“The elf in the self regrets,” said Elphaba. “Were you to have dismembered me, I might have been posted back to Shiz in small pieces and been spared the tedium of this forced holiday. And this company.”
“Oh, Elphie.” Boq sighed. “This isn’t a good start, you know.”
“I think it’s swell,” said Avaric, glaring.
“I didn’t think friendship required this much,” snapped Elphaba to Boq. “I was better off before.”
It was late afternoon by the time they arrived in Neverdale and settled at the inn, and made their way by foot along the lake to Caprice-in-the-Pines.
Two older women were in the sunlight by the portico, shelling string beans and wristwrenchers. The one Boq recognized was Ama Clutch, Galinda’s chaperone; the other must be the minder of Miss Shenshen or Miss Pfannee. They started at the sight of the procession coming up the drive, and Ama Clutch leaned forward, the string beans spilling out of her lap. “Well, I never,” she said as they drew near, “it’s Miss Elphie herself. My uncle’s whiskers. I never did.” She pulled herself to her feet and clasped Elphaba into her arms. Elphaba stood as stiff as a plaster figure.
“Give us a minute to be catching our breath, duckies,” said Ama Clutch. “Whatever in the blameless heaven are you doing here, Miss Elphaba? It don’t seem possible.”
“I have been invited by Miss Galinda,” said Elphaba, “and my fellow travelers here insisted they wanted to accompany me. So I find myself compelled to accept.”
“I know nothing of this,” said Ama Clutch. “Miss Elphaba, let me take that heavy reticule and find you something clean to put on. You must be frayed from the voyage. You gentlemen will be staying in the village, of course. But for now, the girls are in the summerhouse at the edge of the lake.”
The travelers made their way along a path interrupted with stone steps at the steeper parts. Grommetik took longer at steps and was left behind, and no one was inclined to stay and lend a hand to a figure with such a hard skin and clockwork thoughts. Skirting the final growth of hollyflight bushes, they came upon the gazebo.
It was a skeleton house of unstripped logs, six sides open to the breezes, with a fretwork of arabesquing twigs, and Lake Chorge a mighty field of blue beyond. The girls were sitting on steps and in wicker chairs, and Ama Clipp was lost in some smallwork involving three needles and many colors of thread.
“Miss Galinda!” broke out Boq, needing his to be the first voice heard.
The girls raised their heads. In evanescent summer frocks, free of hoops and bustles, they looked like birds about to scatter.
“Holy terror!” said Galinda, her jaw dropping. “What’re you doing here!”
“I’m not decent!” shrieked Shenshen, drawing attention to her unshod feet and pale exposed ankles.
Pfannee bit one corner of her lip and tried to revise her smirk into a smile of welcome.
“I am not staying for long,” said Elphaba. “By the way, girls, this is Master Avaric, the Margreave Descending from Tenmeadows, Gillikin. And this is Master Boq from Munchkinland. They’re both at Briscoe Hall. Master Avaric, as if you can’t tell by the lovesick expression in Boq’s face, this is Miss Galinda of the Arduennas, and Miss Shenshen and Miss Pfannee, who can outline their own pedigrees perfectly well.”
“But how enchanting, and how naughty,” said Miss Shenshen. “Miss Elphaba who-never-gives-us-the-time-of-day, you have redeemed yourself for all time by this pleasant surprise. How do you do, gentlemen.”
“But,” stammered Galinda, “but why are you here? What’s wrong?”
“I am here because I stupidly mentioned your invitation to Master Boq, who saw it as a sign from the Unnamed God that we should visit.”
But at this Miss Pfannee could control herself no longer, and fell on the floor of the gazebo, writhing in laughter. “What,” said Shenshen, “what?”
“But what invitation are you talking about?” asked Galinda.
“I don’t need to show you,” said Elphaba. For the first time since Boq had known her, she looked confused. “Surely I don’t need to bring it out—”
“I believe I have been set up to be mortified,” said Galinda, glaring at the helpless Pfannee. “I am being humiliated for sport. This is not funny, Miss Pfannee! I have half a mind to—to kick you!”
Just then Grommetik made it around the edge of the hollyflight bush. The sight of the stupid copper thing teetering on the edge of a stone step made Shenshen collapse against a column and join Pfannee in uncontrollable laughter. Even Ama Clipp smiled to herself as she began to put away her materials.
