Watching
“He’s a strange one,” she said.
Horace, looking past her shoulder, down and past the gateway to the square, ignored half a dozen men she could have used those words about, and said, “The Scrivener. Who’s this that calls him strange? Not Wanda, surely.”
She looked at the table she was using for a writing desk, set to catch the afternoon light and cluttered with weighted piles of paper scraps. “Wanda has unplumbed depths. But no, Pinky, I’m serious.
“He’s always there. Always around. And listening. You like him, don’t you? Not just the boy; the poet. Better than me, I imagine. I think more people have heard his little rhymes than have ever seen mine. With all there are in print, nobody reads them. Father—yes, I’m using “Father” now—he has them set in type and gives the things away like they were some sort of tea biscuits with the royal favor stamped in gold.”
He thought that John did well with the books. The crests were barely noticible.
“Michael wants me to move back home.”
That would be the reason for her mood now after the visit. “Hmm. You would have known they might expect that some day he would produce an heir.”
“Oh, I’ve convinced Aunt Emily at least. Finally. That however things might look on paper, Michael can do much better. I have her looking more closely at Robin. Poor little duck. She’s been in love with him since she was nine.”
“You’d have him trade one cousin for another? Swap a Swan for a duckling.”
“Oh, but Michael’s half in love with Wanda. I think he would marry her instead of me, if I’d go through with it. I admit it has it’s charms.”
“The mistress wife. You wrote that one already in The Bishop’s Second Woman. And the way you turned that ending shows you know better than to try it, even if only as a joke between the two of you. You have a better grasp of reality than that.”
“You think I would make a poor tragic heroine?”
“I think you’re insane and this whole whoring business proves it.”
“But, Pinky, I ‘m a very well-respected whore. And it is what tipped the scales with Auntie Queen.”
The lower angled sunlight put her face somewhat in shadow, but tipped the the curls formed from her newly shortened hair. He wondered if she’d washed away the tint and before or after her interview.
“I saw you the day of your Baptism,” he said. It was the light that made him think of that. The light and the thought of the Queen and her strange brood. “I met (___cousin) in the market. They were drunk or halfway there and making a party up as they went along. Buying presents for a baby. You.
“You know the things Linette did to have you born within the city and acknowledged by the family? Six months of secrets and plotting boiled down to that. Drunks buying presents for a baby.”
“They dragged me along to (________house). I got lost. Then I walked into the Little Garden.”
“The Pretty Garden. I called it, as if all the others there weren’t”
“You were sleeping in her lap. In that contraption Phillip’s uncle designed. Glider swing.”
“I think you may have mentioned the moment once or twice. You bad thing thinking you had fallen in love with some new mother.
“You know, Pinky, I only recently found out you could have been my father. Not me, of course. I wouldn’t have been me with you for a father, but Linette’s baby.”
“John told you that?”
“No, Linnie, silly.”
“You went there.”
“I had some questions.” For both Linette the mother and Linette of the church, he imagined.
“You would go that far. Rather than marry Michael?”
“As she said: even now a woman could do worse than going to the church.
“She ‘s proud of me, Pinky. She doesn’t just have my books, she reads them. She knows them at least as well as Roger does. Almost as well as you.”
“And this recent phase?”
“Is sex: pftt!”
“Emily would not have been so cavalier”
“Well, she has wanted me for Michael, or Elaine—god help, if I had been a boy—since the day she found out John had done the deed to Linnie. It’s difficult for her to let an idea go.”
“And you will be punished.”
“Or have her take it out on everyone I care about.”
“Not an easy woman to have a disagreement with.”
She did not need to answer that. In the square the lamps were being kindled. The scrivener was folding the letter he’d composed for an old woman wrapped in brown cheap cloth that pooled into the dust and hid her feet. The woman touched the still warm sealing wax to print it with her thumb. A sensation almost as intimate as the way he formed thoughts into words and wrote. As Wanda, she had found that disconcerting.”
“No,” she said, “not an easy woman.”
