Rogues' Wedding

by Terry Griggs

  “Who, then …?”

  “Roland Avery, Esquire.” He offered his hand and gave Grif’s a quick, cursory shake. “The proprietor of this fine establishment. How may I be of service? Would you care for a drink?”

  “Have you a glass, Mr. Avery?”

  “One.”

  “A modest investment.” Despite everything, Grif felt his spirits begin to lift. “What I need is a room. Do you have any here at The Dancing Sun?”

  “Oh, yes.” Roland flipped open the ledger to a different page and placed it on the bar.

  “Sign here, please.”

  Grif retrieved the pen that Hattie had given him, choosing to use it rather than the boy’s proferred one. He might have been tempted to lie otherwise, and sign a name not his own. He saw that there was plenty of space to do it in, for he was apparently the only guest registered.

  Roland watched with delight, as though Grif’s penmanship constituted some fascinating stunt. “You have relatives in town, Mr. Smolders?”

  “No.” Christ. “That is, none that I’m aware of.”

  Both he and the boy stared momentarily at the name he had signed in the register, his name, and no one else in the world had a right to it.

  “Your room is up the stairs, first on the left,” Roland said.

  Grif snatched up the key, gave the young hosteller a grateful nod and made for the stairs.

  Roland Avery turned back to his book and found his original place in it, smiling to himself in the way an accountant might if an unexpected and diverting figure had arrived suddenly in the columns of his ledger.

  The ceiling of Grif’s room was painted a deep green, the floor done in a checkerboard pattern of red and black, and the walls had been papered with blue roses against a pin-work background. The doorway was stencilled with grapevines and sage leaves, and the Zommo—the cabinet for the chamber pot that sat beside the bed—had been mahoganized, almost successfully. A marine picture, an ambitious garden collage made of shells, crayfish claws and driftwood sticks, decorated one of the walls, and beneath it was inscribed a verse that Grif stepped closer to read: “Call us not weeds; we are flowers of the sea, And lovely and bright and gay-tinted are we.”

  All in all, the room was comfortable and welcoming, but a bit cockeyed and out of proportion, as if built with a lax and carefree hand. The painting was slapdash, the baseboards not quite flush, the window frame crooked. He liked it.

  In one corner, on a child’s rod-back chair, sat a homemade doll with a nut for a head—a walnut painted with tiny black eyes and red, pursed lips. Her facial features were derived from the nut’s natural bumps and ridges, which aged her some; she looked like she knew a thing or two. Grif regarded it closely, but from a few feet away. Having a rag body, it slumped in the chair. Lost? Left behind by some child travelling with a parent? The doll wore a perturbed expression, yet he decided that it was not blaming him for its own misfortune.

  He seated himself on the bed and took off his shoes, so worn and mulish, the things had no flight left in them. If he tried to run away now, to walk or even crawl, his shoe leather would rebel; it would dig in what was left of the heels and hold firm. The room had a coil of rope on the floor by the window, but Grif knew that rope was not going to save him this time. It might even be the end of him, the last thing he’d feel while swinging out of this world. He required something far less homey and practical to get himself out of the fix he was in. He needed something miraculous.

  He emptied his pockets, taking out the pen, the purse, the journal, and placed them beside him. He removed the Reverend Bee’s well-travelled ecclesiastical rag, and laid it across the foot of the bed like a tired and dusty old dog.

  He waited. This could take a long time, he realized, as long as walking the length of the province. He might wait and wait and wait. He might become the very state he was immersed in, suspended, taut, never released by an arrival.

  He did not think this would happen to him. Eventually, someone would come and settle his life for him. The actor, possibly. Fenwick Nashe. He’d glide through the door, dapper in Grif’s own name, that still-unspoken plan wavering on his clever, dissimulating lips. But more likely the police, clattering noisily down the hall, pounding savagely on the door, then bursting in. A brutal eviction.

  When it did come, it entered silently, without knocking, without warning, recognition a sudden knife sliding into his chest.

