Wisdom's Kiss (40 page)

PENNED BY ANONYMOUS

Act I, Scene ix.
Wisdom's suite in Phraugheloch Palcene.

A knock. Fortitude, weeping, opens the door.

FOOTMAN
: A letter for Lady Fortitude.

FORTITUDE
: I thank you ... O Tips!...It is as I feared—you love another! O my love, you have broken my heart!

Fortitude exits the suite, weeping.
Enter Wisdom, weeping, and Benevolence.

WISDOM
: How shall I survive this? I know I must marry, but tomorrow...'Tis too soon!

BENEVOLENCE
: What scheming do these nuptials hide? I smell strategy behind the haste—strategy most diabolic.

A knock. Benevolence opens the door to Roger.

ROGER
: Good evening, Your Majesty. Have you no maid or footman to perform this labor?

BENEVOLENCE
: Honest work should never trouble honest people ... Good evening to you, Your Grace. How fare you this night?

ROGER
: I came to inquire as to the well-being of my betrothed. If there be any succor to offer, please do not delay in communicating how best I should convey it.

BENEVOLENCE
: His Majesty's announcement has quite overwhelmed my granddaughter, who fears too little time to prepare her wardrobe.

WISDOM
: Yes! I have not yet a gown suitable to wed a duke.

ROGER
: Our love needs no cloth to secure it! I have burned six months to be your groom; 'tis a light in my heart that I shall be yours tomorrow.

WISDOM
[
aside
]: But do I wish to be yours in return?

BENEVOLENCE
: If six months you have tarried, why dash now? I must confess I find baffling this need for dispatch.

ROGER
: We would the emperor's blessing...

BENEVOLENCE
: Yet Rüdiger lingers in Froglock, as well he should for such enthusiastic crowds. Many details yet require resolution—the terms of your
style
, for example. Does not Her Most Noble Grace take issue with "Duke and Princess"?

ROGER
: 'Tis of no account! My sweet mother thinks only of what is best for our family, as do I.

BENEVOLENCE
: In wedding Wisdom you will have a new family to defend.

ROGER
: I prefer to think of Wisdom joining our greater whole...

BENEVOLENCE
: As a drop of rain is absorbed into a broad ocean?

ROGER
: Precisely!

WISDOM
[
aside
]: Heavens preserve me! I shall be drowned!

BENEVOLENCE
: I had anticipated a more compassionate response to my metaphor ... I must ask outright: what schemes do you hatch for this beloved girl?

ROGER
: Schemes? I take offense! It will be only glory for us both—glory that we but deserve!

WISDOM
[
aside
]: We, we, always it is two! Where am I to be found in this equation?

BENEVOLENCE
: 'Tis my experience that a ruler's call for glory leads to many men's pain.

ROGER
: You wish Farina to remain a duchy, undistinguished? Easy words for a queen of a kingdom!

BENEVOLENCE
: My granddaughter shall not wed a man more zealot than peer.

ROGER
: It is the emperor's decree—you will defy that? I thought not. Fear not, Your Majesty, for the princess's royal status is most valued by my mother and myself. I depart, my betrothed; tomorrow, my wife.

Exit Roger.

WISDOM
: I do not like that man!

BENEVOLENCE
: Nor I ... Yet what other resolution can prevail?

Enter Escoffier the cat.

WISDOM
: We are not entirely without power ... You have capacities, handsome Escoffier, do you not?

BENEVOLENCE
: No! We made a solemn vow—upon the death of another!—that we would abstain forever from magic.

WISDOM
: Yet this union shall cause the death of me!

BENEVOLENCE
: Surely we may yet devise a natural solution. O dear cat, what are we to do?

FELIS EL GATO

Impresario Extraordinaire ♦ Soldier of Fortune
Mercenary of Stage & Empire

LORD OF THE LEGENDARY
FIST OF GOD
Famed Throughout the Courts and Countries of the World
&
The Great Sultanate
*
THE BOOTED MAESTRO
*

W
RITTEN IN
H
IS
O
WN
H
AND
~A
LL
T
RUTHS
V
ERIFIED
~
A
LL
B
OASTS
R
EAL

A Most Marvelous Entertainment. Not to Be Missed!

***

SADLY
, the audience's most fitting veneration of "The Demon Vanquished" was cut short by the emperor, who—to my pique, I cannot deny it—interrupted the thundering adulation to proclaim that the princess would wed Duke Roger the very next day! This unexpected news sent the princess into a swoon— performed quite artfully, if I may say. Duchess Wilhelmina appeared thoroughly satisfied with the emperor's words; clearly the woman deduced what so many astute observers, myself most of all, had already observed: her son's betrothed now preferred a well-trained circus acrobat. Sensing that the spotlight had faded from our act, with a flourish of my red demon cape I withdrew from the stage with my apprentice. The uproar from the emperor's announcement affected the show for some time, and I fear the tigers, with that innate animal ability to sense unease, were too unsettled to perform. Nor did Tomas appear for his usual act upon the Globe d'Or despite the three runners I sent to seek him out, and so I was forced to stage the Jug Juggler in his stead, and a poor substitute he proved.

Experienced as I am in the torment which love wreaks, I sought Tomas out upon the show's conclusion, and, as I had expected, found the young man in the throes of romantic agony. While he recognized too well that Wisdom, royal born and promised to another, could never be his, he had yet dreamt of enjoying his sliver of paradise a few brief days more. Exacerbating this tragedy—as I learned in sobs and fragments while he raged about his chamber—his childhood sweetheart, that tavern wench to whom he remained so interminably loyal, was in Froglock this very minute, employed as none other than lady-in-waiting to the princess! And she, in witnessing the fervor of Tomas and Wisdom, underwent her own most brutal humiliation—made all the worse by her having up to that moment believed her love to be a
soldier!

