She edged toward it, one hand ready to wrestle her farthingale into submission, the other hand—the one with the teacup—extended for balance. The bench cringed as she sat gingerly, like a sparrow on a fence.
Fat Jacomo plunked himself violently beside her. The bench was springy and bounced; Tess barely kept all her tea in the cup, and nearly went over backward.
Tess regained her balance and glared at Jacomo. He’d had every opportunity to reveal her shameful history to his parents. Maybe he’d kept quiet for Richard’s sake, or maybe he meant to make her suffer. He could hold his knowledge over her like an axe, keeping her ever in fear of the day it would fall.
She made an ugly face at him. Jacomo ignored her, drawing his beetling brows and squinting at the scene beyond the screen. His fleshy mouth puckered in distaste.
Tess couldn’t help it; she looked. Richard, doublet off, his pleated shirt hanging loose around his trunk hose, led Jeanne by the hand across the room. She’d been undressed by maids (this was no longer Tess’s job, nor would it be again in this lifetime; that door had closed) and wore only a white linen shift. She followed her new husband reluctantly, glancing back at the screen with a look Tess knew only too well.
Does it hurt terribly?
“Just lie back and think of anything else,” Tess muttered into her teacup.
“Don’t talk,” said Jacomo, turning his baleful gaze on Tess. “I don’t want to hear a peep from you. It’s your fault we’re here.”
“No, indeed. It’s your vile brother’s,” said Tess, unable to stop herself from poking the bear with a stick. “Or your harridan mother’s.”
“Mother was pleased with this marriage and satisfied with the bride’s virtue,” said the student-priest, folding his fat arms over his fat chest and leaning back until his shoulders rested against the wall. “You had to blab to Heinrigh. You couldn’t stay quiet a few hours longer for your own sister’s sake.”
“You don’t know what I’ve done or would do for my sister’s sake,” hissed Tess. Her fingers clenched around her cup, as if she might dash its contents in Jacomo’s face.
“I know more than you suppose.” He had the gall to smile.
Tess snorted unattractively. “Whatever you imagine, it can have no reflection on Jeanne.”
“My mother would disagree,” he said, leering nastily. “Does the name ‘Lord Morney’s Little Bit’ mean anything to you?”
In fact it did not. Something inside her unclenched slightly. Maybe Jacomo didn’t know anything after all. “?‘Little Bit’ sounds equine. Are you referring to his horse?”
Jacomo made a horsy sound through his lips. “I have it on good authority that you played the harlot to Lord Morney and half the lads at St. Bert’s.”
“Lies,” she said. She downed the last of her cup, relieved. He knew half-truths at most. Rumor had rendered the tale plausibly deniable; resemblance to real persons, living or dead, was coincidental. Tess set her cup on the floor; she caught a brief glimpse of the scene beyond the screen and averted her gaze. “Where do you get your inaccurate gossip?” she said.
“I drink at the Mallet and Mullet,” he said, and this time Tess flinched. He couldn’t have seen her there; it had been almost three years.
Jacomo smirked, malice written on his florid face. “Sometimes I drink with Harald Fjargard and Roger Ivy. They tell amusing stories about one Therese Belgioso. Don’t deny that’s you; I’m not an idiot, and you’re no mistress of disguise.”
Tess’s mouth went bone dry, and suddenly she was at the Mallet and Mullet again—in Will’s room above the kitchens, the floor strewn with books and clothes. There is giggling coming from behind the privacy screen. Will leaps out of bed to find Harald and Roger—his best mates—hiding behind it. He spreads his arms and lets them take in his nakedness. “Happy now? May it be the last thing you ever see!”
He swats the pair with his shirt and they flee, laughing.
Tessie weeps disconsolately, mortified that they’ve seen her, seen all. Will comes back to bed, gathers her on his lap, says, “It gladdens my heart to see you weeping. Do you know why, little bird? You’re the same shy, innocent girl I first met, so modest and pure.” He kisses her bare shoulder. “You are still a virgin in your heart, my little bird, my wife!”
Tess forced her mind back to the present, reeling and nauseated; she longed to crawl into a hole and die. She could only keep her eyes fixed on the floor, her skirts, or Jacomo’s black-clad knee.
She was not going to play Roger Ivy to her sister’s wedding night.
The student-priest studied her expression as if examining a vase for cracks. “That hit a nerve, I see,” he said. “Is your conscience bothering you, ‘Maid’ Dombegh?”
His sarcasm and self-satisfaction felt like another layer of filth on her skin. “Is this how you spend your time at seminary?” Tess said through her teeth. “Getting the dirt on everyone?”
“It passes the time,” he said stiffly, raising his chin so it was merely doubled, not tripled.
“You’re going to be a terrible priest,” she said, clenching her hands in her lap.
He leaned in, grinning, his teeth small and precise in his round face. “Maybe. But at least I’m not a dirty whor—”
Her fist was in motion before she even registered his words, as if her body had made the decision without her, certain she’d approve. And she did approve, in principle, though in practice the collision with Jacomo’s nose hurt her knuckles.
He leaped up, blood gushing down his chin and running into the channels of his white ruff.
The treacherous bench gave way at last and pitched Tess onto her back. She battled her farthingale down and wrested herself back to sitting just in time to see Jeanne, her face pale and her eyes enormous, clutching a bedsheet to her bosom, peek around the edge of the screen.
That night, Tess dreamed.
Drunk as she was, she would not ordinarily have remembered her dreams, but this was unusually vivid. She discovered (in dreamland) that her left foot was wrapped in filthy bandages; she could not remember why. When she unwrapped them, it turned out the bandages had been keeping her foot bound to her leg, and that without them the foot was completely unattached. It lay there on the pile of bandages, inert.
How long had her foot been separated from the rest of her? How had it happened, and how could she have forgotten?
She’d cut her own foot off with a cleaver. She remembered doing it, now that she thought it over, but what a thing to forget! It must have been the most terrifying moment of her life, the moment she realized it had to be done and that she would go through with it. It must have hurt (she couldn’t remember, but logically it must have). How had she found the courage and the will to bring the knife down?
She spent the rest of the dream trying to recapture that feeling—the definiteness, the surety and determination. The commitment. When you decide to cut off your own foot, there can be no hesitation; it’s one swift, decisive blow or a lifetime of mangled regrets. She had done it, though. She had been that strong, if only once.
Sunlight made her eyelids flutter, and she rolled over irritably, not wanting to wake up. She was just on the verge of recapturing the feeling, how she had brought the cleaver down unflinchingly, how she had been tragic and mighty, and in that moment how her bones had chipped and shattered, but it was all done in an instant.
Severed.
Her eyes popped open, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was. Tangled in bedclothes, she lay sideways across a strange bed, her head half lolling off one edge. Above her the ceiling swam with cherubs, and for a nightmarish moment she thought she was back at her grandmother’s house, in the room where Dozerius had been born.
She flailed about, panicking, until she was half sitting up. The room swirled around her, and her stomach churned within her.