rampant.

  “I do not think it is appropriate that we should go to any ball in these circumstances.”

  He swung about, the light flashing wildly and redly in his glass. “My dear Margaret,” he said softly, the way a cat purrs. “My dear Margaret—these circumstances? You hold the power to change them in your hand.”

  Impulsively her left hand, which lay in her lap, closed until the nails bit into her palm.

  The cat’s purr, the cat’s smile, the cat’s little flicker of enjoyment in the eyes all played about Rupert. “If you think it is inappropriate for us to appear officially in public until we are married, only say the word.”

  She did not recall getting to her feet. She did not recall throwing down her napkin. She only knew that she was leaving the room, skirts rustling anxiously around her, and she could hear Rupert’s mocking laughter in her mind. He was not laughing, but she could hear it. She could hear it as plainly as if he stood beside her.

  I despise you. I despise you! The words beat to the cadence of her feet on the stairs upward. I despise you all!

  Once in her own room she shut the door and went directly to the window, throwing back the curtains to let in the strong electrum light of the earth. It was in waning gibbous, if she could call it such, and its light was powerful, flooding over the lawn and paddock, fields and dale. Far away the Marius Hills were a bulk of dragon’s shoulder lifted against the terrestrial glare, silhouetted and black as the mother of all shadows. She stared up past them, up past the oak that grew on the lawn, past the pale tendrils of cloud that had been torn by high winds across the sky, up at the earth.

  It no longer rattled her as it had that first night. She did not often look it squarely on, if she could help it, but she did so now for no reason she could put into words. She gripped the casement in a light but steady hand and stared into the half-pearl eye of mottled white and blue.

  She was caught between two evils. Which did she choose, since she had to choose—Rupert, or her own family? At her back breathed the threat of her suitor’s proposal, before her loomed the impossible distance of space and the dislike of her own kind.

  “A little more than kin and less than kind,” she murmured. Her breath fogged on the cold pane, and for a moment the glaring light was diffused through a mothy web of silver, and it was almost beautiful. Then, with a painful unchanciness, her mind jerked aside to Skander. Was he a way out? Was he the tertium quid she hardly dared believe she could have?

  No. That thought was dashed almost the moment it came into her mind, leaving her pained and empty inside like a fly that has been a spider’s dinner. She knew Rupert little—she wanted to know him little—but she understood him well enough to know he would not stay his hand should anyone or anything come between him and his ambition. Nothing would be spared, not even the life of his own cousin. She could not put Skander in a position to suffer such a fate.

  From the northern head of the dale came the muffled sound of autumn thunder.

  With a gusty sigh Margaret folded her arms across her chest, rubbing her hands viciously on her upper arms in an attempt to warm them, for the air seeping through the pane was very cold. She wore a gown of cambric an
d the fabric made the softest, most whispering noises under her absentminded hand.

  At last she turned away from the window. She cast a quick eye about the dark room and saw that everything was in order. Rhea might or might not return to see if she needed anything. It would be well for both of them, thought Margaret, if the maid chose to surreptitiously forget her evening duties to her mistress. As she turned her back on the glare of earth-light, her own shadow long and looming dark across the floor, she knew there was only one answer. Earth was too far away for her to reach, her family too ignorant and uncaring to reach out to her. She was caught between Rupert’s thumb and first finger, a pawn in his hand, and she could only do his bidding.

  Her eye lighted on the door. He would not have gone to his chamber yet. He might still be in the dining room, standing at the window, looking out on the lawn even as she had—but across at the hills and down into the valley, which were his, and not up at the oblong gash of planet that was hers. If she went now she would find him and tell him she would accept his proposal. What else was to be done? She had no other way out, and he was handsome and rich and attentive, if sometimes cruel and dark, like the dark side of the moon. She stirred, half-heartedly, like a bird in its feathers…

  But she did not move forward. Perhaps it was mere apathy that held her back, or the single spark of pride in her that Rupert had not found and stamped out. She reached behind herself and began to earnestly tug at the buttons of her gown, dismantling it and casting it heedlessly on the back of a chair. She hastened into her lawn night-gown, which was even cooler than the air of her bedroom, all the while telling herself with renewed vigour that though it was only a week to the gala she would go with her head held high and unshackled. Skander had called her a force to be reckoned with, well—let Rupert reckon with her. She climbed into bed and turned her face into the full glory of the earth’s light. She could not reach it, but its unwilling ambassador to Plenilune would make it proud.

  She lay back, staring up at the canopy of her bed with her arms tucked behind her head and pillow. Everything was broken up in ebony and white; from within the pool of earth-light she could not distinguish the shapes of her own bedroom. But she knew that in one corner, underneath a cloth, was the red dress that she was to wear to the gala. It was very nearly done; it did not need a whole week to complete it.