‘’But what is going on?” said Elphaba.
“Were you born to plague me?” Galinda said tearfully to her roomie. “Did I ask for your association?”
“Don’t,” said Boq. “Don’t, Miss Galinda, please don’t say another word. You’re upset.”
“I—wrote—the—letter,” heaved Pfannee between her gales of laughter. Avaric began to chuckle, and Elphaba’s eyes went wide and a little unfocused.
“You mean you didn’t write to invite me to visit here?” said Elphaba to Galinda.
“Oh, dear no, I did not,” said Galinda. In her anger she was beginning to regain some control, even though, Boq guessed, damage had been done for good. “My darling Miss Elphaba, I wouldn’t have dreamed of exposing you to such thoughtless cruelties as these girls perpetrate on each other and on me for sheer amusement. Besides, you have no place in a setting like this.”
“But I’ve been invited,” said Elphaba. “Miss Pfannee, you wrote that letter instead of Miss Galinda?”
“You ate it up!” chortled Pfannee.
“Well this is your home and I accept your invitation even if it was written under false pretenses,” Elphaba said, her voice evenly matter-of-fact as she stared into Miss Pfannee’s narrowed eyes. “I’ll go up and unpack my bags.”
She strode away. Only Grommetik followed. The air went stale with things unsaid. By and by Pfannee’s hysteria grew quieter, and she merely snorted and wheezed, and then grew still, lying vaporishly and unkempt on the flagstone floor of the gazebo.
“Well you all needn’t pierce me with your sniffy attitudes,” she said at last. “It was a joke.”
Elphaba stayed in her room for a day. Galinda came and went with a dinner. On occasion she would stay for a few minutes. So the boys took to swimming and rowing on the lake with the girls. Boq tried to fan in himself an interest in Shenshen or Pfannee, who certainly were coquettish enough. But they both seemed besotted with Avaric.
At last Boq cornered Galinda on the porch and pleaded with her to talk with him. She agreed, a measure of her demure demeanor returning, and they sat a short distance apart on a swing. “I suppose I’m to blame for not seeing through that ruse,” said Boq. “Elphie wasn’t inclined to accept that invitation. I made her.”
“What is this Elphie?” said Galinda. “Where has propriety gone this summer, I ask you?”
“We’ve become friends.”
“Well, I can promise to have gathered that. Why did you make her accept an invitation? Didn’t you know I’d never write such a thing?”
“How should I know that? You’re her roomie.”
“By executive order of Madame Morrible, not by choice! I care to have that remembered!”
“I didn’t know. You seem to get along.”
She sniffed, and curled a lip, but it seemed to be a remark to herself.
Boq continued, “If you’ve been woefully humiliated, why don’t you leave?”
“Perhaps I shall,” she said. “I’m considering. Elphaba says that to leave is to admit defeat. Yet if she comes out of her hiding and begins to trip along with the rest of you—and me—the joke will be unbearable. They don’t like her,” she explained.
“Well neither do you, I’d say!” said Boq, in an explosive whisper.
“It’s different, I have a right and a reason,” she retorted. “I am forced to put up with her! And all because my stupid Ama stepped
on a rusty nail in the railway station in Frottica and missed the orientation! My whole academic career up in smoke because of my Ama’s carelessness! When I’m a sorcerer I’ll have my revenge on her for that!”
“You could say that Elphaba brought us together,” said Boq softly. “I’m closer to her and so I’m closer to you.”
Galinda seemed to give up. She leaned her head back on the velvet cushions of the swing and said, “Boq, you know despite myself I think you’re a little sweet. You’re a little sweet and you’re a little charming and you’re a little maddening and you’re a little habit-forming.”
Boq held his breath.
“But you’re little!” she concluded. “You’re a Munchkin, for god’s sake!”
He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.
The next day Elphaba, Galinda, Boq, and Grommetik—and of course Ama Clutch—made the six-hour trip back to Shiz with fewer than a dozen remarks among them. Avaric stayed behind to disport himself with Pfannee and Shenshen. The pestering rain took up at the outskirts of Shiz, and the august facades of Crage Hall and Briscoe Hall were nearly obliterated with mist by the time they were, at last, home.
