Cranky Ladies of History

by Tehani Wessely

  She walked forward at a seemly pace, hands open. “My dear! How good to see you!” Missy joined her in a swift embrace. The awkward pause went unremarked.

  “Will you have tea? Chocolate?” She faced M’sieur Tessiter politely. “I am afraid I can’t offer you a place to spend the night. You see, we are in an uproar—”

  Missy’s throaty chuckle interrupted her attempt at an excuse. “But that’s the news I’ve come to share! Robert will stay with me. I’ve bought a new home not five leagues from here!”

  Gabrielle wouldn’t need to pressure Goncourt into hosting his rival, then. Yet Missy would be near enough to see, to touch. What measures, if any, could be taken for her safety?

  Gabrielle cast about in her mind for the names of available neighbouring estates. “Not—Broceliande?”

  “But yes! Broceliande, certainly! Is that—is there something wrong with it? The house? The lands? The—”

  “No.” Gabrielle forced herself to think rationally. “Only Goncourt’s people have an old feud with the former owners. And there is an idiotic tradition involving a curse—”

  “A curse!” Missy collapsed onto the footstool. “Don’t say such a thing!”

  “Mere silliness, I assure you. Nothing at all to worry about if it were true.” Nothing more than eternal enmity between their households.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  Goncourt drove. Rozven was low on male servants. Of course a woman could manage an automobile as well as any man, barring a breakdown. Gabrielle herself, for example. Her newly sensitive hands were also strong. They longed to hold and turn the car’s steering wheel.

  By boat, Broceliande was no more than five leagues away. If small enough, Gabrielle and her husband could have sailed down the beautiful stream and over the dark pond into which it fed, then out again, past the farmers’ fields and so on, and so at last to the sea. She pictured their vessel as a dried brown leaf, sides deeply curling, a sail of white samite attached to its stem. An idle fancy.

  In reality there were no good direct roads such as they needed; it took them the better part of the afternoon to reach the prim-looking house of Gabrielle’s lover. Its walls were a delicate, biscuity yellow, the colour of an aging beauty’s complexion.

  Missy served English tea: lavish cakes, plentiful sandwiches, hothouse pineapples and grapes. The grapes aroused in Gabrielle a startling greed.

  The problematic M’sieur Robert Tessiter was still in attendance, a week after he’d arrived. Goncourt could be managed well enough: a hint that the house’s previous inhabitants had left so hastily for South America that their cellars remained largely intact was sufficient to clear him from the stage. But M’sieur Robert was not so easily got rid of.

  Gabrielle had him open a window so she could more easily admire the room’s view of the sea. It was admittedly magnificent. She blamed this quality for dazzling her into a clumsy-handedness she never experienced these days and causing her to drop her diamond bracelet onto the beach below. Then she stared at the man half a minute, until he volunteered to go and hunt for it.

  He left. Gabrielle wasted not one second. She sped to the divan. Missy half-rose and drew her down. Gabrielle tasted sweet juices dried to a slight stickiness on her lover’s lips, a last trace of their shared meal.

  Shouting floated in the open window. Impossible to distinguish any words in it, though the tone was querulous.

  The women investigated only themselves. Each breathed the other’s breath. The shouting outside continued, muffled by distance and the noise of the waves. Missy spoke over it, her voice close and low: “You will stay here tonight? And come to me?”

  Gabrielle gave no answer.

  “You hesitate—why?”

  Gazouette would be safe. She must have faith in that. She must show her faith and stay.

  Had she not seen proof? The day after her immersion the child had tumbled down the entire length of the grand staircase unhurt—just a bit frightened.

  Then the head groom’s mastiff had gone mad and dug up his stake, rushing chain and all at Gazouette, whom Taylor had lain to bathe in the unseasonably warm sun. With her own horror-filled eyes Gabrielle had watched from the terrace as the ravening dog ran toward her daughter, and as the stake caught on something not there—on nothing—on air—on the bare soil of the empty flower beds. Halting the beast till it could be shot.

