On the Far Side of the Sea

A man so rich, so young, learns to expect favor.  Youth tells him the world is an eager thing.  Wealth says it holds presents.

The dog Basil had two purposes:  to scent quarry, and to unspoil his master of these expectations.  Because everything about this dog was a trial.

This time it was a flaking door.  A brown flaking door that once was red.  The dog Basil was now scratching at it.  A hovel in the middle of a humid wood with a brown flaking door.  What this dog hunted was mischief.

Just as the man and his manservant caught up, just as both bent to wrench him up by that scruff, the door opened.  The men straightened.  In the doorway stood a woman.

“Which one of you hates my door?”  She said this to the dog.

They looked at her.  She was a different woman.  She made her own light.  Or parts of her did.  Her eyes flashed, and her teeth gleamed, and off her hair danced coins and flosses of shine.  The man forgot to say something.

“Silence all around,” she said.  “A genuine mystery.”  Finally she looked up at the man.

“My dog,” he managed to say.  The butt of his long gun was resting on the ground.  He dragged it forward as if this helped explain.  “Apologies for my dog.”

The woman put a white finger on the barrel of the gun and pushed.  When it leaned quite away, she removed the finger.  Without retracting it she leveled it at the dog.

“You and your masters and their apologies should come in and have something hot.”

Indoors it smelled like mountainside.  There was only one room.  Surprisingly it felt spacious.  Or perhaps just sparse.  The only things were the chairs they sat on, a bed and a hearth, a yellow stove, a kidney-shaped mirror.

And books.  Many appeared to be music books, but nowhere was there an instrument.

They had something hot.  None of the cups matched.

“Haven’t had many visitors since my mother passed,” she said.  The words suggested apology, the tone none at all.  “I may have gotten used to the solitude.”

She stood to refill the manservant’s cup.

“No offense to present company,” she added quickly, sitting down again.  “I do enjoy the occasional guest.  Even the kind that stares.”

The man looked stricken.  “I am so sorry,” he said.

“I was speaking of the dog.”  She cleared her throat.  “What is his name?”

The question was charity, to cut short his embarrassment.  He was grateful.

“Basil,” he said.  “After the herb.  He’s a scent hound.”

“A dog named after a food.  Two of my favorite things.”

“What about trouble?  Because that is this dog’s favorite thing.”

The dog raised his chin off his paws and, using the corners of his eyes for each of them in turn, gave a yelp.

On their way out, the man could think of nothing clever, and simply asked the woman her name.  She told him and asked his.  The manservant picked up both guns.  They had left them outside.  When after a few steps the man looked back, she was still at the doorway.  Her mouth seemed to be moving still, as if repeating his name.

***

Two days later, the man returned.  This time he came alone.  The door still flaked.  A green blade of something fernish wandered across the lower half.  It looked to him like a dog turnstile.  This amused him until it dismayed him.  He was having frivolous thoughts just when he could not afford to feel frivolous.

The door opened.

“You,” she said.

“And you,” he said.

It was awkward at first.  The way he kept his head down reminded her of a burglar.  The way she kept her arms crossed made him feel petty for thinking it made her seem haughty.

But it was easier without the yelping.

He drank from the same cup she’d used during his first visit.  She noticed this with some embarrassment on handing it to him.  He noticed the cup, and the embarrassment, and, pleased to spare her more, that his left-handed grip would keep his mouth from where she’d placed hers.

Both of them pretended not to notice how long they’d been talking.  Partly they were enjoying things.  Partly they did not want to ruin the small delight of announcing surprise at how much time had passed.

When that moment came and went, and it was time to leave, he could think of nothing clever.  He told her where he lived, because that was where he was going.  Instantly he was sorry, because he lived in a castle, and it sounded pompous.  She only nodded her head.

He returned the next day.  But no one answered.

He knocked again.  Nothing.

He waited what he thought a handful of grown men would agree was time enough for a reasonable nap, in case she was taking one.  Then he knocked again.

He waited for hours.  He had given his staff the day off.  He was in no hurry to return home.

He worried.  Maybe she’d left.  Maybe she’d tired of her solitary life and found an appealing cliff.  Maybe she was inside, determined not to subject herself again to what surely she remembered as the monotony of their last encounter.

Maybe she’d left forever.

He returned the next day.  He had not finished knocking when the door moved.

“You,” she said.

“No,” he said.  “You.”

***

It was late afternoon.  Outside the light fell fat and careless through the trees.  Like their other late afternoon conversations—they’d had weeks of them—this one roamed.

The way she had of folding her arms against herself made him feel something between urgency and not getting air.

The way he kept his head bowed but flickered his eyes up at her at the ends of sentences left the back of her neck damp.

They were talking music, and how she’d played the harpsichord as a child (“I’ve told you that before, forgive me.”  “No, I don’t think so.”), and how the truest compliments were always the least graciously received, and about the forest outside.

“You’ll never get lost if you remember moss grows to the north,” he said.

