The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “My thanks, Captain,” said Orsino, “for allowing your nephew Cesario to join my household.”

  Bassanio’s eyes twinkled in his weathered face, but his gesture toward Viola was carefully neutral. “So young a lad needs a protector, my lord. My thanks are due to you.”

  “I’m sure,” said Orsino, “we’ll get on famously.”

  She almost ducked, sure that intelligent gaze would see through her disguise. But his blue eyes touched hers, light as a feather, and returned to Bassanio’s guileless smile without changing their expression.

  Viola didn’t dare present herself in this strange land in her true female form. Her respectable name, her blameless ancestry, would count for nothing without the income to shore them up. Making her way as a man, no matter how young, was infinitely preferable to the life she’d have as a woman lacking friends, family, and dowry.

  She and her brother Sebastian had planned to make a new life after their father’s death in Messaline. Even though many of their father’s former patients conveniently forgot how he’d treated their ailments for promises rather than payment, still they’d managed to put together a meager purse. But that purse, and, much more importantly, Sebastian himself, had been lost in the shipwreck which cast Viola, Bassanio, and handful of crew members onto the shores of Illyria.

  She tightened her lips. No, she wouldn’t cry for her brother, not here, not now. He was gone. She had to make her own way in the world, without a father, without a brother, without a husband. . . . Not that she had any objection to taking a husband when the world held men like Orsino.

  Bassanio was leaving. He patted Viola roughly on the shoulder. She knotted her fist and punched his arm. “Thank you, Captain.”

  “You take care, young man,” he returned with another twinkle, and was gone.

  Orsino turned in the opposite direction. “Gentlemen, attend me.” Viola fell in with the others at his back. It was time for the afternoon ride.

  What a good thing it was that she and Sebastian had been born in the same hour, that sad hour which had seen their mother’s death. They’d grown to be friends as well as siblings. Viola had scandalized the neighbors by climbing trees and riding astride just as her brother did. And she’d unsexed herself even further by helping her father at his surgery. No wonder she’d chosen to shed the garments of womanhood, when in many ways they clung so indifferently to her.

  Orsino led his retainers into the stable yard. It was as redolent of horses and hay and sunshine this afternoon as it had been the day before. A groom was waiting with the Duke’s horse, a tall, muscular bay. Viola turned toward the small horse, little more than a pony, which had been assigned to her. A genuine youth might’ve complained, asking for a larger and more assertive beast. But while she might be devious, she wasn’t stupid.

  A ragtag figure skulked in the shadows of the tack room. On this warm day he wore an old army greatcoat, its bits of braid tarnished, its pockets sagging. His coat was gray, his hair was gray, his face was gray. His eyes were bits of flint. A lute hung like a sword across his back.

  “Who is that?” Viola asked her colleagues Curio and Valentine.

  Curio shrugged. “His name is Feste, a poor madman. The Countess Olivia provides him with a hut beside her wall and food in her kitchen. She finds his songs and pranks amusing, I suppose. So does Orsino, asking him to sing and play when the melancholy falls upon him.”

  “Or perhaps the songs Orsino hopes to hear from Feste are those of Olivia herself.” Valentine reached for the reins of his own horse.

  Orsino stepped into the tack room and bent his head close to Feste’s wizened form. Feste spoke. Orsino nodded, his eyes straying more than once to the road leading south.

  “Olivia?” Viola asked. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard that name.

  “Countess Olivia’s estate is to the south of the city,” answered Valentine. “Orsino courts her but she’ll have none of him, says she’ll consider no man’s suit while she mourns her brother’s death some six weeks past.”

  Orsino’s heart was pledged? Viola pretended her own heart didn’t sink at bit at the news. “Her brother was killed in the war?”

  “Not exactly,” Curio replied. “Count Leonardo returned wounded, yes, but was well on his way to regaining his health when he sickened suddenly and died. Some lingering contagion of his wound, no doubt.”

  “No doubt,” repeated Valentine, a slight edge to his voice. “His death left his sister an heiress with a large household and a title in her own right. I daresay Orsino presses his suit because he wishes to recoup the expense of equipping a company for war.”