  “I will.” A change in Gabrielle’s attitude toward her daughter would be marked, were anyone watching.

  As well she agreed. Her husband’s hard-soled shoes sounded in the corridor. Automatically the two women moved a few inches apart. Nothing could have been more decorous, more placatory, than their attitudes as Goncourt entered.

  Her husband’s expedition to the cellar had been fruitful, and he was happy to accept Missy’s offer of hospitality. That evening, with their supper, the four enjoyed several bottles of wines he deemed “satisfactory”. More formally inclined than Gabrielle, Missy signaled her when it was the hour to withdraw from the gentlemen’s company. But scarcely had they exchanged preliminary embraces than Tessiter and Goncourt followed them, to swallow more tea and converse ignorantly about the war—although M’sieur Robert’s observations seemed oddly better than those of the older and more worldly man. They scanned, somehow, matching a rhythm of international affairs Gabrielle hadn’t realised she’d internalised.

  Not until she and Goncourt retired did Gabrielle find the note. Missy had apparently secreted it in her pocket. “Turn right, then left, then straight on till six,” it read, a touch cryptically. Below that line it unambiguously added, “Midnight.”

  “What have you got?” her husband asked.

  “A puzzle. Not a very interesting one.” She threw it on the dying fire and set about to soothe him to sleep.

  Gabrielle herself stayed awake, and when she judged it time, slipped from the bed and made her way across the invisible floor on bare feet. She had memorised the furniture’s location; she made it to the door without incident, and exited quickly so that the candle left burning in the passage wouldn’t disturb Goncourt with its light.

  A right turn took her to where a narrow corridor branched off to the left. The crack beneath the corridor’s sixth door glowed yellow. Inside, a curl of smoke rose above a high-backed armchair drawn up to face the bright hearth. As Gabrielle closed the door an arm clad in the tailored sleeve of a man’s jacket appeared to one side of the chair, cigarette in hand.

  “Is it not a little dangerous to dress so, even here in your home, my love?” she asked.

  “I rather hope you are mistaken.” Not Missy, but M’sieur Robert stood to welcome her in.

  Gabrielle kept calm. “It would appear so. My apologies.” She turned to leave.

  “Oh, you have come to the right place,” said Tessiter. He moved with surprising speed to block the door. “Congratulations. You executed my directions flawlessly.”

  “Your directions.” Her voice lacked all intonation. She knew suddenly what was toward. The men who believed themselves her masters were again attempting to control her.

  “The first set of them, at any rate.” He gestured to the armchair. “If you’ll be so kind as to seat yourself, I’ll convey the rest.”

  She could scream. The room wasn’t that isolated; someone would hear and come. But how to explain her presence in this unlocked room with a man to whom she wasn’t married? Goncourt’s smouldering jealousy would blaze up at the discovery, and servants, deplorably, talked.

  She sat. With half her mind, she listened. An important spy had been gravely wounded. He was to be sent to her hospital. Via Tessiter the government instructed Gabrielle to tend to his needs herself. She was to ensure that whatever he said of his mission in Flanders fell on her ears alone: fevered ravings, lucid reports, deathbed confessions. She should record his pronouncements and pass them on to Tessiter, using Missy as their go-between. Simple enough, did she not think?

  She thought. As before, the government’s requests se
emed reasonable. The war itself, though, was not. Bluntly, it was a flaunting display of cretinism, a contest between heads of nations desperate to determine who possessed the longest metaphoric stick between their legs.

  The half of her attention not claimed by Tessiter Gabrielle devoted to calculation. If Missy was to play the role of a messenger in this scheme, she was perhaps more deeply involved than first indicated. The threats against her must have been mere charades. Or perhaps her lover’s status had changed between this approach to Gabrielle and the earlier one. In either circumstance, Gabrielle had no need to protect her.

  Goncourt she disregarded, as always. He could look after himself. His connections were more current, more powerful than Missy’s—though if her lover was now an agent, their respective ambits might be evenly matched.

  Which left Gabrielle with perhaps one regrettable vulnerability. Gazouette.

