Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “You love this place and these people very deeply. I knew that. But you were right to bring me here.” He stopped, and stopped walking, standing to look out over the flashing, windy water to the Hunter, dark under its crown of snow. She said nothing, and presently he went on, “And—forgive me, once again—you’re very young. Eighteen years old. And are your father’s only daughter and only child. There is time—There is no cause, no reason to rush you. If you wish the engagement between us to end, if you wish to be released, you need only tell me.”

  She stood beside him, pulling her shawl up round her neck as the cold, bright wind rose, rattling the trees. This was, of course, the one thing she had not expected. She never did expect the right thing. This was so easy, too easy, this cutting of the Gordian knot. You can’t go about cutting knots, or things begin to fall apart…He was being kind, ultimately, sacrificially kind to her, as he was bound as a gentleman to be. But it was not kindness she wanted.

  “I didn’t mean to ask you that, Givan. I only want—I think—to wait. For a while. If we’d married right away, last spring, it would have been all right. But I—I feel I must wait, now. But I don’t want to make you unhappy!”

  “It would make me very unhappy to know that I had in any way lessened your happiness. Piera, don’t perjure your heart in trying to be merciful to me.”

  He was a gallant man. She turned to him as if in anger, her eyes alight: “But that’s what you’re doing—not I! I don’t know what I want, and you do!”

  “I can’t ask of you what you cannot freely grant,” he answered, stiff.

  “There’s no chance of our ever living here,” she asked at last, childishly, very softly, knowing the answer.

  “No,” he said, and unable to say more he walked away from her along the shore. She watched his spare, slight figure against the wintry brightness of the lake, on the empty shore between water and sky.

  He came back and stood near her. “Isn’t it best,” he said, quietly enough, “to break all bonds, Piera, and let time work as it will? I had intended to ask you to wait until you’re twenty. Perhaps you had that in mind. But it is scarcely fair to you, and it could be much harder in the end, if there were promises left between us. You know in any case that I won’t change. But that’s not a promise, only a fact. I can’t help it.” He smiled and turned away, unable to look at her, waiting for her answer.

  “But can’t we—But what will you—” She clenched her hands in a kind of rage. “All right, Givan. Let it be so. I wish you’d chosen better, chosen a woman who knew her own mind!”

  “I never saw you till now,” he said turning back to her, “I never knew you!” He spoke the truth; he was afire, his restraint broken, so that they stood face to face for once. Piera raised her hands open towards him, her eyes on his.

  He looked down.

  “I’ll leave tomorrow on the Post,” he said in a contained, dry voice. They started back to the house together in silence. He took her arm to help her over a patch of thawing mud on the path. She looked down at his strong, thin hand on her sleeve. He said nothing and did not look at her.

  That night she had to tell her father that the engagement was broken, not extended, and that she had broken it; but inwardly she protested her words. It was he, not she, that had refused. He knew, now, that what he asked of her she would give; and would not ask, denying his own passion, denying her the right to passion.

  V

  Piera had thought that no one would take much notice of her broken engagement, aside from a flurry of gossip which she did not care about. The only people beside her father whose opinion mattered to her were the Sordes, and the Sordes had troubles of their own. They would sympathise with her and that would be that. But it wasn’t that at all. Guide and Eleonora had met Givan Koste; they had accepted him as Piera’s betrothed; when they found the promise broken and him gone overnight, they did not condone. Laura bore the brunt of their disapproval. Neither of them said anything directly to Piera. But Guide did not joke with her any more, or greet her with a smile, or go back to calling her thou. She knew she was out of his good graces and might never, he being the man he was, get back in them.

  “If he was too old for her,” he said to Laura, “she might have known it a year ago. If there’s twenty years between them now, there was twenty years between them then. I don’t like it that she gave her word and then took it back.”

  “A broken engagement’s better than a bad marriage,” Laura answered, as dogged as he. “Besides, she didn’t jilt him. She wanted to wait. He insisted they break it off.”

