Will Power (32 page)

I thanked him for his insight and moved on hurriedly, wondering at how quick people here were to give you personal history lessons. Beyond the barbican was a broad, paved road which skirted the edge
of the city in what looked like a circle. Presumably it led somewhere other than simply round the badly patched walls of Phasdreille, but I had heard so little about the immediate environs that I could not begin to speculate where it might go. When I met my secret assignation, would I be led into the city? And, if not, what else was there round here other than the forest, which was the domain of goblins and dead friends?

A coach drew up as I was mulling this over. My heart leaped and I tried to look conspicuous. It was drawn by a pair of white mares with red ribbons plaited into their manes and tails. A slender white hand parted the curtained window and stretched out, dangling a flounce of red-tasseled silk: a handkerchief, perhaps. Was this a sign for me? I faltered uncertainly. The coach and its offered invitation remained where they were. I took a hesitant step and then, quite out of the blue, a gentleman appeared from the bushes at the bridgehead. He wore a small mask spangled with glittering stones and a pale coat with forked tails and hemmed with gold. He strode up to the coach, took the handkerchief and stepped back as the door swung open in admittance. He climbed up and disappeared inside. The door clicked shut and the coach rattled away.

As it trundled out of sight I looked back to where the stranger had come from. Around the barbican grew dense laurel bushes and a scattering of sculpted bay trees. If I was not mistaken, these bushes were alive with casually hidden courtiers. Indeed, now that I looked, they weren’t really hidden at all. Any attempt at concealment was purely token and, while they all wore elaborate masks, there was a similarly minimal effort to actually hide their identity. Clothes are expensive, and even a wealthy courtier can only run to a few suits of the kind of luxuriance that these blokes sported, so I could recognize several of them at a glance. One of them had been one of the principal players in the love debate we had witnessed while waiting to meet the king, and another had ridden with us earlier in the afternoon.

After another few minutes a different carriage rolled up and stopped. A lady’s satin glove was dropped nonchalantly by the cloaked driver, and a masked dandy emerged from the shrubbery, returned it to the invisible lady inside, and was admitted. The whole thing took no more than thirty seconds. Then they were off to whatever prearranged pleasures they had in store—though whether this would consist of more than courtly wordplay, I could not guess.

For about a half hour this bizarre pantomime went on. Coaches would draw up, display their appointed signs, and collect their respective gallants. Passersby seemed used to the huddle of half-hidden lovers awaiting their trysts and would occasionally stop to chat with one or more of them. More often, however, they would simply watch from an admiring distance. On several occasions the masked courtier would make a courteous bow to the audience before climbing into the carriage. This invariably produced a little smattering of applause from those around, including those halfheartedly ensconced in the shrubbery.

Apart from bewildering me utterly, this strange sequence of events also raised a serious question in my mind. Since this seemed to be the official marketplace of love, how was I to recognize my designated lady? If there had been any mention of some significant token that would identify her, I couldn’t remember it, and even if she stuck her head out of the window, I wouldn’t recognize her. Perhaps she would hang a board with my name in big letters from the window, or the driver would lean over and bellow, “Hawthorne, you’re on next.” I feared I would get little applause from the crowd for that and, since I had neither mask nor sumptuous attire, it seemed I was going to get precious little in the way of panache points.

At that point two courtiers accidentally came out for the same carriage but, after careful inspection of the workmanship of the proffered signet ring, one of them politely retired with much bowing and scraping, for which he got a round of consolation applause. I was close to abandoning the whole farcical escapade when a canopied two-wheel buggy, stylish but probably quite fast, drew to a halt at the edge of the road. The curtain above the half-door stirred slightly and a white hand emerged. It was holding an envelope.

I looked about me, but no one else seemed to be claiming this one. I took a deep breath and strode purposefully up to the vehicle with its single horse and driver. The eyes of the crowd followed me and I sensed their amusement. I felt awkward, like I’d stepped onto the stage knowing only half my lines or couldn’t remember how the scene ended. As is always the case in such moments, the audience smelled my uncertainty and fed on it. A titter rippled through the crowd. I flinched but kept walking, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t have the further humiliation of being turned away. My steps were halting, uncertain, quite different from the confident and balanced strides of
the courtiers who had preceded me. I turned to find some masked fop emerging from the trees in a clumsy, limping gait, which was clearly offered as a parody of mine. The crowd lapped it up, chortling delicately and pointing from behind fans and hats.

If I get out of this, I thought, I’ll show that poncing git what I thought of his joke. He was dressed in deep, glowing blue velvet trimmed with lace and wore a rapier in a jeweled sheath. I’ll remember you, I thought, you clever swine. I’ll remember you, and we’ll see if you can use that sword as well as mince about with it. Knowing that he was probably quite the expert with the blade only made me angrier.

“Mr. Hawthorne?” came a low, female voice from inside.

“What?” I said. “Er, yes, that’s me. I’m in then, am I?”

Not the most romantic speech I could have delivered, I know, but it seemed to do the trick.

“Climb up,” she answered.

And suddenly I forgot the smirking, disdainful crowd. The voice was breathy, passionate, and sent my heart pounding. I did not need to be asked twice. I climbed in and didn’t even think to flick some rude gesture at the crowd as we rattled away.

For a second I sat quite silently in the gloom of the hooded carriage. The girl was sitting opposite me and, like the gallants I had been lining up with, she was masked. It was an odd mask, glittery and shaped like the beak of a bird. Though golden and studded with green stones, it was eerie looking and, in other colors, would have been quite sinister. She was pale and blond, but since that went for the entire non-goblin population of this land, it was hardly informative. She wore her hair in golden ringlets which broke around her shoulders and the lacy enticement of her neckline. Her dress was of a rose-colored silk adorned with frills and some small amethysts. Her necklace looked like silver and tiger’s eye or some similar semiprecious stones. And, strangely enough—for in other circumstances I would have thought her way too good for the likes of me—I was a little bit disappointed.

