Entertaining Angels: A Christmas Novella
Page 15
It was, of course, Thomazine who ended up tending to him.
Half-blind with headache, cold, sweaty and shivering, the ragged muscle in his cheek locked rigid, and yet she did not seem to mind, and nor did she mind that outside in the dusk they could hear voices, laughter, the ring of hooves and wheels on the barton cobbles as people gathered.
“Be a shame if mama ended up missing her own party, wouldn’t it?” she said cheerfully. “How are you feeling now?”
“Miserable,” he said, and meant it.
If he sat up in the bed, if he crossed to the window, he could likely see the lights between the open barn doors. Lanterns, standing on trestles, and hanging amongst the trees in the orchard. Little pools of kind golden light, like warm honey. He could imagine it. It was better to imagine, than – “You go. Down. Stairs.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” she said, and there was nothing meaningful about the way she said it. She just did not want to leave him. It was that simple, and he turned his head on the cool pillow and closed his eyes again. No tears. They hurt his head too much, and he had not the energy for anything so definite as weeping.
“Why?” he said eventually, without looking at her.
She sighed. (He could not see her face, where he lay looking at the rough blank wall, but he could imagine it. When you had spaces when you could not see, you grew used to reading sounds. The soft rustle of fabric, where a woman might set her work down, not knowing what to say. The sound of her hands clasping and unclasping in awkwardness. Someone, outside, tuning a fiddle. There would be dancing, tonight -)
“Because,” she said, and he heard her set her shoulders, the tiny creak of reed in her stays. “Because it’s rubbish being left by yourself when you’re poorly,” she said, with a sudden fierceness. “When everybody else is having a good time, and you can hear them, and you’re stuck up here by yourself feeling miserable, and ill, and – “ and she swallowed, “And frightened. You are, Russell, aren’t you? Frightened?”
Why should he not tell her? What could she do? “Yes.”
And she said nothing, though he could tell by the silence of her that it was because she didn’t know what to say, rather than any disgust of him, and so he went on, “She means well, tibber! She meant only kindness, and she does not know – oh, Thomazine, how should I know what it is to keep Christmas?” he muttered, and then burst out, “What do I know of it? Other than that I am forced to perform like a chained bear for the amusement of cruel children? Laughed at and poked and dragged out of the places I am comfortable, to be ogled for sport?” He paused, and his voice shook, and he hated that. “And where, in God’s name, would this marred face be welcome at any occasion of joy?”
“There is no one?” she said carefully. “Truly? You have no home - no kin, no -”
“No one who would own me. No. I - I have always preferred to have it so, you see. It did not matter. It does not matter. But I do not think I could - ah, God, tibber, you have no idea! There has been talk of nothing else for weeks in London - oh, the feasts! The plays! The gowns! The masques!” he mimicked an affected Court drawl bitterly - “a month of mandatory gaiety that none is permitted to leave without His Majesty’s wish - it’s like being confined under suspicion of a contagion, without the release of being dead at the end of it! And I come here – I come to Essex – to hide from it, and I find that your mother has brought it dragging after me, like a dead chicken round a hound’s neck, to remind me of what I cannot have!”
He closed his eyes again, and a shiver ran through him, leaving a cold constellation of goosebumps in its wake. “I am afraid,” he said, and it was the first time he had ever said it, out loud, in words. “I am terrified, Thomazine. Because I want what I cannot have, and I fear asking for it. I am like a hound – a whipped one, who craves the favour of the master who beats him, and is too afraid of a second beating to ask for it honestly.”
Outside, in the kind darkness, he began to recognise “Packington’s Pound”, played very badly, on a squeaky fiddle.
She said nothing. And then, “Russell.”
He shook his head, just once. “Russell,” she said again, and there was that in her voice that did not brook argument, “if I go outside this room, and stand on the landing till you bid me come in again, will you dress?”
“I – what?”
“Put your clothes on. And come down. And dance with me.”
Which was so ludicrous as to be faintly comical, and he frowned, fidgeting, his mouth working –
But why should he not? –
He could not, of course. They would talk. He had no idea how to dance, and if he ever had, he had long since forgotten it, and they would laugh, and -
“I could show you,” she said reasonably. “We can hear the music from here. And it’s not hard. You take my hand, so –“
And so he found himself - barefoot and dishevelled, dressed only in his own ragged breeches and shirt - pacing the steps of the dance with her, while she rapped the directions to him.
“And step – and step – And turn, no, not like that, Russell, you haven’t dropped something, I know you have some grace, sir, I’ve seen you on a horse, turn all the way about – “
No softness about it, no sentiment. “And clap – oh, in all charity, Apple! Watch your feet, will you!”
“If I watch my feet, I fall over them,” he said plaintively. “And you have shoes on, and I do not.”
“Then I suggest you do?”
He did not think he could enjoy it, for his whole attention was fixed on remembering which way about he was supposed to be facing at any given time and where his feet were supposed to go next. But then, Thomazine’s whole attention was fixed on making sure he remembered, and he did not think she was enjoying it much, either. Though she had a fierce grin on her face, to be sure, and her fingers clasped his with a degree of satisfaction at the end of the music as though she was proud of him.
“You see? You can do it!”
“I –“ Can’t, he was going to say. And then he realised he was standing in the middle of a chamber filled with furniture, and he had danced a full measure with her, and all the walls were still standing and he had not broken anything. He took a deep breath. “I can, can’t I?”
“Then let us go and show them what you’re capable of,” she said. And since she thought he could do it, he could do it, and he put his boots on, and followed her meekly down into the iron-cold, smoky air.