  No, surely he loved her for herself, and pitied her brother’s death. . . . Viola looked down at her boots, a bit too big for her feet, mottled with dust and dung. So Olivia was a solitary woman, too, without father, without brother, but with a very tidy dowry indeed. Some are born fortunate, some achieve fortune, and some have fortune thrust upon them.

  Orsino plucked a coin from his pocket and pressed it into Feste’s hand. The madman turned to go, but not without shooting a shrewd glance around the stable yard. Something glinted in his eye, a subtle sardonic understanding. But if Curio or Valentine or Orsino himself couldn’t penetrate her disguise, Viola told herself, why should this poor fool be able to?

  Orsino leaped onto his horse and without looking around to see if anyone was behind him rode off to the south. Their horses jostling in the gateway, the others followed. None of them sat their saddles as elegantly as Orsino, Viola thought. His lithe body swayed so perfectly to the rhythm of the hoof beats he and the horse might have been a centaur.

  Gaining the crest of a hill, Orsino turned aside from the road and led his small troop along a cliff overlooking the sea. Viola lagged behind, her pony ambling through tall grass that bent double in a cool breeze with a premonitory taste of winter to it. Below her the sea heaved and shuddered and spilled in a white froth onto the rocky beach.

  Sebastian had been carried away by waves much fiercer, beaten into foam by a shrieking wind. At least his soul hadn’t entered Elysium alone—with him disappeared the French officer, Antonio, who’d enlivened their table with stories of Austerlitz and Waterloo, and who’d worried about sailing so close to the coast of his enemy Illyria. Death, thought Viola, was capricious indeed. Look at Count Leonardo, surviving battle only to fall ill and die in his own household. Or so Curio had said, although Valentine’s tone seemed to imply something else.

  Orsino’s voice broke into her reverie. “Cesario!”

  After a long silent moment, Viola thought suddenly, That’s me.

  “Cesario, attend me.”

  Viola tightened her knees and her horse strolled forward. She looked up at Orsino. He didn’t seem annoyed with her—if anything, the slightest of smiles played at the corners of his mouth. But then, he wasn’t looking down at her but inland. She followed the direction of his gaze.

  Below them a church nestled into a fold of green land. The spreading fronds of an ancient yew tree sheltered several ancient tombstones and one fresh new one. The grave before it was still mounded, covered in new-grown grass and flowers. Three people stood there, two of them deferring to a woman clothed head to toe in black. Only the handkerchief she pressed to her eyes was white, little brighter than her pale skin.

  “The Countess Olivia?” Viola asked, remembering in the nick of time to speak in her deepest voice.

  “The very same.” Orsino shifted in his saddle. “I’m sure Curio and Valentine, as given to gossip as any woman, told you of my thwarted love for her.”

  “Well—yes, they have.”

  “Ah, an honest lad. Good. And did they tell you of her brother’s death?”

  “Only that he died.”

  “He died. He died indeed.”

  The group in the churchyard walked slowly toward the gate. The brim of Olivia’s bonnet caught the wind and tugged her face upward, so that she saw the group of horsemen on the ridge above her. Shaking her head, she t
urned away and rested her hand on the arm of the fastidiously frock-coated man beside her. Another, more plainly-dressed, woman acknowledged Orsino’s presence with a subtle wave and then followed Olivia and the man into a waiting carriage.

  As far as Viola could tell from this distance, Olivia was beautiful enough to warrant Orsino’s attentions. And worldly enough to enjoy them—no, that was unkind. The woman had probably commanded that stylish straight skirt, the short jacket with its puffed sleeves, and the feathered bonnet in anticipation of her brother’s homecoming, only to find herself dying them black soon after. “He died,” Viola prompted Orsino.

  “The manner of his death, there’s the rub. The Countess announced that he died honorably from his wound. And yet the madman tells me he died from a gastric fever.”

  “Ah,” Viola returned noncommittally, but she told herself, a suppurating wound wouldn’t cause violent distress to the digestive tract, not at all.