  “Because he saw, no doubt, that she meant to go back on her word, soon or late.”

  “I just don’t understand,” said Eleonora, “what it is she wants and why it came up so suddenly. There wasn’t a hint of all this till after Epiphany. She says she wants to stay here. But what is there for her here, once Count Orlant is gone? The day’s coming, and she knows it, when she’ll be alone. And if she stays here she’ll be left to the estate. Is that what she wants? I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t know that she particularly wants it, but if she wants to stay at Valtorsa she knows somebody has to look after it.”

  “Aye,” Guide said, getting up and turning rather heavily to go out. “We must leave our land to women, it would seem, if not to strangers, in the end.”

  His wife and daughter were silent. He went out, straight and stiff, with his heavy walk.

  Eleonora took up her work. Presently she said, in her mild voice which no longer had much lilt or lift in it, “It isn’t that I blame the child, you know. But it seems…So much goes to waste I liked the man.”

  “So did I. So did she! But he was so—So good.”

  That made Eleonora laugh for a moment.

  “All right,” she said. “But what is it you want, you two? If the good men are too good—and there are few enough good men up here, goodness knows—and you won’t consider a man from down below, because he’ll take you from home—Who are you going to marry?”

  “I don’t know that I want to marry,” Laura said placidly. “Where are the sheets that wanted mending?—Piera will marry, I expect. In time. She could run Valtorsa perfectly well by herself, better than Count Orlant, I expect. She takes more interest in running the estate than in the house, really. I begin to wonder whether anybody could win her away. He’ll have to come and help her run Valtorsa…”

  “They’re there in the bottom of the work table, aren’t they? Well, all right, but what about you?”

  “I wish father would let me help him more.”

  Laura spoke intensely, and her mother listened, alert.

  “I would like very much to be able to help him.”

  “With the farm work?”

  “No—I know there’s a lot I can’t do—But he isn’t doing so much actual work any more, you know, mother, of that kind. But the accounts and the sales, and going in to Portacheyka, and the management, I could learn that. I could help him with it and—help carry the estate over till Itale comes back.”

  Eleonora did not answer, and presently Laura said in a lower tone, “I know it—I know the idea doesn’t suit him.”

  “He believes very deeply, my dear, that we’re each called to play the part we were given as best we can. As woman or man, or master or servant. That we are to do what we were given to do. That to try to do otherwise is idle, or folly, or…ruin…” Eleonora’s voice died out on the last word.

  “Do you believe that, mother?”

  But she could not choose between the husband and the son. She shook her head. “I don’t know, Laura.”

  “Would he teach me to help with the accounts—just that? Would it be wrong to ask him?”

  “No. Of course not. Ask him,” Eleonora said with a little increase of firmness; and added presently, “Talk to Emanuel about it. I think he might agree with you.”

  Laura shook her head.

  “Why not? Have you spoken about it to him already?”

 
“No. I can’t. He feels…you know, as if he were to blame, as if father blamed him for…He won’t interfere for me. I can’t ask him.”

  “I think you can,” Eleonora said. “When he comes back.”

  Emanuel had gone to Krasnoy, late in February, following a second letter from Brelavay. Brelavay wrote very briefly that they had received official confirmation of Itale’s conviction and sentence and knew him to be in the St Lazar prison in Rakava. It was a cold, guarded letter. Guide had not replied to the first, and clearly Brelavay had expected some response.

  “You should answer this, I think,” Eleonora had said.

  “What good?”

  “To thank him.”

  “For telling me my son’s in jail? What thanks do I owe these men that led him into ruin?”

  “Nobody led him,” Laura burst out. “He went his own way. It’s the government and their police that put him in jail, and if you won’t write this man to thank him for trying to help and for sticking by Itale, then I will!”

  “You will not,” said Guide, and she did not. He did, however; and posted the letter along with a letter of request to the regents of St Lazar prison, composed under Emanuel’s guidance. No answer came to the latter; Brelavay answered promptly. There was enough encouragement in his reply that Emmanuel decided to go to Krasnoy to meet him and see if the machinery of appeal could be set going, or to try to win permission to visit Itale, or all else failing, permission to write to him.

