Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (18 page)

“We did, indeed, particularly so when he first arrived.”

“I begged him to exert himself for fear you should suspect what was the matter; but it made him so melancholy, not being able to stay more than a fortnight with us, and seeing me so much affected. Poor fellow! I gave him a lock of hair set in a ship’s compass when he was at Longstaple last, and that was some comfort to him. Perhaps you might have noticed it when you saw him?”

“I did,” said Elinor, with a composure of voice, under which was concealed an emotion and distress beyond anything she had ever felt before. Glancing up in her shock, she was confronted with the strangest sight of all: Miss Steele was lacing up her whale-bone corset and there, on the small of her back, was etched a tattoo in scarlet ink; it was the cryptic five-pointed pattern, exactly as had appeared to Elinor so many times, in such darkly portentous fashion, since her arrival on Pestilent Isle.

W
HAT LUCY HAD ASSERTED
to be true Elinor dared not doubt, supported as it was on every side by such probabilities and proofs, and contradicted by nothing but her own wishes. Their opportunity of acquaintance in the house of Mr. Pratt was a foundation for the rest, and Edward’s uncertain behaviour towards herself overcame every fear of condemning him unfairly, and established as a fact his ill-treatment of herself. Her resentment of such behaviour, her indignation at having been its dupe, for a short time made her feel only for herself; but other ideas, other considerations, soon arose. Had Edward been intentionally deceiving her? Had he feigned a regard for her which he did not feel? Was his engagement to Lucy an engagement of the heart?

Such thoughts swirled about in Elinor’s mind as, standing before her bedroom mirror, she slowly worked a rough patch of red alder bark over her entire body, a salutary measure dictated by Sir John to remove any lingering traces of the Fang-Beast’s viscous emissions from her skin.

“It stings,” she cried, reacting to both the pain of Lucy’s revelation and the infinite small abrasions of the tree bark upon her flesh—though somewhat more to the latter. “O, it stings.”

And yet, whatever might once have been, Elinor could not believe Edward loved Lucy at present. His affection was all her own. She could not be deceived in that. Her mother, sisters, Fanny, all had been conscious of his regard for her at Norland; it was not an illusion of her own vanity. He certainly loved her. Elinor proceeded to the second step of Sir John’s cleansing protocol, wringing a bolt of worsted in warm, fresh water and pressing it delicately against every inch of her abraded skin.

Could Edward ever be tolerably happy with Lucy Steele? Could he, with his integrity, his delicacy, and well-informed mind, be satisfied with a wife like her—illiterate, artful, too selfish to notice even when her own kayak was about to be bit to splinters by a two-headed, forty-foot-long sea serpent exuding a cloud of malodorous sludge? Elinor did not have the answer. The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally blind Edward to everything but Lucy’s beauty and good nature; but the four succeeding years must have opened his eyes to her defects of education, while the same period of time had perhaps robbed her of that simplicity which might once have leant interesting character to her beauty.

Then there was the matter of the tattoo—that strange shape that had called to Elinor from her nightmares, only to appear, writ in the very flesh of her rival’s lower back. The thought of it pained Elinor’s mind as much as did the rough scratch of the worsted wool upon her arms.

As these considerations occurred to her in painful succession, she wept for Edward more than for herself, and only stopped weeping when the salt of her tears burned like acid on her tenderized cheeks. Consoled by the belief that Edward had done nothing to forfeit her esteem, she thought she could command herself to guard every suspicion of the truth from her mother and sisters. When she joined them at dinner only two hours after she had first suffered the extinction of all her dearest hopes, no one would have supposed from the appearance of herself, that Elinor was mourning in secret over obstacles; her face glowed red from neither embarrassment nor grief, but only from the punctilious removal of a dermal layer.

The necessity of concealing from her mother and Marianne, what Lucy had entrusted in confidence to herself was no aggravation of Elinor’s distress. She knew she could receive no assistance from them. So she gave out to them only the details of the Fang-Beast’s attack and the nearness of their escape; this adventuresome anecdote led to a warm discussion of whether the girls should sew balloons into their bustles, to keep them buoyed if occasion should knock them from their vessels; thusly did the
conversation drift forward through the dessert course, which was taffy.