  The carriage disappeared around a bend in the road. With an extravagant sigh, Orsino turned to Viola. For just a moment his eyes held the image of the black-clad woman. Then they cleared and brightened, and Viola knew he saw—a stripling youth, not her. “I find myself in a difficult position, Cesario. If I ask for your discretion, you’ll not deny it me, will you?”

  “Of course not, my lord.”

  “Today I heard an evil rumor concerning Count Leonardo’s death.”

  “From the madman?”

  “From him, yes, although I doubt he’s the only rumormonger about. Feste told me Leonardo may have died by his own hand. That would explain much. If Olivia thought such a terrible secret needed concealing, she could well withdraw herself from the world and from me.”

  A thrill of horror gathered Viola’s shoulder blades like cloth. “To lose a brother in such a way would explain much.”

  “But Feste asks, as much as the fool asks anything in his roundabout way, why a soldier like Leonardo would take his life by poison when his weapons, sword, dirk, and gun, are ready to hand.”

  “Perhaps to make his death appear an accident,” Viola suggested, “so as not to lay the burden of the truth upon his sister.”

  “Honest, and clever as well.” Again that hint of a smile curved Orsino’s lips. “His death might genuinely have been an accident, don’t you think?”

  Viola did think that. And her mind reached further, to another, more sinister possibility. Should she voice that sudden suspicion? No, not just yet. Not unless Orsino himself spoke it first.

  One of the waiting gentlemen laughed. A horse whickered softly. Black birds circled the tower of the church. Orsino leaned forward over his saddlebow, his look so intent Viola had to keep herself not from shrinking away but from bending closer. “If I could find the truth of the matter, the means and manner of Leonardo’s death, I could ease the Countess’s mind. Then she might be pleased to hear my suit.”

  “Or might reject it utterly, if the truth is the harshest of all possible truths.”

  “I’ll make that gamble,” Orsino said. “I knew Leonardo, he was under my command. If he took his own life then I’ll—I’ll assume Feste’s rags and wander the roads of my own dukedom, unheralded and unknown.”

  Those keen blue eyes, that noble stance, unrecognized? But Viola allowed him his rhetoric, for his heart followed close behind. “You yourself couldn’t find such a truth. Better to place someone in the Countess’s household, there to make discreet inquiries. . . . Oh.” Her face grew hot. She hoped Orsino thought it was the wind that colored her cheeks so prettily.

  “Yes, I should place some trustworthy retainer in the Countess’s household. You, Cesario? You could play a gardener or a footman.”

  “Or,” Viola responded somewhat giddily, “like the boys of old who played the female parts upon the stage, I could profit by my as-yet smooth cheeks and present myself as a maid. Then I could gain access to the innermost recesses of house and so uncover its secrets.”

  “Brilliant!” Orsino’s smile at last broke free of constraint and illuminated his face, like the sun dispelling a storm’s murk.

  Viola basked in the glow. Answering the mystery of Leonardo’s death seemed little enough, if she could earn another such smile.

  “If you would stoop to such a ruse for me,” Orsino murmured, “if you could acquit such an important task for me, why, I would be so deeply in your debt it would take my greatest galley to hold your reward. Will you do it?”

  Yes, Viola wanted to cry, but instead she bowed stiffly and said in her gruffest voice, “As you wish, my lord. What you will.”

  * * * * *

  Fire leaped upon the vast hearth, its orange gleam playing across the polished copper and pewter of the kitchen implements. The scents of smoke and baking bread teased Viola’s nostrils. She settled her cap over the cropped ends of her hair, smoothed her apron, and sat down at the table. Knees together, she reminded herself. Eyes downcast demurely.

  Armed with a letter of reference from the Duke’s palace, she’d quickly secured a position as scullery maid in the Countess’s mansion—her role within a role, she thought with a smile. Within a day she’d grasped Olivia’s cast of characters, from the servants downstairs to the Countess and her guests upstairs. Now she had to learn the lines of Leonardo’s death.