6
Boq didn’t have time or inclination to remark on his romance when he saw Crope and Tibbett. The Rhino librarian, having paid scant attention to the boys or their progress all summer, had suddenly cottoned on to how little had been achieved, and was all rheumatic huffs and watchful eyes. The boys chattered little, they brushed and cleaned vellum and rubbed finfoot oil on leather bindings and polished brass clasps. Only a few days left of this tedium.
One afternoon Boq let his eye drift down the codex he was handling. Usually he worked without attention to the subject matter of the materials, but his eye was drawn to the bright red paint applied in the illustration. It was a picture—maybe four, five hundred years old?—of a Kumbric Witch. Some monk’s visionary zeal or anxiety about magic had inspired his brush. The Witch stood on an isthmus connecting two rocky lands, and on either side of her stretched patches of cerulean blue sea, with white-lipped waves of astonishing vigor and particularity. The Witch held in her hands a beast of unrecognizable species, though it was clearly drowned, or nearly drowned. She cradled it in an arm that, without attention to actual skeletal flexibility, lovingly encircled the beast’s wet, spiky-furred back. With her other hand she was freeing a breast from her robe, offering suck to the creature. Her expression was hard to read, or had the monk’s hand smudged, or age and grime bestowed a sfumato sympathy? She was nearly motherly, with miserable child. Her look was inward, or sad, or something. But her feet didn’t match her expression, for they were planted on the narrow strand with prehensile grip, apparent even through the silver-colored shoes, whose coin-of-the-realm brilliance had first caught Boq’s eye. Furthermore, the feet were turned out at ninety-degree angles to the shins. They showed in profile as mirror images, heels clicked together and toes pointing in opposite directions, like a stance in ballet. The gown was a hazy dawn blue. He guessed by the jeweled tones of the work that the document hadn’t been opened in centuries.
Dramatically, or teleologically, this image seemed some sort of a hybrid of the creation myths of the Animals. Here were the flood waters, whether they derived from legends of Lurline or the Unnamed God, whether they were rising or sinking. Was the Kumbric Witch interfering with or accomplishing the ordained fate of the beasts? Though in a script too crabbed and archaic for Boq to decipher, perhaps this document supported the fable of a Kumbric Witch spell that gave the Animals the gifts of speech, memory, and remorse. Perhaps it merely refuted it, but glowingly. Any way you looked at it there was the syncretism of myth, myth’s happy appetite to engorge on narrative strains. Maybe this painting was the suggestion of some alarmed monk that the Animals received their strengths through yet another sort of baptism, by nursing at the teat of the Kumbric Witch? Inducted through the milk of the Witch?
Such analysis wasn’t his strong point. He had a hard enough time with the nutrients and common pests of barley. He should do the unthinkable and deliver this actual scroll to Doctor Dillamond. It would be valuable to know about.
Or maybe, he thought as he hurried to meet Elphaba, the thing safely smuggled into the deep pocket of his cape and out of the Three Queens library, maybe the Witch wasn’t feeding the drenched animal, but killing it? Sacrificing it to stay the floods?
Art was way beyond him.
He had run into Ama Clutch in the bazaar and begged her to deliver a note to Elphaba. The good woman seemed more sympathetic than usual to him; was Galinda singing his praises in the privacy of her room?
It was his first time to see the funny green jumping bean since arriving back in Shiz. And there she was, on time, arriving at the café as requested, in a gray ghost of a dress, with a knitted overpull fraying at the sleeves, and a man’s umbrella, big and black and lancelike when rolled up. Elphaba sat down with a graceless fromp, and examined the scroll. She looked at it more closely than she would bring herself to look at Boq. But she listened to his exegesis, and thought it feeble. “What prevents this from being the Fairy Queen Lurline?” she asked.
“Well, the accoutrements of glamour are missing. I mean the golden nimbus of hair. The elegance. The transparent wings. The wand.”
“Those silver shoes are pretty gaudy.” She munched on a dry biscuit.
“It doesn’t look like a portrait of determination or—what do I mean—genesis. It looks reactive rather than proactive. That figure is at the very least confused, don’t you think?”