  Would Gabrielle’s compliance guarantee her daughter’s freedom? Probably not. Leverage once gained would never be abandoned.

  As for the stairs, the mastiff: they could have been coincidence as easily as evidence of an answered prayer.

  Did she believe her daughter safe? Or not?

  Abruptly, there was silence. No sound but the hissing of the flames. Reviewing her memory of the past few seconds she realised Tessiter had asked a question: Would she do the job? She shifted uncomfortably on the too-soft velveteen cushion and answered him.

  “Yes.”

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  At least the spy was handsome. Blond, almost silver-haired, with eyes an unusually deep green and a face like a young David—though Gabrielle couldn’t help seeing him as a gape-mouthed fish caught in her talons. The wound to his thigh stank and seeped an ugly mixture of blood and pus when he arrived. She washed it thoroughly with lavender water and packed it with a special healing clay like one Sido had used. This was perhaps why the gaping hole in his flesh closed so quickly. Or it could be due to some supernatural quality in her touch, as many claimed.

  Alas, the spy’s mind recovered slowly. When she knew she wasn’t going to be free to sit by his side, Gabrielle gave him drops of a tincture she’d brewed from valerian and poppy to still his broken ramblings.

  The nurses and servants believed she tended Lieutenant Tranché because she desired him. Little matter that. Any story would do but the truth, and she took care to give their rumors no grounds. Nothing that could be laid before Goncourt as definitive.

  Despite the house’s pressing lack of living space, Gabrielle had maintained her private room. Here she wrote her tales of an irretrievable past. It made sense to use the same pen, paper, desk drawer, lock, and key for her secret work for the government. Scrupulously she inscribed every wandering sentence the lieutenant uttered, not venturing to decide its relevance. She sealed the results in scented envelopes and delivered them personally into the hands of her former lover at their too-frequent meetings.

  She took care that they two were never again alone together. Nonetheless, Missy’s eyes often spilled over with questions and unacknowledged tears.

  For weeks there was no coherence to Tranché’s speech. At last his green eyes focused on her, and not some phantom of his illness. She introduced herself, said the password Tessiter had revealed to her, received his countersign. From that moment commenced Gabrielle’s real labours in the fields of intelligence. She always remembered the exact date. It was one month from the day she had sent Gazouette away a second time. For good.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  Gabrielle died at the age of eighty-one. Her estranged and cold yet dutiful daughter returned to attend her sickbed, travelling alone all the way to France from Greece, her most recent in a series of loveless homes.

  Rozven had been sold years earlier, upon Goncourt succumbing to a malady of the heart; Gabrielle inhabited a flat in Paris, alone except for her beloved bulldog Beau and a paid nurse. The medal bestowed in exchange for her wartime activities hung framed above her headboard, in a spot where she didn’t have to see it.

  Propped up with massive quantities of pillows, as she insisted, she watched out her windows while the chestnuts blossomed, watched their leaves unfurl, darken, become brown. But she didn’t see them fall.

  When, at last, after two seasons of grudging patience, the inevitable moment came, Gazouette (who had never shaken her childish nickname) was where she knew she should be, holding her mother’s always strangely youthful hands. She bent forward to catch Gabrielle’s last words—for posterity, she told herself, because they could never be meant for anyone else.

  “It was best that you not know,” the old woman murmured. “I made my mind up never to tell you, and I never did. Even long after the danger.”

  Gazouette couldn’t help questioning that. “Never to tell me what?”

  Gabrielle seemed not to hear her, or at least not to make the effort to respond. “You never felt the smallest threat.”

  She shut her eyes a final time. “And even without you, I have had a beautiful life.”

  “A Beautiful Stream” by Nisi Shawl

  NETER NEFER

  Amanda Pillar

  I was the daughter and sister of gods.

  But godhood was not my destiny.

  It was my mother’s.

  Blood dripped down the khopesh’s blade to pool on the sandstone tiles underneath my mother’s sandalled feet. The drip, drip, drip trapped my eye, the life essence so red and raw once separated from its host. If I captured it all, could I pour it back? Give life once it had been taken?