  Viola reached into her basket of peas. She stripped one pod, and the next, and the next, pouring the green pellets into an iron pot. Across the table Bianca, Olivia’s maid, sewed tiny stitches into a shimmering fall of silk—a nightdress, probably. Viola said, “What a lovely gown. But then, the Countess owns many lovely gowns, I expect.”

  “Oh yes, that she does. Has her dresses made up in Vienna.”

  “If I owned such fine clothes I’d hate to dye them all black.”

  Bianca’s long nose and lashless eyes twitched nervously as a rabbit’s. “No help for it, a death in the family’s a death in the family, isn’t it?”

  “And decorum must be observed,” said a stern male voice behind Viola’s back, “in life as well as in death.”

  She looked up. As the Countess’s steward, Malvolio had interviewed her, hired her, and then lectured her on behaving herself and keeping her place in the household. He was the model of frock-coated propriety, his manner as starched as his white neckcloth and the pointed wings of his collar.

  He walked on by, not expecting Viola to answer his pronouncement. Bianca’s narrow cheeks flushed crimson. At the other end of the table Helen thumped a cleaver down on a joint of meat. She was as hearty as Bianca was frail—but then, Viola never trusted a thin, pale, cook.

  “Did you send for a cat?” Malvolio asked her.

  “Yes, I did.”

  He waited.

  “Sir.”

  “There will be no more poisons in this house, will there?”

  “No, sir.” Helen’s cleaver rose and fell emphatically, as though she was imagining the bloody joint beneath her hands to be one of his.

  Malvolio tasted the soup steaming over the fire. “Too much coriander deranges the mind. Next time use parsley.” He marched out of the room

  Viola asked quickly but quietly, “Poisons?”

  “Arsenicum. To kill the rats and mice. It was Maria who bid me purchase a packet of it and sprinkle it about the cellars. It was no doing of mine that the Count . . .” Biting off her sentence, Helen piled the bits of meat in a pan.

  Bianca leaned toward Viola, whispering, “Count Leonardo drank the arsenicum with his posset one Sunday afternoon after dinner and was dead before Monday’s dawn.”

  Yes, Viola thought, a fatal dose of arsenicum would produce a great upheaval in the stomach and bowels, and kill within hours.

  “We don’t know that he took the arsenicum,” Helen insisted. “The Count wasn’t at all despondent, was he? No, he’d been out riding that very day, and told Ferdinand before dinner he was tired and achy, but still recovering well from his wound.”

  “Could he have taken the arsenicum by accident?” asked Viola.

 
; “I used only half the packet, not wanting to be over-generous with a poison. The rest I hid away. I noticed the morning the Count died that it had gone.” Her knife flashing, Helen sliced a carrot over the meat.

  “And you never found it?”

  “No. Vanished like the snow in spring, it did.”

  The back door opened and Ferdinand himself stepped inside, carrying a pair of large, freshly polished shoes. Like Curio and Valentine, his face was fresh if callow. He walked with the loose-limbed gait of a colt.

  Bianca turned to him. “Ferdinand found traces of the arsenicum, though—in the Count’s chamber.”

  “That I did,” said Ferdinand. “A fine powder on the tray beside the empty posset cup.”

  “You’re sure that was arsenicum?” Viola asked.

  “Who’d be bold enough to taste it?” retorted Ferdinand. “Not I.”

  “The Count drank the arsenicum of a purpose,” Bianca concluded. “There’s no other explanation.”

  Yes there was, Viola told herself. Murder. Leonardo showed no signs of despair. He might have destroyed the paper packet that had held the arsenicum, meaning to spare his sister the certainty of his suicide. And yet why should he have known there was arsenicum in the house, let alone where it was kept?

  Olivia, Viola thought. She could’ve dosed Leonardo with the poison. But why? She was already wealthy. She was already titled. Perhaps instead of taking her dowry to a husband’s household she wished to draw a husband to hers. . . . No. Olivia was rejecting Orsino, the most suitable, the most desirable of husbands. And there was no reason to think she knew about the arsenicum any more than Leonardo did.

  Orsino would laugh Viola out of his presence if she cast a crime upon Olivia. The Countess had been sinned against, she was no sinner herself. Orsino’s love for her was not misplaced.