Tess of the Road
Rachel Hartman
For Scott, who’s been on this road with me a very long time
When Tessie Dombegh was six and still irrepressible, she married her twin sister, Jeanne, in the courtyard of their childhood home.
Married her to Cousin Kenneth, that is. Tessie, draped in one of her father’s law robes cinched with an incongruous red ribbon, played the priest. Faffy the snaphound was the flower girl (Tessie had cleverly given him a bouquet of snapdragons).
It was past midsummer, and the plum tree was dropping fruit onto the bricked walkways, little plummy bombs that fermented in the sun and got the bees drunk. They buzzed in slow orbits, the worst sort of wedding guest, and terrified the groom.
Tessie led the wedding party to the bee-free apex of the garden, where the green-man fountain, forever choking on leaves, glugged and fussed and spit water at intervals. Father Tessie—she was a clergyman, after all—clambered onto the low fountain wall and turned toward the happy couple, wrestling her expression into solemnity as she leafed through the weighty tome she carried, just like the priest at Aunt Jenny’s wedding the week before.
Unlike the priest at St. Munn’s, Father Tessie’s book was not the Compendium of Rites but The Adventures of the Porphyrian Pirate Dozerius and His Valorous Crew, Vol. 1. She flipped pages until the story “Dozerius and the Gargantuan Hedgehog of Balbolia” lay open before her, and then she said, “Let us pray.”
Faffy shook his bouquet like it was a squirrel. Petals flew everywhere.
Jeanne bowed her golden head, crowned with white carnations and pink mother-may-I. She clutched a bunch of yellow daylilies to the bodice of her nicest gown, the pale blue velvet with silver buttons that she’d worn to Aunt Jenny’s wedding. (Tessie, dark-haired, had worn the same dress in green, and then torn the skirt climbing the wisteria trellis at Count Julian’s, exactly as she’d been told a thousand times not to do.)
Kenneth, who hadn’t been warned beforehand that he was getting married today, had been hastily clad in one of Papa’s more festive doublets, a wine-colored silk; he was nine, and bigger than the twins, but still it hung to his knees. Docile as a cow, he’d let Tessie festoon his strawberry curls with sprigs of baby’s breath, which made him look rather like he’d crawled in from under a shrub.
“Bow your head, Kenneth,” Tessie stage-whispered to her cousin, who was gaping into space. “And you’re supposed to hold her hand.”
“I don’t wanna hold her hand,” said Kenneth, wrinkling his freckled pug nose.
He was usually so biddable that this resistance took Tessie by surprise. “You have to,” she scolded. “The ceremony doesn’t work without it.”
Kenneth rolled his eyes and grabbed Jeanne’s hand in one of his grubby paws. Jeanne flushed pink, which Tessie chose to interpret as happiness and not embarrassment. These two were less enthusiastic about getting married than she’d anticipated. This boded ill for her grand experiment unless she could turn things around.
She flipped a page and plowed ahead with the service, administering their vows. They mumbled their answers, but Tessie had a fierce capacity for wishful thinking and decided Heaven could hear them even if she could not. At last she uttered the final blessing, words of celestial power she’d memorized during Aunt Jenny’s service: “By the authority entrusted to me by Heaven and Allsaints, let these two be joined in marriage. Let two hearts be as one heart, two lives as one life. What Heaven joins together, no earthly power may rend asunder. Blessed be every enterprise undertaken together and”—here was the important point, Tessie’s entire purpose—“fruitful be thine issue. Under the eye of Heaven, so let it be.”
Tessie beamed down upon her sister and cousin. They stared back, eyes enormous, as if they’d gleaned what she was about. Issue was code for babies, and Tessie, forever curious, was relying upon Kenneth and Jeanne for proof.
* * *
Mama had given birth two months before, and Tessie had been immoderately obsessed with how this had come to pass. The only hint Mama would give her had been the cryptic statement “You can’t have a baby unless you’re married.”
Tessie had pondered these weighty words upon a block of ice in the cold store, sore from the spanking she’d also received. She couldn’t make it add up. If babies came from inside your body (and Mama’s belly, now diminished, was evidence of this), how did your body know that you were married? If Tess pretended she was married hard enough, could she fool herself into having a baby?
She had pretended very hard; indeed, no one could pretend like Tess. When she rose in the morning, she’d said, “Ah, how blessed am I to face another lovely day of being married!” She’d served imaginary dinner and scoldings to her imaginary husband, and said, “Good night, you old prune,” to him every night as she drifted off to sleep. It all came to naught, though. Her belly didn’t swell, and she eventually grew weary of her imagined spouse—he was such a trial to her, Saints give her patience.
Unlike her mother, Tess could abandon the old prune whenever she wished and return to her first love, piracy. That’s exactly what she did.
However, Aunt Jenny’s wedding had rekindled her interest in the mystical origins of babies. There were clues embedded in the service itself, hints of what had been missing from her original experiment. First was the priest’s blessing, “fruitful be thine issue.” Maybe the Saints needed to be given fair warning that someone was ready for babies now. Second was what had come after the wedding, the so-called wedding night.
She understood this only hazily. Aunt Jenny and newly minted Uncle Malagrigio (a Ninysh wine merchant) had gone off to some specially decorated bedchamber while the Belgioso cousins, aunts, and uncles laughed and winked, calling out bad advice and giving them lusty slaps on their backsides as they went upstairs.
Mama hadn’t participated in the merriment but had turned pale and pinched-looking and gone off to nurse baby Nedward in a quiet corner downstairs. Tessie and Jeanne had exchanged a quick look that meant, Mama’s sad, whose turn is it? It had been Tessie’s turn, to her regret. Her great-grandfather Count Julian had just ordered another round of desserts to be brought out; she was going to miss the marchpane.
Tessie dutifully sat by Mama, ready to absorb whatever pain her mother radiated. Mama patted her head absently, as if Tess were her faithful dog, and muttered in Ninysh to Great-Aunt Elise on her other side: “Of course I’m happy. I’m happy I don’t have to worry about my little sister anymore, or how we’d cope if she bore a bastard.”
“You’re so sour we could pickle beets in you,” Aunt Elise muttered back. “What do you want, Samsamese-style scrutiny, flying the bloody sheets in the breeze like a flag of victory?”
Tessie’s ears pricked up at “bloody sheets.” That sounded piratical.
“What I want,” said Mama, her voice sharp and hurt, “is accountability. I want the wicked punished for their sins. Is that too much to ask?”
And then she had appeared, like a spirit summoned to Mama’s anger: Seraphina, Tessie’s half sister. She slouched into the room, sullenly picking at her dessert plate. She always looked bored at Belgioso gatherings. They weren’t her family, after all; Seraphina had a different mother, a terrible dragon mother. Tessie and Jeanne had found out at midwinter and weren’t allowed to tell anyone, which was a misery.