“You’ve been hanging around Crope and Tibbett too long, go back to your barley,” she said, pocketing the thing. “You’re getting vague and artsy. But I’ll give it to Doctor Dillamond. I’ll tell you, he keeps making breakthroughs. This business of opposing lenses has opened up a whole new world of corpuscular architecture. He let me look once, but I couldn’t make out much except for stress and bias, color and pulse. He’s very excited. The problem I see now is getting him to stop—I think he’s on the verge of founding a whole new branch of knowledge, and every day’s findings provoke a hundred new questions. Clinical, theoretical, hypothetical, empirical, even ontological, I guess. He’s been staying up late at night in the labs. We can see his lights on when we pull the drapes at night.”
“Well, does he need anything more from us? I only have two days left in that library, and then school starts.”
“I can’t get him to focus. I think he’s just putting together what he’s got.”
“How about Galinda, then,” he said, “if we’re done with academic espionage for the time being? How is she? Does she ask for me?”
Elphaba allowed herself to look at Boq. “No. Galinda really hasn’t said anything about you. To give you hope you don’t deserve, I should add she’s hardly said anything to me at all, either. She’s in a heavy sulk.”
“When will I see her again?”
“Does it mean that much to you?” She smiled wanly. “Boq, does she really mean that much to you?”
“She is my world,” he answered.
“Your world is too small if she is it.”
“You can’t criticize the size of a world. I can’t help it and I can’t stop it and I can’t deny it.”
“I should say you look silly,” she said, draining the last drops of lukewarm tea from her cup. “I should say you’ll look back on this summer and cringe. She may be lovely, Boq—no, she is lovely, I agree—but you’re worth a dozen of her.” At his shocked expression she threw up her hands. “Not to me! I don’t mean me! Please, that stricken look! Spare me!”
But he wasn’t sure if he believed her. She gathered her things in a hurry and rushed out, knocking the spitoon over in a clatter, slicing her big umbrella right through someone’s newspaper. She didn’t look both ways as she lunged across Railway Square and was nearly mowed down by an old Ox on a cumbersome tricycle.
7
The next time Boq saw Elphaba and Galinda, all
thoughts of romance fled. It was in the small triangular park outside the gate of Crage Hall. He had been just happening by, once again, this time with Avaric in tow. The gates had opened and Ama Vimp had come flouncing out, face white and nose dripping, and a flurry of girls poured out after her. Among them were Elphaba and Galinda and Shenshen and Pfannee and Milla. Free of their walls, the girls huddled in chattering circles, or stood beneath the trees in shock, or hugged each other, and wailed, and wiped each other’s eyes.
Boq and Avaric hurried up to their friends. Elphaba had her shoulders high, like a cat’s bony yoke, and hers was the only dry face. She stayed arm’s length away from Galinda and the others. Boq longed to take Galinda in his arms, but she didn’t look at him more than once before diving her face into Milla’s teck-fur collar.
“What is it? What has happened?” said Avaric. “Miss Shenshen, Miss Pfannee?”
“It’s too horrible,” they cried, and Galinda nodded, and her nose ran messily along the shoulder seam of Milla’s blouse. “The police are there, and a doctor, but it seems to be—”
“What,” said Boq, and turned to Elphaba. “Elphie what is it, what?”
“They found out,” she said. Her eyes were glazed like old Shizian porcelain. “Somehow the bastards found out.”
The gate creaked open again, and petals of early autumn vineflowers, blue and purple, came dancing over the college wall. They hung, and stepped like butterflies, and fell slowly, as three caped policemen and a doctor in a dark cap emerged carrying a stretcher. A red blanket had covered the patient, but the wind that tossed the petals caught a corner of the blanket and pulled it back in a triangular fold. The girls all shrieked and Ama Vimp ran forward to tuck the blanket down, but in the sunlight all had looked down and seen the twisted shoulders and back-thrown head of Doctor Dillamond. His throat was still knotted with congealed ropes of black blood, where it had been slit as thoroughly as if he had wandered into an abattoir.
Boq sat down, disgusted and alarmed, hoping he had not seen death, just a horrible treatable wound. But the police and doctor weren’t hurrying, there was no reason to hurry now. Boq fell back against the wall, and Avaric, who had never seen the Goat before, held Boq’s hands tightly with one hand and covered his own face with the other.
The Wicked Years Complete Collection Page 15