  Her, of course. His wife. Avice walked into the room as if only this moment she had slipped out of her bridal chamber at the Belvedere Hotel in London to see what was keeping her husband from coming in to her. Time lost, distance travelled, humiliation suffered—it all might have been nothing more to her than some vile mess on the threshold, easily evaded with one deft scene-splicing step.

  She was stark naked. Her body white and smooth, perfect as a stripped and whittled branch of cedar. Unblemished, except for that splatter of moles on her cheek, a faint bruise on her left breast, a crescent-shaped welt on her thigh. Her hair was shorn like a boy’s. She was beautiful. She smelled like a saint, of roses and sweat. She was beautiful, more so than he would have imagined—had he bothered to do such a thing.

  But her expression, frankly, was not one a young husband would want to see approaching. Her look was not tremulous and open, a bride blushing with a new-found boldness and excitement, but one that Grif had not known until this moment a woman could possess. Her face was as rigid and hard as the granite he had often run his hands over on his travels with Ned through the North Channel. He did not think he would be running his hands over her features, warming them into a softness, a renewed sympathy and humanity.

  Avice, he thought, her name a wick he was about to light with his tongue. He could not even remember what had driven him with such force away from her, why he had run so far; but now, finally, he knew he was ready for her.

  And she was ready for him.

  PART II

  I’m sure if I were free again,

  I’d live a single life;

  And not be such a simpleton,

  As to become a wife.

  —popular nineteenth-century rhyme

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mr. and Mrs.

  It was a marriage of convenience. Hers. And necessarily so, for she was the one who had been stuck with it. Stuck with the galling inconvenience of having a husband so rare, so scarce, that he did not even fill his own shoes.

  On the morning after her wedding, Avice Drinkwater, still metamorphosing into Mrs. Thomas G. Smolders, the glinting dust her marriage had stirred up hardly settled around her, found that already in her new life she had to take stock. This was it: a morning coat, a pair of men’s dress shoes, and a small brown cowhide valise containing a shirt, three collars, two pairs of socks, a woollen union suit with a moth hole in one sleeve, a bar of soap, a razor and an ivory-handled toothbrush. This was it, what she was married to, the modest props and costume of a husband, but no husband—her mate nothing more than a bone-handled, bristle-headed object.

  She might have smiled at this, one of her sharp and self-depreciating smiles, sharp enough to pare down the edges of what was a full and substantial self. Except that she was not in the mood on this particular morning for self-deprecation, or for diminishment of any kind. She had absolutely no intention of being whittled down by circumstance into a whining sliver of a woman. What she felt largely was something hot in her blood, lapping her heart, boiling it, burning her inner layers, scorching her from within. If she were to run her tongue along her wrist and into her palm, she knew that she would be able to taste it even, this searing and poisonous fury. This bitterness. Let other women suffer from vapours: what she exuded—noxious fumes, scalding steam—would fell anyone who came too close.

  Her sisters. How they would rally and flutter around her when they heard the news of his decampment. How sympathetic they would be, how enraged on her behalf. There would be much talk of a search, perhaps a private investigator, a lawsuit, an annulment. And ho
w secretly thrilled they would be, wallowing in the muck of her shame, sucking through their teeth the fetid waters of her misfortune. Their warnings about her disastrous choice would be vindicated, their unkind and unacknowledged wishes gratified. How they would simper and cluck … and chuckle in her ear.

  Like hell they would.

  Back to stock-taking. All right, she was married, she did have a husband, and she would not be done out of one. Unless, of course, she herself were to do the deed. The deed—yes—that would strike her marriage through with a theme, would outfit it with a purpose. It would certainly give her a sense of resolution, if not comfort.

  Avice had been rash about Grif, she realized, but not wrong. She hardly knew him, true, but she knew herself, knew the kind of appetite he provoked in her. He was unclaimed treasure, standing so handsomely behind a pile of less splendid goods on display at Kingsmill’s, and she had immediately wanted to (and did) lay claim. Her desire had been to hoard him, or to spend him freely, as extravagantly as she wished. She was interested in him in a way that felt as basic and elemental as a rough wind blasting her on an open shore. She was still interested in him—in how, precisely, he would look throttled, mangled, slit from tip to stern.