“Or if I stay indoors while remembering it,” she said.

Then about how things seemed more significant when they took place in raw nature:  words, revelations, stories.  She thought of Orpheus among the rocks and trees.  He recalled Jesus in the desert.

“Jesus?” she repeated.

“Yes, Jesus.”

She shifted in her chair.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked.

“No, no,” she said, the second unpersuasive as the first.  She was examining her wrist with her fingers, but roughly, like she’d discovered a weak pulse and there was nothing for it.

“I suppose I’ve never been too religious,” she said.

“What is too religious?”

He meant this earnestly.  She thought he was being clever.

“Thinking you will get an answer,” she said, “when for years you watch someone suffer and ask why.”

He realized she’d misunderstood.  He kept this to himself.

“Because I got no answer,” she continued.  “Which did not make it any easier.  Or her suffering any more meaningful.”  She had not let go of her wrist.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and very quietly, because he believed strong women like this were generally on prickly relations with sympathy.

Abruptly, as if she hadn’t heard him—indeed, almost interrupting him—she said, “What appeals to you about it?”

“What?”

“Your faith.  Him.  The miracles, I suppose?  Turning loaves to fishes?”

“Loaves to—  You do know he raised someone from the dead?”

“I do,” she said.  “I also know he said ‘Turn the other cheek’ and then beat up the moneychangers.”

“Well—”

“Bit of a hypocrite, wasn’t he?”

“Sacrilege!”  But he said it smiling.

“Also incompetent.  Supposedly divine, but couldn’t stop one of his own disciples from getting him killed.  For a bag of change.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”  The smile was gone.

“Silver, then,” she said.  “And hardly a secret, mind, because the prophets had been predicting it for centuries.  Allegedly.”

His chin came down an inch:  the aborted nod of someone concluding something.

“And his faithlessness?” he asked.

“What?”

“You’ve forgotten about the cross.  ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’  While dying on the cross.”

“Exactly.  Yes.  While dying for us.  Setting such a fine example.”

He swallowed.  It had the two-part noise of a swallow, but loud:  a key in a lock, the same key turning.

“You are offensive,” he said.

“That’s fine.  Tell me why I am wrong.”

She sat back in her chair.  It was an act of condescension and infuriating.  He wondered if there was any scripture about getting comfortable in a chair in hell.

“You’ve missed the point entirely,” he said.

She waited.

“Those aren’t coincidences,” he said.  “He shows a lack of integrity, incompetence.  No devotion at the very moment it counts.  What are those?”

“What are what?”

“Virtues, three fundamental virtues.  A man without those things, it does not matter who you are, what others think of you.  He was flawed in exactly those ways for reasons.  A reason.”

He was losing his fluency.  She wondered if he was getting excited.  His voice was smooth, though.

“He was God,” he continued, “but a man too.  He was not perfect.  And those of us who are men also, imperfect also, we are not worthless or hopeless.  His flaws were a reassurance.  We can be good as God.”

She wondered whether he had delivered this before.  And on the surface of that thought formed a bead of alarm.  Maybe this was all a mistake.  Maybe he was a religious fanatic, all that brown ruggish hair a trap.

“That’s what I’ve always thought, anyway,” he said.  “That the flaws were—kindnesses.  Invitations, gentle ones.  To be better.”

The fluster in this last part was a relief to hear.  This was not a speech.  It was the decanting of too many hours thinking alone.

“Interesting,” she said.

“True,” he said.

She laughed.

“Marry me,” he said.

She smiled, put her hands on her knee, and waited.  As if he were sharing something amusing but hadn’t finished.

“What?” she said finally.

It was ridiculous.  He didn’t mind.

“Marry me,” he said.

She did not shake her head.  It was a slower motion, like rubbing first one cheek and then the other against a fur.

“Why?”

His face fell.

“I am a good man.”

“I mean, why are you asking me?”

Those flashing eyes were not built to return steady looks, but he dared them anyway.

“Because you are what I want.”

***

Each time, he made up his mind not to bring it up.  Each time, it burned under his skin, as if an encampment there of jawed beetles was settling down to work, until he said it, blurting it out, and he did not know why, though somewhere in his head there was a notion he could not let history say it was he who had lost her for want of trying.

“Marry me.”

“Again?”

“No, it would be the first time.”

She just looked at him.  In some ways they acted like they were already married.

“Marry me, please.”

***

He had not seen her in a long while.  She had forbidden him from visiting until he learned to keep his promises.

Each time, he had left promising he would not speak of marriage the next time.  Each time, he had broken that promise.

This was an embarrassing record for a man selling a lifelong promise.

He asked his manservant to go.  He knew this was absurd but asked anyway.

“What would I say?” his manservant asked.

“That I love her.”

“I think she knows.”

“Because I’ve told her,” said the man.

“Right.”

“Well then, maybe hearing it from someone else will make it real for her,” the man said.  “Objective.”

The manservant considered this.

“Should I mention marriage?” he asked.

