“She punched a priest,” Papa finally said weakly.
“Feh. Who hasn’t?” Mother Philomela had untied her donkey and was stroking its nose. “Well, never mind. The parents never know. I’ll get to the bottom of it. Our order is salubrious for wild and selfish young ladies. Nothing like a hospice full of graypox victims to give you some perspective. Life is short, by Heaven’s mercy, and we are distressingly fragile.”
The nun leaped onto her donkey like a woman half her age and began to sing in an unexpectedly clear soprano:
The flesh is but
A sack of goo,
A feast for worms
To delve into.
Remember, mortal,
As you strive,
That you, ambitious goo,
Must also die.
Papa mounted his horse, his lips pinched as if the song disturbed him. Tess had been standing frozen, listening to them talk, and had forgotten to pull the shawl across her face. Papa looked right at her as he turned his steed.
He looked her in the eye.
Maybe he thought she looked familiar; his frown deepened, and his gaze lingered. Maybe he thought, That woman could be Tessie’s twin, almost, or the question arose in his mind halfway to Ranleigh Cottage, Wait, did I see…? No, it couldn’t have been.
He didn’t recognize his own daughter out of context. He rode on, unseeing, unknowing. Tess gaped after him, her voice caught in her throat, insubstantial as a ghost.
Tess flopped down in an empty doorway at the edge of the market square and leaned her aching head against the frame. Papa had left her shaken.
She’d always known she was particularly flawed—it was the fabric of her life—but she hadn’t been bad on purpose. Even if she’d been a bit wild as a child, that was a long time ago. Did Papa think she enjoyed shaming herself and her family? What kind of joy, anarchic or otherwise, was to be had from ruining yourself?
And yet Tess couldn’t quite believe herself born bad, either. Her entire existence had gotten off on the wrong foot, somehow, but it wasn’t uniformly awful. She’d taken good care of Faffy; she’d saved the life of a quigutl laying eggs in the cellar. She’d gone to Mass—well, no, Mama had dragged her. But would someone born bad have given two years of her life unselfishly helping Jeanne find a husband?
Unselfishly? You whined the whole time, whispered her mother’s voice at the back of her mind. And you almost spoiled it for her in the end.
Then there’s Will and the baby. And just this morning you kicked a helpless old man.
Tess closed her eyes against the painful sunshine, deeply weary. Cosmically weary. She’d run away from home, and now she wanted to run away from running away, but it was no use. Tess (born bad) was always with her, wherever she went.
Wine might have helped, temporarily, but she had hardly any coin in her little purse. She could’ve afforded beer, but…She cringed, remembering yesterday’s state of mind, Mama’s voice in endless pursuit. Being drunk wouldn’t guarantee peace of mind, and besides, she’d be undrunk and penniless before she knew it, and then what would she do? Tess (b. b.) would be waiting for her, worse than ever.
There was only one permanent way to run away from yourself. Tess considered it carefully. The knife she’d brought was short and dull, and she didn’t know where to stab herself effectively. It would be embarrassing to only mostly bleed to death before scabbing up. The bridge she’d slept under wasn’t high, although there were convenient rocks to dash herself against. Dashing seemed an uncertain art, though. With her luck, she’d merely break her ankle and have to lie there in agony until someone discovered her.
Mother Philomela’s song had made death sound as easy as it was inevitable, but Tess had (she felt) a special talent for doing things wrong. The bad in born bad was more than mere sinfulness; she’d bungle her own death, given half a chance. She did everything wrong.
She stared at the mockingly blue sky. Dying took commitment. It was easier to go on living incompetently. What if she put off deciding until tomorrow? She needed time to get her nerve up and work out a foolproof, painless way to do it. Until then, she’d walk on—badly.
Tess staggered to her feet, brushed dirt off her backside, and drifted back into the market. She bought a pork pie, devouring it joylessly, and a water skin, which seemed sensible. Then, having used up almost all her capacity for planning, she bought some more little cheeses, the foodstuff requiring the least amount of thought or ambition.
There. Incompetence fulfilled. She’d last one more day.
You’ll never make it to Segosh, said her mother’s voice. She swatted the gadfly thought away. She couldn’t think about Segosh right now; one foot in front of the other was all she could manage.
A booth full of shiny quigutl devices stood nearby, and Tess’s feet, operating separately from her will, took her in for a closer look. Most of their wares were communication charms, shiny thniks and thnimis heaped in pewter boxes or strung from the ceiling in matched pairs, tinkling like Saint’s-day chimes. Tess didn’t care for those; her childhood friend, Pathka, had given her a taste for the oddities. A statue that spoke your words back to you, billed as an aid to memory. A four-legged dancing fish, sold as a children’s toy or back massager. A whistling, jack-knifing mechanical shrimp that had no purpose whatsoever.
Pathka had scuttled out of Tess’s life before most quigutl craft had become legally available to the public, but she’d given Tess a small collection of curiosities during the years they’d been friends. Seraphina had collected such trinkets, too, but her docile statuettes were boring compared with Tess’s restless pets. (Tess drew the obvious parallels between herself and her sister, of course; it was so seldom that she came out ahead of Seraphina in any way that she’d clung to this one victory with a fierce, if misplaced, pride.) Pathka had given her an ever-inching brass caterpillar, a scorpion-cow named Stingy, and a fthootl (Pathka’s word) that fluttered like a drunken butterfly and would poke you in the eye given half an opportunity.
“It’s supposed to poke you in the eye,” Pathka had explained. “It’s part of a game we play, called Poke Me in the Eye. The object is—”
“To poke someone in the eye?” Tess had cut in, like the young smarty-biscuit she’d been.
“No, no,” said Pathka. “You’re supposed to catch it with your eye cone before it can poke your eye.” She had demonstrated; the quigutl had bulgy eye cones like chameleons, and the aperture could widen and narrow, apparently at will. When the fthootl made a stab at her, she clamped down on it. “It’s good for building up ocular dexterity,” Pathka explained.
“What happens if it gets all the way through?” asked Tess, morbidly fascinated.
“Blindness,” said Pathka pleasantly, as if she were talking about cake.
The memory made Tess smile in spite of herself. Most Goreddis found the lizardy quigutl frightening, but if you could get past the surface—learn their language, to start—they were deeply odd. Far stranger than anyone imagined. Tess felt privileged to know this.