  He came back in March with nothing. Stefan Oragon, with a caution that was the reverse side of his oratorical flamboyance, had felt out the ground and found it impossible to take a step: The men jailed in the eastern provinces in November and December were object-lessons, warnings, their disappearance was precisely their importance to the government; to bring attention to any one of them was to increase his risk. Only if they were allowed to become or to appear unimportant would there be any chance, after some lapse of time, of bringing them back into the light. “Every time you say Sorde’s name you put a bar on his window,” Oragon said. “I could wish your name were different, sir, so long as you’re here in Krasnoy…” And Emanuel, cowed and embittered, had soon left Krasnoy.

  “I didn’t know,” he said to his brother. “I didn’t know what it was like. I thought the law—I am a lawyer, I thought I knew the power of the law. I knew nothing about it! God help me, I thought it drew its power from justice!”

  In October there was a letter from Rakava: a refusal of Guide’s request for permission to visit or write the man in prison.

  “Eight months to send me this,” Guide said, crushing the paper in his hand, and his hand shook.

  Early in 1829, on Oragon’s advice, he wrote to the governor of the Polana Province renewing the request. He received no reply. In March Emanuel, who had kept up correspondence with Brelavay and others, received a hand-delivered note from Givan Karantay: “Lately in the east and north the families of suspects and prisoners have been brought under suspicion and in some cases held by the police for questioning. It is surely best that while this situation lasts you cease writing us; we will try to keep you informed of any news we get, but not through the mails, which are now closely surveyed…”

  The year had come in mild, but in April there was a late hard frost for a night and a day when the peach orchards were in full flower. The crop was lost, a crippling blow to those tenant farmers whose livelihood was in the orchards. Guide’s own profits came principally from grain and vines, and he could afford to help his tenants through the bad year; but the loss galled him, the waste of those acres of fair, gnarled little trees. That May and June he would go to the orchards and walk down the grass between the trees that bore no fruit. He would return to the house frowning, erect, walking heavily. In July the rejection of his second plea came from Rakava. That night, coming to bed late and without light other than the starlight in the windows, he lay down and lay still, knowing from the quality of her silence that Eleonora was still awake. He spoke in the darkness, not loud, but harshly.

  “You must not lie there and think of him.”

  She did not reply.

  “It’s no good, Eleonora,” he said more softly.

  “I know.”

  They lay side by side, both silent, hearing the crickets trill and trill in the warm furrows and along the roadsides in the summer night.

  “Oh my dear, my dear,” she said turning to him, putting her arms about him; but even she, his life’s stay, his one enduring joy, had no comfort for him.

  That night Laura too lay awake, in her room down the hallway, by the window that gave on the fields where the crickets were trilling. She had turned twenty-three in June. It was an age she had long ago picked as a dividing age, a watershed. It had seemed a remote goal, even when she was twenty. When she was twenty-three she would be certain; she would be settled in the course of her life, through with yearnings, turmoils, and reversals: a woman, beginning to be wise.

  But here she was unsure, unwise, worse off than ever, and worst of all, alone.

  Three weeks ago Piera had come over in the afternoon with a book to read aloud down at their old place by the boat house below the road. They had gone there but had never opened the book. Piera, very lively and pretty in a new flowered cotton, wanted to tell her friend something. “Well?” Laura said at last, lazy and teasing. “I haven’t asked the right question yet, I can see that; tell me what to ask, please.”

  “Oh, nothing. All right, very well. Ask me who proposed marriage to me!” Piera blushed, and blew the seeds off a dandelion clock.

  “Oh my! Oh, you trophy-hunter! How many times is Sandre going to try?”