  She wished she had a wedding photograph so that she could study it, and him, more closely. She had been too cavalier, too certain of herself; she had missed something about him, and now she wanted to find it, that intimate and revealing detail, the tiny pore in his person through which his regard for her had disappeared. She determined to find whatever reason he could possibly have had for leaving her, no matter how deeply, and surgically, she had to delve. First she would ruin him, then she would be his personal archaeologist, picking and sifting through those ruins.

  In the morning light that fell through that treacherous window in the Belvedere Hotel, the one through which Grif had made his escape, Avice again surveyed what remained—the trappings of a husband, without the trapped, as it were. Her marriage definitely lacked substance, but as this was something she herself had never lacked, the problem did not seem to be insoluble. Watching the light pour in, creating an empty spotlight on the floor, a notion occurred to her. She did not need an archangel to materialize in this light, to fill her ear with revelatory news. The gist of that news probably hadn’t changed much since Biblical times, anyway. What Mary was told, Avice had already figured out: husbands consist mostly of illusion. So occupied were they with their jobs, their clubs, their recreational and civic duties (or their divine ones), that wives scarcely saw them. Occasionally, a husband might wander through the house like an animal and leave behind droppings—cigar ash, mud on the rug, a pittance to manage the household with—and while there, beget a brood of offspring, the delivery of which would eventually kill his mate. Work and grief, that was what a woman really married. When you considered it, as Avice was intently doing—her brow as rippled as a washboard, but her thoughts slippery as silk—an illusory husband might be more useful than a real one, not to mention more agreeable. If the good Lord could create a man with a pinch of dust and a little sleight of hand, then surely she could do the same with a morning coat, a pair of shoes and a toothbrush.

  So pleased was she with this inspiration that when the arrival of the newlyweds’ breakfast was announced with a tactful and muted knock at the door, Avice lowered her voice a register or two and ordered that it be left outside. For good measure she also murmured an endearment, sleepily, contentedly, and then held her breath, listening, waiting as the footsteps retreated down the hall. She jumped out of bed and ran over to the door, cautiously peeked out, then wheeled in a laden tray—fried eggs, sausages, potatoes, ham, toast—and ate it all, every last crumb, his share, hers, theirs. After all, she was eating for two.

  As she drank down the last of the coffee, allowing herself to slurp it, to lick the saucer, to belch—all husbandly habits and prerogatives—she gave some thought to what sort of couple she would make, and just how she might round out the masculine half. She knew that there had always been women who had taken the part of men in life, such as those who had fought, disguised as soldiers, in the American Civil War, or that brilliant and dashing physician in the British army, James Barry. A whole successful life in the male arena and only after death was it discovered that Dr. Barry was female. How very gratifying, and evidently not impossible; but Avice wanted more than that. Half of humanity was simply not enough for her. She wanted to be, and would be, complete.

  Pacing the room, as her husband had done only the night before, she circled his shoes, once, twice, then stopped before them. What had seized him so suddenly and plucked him out of this room, right out of his shoes, it seemed? Surely there was no idea so strong that it could have blown him through the window. It must have been an agency of some sort, an abduction; but then she had heard no shouts, no scuffle, no protest coming from him. There had been that noise, a gunshot she had thought, but perhaps only a trick a child might play—an air-filled paper bag slapped open. A craven, despicable trick: the deserting wretch had wanted her to think him in trouble. Well, he was that.

  She slid a questing foot into one of Grif’s abandoned shoes and wiggled her toes widely. My, what big feet you have. Didn’t her friends long for fairy-tale weddings of their own? What would they make of hers, she wondered, which had turned her into a Cinderella who was required to fit the boots and role of the prince (with no want of ugly sisters, either)? She slipped her foot into the other shoe, then clomped over to the valise and dug around in it for the socks. Both pairs might help, but when she tried them on, they drooped, garterless, like rags around her ankles. Likewise, when she pulled on the shirt and coat, they hung loosely on her slender frame. She looked like a dressed stick.