In my old Cresdon haunt, the Eagle, a woman like this would have turned heads like hands on a clock. Had she walked up to the bar where I sat, cheating some poor idiot out of his meager wages, I would have gaped, stared and, quite possibly, drooled. But I was getting used to beauty, elegance, finery, and riches; I was not quite so easy to impress these days. Before, I would have turned on my best performance for the chance of an hour alone with any woman distinguished by a lack of contagious skin afflictions and a fair limb count, but now I expected radiant perfection. The girl, under her mask and silk, might well be it, but her jewelry clearly wasn’t, and this, strangely, bothered me. She would not have passed muster in the king’s palace thus attired, and there would have been snickerings and knowing glances at her amethysts and tiger’s eye. Perhaps there were the makings of a courtier in me yet.

“You are very quiet, Mr. Hawthorne,” she said. Her voice, as I had noticed when she first spoke, had that rich and breathy character
that spoke of both naïveté and knowledge, of coyness and sensuality. I caught my breath, began to answer, and had to pause, swallow, and try again.

“I am not sure where to begin,” I said, beginning. “You know my name, but I do not know yours, nor do I think I have seen you at court.”

She smiled. That much I could see, since the mask left the lower part of her face uncovered. She had good, even, white teeth, but I was struck not by them but by how few times I had seen courtiers produce anything so genuine. Their smiles were controlled wrinkles of their lips, as if someone had threaded a fishing line through the corners of their mouths and then tugged it gently upward. Such smiles were amused or sardonic, but always restrained, and no one showed their teeth.

“My name is not important,” she said, “and I am surprised you ask it.”

“Is it not normal to introduce oneself before”—I faltered, realizing I had dug myself a hole—“er . . . before, driving somewhere together?”

She giggled at my clumsiness. It was, again, both endearing and uncourtly, perhaps endearing
because
it was uncourtly. I smiled despite myself, but my doubts grew.

“So do you read many plays?” I said.

This stopped her smile like I had smacked it with a large fish. “What do you mean?” she asked, her voice losing a little of the refined politeness it had managed thus far.

“You made reference to a play in your letter,” I clarified. “Have you read many?”

“The odd one,” she said, with no real effort to conceal the lie. She beamed again.

The odd one?
This was not the same mind that had conjured all those phoenixes and clouds onto the pages of the letter. As she seemed to relax and grow more playful, I found myself growing uneasy.

“You’re not from round here, are you?” she said, and a little more of that aristocratic hauteur fell away from her accent.

“Not exactly, no,” I answered warily.

“You’re so tense!” she exclaimed. “I won’t bite, you know. What do you go by, Will or Bill?”

“Either,” I said, cautiously. “Usually Will.”

“Right then, Will,” she announced. “Turn round and let me rub your shoulders.”

She moved suddenly, leaning across the carriage and pulling my upper body toward her. Usually this would be a promising step, but now I flinched like I’d taken an arrow in the gut.

“You’re very highly strung, aren’t you Will?” she said, as I recoiled slightly from her touch. “Your muscles are all knotted up like bits o’ rope.”

I pulled myself back abruptly and caught her wrist. “So that’s the fashionable courtly speech, is it?” I demanded.
“Bits o’ rope?
You didn’t write that letter.”

“Yes, I did,” she said, lying playfully again.

“No chance. You don’t sound like a courtier, you don’t dress like one, and I’ll bet my last farthing that you can’t write like one.”

“What does it matter who wrote the letter?” she answered.

“So you didn’t?” I pressed.

“No,” she replied, a trifle sulkily.

I released her hands, waiting for more information. She folded her arms and sat in silence for a minute or so. Then, in what I took to be her own voice—it was devoid of courtly affectation and touched with some regional accent that was round and earthy—she said, “And you don’t think I look like a courtier?”

Her tone was hurt, and this seemed so completely genuine that my suspicion momentarily evaporated and I had nothing but a kind of pity for her.

“Well, I haven’t really seen you yet,” I said, as kindly as I could in the circumstances.

“There!” she said, snatching the mask from her face. “Now you can see me.”

She was quite beautiful. Her face was fuller than was the fashion at court and she held a slight rosiness in her cheeks which would have seemed too countrified for the city, but she looked real as few of the women in the palace had looked. I was caught by surprise.

“Well?” she demanded, pouting slightly. Even in the dull light I could see that her eyes were hazel, deep and darker than any I had seen in the city.

“You look wonderful,” I said, honestly.

“But not like a court lady.”

“Better than a court lady.”

She looked at me quizzically, a childlike skepticism passing over her face. Then she smiled broadly again. “Good,” she concluded. “Look, we are nearly there.”

She moved the curtain and the light fell on her face. We had been traveling for some time and were now far from the city. Trees grew out of darkening fields and, in the distance, isolated stone cottages showed lights at the windows.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Nearly there.”

“Yes, but . . .”

She reached across and laid her finger on my lips. I fell silent and then decided that this would be a good time to kiss her. I had no idea who she was or what she had in mind for me when the coach stopped, but I could not believe she meant me harm. Well, I preferred not to. It was conceivable that she would slip a stiletto in my ribs or hand me over to someone else who would, but she was no goblin, even if she wasn’t a courtier either. I contrived to get closer to her on the pretext of looking out of the window and then made the move. As my cheek brushed against hers she backed away: a small but decisive gesture.