  Alexander Sorentay had been jilted dramatically by Advocate Ksenay’s daughter Mariya, who ran off two weeks before the wedding-day with an itinerant buttons-and-needles vendor from Vermare and never appeared in Portacheyka again. This event had quite eclipsed the duller gossip-matter of Piera’s broken engagement. Alexander had restrained his determination to marry as long as decency demanded but not a day longer, and on that day had laid siege once more on his first love. This time his wooing was overt and all but spectacular; he was past shame, and need not fear damaging her reputation since everybody knew he was having no success. “He coorts and she discoorages,” Marta Astolfeya had said, and this became the general summary. “Still coortin?” Emanuel would ask when the Valtorskars came over to sit on the Sordes’ terrace above the lake after supper, and Piera would answer, “Oh aye, uncle, and I’m still discooragin!” She had been distressed by Alexander’s suit at first, having never lost her guilt concerning that letter written him from Aisnar; but his persistence wore out first her pity and then her patience. She was civil, and skilful at avoiding offense to his family, who favored the match; but she had no intention of accepting the leavings of the lawyer’s daughter.

  “Alexander indeed,” she said. “No, no. This was a surprise. A bolt from the blue. Guess! You’ll never guess it.”

  “There isn’t anyone,” Laura said, reviewing mentally. “The fact is, there are no men here, when you look at them in this light.”

  “Our overseer. Gavrey.”

  “What about him?”

  “It was him.”

  “Gavrey,” Laura said.

  “Yes. Out of the blue. Nothing to prepare me. No warnings. He scarcely speaks to me, as a general rule, except on business, of course. We get on very well working, I will say that. But to turn to me with no preparation at all over the rental account book and, ‘Contesina, will you—’ No, I won’t imitate him. I don’t feel like making fun of him, really. In fact I am a little upset, I think.”

  “But you said no?”

  “Of course.”

  After a little silence Laura said, “Because of the…differences between you.”

  “What do you mean? That he’s a farmer’s son, and apparently illegitimate? Is that what you think? I was afraid he would think that, but I thought you—All right, of course one would consider that; but if I wanted
to marry Berke Gavrey I would do so. In many ways I wish I could. We work together well, as I said. I believe we could make a very good thing of the estate. He knows that, I suppose that’s why he brought up marriage. He is a very practical man. And an ambitious one. But he is not a man I wish to marry.”

  Piera had completely dropped her embarrassed, mocking tone; Laura had seldom heard her speak so seriously, or so bluntly. She made only the most conventional response, and they did not stay much longer there by the boat house. Piera went to rejoin her father, who had been in ill health for some weeks, and Laura went up to her room and got by herself at last. “The coward,” she whispered, and it was all she found to say, there in the wreckage of what had been passionate emotion and now was nothing at all. “The coward!”

  Two years ago in spring, while Piera had been away in Aisnar, a little while after Itale’s letter describing his meeting with Piera at the convent school, there had come a week of sweet April weather; and Laura, long confined to the house with a lingering bronchitis, was released rejoicing into the sunshine. She walked up into the peach orchards, just coming into bloom. The morning sun shone on the trees and the short, fresh, young grass between them. She did not walk far, but put down her rug and sat down. The soft wind blew. All around her were dark, vigorous trunks and branches, twigs knotted and knotted with pale flowerbuds. From the barnyard eastward down the valley came the ring of metal on metal, the hiss of hot iron in water, the creaking of an ancient bellows. Bron’s great-grandson, Zeske, would be working the bellows; they were fitting horseshoes, shaping them on the anvil; shoeing, too, perhaps, for she heard the stamping and sharp neigh of a draft-horse, distinct and clear as were all sounds here, yet softened and made miniature by distance and by the vast, southward motion of the air. Then Gavrey had come running down through the trees, and stopped short, seeing her. His was on his back, his hound Roshe was with him, panting. He had been up in the forests, in the high places, and the strangeness of the forests was still with him. He stopped not ten feet from Laura. Neither spoke. His gaze, at first simply startled, became the intent look that was characteristic of him. He stood there, from motion to stillness in one instant, gazing.