Lalette looked up through branches to the purpling sky, then down from the little crest and across the long flat fertile fields, reaching out toward the Eastern Sea, where night was rising. “I must go,” she said. “My mother will be back from the service.” Her voice was flat.
“Not yet,” said Rodvard, lifting his head from arms wrapped around his knees. “You said she would stay to talk with the fat priest. . . . In this light, your eyes are green.”
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“It is the sign of a bad temper, my mother tells me. She looked in the waters for me once, and says that when I am married, I will be a frightful shrew.” (It was almost too much trouble to move, she was glad even to make a slender line of conversation that would hold her immobile in the calm twilight.)
“Then you must be fated to marry a bad man. I do not see—if you really loved someone, how could you be shrewish with them?”
“Oh, the girls of our heritage cannot marry for love. It is the tradition of the witch-families.” She sat up suddenly. “Now I must absolutely go.”
He placed his hand over hers, where it rested on the long green moss under the cedars. “Absolutely, I will not let you go. I will bind you with hard bonds, till you tell me more about your family. Do you really have a Blue Star?”
“My mother does. . . . I do not know. My father would never use it, that is why we are so poor. He said it was wrong and dangerous. My mother’s father used it though, she says, before she got it from him. It was he who told her to choose my father. He was a Capellan in the army, you know, and was killed in the war at the siege of Sedad Mir. My mother’s father could read through the Star that my father wanted my mother for herself and not for her heritage. It was a love-match, but now there is no one that can use the Star.” (Lalette thought: I really must not tell stories like that that are not true, it only slipped out because I do not wish to go back and hear her talking about Count Cleudi again.)
“Could not you sell it?” asked Rodvard.
“Who would buy it? It would be a confession that someone wanted to practice witchery, and then the priests would come down and there’d be a church trial. It is a very strange thing and a burden to have witchery in one’s blood.” She shuddered a little (attracted and yet depressed, as always when it was a question of That). “I do not want to be a witch, ever—”
“Why, I would think—” began Rodvard, (really thinking that in spite of her beauty, this was the reason she more than a little repelled).
“—and have people hating me, and those who want to like me not sure whether they really do, or whether it is only another witchery. The only real friend my mother has is Uncle Bontembi, and that’s because he’s a priest, and I don’t think he’s a real friend either, but keeps watch of her so that when she makes a witchery he can collect another fine for the Church.” Rodvard felt the small hand clench beneath his own. “I’ll never marry, and stay a virgin, and will not be a witch!”
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“What would happen to the Blue Star then? You have no sisters, have you?”
“Only a brother, and he went overseas to Mancherei when the Prophet began to preach there. Somebody said he went beyond to the Green Isles afterward, when the Prophet left. We do not hear from him any more. . . . But he couldn’t use the Blue Star anyway, unless he were bound with a girl from one of the other families, who could witch it for him.”
Overhead the sky was deepening, with one faint easterly star agleam, a long slow smoke rose in convolutions from the chimney of a cot down there, (and Rodvard thought desperately of the lovely light-haired girl who had come so many times to search witch-family records at his clerk’s cabinet in the Office of Pedigree, but she was a baron’s daughter by her badge, and even if he did obtain the Blue Star from this one, and used it to win the light-haired girl, then Lalette would be a witch and put a spell on him—oh tangle!). The hand within his stirred.
“I must go,” said Lalette again. (He looks something like Cleudi, she was thinking, but not so old and hard and a little romantic, and he had eye enough to catch the wonderful tiny flash of green among the blue when the sun dipped under.)
“Ah, no. You shall not go, not yet. This is a magic evening and we will keep it forever till all’s dark.”
Her face softened a trifle in the fading light, but she pulled to withdraw her hand. “Truly.”
He clung the tighter, feeling heart-beat, vein-beat in the momentary small struggle. “What if I will not let you go till lantern-glass and the gates are closed?”
”Then Uncle Bontembi will expect me to make a confession and if I do not, he will put a fine on me, and it will be bad for my mother because we are so poor.”
“But if I kept you, it would be to run away with you, ah, far beyond the Shining Mountains, and live with you forever.”
Her hand went passive again, she leaned toward him a trifle, as though to see more surely the expression on his face. “Do you mean that, Rodvard Bergelin?”
He caught breath. “Why—why should I say it else?”
“You do not. Let me go, let me go, or I’ll make you.” She half turned, trying to rise, bringing the other hand to help pull loose his fingers.
“Will you witch me, witch?” he cried, struggling, and his grasp slipped to her wrist.
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“No—.” She snatched at the held hand with the other, catching the thumb and crying fiercely; “I’ll break my own finger, I swear it, if you do not let go.”