  “Are they all dead?” Mother asked. Her voice was faint, as if it travelled a great distance to reach me, though I was mere feet away. It did not matter; she was not speaking to me. I swayed, my eyes locked on her curved blade and the dripping blood. I dimly registered the sound of screams echoing from other areas of the palace.

  “Yes, God’s Wife,” someone replied. “No one here survives.”

  Footsteps pounded as guards and servants rushed back and forth. I heard the scraping sound of clothing being dragged over sandstone.

  “Neferure!” Mother’s voice was a whip.

  I jolted to attention. “Mother?”

  She stood regal before me, fingers gripping her khopesh with white-knuckled fury. In her other hand, she held a dagger. Her white gown had lost its pristine crispness, the splashes of garnet speaking of the battle just past. “Are you injured?”

  I looked down at myself, studying my limbs. Crimson trickled down my arm and I frowned. I had been cut? Fingers tracing the blood up to its source, I found an incision at my throat. It must have happened when one of the attackers grabbed me. Cupping my hand over the wound, I tried to force the blood back inside. I did not want to end up empty like the men on the floor.

  Mother took a step closer, her foot sliding through the blood puddle that had formed next to her. “Daughter?”

  “I have been cut, but it doesn’t seem serious.”

  Mother threw her words behind her; “Fetch a swnw, immediately!”

  My protest was instant, “I don’t need a physician!”

  Mother turned to one of the guards, ignoring me. “And a priest of Sekhmet.”

  “As you wish, God’s Wife.” The guard turned and shouted down the hall, “My lady Hatshepsut requires a swnw and a priest of Sekhmet immediately!”

  I wanted to groan, but the look of concern she flashed towards me kept my lips sealed. She moved the hand from my throat, inspecting the wound. Gently, she placed my palm back. “I would kill them again for the insult they have done you. May their hearts be stones when compared to the feather of Ma’at.”

  “It would be justice,” I said. Then, with Mother so close, I whispered, “Why did they attack us?”

  Her dark brows drew together sharply. “Where is your father?”

  My heart began to beat with alarm. “He is unwell and in his rooms; I was on my way back from him…”

  Even gods could grow poorly. The demons of
disease did not discriminate against those they cursed, and Father had surely been cursed. His skin was covered in raw, ugly looking sores; his purity corrupted by evil. Secretly, I feared he would join Osiris, the god of death, sooner rather than later.

  Mother spun on her heel and ran from the room. My hand cupped awkwardly to my neck, I followed as she ran down stone-lined halls. Her footsteps beat out an uneven pattern of desperation, leaving a one-sided blood trail the guards could follow. The palace at Thebes was vast; the God’s Wife had her own suite of rooms, with the Pharaoh in a separate quarter. I was breathing heavily by the time we made my father’s rooms. Two guards lay dead at the entrance, discarded on the floor like broken toys. Blood pooled around them like fallen shadows.

  The door banged against the wall as Mother thrust it open. She strode into the room, khopesh and dagger raised. Furniture was overturned and beautiful statues and bowls were smashed on the floor. Throwing open the door to Father’s sleep chamber, we came to a sudden stop. He lay in his bed, head set in the middle of his headrest, clothing neat and tidy. A rusty cloth had been spread over his middle. He looked peaceful.

  Rushing forward, Mother dropped to her knees at her husband’s side; her weapons clattering to the stone floor. A high, keening sound filled the room. I had never seen her like this. I could not watch her pain, and so my gaze swept the room, avoiding Father as well. My eyes came to rest on a statue of the sun god, Horus, discarded on the floor at Father’s side. During life, Horus and Pharaoh were as one. But the statue had been broken, smashed in two. Kneeling down, I picked up the pieces, stunned at the sacrilege. Mother’s wail died to sobs. Looking over her shaking shoulders, I realised the cloth covering Father was stained with blood. His life had flooded out across the bed. A knife hilt jutted obscenely from his chest; his heart, the seat of his soul, punctured by violence.