  Vexed, she kicked at a chair and her foot moulted the socks, which flew off into a corner. It wasn’t so much the sight of her ill-fitting male costume reflected in the dresser mirror that annoyed her, for she had funds and resources of her own (her father had not trusted Grif on that score for a moment); to procure a more suitable outfit, and one of better quality, would be an easy enough task. No, what truly and deeply irritated her had more to do with the liberty this masculine clothing afforded. He had not been required to bind and cinch and hobble himself with corsets and straps, with hooks and endless buttons and yards of heavy, imprisoning cloth. Eighteen-inch waists, skirts that dragged in the mud, sleeves that ballooned so hugely they required supporting structures underneath. He had not been stopped, paralyzed, by his very clothing. A woman’s blood could scarcely even circulate in her body, so tied was it in place. To think that he had all this freedom … and it had not been enough.

  Tears sprang to her eyes, but with a tide of will she called them back. She promised herself, her better and her worse half in this union, that she would find a more useful and less feminine release for these emotional waters. Let there be no more leaking through the eyes. She was going to learn how to spit.

  By mid-afternoon the chambermaid, had she been allowed into the room, might have wondered if a rainstorm had lately passed through, so gob-flecked and damp had it become. By then Avice had mastered the art of expectoration, and felt she could hawk with the best of the boys. Not that she could put out a fire, but she could send a foaming globe of spittle whizzing through the air and pinging on target with a crackerjack accuracy. If Grif just so happened to appear at the window, his miserable, pleading face bobbing into view, she’d christen it all right. She’d daub him smack between the eyes with a wet and shattering kiss of contempt.

  This thought warmed her and gave her cramped feelings some range, as had that flask of courage she had discovered in the pocket of his coat. Drink, spit. Drink, spit. Really, a man’s life was a wonderful thing. She knew she had the wit to manage it, tacking such a life onto her own as one might add an extension to a house, a porch that stood open to the world. She took another pull at the flask, delighted to have found it when she frisked Grif’s abandoned coat, her fingers searching the garment’s cheap crimi
nal cloth as if he himself might be hidden somewhere in it. (The louse.)

  She had also found two train tickets concealed in an inside pocket. How could she have forgotten, having planned most of it herself—their getaway, their honeymoon? It had been intended as an adventurous lark, and a rebuke to her family: a week in a rough American city known more for its industry than its romance. What a shame if they both missed it. Of course, she was both now, but did she honestly think she could get away with it? Avice was aware that a woman travelling alone attracted too much of the wrong kind of attention. Such a woman, brazen and depraved (for otherwise she would not be travelling unescorted), was considered fair game—the very game that she herself had been so eager to be, and play, only the night before, at least the sanctioned version of it, which was supposed to make all the difference. So much for that scruple, she thought (drink, spit): new game, new rules.

  She took a turn around the room, trying out a few manly walks. She sauntered and strolled. She mastered the strut, the swagger, the hemorrhoidal hobble, the caveman’s lope and lunge. The drink had ignited a votive flame in her belly, and she had begun to have a good time. She mimicked with her feet male pride and arrogance, and walked for miles, it seemed, keeping herself entertained while searching for her own ambulatory style, the style of her other. She wanted to make a signature with her own two dissembling feet that was self-assured and forthright. Nothing creative, nothing exceptional—what she wanted was a standard and dominant masculine tread. If a woman’s walk, whether helpless or seductive, was designed to attract attention, then a man’s was purely territorial, staking claim, measuring out in footfalls what was his. It was this she practised over and over, pacing it to perfection, working it into her whole body, schooling her muscles, until the artificial and adopted walk came naturally. Defense and camouflage. When she was at large in the world, she would invite neither prying nor preying eyes. No more gracious swaying and lilting for her. No more being rooted in place like a bloody useless flower.