“No. . . .” He flung her two hands apart. Lithe as a serpent, she wrung one and then the other from his grasp, but it was with an effort that carried her off balance and supine asprawl. He rolled on his hip to pin her down, hands on her elbows, breast to breast, and was kissing her half-opened mouth till she stopped trying, turning her face from his and whispering: “Let me go. It’s wrong. It’s wrong.”
“I will not,” and he released one hand to feel where the maddening sensation of her breast came against him and the laces began. (The thought was fleetingly seen in the camera obscura of his inner mind that he did not love her and would have to pay for this somehow.)
“Let me go!” she cried again in a strangled voice, and convulsing, struck him on the side of the head with her free hand. At that moment the laces gave, her hand came round his head instead of against it, drawing his face down in a long sobbing kiss, through which a murmur, softer than a whisper; “All right, oh, all right, go on.” (There was one little flash of triumph across her mind, one trouble solved, Cleudi would never want her now.)
Afterward, he knelt to kiss her skirt-hem. Her lips were compressed at the center, a little raised at the corners. “Now I understand,” said she; but he did not, and all the way home was eaten by the most dreadful cold fear that she would revenge herself on him with a witchery that would leave him stark idiot or smitten with dreadful disease. And the other, the other; his mind would not form her name, and there was a cry within him.
II
All three of them were waiting, with that man of Count Cleudi’s—the olive-skinned one with such intense eyes—what was his name? Lalette curtsied; Uncle Bontembi smiled. Said Cleudi; “Mathurin, the baskets. I commenced to think we should miss the pleasure of your company tonight, charming Demoiselle Lalette, and my heart was desolated.”
“Oh,” she said, (thinking—what if they knew?). “But here is Uncle Bontembi who will tell you that to be desolate of heart is to serve evil and not true religion, since God wishes us to be happy; for since he has created us in his image, it must be an image of delight.”
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“You reason like an angel, Demoiselle Lalette; permit that I salute you.” She moved just enough to make his kiss fall on her cheek. Dame Leonalda simpered, but there was, flick and gone again, a frown across Cleudi’s high-cheekboned face. “What a lovely color your daughter has!”
Mathurin laid out the table with napkins which he unfolded from the baskets. There were oysters packed in snow; bubbling wine; a pastry of truffles and pike-livers; small artichokes pickled entire, peaches that must have come from the south, since it was only peach-blossom time in Dossola; white bread; a ham enriched with spices; honeyed small sweetmeats of dwarf fruit. (If he were only more to me and less for himself, thought Lalette, he might be possible; for he does not stint.) They sat down with herself and her mother opposite each other and the two men at the sides of the table, so small that knees touched. Mathurin the servant stood beside her chair, but flitted round to give to the rest as occasion demanded. Cleudi discoursed—a thousand things, eating with his left hand and letting his right now and again drop to touch the fabric over Lalette’s leg, which, laughing with talk and wine, she did not deny him. (An aura, like a perfume of virility and desire and pleasure, emanated from him; Lalette felt as though she were swaying slightly in her seat.)
“Lalette Asterhax; the name has fifteen letters,” said Cleudi, “and the sum of one and five is six, which fails by one the mystical number of seven. Look also, how you may take it by another route, L being the twelfth letter of the alphabet, so that to it, there is added one for A, another twelve for the second L and so on, the sum of all being eighty-seven.” (He has prepared this in advance, she thought.) “Being itself summed up again this eighty-seven is fifteen, so it is evident that you will be incomplete and thus lacking in happiness, until united with a man who can supply the missing figures.”
“I am not sure that the Church would approve your doctrine,” said Uncle Bontembi. He had moved his chair around to place his arm over the back of Dame Leonalda’s, and she had thrown her head back to rest on the arm.
“You are clearly wrong, my friend,” said Cleudi. “The Church itself takes cognizance of the power of numbers, which are the sign-manual of enlistment under God against evil, rather than being the protection itself, as some ignorant persons would make them. Look, does not the Church in Dossola have seven Episcopals? Are there not seven varieties of angels, and is it not dulcet to make seven prayers within the period? Whereas it is the heretical followers of the Prophet who deny the value of numbers.”
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“Then,” said Lalette, “I must never complete myself by union with you; for you have five letters and the seven of my first name being added to them, make twelve, which is three by your manner of computation, and an evil omen.”
Cleudi laughed. “All, divine Lalette, your reasoning is unreason.” He poured more wine. “For it is clear that man and woman are each incomplete by themselves, not to be completed until they are united; else we were not so formed. Now such union is manifestly to the pleasure of God, since he arranged it thus, so that if anything prevent true union, it must be contrary to the ordinance of God. Is this not exact, Uncle Bontembi?”
Through Dame Leonalda’s giggle the priest smiled, his face curling in wrinkles around the fat. “Your lordship lacks only the oath and a drop of oil in the palm to be an Episcopal. I resign in your favor my chance of preferment.”