Much as she had suffered from her first conversation with Lucy on the subject, Elinor soon felt an earnest wish of renewing it. She wanted to hear many particulars of their engagement repeated again; she wanted more clearly to understand what Lucy really felt for Edward; and she particularly wanted to convince Lucy, by her readiness to enter on the matter again, that she was no otherwise interested in it than as a friend. And also, then, from some dim part of her mind came a dark, insistent voice, demanding she find some means of again inspecting the mysterious tattoo on Lucy’s back, and discovering its origins.

But there was no immediate opportunity of doing either. The weather was growing ever more dreadful, with winds whipping strong enough in recent days to tear off the roof of an abandoned shed on Deadwind Island and down upon one of the servants, who was knocked off his feet and then decapitated by the weather vane. A walk, where they might most easily separate themselves from the others, was therefore ill-advised; and though they met at least every other evening either at the Middleton’s estate or at Barton Cottage, they could not be supposed to meet for the sake of conversation. Such a thought would never enter either Sir John or Lady Middleton’s head; and therefore, very little leisure was ever given for particular discourse. They met for the sake of eating, drinking, oyster-shucking, laughing together, or playing any game that was sufficiently noisy.

Then one morning Sir John rowed up to the rebuilt dockside to beg, in the name of charity, that they would all dine with Lady Middleton that day, as he was obliged to help re-bury the poor unfortunate who had been decapitated by the weather vane; the other servants had done so inadequately, and so the corpse had been dug up by hyenas and now lay rotting on the beach. Elinor immediately accepted the invitation; Marianne agreed more grudgingly. Margaret asked and received enthusiastic permission from her mother to join the party as well, and all were glad to see that the girl had regained some of her childish spirit.
Weeks had passed since Margaret had last mentioned her skittering cave-people or the geyser of mysterious steam; they’d succeeded, Mrs. Dashwood hoped, in persuading the girl that it was all a matter of her imagination.

The insipidity of the evening at the Middletons was exactly as Elinor had expected; it produced not one novelty of thought or expression, and nothing could be less interesting than the whole of their discourse both in the dining parlour and drawing-room. They quitted it only with the removal of the tea-things. The card-table was then moved to pursue an amusement called Karankrolla, native to Lady Middleton’s homeland, and Elinor began to wonder at herself for having ever entertained a hope of finding time for conversation with Miss Steele.

“I am glad,” said Lady Middleton to Lucy, as she opened an ivory chest and produced a bewildering array of multi-coloured game pieces, “that you are not going to finish poor little Annamaria’s ship-in-a-bottle this evening, for I am sure it must hurt your eyes to work the miniatures by candlelight.”

This hint was enough. Lucy replied, “Indeed you are very much mistaken, Lady Middleton. I am only waiting to know whether you have enough participants for your amusement without me, or I should have had out my miniature sail-trimming equipment already. I would not disappoint the little angel for all the world.”

“You are very good, I hope it won’t hurt your eyes—will you ring the bell for some working candles?”

Lucy directly drew her work table near her and reseated herself with an alacrity and cheerfulness which seemed to imply that she could taste no greater delight than in building a diminutive clipper ship within the confines of an emptied-out glass beer bottle for a spoilt child.

Lady Middleton explained the rules of Karankrolla, which no one present could comprehend except for Mrs. Jennings, who offered no assistance in elucidating them to the rest of the company. As best Elinor could understand, each participant had to win fourteen Ghahalas to make a Hephalon; earning a Ghahala was a simple matter of turning
one’s Ja’ja’va shell three times round the Pifflestick; unless the wind was blowing from the northeast, in which case alternate rules were applied. All of this was detailed very rapidly by Lady Middleton, who concluded finally that if Karankrolla is not played for money, the gods are angered.

Out of politeness, no one made any objection but Marianne, who with her usual inattention to the forms of general civility, exclaimed, “Your Ladyship will have the goodness to excuse
me
—I shall go to the pianoforte; I have not touched it since it was tuned.” And without further ceremony, she turned away and walked to the instrument.