I could only marvel at the extraordinary drama of this romance, and my mind straightaway commenced concocting how best to put it to the stage. My theatrical instincts, however, did not prevent me from simultaneously endeavoring to set Tomas's heart at ease. He, I deduced, had already sent Trudy (a name I recalled all too well from countless previous conversations) a missive explaining his predicament and apologizing for the suffering he had inflicted, and while his promptness in this regard should be commended, the gist of his correspondence as he summarized it for me was not close to the more lyrical words of which an experienced beau would doubtless have been capable.

So it was that I urged the young man without fail to approach this Trudy, and with voice and manner express the thoughts that with ink and paper he so patently had not. I advised such a tactic well aware of the lad's magnetism, and the fact that he wielded his dark brows and lashes as another might a bouquet of roses. For a woman had but to see the young man—as so often I had witnessed these past years—to fall under his spell. Such was his inherent goodness that never once had Tomas employed this facility for the infliction of suffering, and I knew in my heart that the maid's pain would only be eased by his physical presence. With kind words he could explain the necessity of passing himself off as a soldier given his two brothers, who together had as much appreciation for art as an eel would for mountaineering. Though Tomas begrudged the falsehood, I had forever exhorted him to persist, explaining again and yet again how this one small
misdeed
permitted all his great
deeds
(a lovely example of the phenomenal word craft of which I am capable, particularly when my genius is called upon in the heat of debate). Now, conversely, I employed the same brilliant logic as I soothed him that this cloud of misunderstanding had a bright silver lining in that he could at last speak the truth and relate to the girl his many adventures and accomplishments these past years.

Much gladdened by my excellent counsel, the lad promptly set out, though heedful of my warning that his appearance in Phraugheloch would doubtless sit ill with the duchess.
I, on the other hand, delighted that my
sagacity
had once again produced such an assuredly successful outcome, settled myself in my private tent for some well-deserved slumber.

T
HE
S
TORY OF
F
ORTITUDE OF
B
ACIO
, C
OMMONLY
K
NOWN AS
T
RUDY
,
AS
T
OLD TO
H
ER
D
AUGHTER

Privately Printed and Circulated

WRETCHED TRUDY
! No one in the history of Lax had ever been so miserable. To discover in one instant that Tips had been misleading her for six years
and
that he now loved another ... It was only a terrible dream, Trudy almost convinced herself—and then came his letter, confirming all her worst fears.

She could not bear, not for another instant, to remain in that horrid suite, not with the princess in the next room—with Trudy expected to wait upon her! Horrid Montagne and its horrid people stealing other lasses' sweethearts! Trudy would never speak to them again. Not even to Nonna Ben, however nice the old woman might sometimes appear to be, at least to Trudy's face...

Weeping with sorrow and rage, Trudy fled into the palace proper, thankful beyond measure for the empty corridors, the vast rooms and marbled staircases echoing away into silence, their few occupants focused on their own tasks and thoughts. Every Phraugheloch staff member and attendant, it seemed, was busily preparing for the extravagance of tomorrow's royal wedding—a wedding Trudy would not be attending, however unseemly that might appear. All she wanted was to go home. Put a scarf over her hair, her old cape over her shoulders, and go back to Bacio.

But ... but ... she could not.

In her anguished wanderings, Trudy realized with a wheeze of dread, she had become totally lost. She had not a notion where in the palace she was. The corridors faded one into the next: here a mirror, there a palm tree standing forlorn and lonesome in an enormous embellished pot, elsewhere a ceramic vase taller than Trudy herself. And everywhere, firmly shut doors.

Even if she could find the palace entrance—which seemed very far away indeed from wherever it was that she now stood—she would not depart Froglock without her few possessions. But where in this architectural monstrosity was their suite?

She must not panic ... Nor need she panic, she realized suddenly, for her sight seemed to work here, quite tidily, in fact. If one corridor filled her with trepidation, then she obviously should take the other.

Which was precisely what she did.

Trudy moved through the hallways with growing confidence, pausing only to step aside when others approached; tonight of all nights she had no appetite for prying eyes and disparaging whispers.

On she trekked, climbing staircases and creeping down dimly lit corridors, surprised she had traveled such a distance unwittingly ... and then stopped. She had to stop, for the corridor ended, quite abruptly, at a great pair of doors bearing a polished brass plaque:

CHANCELLOR OF FINANCE
ENTRY INVARIABLY & MOST VEHEMENTLY FORBIDDEN
WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION
OF HER MOST NOBLE GRACE
THE DUCHESS OF FARINA

Any Soul Who Contemplates Even Glancing
at the Pages of this Volume Will
Be Transformed into a Toad
Suffer a Most Excruciating Punishment.
On This You Have My Word.

Friday—v. late—

My life grows ever more dreadful! Roger has just departed—I cannot imagine what I ever saw in the man. He does not love me—he loves only my title & his infernal glory. Were it not for the emperor's edict I should run away this very night with Tips & a few possessions in a sack—like that girl in the story—& find my fortune as I might—perhaps another circus would take us—

Yet why waste the ink to write these words—there is no hope. I even suggested—such is my desperation!—that Nonna & I chance magic—but she v. wisely set me straight!
Now she weeps as well—the only time I have ever seen her cry save for
dear Mama
.

0 Mama—why did you have to do that! You were so good at so many things—you did not need to fly! It should have been me on the broom that fateful night—I have a head for heights—it is on ground that I fail—as I fail now!
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