“But I’ll resign no chance of preferment.” Cleudi reached to squeeze Lalette’s hand, where it lay on the table. “A stroke of fortune. I happened to fall in with His Grace the Chancellor only this morning. He spoke of the difficulty in finance, which is such that—would you believe it?—there is even some question whether Her Majesty will be able to take her summer holiday in the mountains.”
Dame Leonalda raised her head. “Oh, oh, the disgrace!” she sighed.
“I do not see the stroke of fortune,” said Lalette simply.
“A disgrace, yes,” said Cleudi, his mobile face for a moment morose. “But I was happily able to suggest to His Grace that the matter of taxes be placed in the hands of the lords of court, themselves to be taxed an amount equal to that due from their seignories, and they to collect it within their estates.”
“Again—the stroke of fortune?” said Lalette, not much interested, as she dipped a finger in the wine and drew arabesques on the table-napkin in the damp.
“His Grace was so much charmed with my plan that he offered me a place in the service, with the directorate of the lottery, so that I now am happy enough to be no more a Tritulaccan, but Dossolan by service of adoption.” He lifted his glass to Lalette. “I shall drink to your grey eyes, and you to my fortune.”
The glasses touched. “I do wish you good fortune,” she said.
“What better fortune could there be than to have you attend with me the first opera-ball of the season, and make the drawing of the lottery as its queen?”
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Said Uncle Bontembi, in a voice as rich as though he were addressing a congregation; “Spring is the season most calculated to show forth the victory of God over evil and the beginning of new growth and happiness. Not only do we celebrate the return of the sun, but the rejection of darkness, as the former Prince and false Prophet.” Lalette did not look at him.
“I will send a costumer to make you one of the new puffed bodices in—yes, I think it must be red for your coloring . . .” began Cleudi, and then stopped, his eyes seeming to jut from their sockets, as he stared at the wet design under Lalette’s finger. Her own gaze focussed, and suddenly she felt tired and very old and not wine-struck any more, for without thinking at all she had traced the witch-patterns her mother taught her long ago, and now they were smoking gently on the table-cloth.
“Witchery!” croaked the Count, but recovered faster than the shock itself, and slid in one motion to his feet, with an ironical bow. “Madame, my congratulations on your skill in deception, which should take you far. You and your precious mother made me believe you pure.”
“Yes, witchery.” She was up, too. “It would have been the same in all cases. I don’t want your filthy costume and your filthy scudi. Now, go!” Before he could sign himself, she splashed him with a spray of the dazzling drops from her fingertips. “Go, in the name of Trustemus and Vaton, before I bid you go in such a manner you can never rest again.”
Off to one side Lalette heard her mother sob; Cleudi’s face took on a look of dogged blankness. Without another word he let his hands drop loose to his side, trotted to the door and through it. Cried Uncle Bontembi; “We’ll see to her later. I must release him,” and rushed after, his fingers fumbling in his robe for the holy oil, his flesh sagging in grey bags above his jowls.
Lalette sat down slowly, (her mind devoid of any thought save a kind of regretful calm now she had done it), as her mother raised a face where tears had streaked the powder. “Oh, Lalette, how could you—” (the girl felt a wild flutter of being trapped again), but both had forgotten the servant Mathurin, who stepped forward to grip urgently at Lalette’s elbow. “Rodvard Bergelin?” he demanded, and she recoiled from the temper of his face, then remembered her new-won power, and touched his hand lightly as though to brush it away, saying:
“And what business of yours if it was?”
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“He is the only one can save you. The Blue Star, quickly! Cleudi will never forgive you. He’ll have you before the Court of Deacons; he’ll—” He ran round the table to Dame Leonalda. “Madame, where is the Blue Star? It belongs to your daughter, and she must leave on the moment. You will not know her if she has the torturers to deal with.”
The older woman only collapsed into a passion of alcoholic sobbing, head on arms across the table. “I suppose I must trust you,” said Lalette. “I think I know where it is.”
“Believe me, you must. He is as cruel as a crocodile; would strew your grave afterward with poems written by himself, but not till he has the fullest pains from you. . . . Is it in that?”
Lalette had pulled aside her mother’s bed, beneath which lay the old leather portmanteau with the bar-lock. Mathurin tried it once, twice; it would not give. Before the girl could protest, he whipped a knife like a steel tongue from beneath his jacket and expertly slashed around the fastening. The portmanteau fell open on a collection of such small gauds and bits of clothing as women treasure, Mathurin shovelling them onto the floor with both hands until at the back he came on an old, old wooden box, maybe a handsquare across, with a crack in the wood and a thin slab of marble that might once have borne an inscription set in its cover.
“That must be it,” said Lalette, “though I have seen it only outside the case. I cannot be certain now.”
“Why?”
“A witchery is needed, and—”
“Get your cloak and what money you have. Rodvard lives in the Street of the Weavers, the third house on the left as you turn in, the one with the blue door. Do not wait; I must attend my master.”