Lady Middleton looked as if she thanked heaven that
she
had never made so rude a speech, she did not bother to be offended by Margaret, who joined Marianne at the pianoforte, since the youngest Dashwood sister obviously had no money to wager. With no further warning, she shook the Flakala ball, pronounced herself the winner of the first Ghahala, and collected three sovereigns from the elder Miss Steele.

“Oh!” cried Miss Steele. “I shall hope for better luck next time.”

“Perhaps,” said Elinor apologetically, as shells were distributed for the next round, “if I should happen to cut out, I may be of some use to Miss Lucy Steele, in laying the planks of the ship-in-a-bottle.”

“I shall be obliged to you for your help,” cried Lucy, “for I find there is more to be done to it than I thought there was; and it would be a shocking thing to disappoint dear Annamaria after all.”

Their effusive efforts to hide the true nature of their desire to be together was unnecessary; all eyes were focused on the Karankrolla game, where Lady Middleton was collecting another three sovereigns from the elder Miss Steele.

The two fair rivals were thus seated side by side at the same table, and, with the utmost harmony, engaged in forwarding the same work. The pianoforte, where Marianne was wrapped up in her own music and her own thoughts, was so near them that Miss Dashwood now judged she might safely, under the shelter of its noise, introduce the interesting subject, without any risk of being heard at the Karankrolla table.

I
N A FIRM, THOUGH CAUTIOUS
tone, Elinor began. “I should be undeserving of the confidence you have honoured me with, if I felt no further curiosity on its subject. Therefore I will not apologise for bringing it forward again.”

“Thank you for breaking the ice,” cried Lucy. “You have set my heart at ease. I was afraid I had offended you by what I told you Monday.”

“Offended me! How could you suppose so? Believe me,” and Elinor spoke it with the truest sincerity, “nothing could be further from my intention than to give you such an idea. Could you have a motive for the trust that was not honourable and flattering to me?”

“And yet I do assure you,” replied Lucy, her pupils dancing in her little sharp eyes like carp in two ponds, “there seemed to me to be a coldness and displeasure in your manner that made me quite uncomfortable.”

“Recall, dear Lucy, that at the time of your revelation, we were fending off the attentions of the massive, dicephalic, multitudinously-teethed Fang-Beast,” replied Elinor, grateful to have the monster attack as an excuse for her reticence. “It may have lessened my sympathy to your tale beyond what was appropriate.”

“Of course. And yet, I felt sure that you were angry with me.”

“If I may be so impertinent as to re-enumerate: Fang-Beast; ooze-cloud; spinal column. My mind was elsewhere.”

“Of course,” said Lucy once more, carefully lashing together three toothpicks to serve for the flying jib of the
Infinitesimal.
“I am very glad to find it was only my own fancy. If you only knew what a consolation
it was to me to relieve my heart speaking to you of what I am always thinking of every moment of my life.”

From the gaming table came a noise of happy surprise from Miss Steele. “O! I am beginning to comprehend! If I turn my Ja’ja’va
thusly
—”

“Oops,” said Mrs. Jennings suddenly. “I believe the wind just shifted.”

“Alternate rules!” cried Lady Middleton.

“Indeed,” Elinor continued to her friend and rival, “I can easily believe that it was a very great relief to you, to acknowledge your situation to me. Your case is a very unfortunate one; you seem to me to be surrounded with difficulties. Mr. Ferrars, I believe, is entirely dependent on his mother.”

“He has only two thousand pounds of his own; it would be madness to marry upon that, though for my own part, I could give up every prospect of more without a sigh. I have been always used to a very small income; as girls we lived for a time in a turned-over rowboat, and wove our own clothes out of sea moss. I could struggle with any poverty for him; but I love him too well to be the selfish means of robbing him, perhaps, of all that his mother might give him if he married to please her. We must wait, it may be for many years. With almost every other man in the world, it would be an alarming prospect; but Edward’s affection and constancy nothing can deprive me of, I know.”

Unsure how to respond, Elinor toyed uncomfortably with the beer bottle, soon to house the tiny clipper ship.

“That conviction must be everything to you; and he is undoubtedly supported by the same trust in yours.”