“I can’t stop you,” said the man, “but you should know I love another.”

The manservant, not knowing to laugh, just looked at him.

The man rubbed his chin with a curled finger.  “Please do.”

The manservant returned that afternoon.

“She was very polite.  But very firm.”

“About what exactly?”

The manservant looked down and blinked several times.  He was preparing what to say.

“I asked her as many different ways as I could.  Short of being rude.”  The manservant shifted in place.  “Finally she mentioned her mother.  She was not entirely clear.  Something about love getting in the way of life.  Or yielding to life, no—life yielding to love.  Or—”  He stopped.  “She was not entirely clear.”

“Her mother?”  The man leaned forward.  “If she wasn’t clear how firm could she be?”

“She doesn’t want marriage. She was clear about that.”

The man went “puh” with his lips.  He reviewed the lower parts of the room.

“How does she look?” he asked finally.  “Does she look well?”

“She does, she looks well.”  The manservant nibbled thoughtfully on nothing.  “She does have the strangest habit.  Her mouth keeps moving after it’s stopped saying anything.”  The manservant looked for acknowledgment, found instead an indecipherable inwardness. He kept on.  “Like an echo, but she’s mouthing it.  Have you noticed that?”

The man stood, glowered, and left the room.

***

He regarded the ground as he knocked.  It had all started with that leprous scandal of a door.  The man did not want his eyes spoiled by it.  There was nothing charming about it, nothing, and she should know that.

And here she was.  Her fault, he thought.  She knew well how not to answer a door.  Remember the day she never answered?  Well, she could have done that again, yet here she was, licensing everything that followed.

“It’s been some time,” she said.

“I hope I’m not burdening you,” he said.

“Of course not.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Yes.  What do you know of burdens??  And you the young one, healthy.”

She took a step back.  “What—  Is something wrong?”

“There are many things wrong.  But only a coward, a cowardess, lets that matter.”  His voice was not raised.  He was speaking rather quietly, in fact, and quickly.  His was a voice for statistics.

“Life is not a series of perfections,” he continued.  “You cannot expect perfection.  Are you perfect?  Your door?”  He laughed.  “I don’t think so.  From your mother, from me.  Oh love, how terribly inconvenient.”  The words were jagged, but spoken smooth.

She looked at him a moment.

“You say you love me,” she said.

“It’s me!”  Finally he had raised his voice.  But it was a pleading voice, as if he were tired of uncomprehension.  “I’m the one who hates your goddamned door!”

Without indicating the door or anything else, he turned and left.

***

The manservant made her heart a gyroscope.

Each time she opened the door for him, as she faced outward, it beat a happy warmth.  The sight of him was healing.  She spent so much time thinking of the man that her heart was going sore, just as fingers do when they curl and tighten with nothing to grasp.  The manservant’s visits were a justifying balm.

But the moment she turned to lead him inside, her heart caved and slid meekly behind her stomach.  This was play-acting.  The manservant said the man did not know he came on these visits.  Still.  Who did he think he was?  The wounded lover?  The martyr with an unrequited heartbeat?  And she, who was she supposed to be?  The unattainable prize?  The love-scant shrew, reigning with tantalizing indifference?

Six times the manservant visited.

“It is always a pleasure to see you.”

“Thank you, miss.  Don’t mind me saying, the pleasure is mine.”

Six times she pretended not to want to speak of the man.

“And how have you been?”

“Good, good.  He misses you, though.  He does.”

The manservant had a smell.  It was tall, bluish, geologic.  The man had the same smell.

“What about you?”

“Me?”  He looked with alarm at the opposite wall.  “I—  Of course, yes, I suppose—”

“How have you been, I meant.  You, not him.”

“Ah, yes, I’ve been fine.”  His voice tightened.  “Busy.  Trying to get away as much as I can.  A great time of year for those all-day walks.  Not as much as I’d like, though.”

“Never as much as we’d like.”

The manservant let his lips float apart.

“We’re all busier than is good for us,” she added, “always too busy.”

“Indeed,” he said.

The smell contained nothing organic, and resembled the plodding reek of stone, but still it reminded her for some reason of an eagle’s wings.  Likely it was the castle’s scent and their clothing soaked it up.

“The last time he was here he was—unusual,” she said.  “Has he spoken of that with you?”

“He is angry with himself, miss.  I do not know what happened.  He won’t tell me.  But my feeling?  My feeling is it may be one reason he has not returned.”

It occurred to her she was being tested.  She wanted nothing bad to happen to the man.  Yet only an acute and troubling development—an illness, an injury—would support the number of questions she burned to ask about him.

If this was love, she hated it already.

“What are the others?”

“Others?”

“Reasons why he has not returned.”

The manservant spoke too glowingly of the man.  He took a literal, amateurish approach to his mission.  It was hagiography.  Oddly, this was effective.  She heard enough to miss him.  But the frustration in not hearing genuine things, plausible things, left her ravenous when before she’d been merely hungry.

“By coming he risks you will end it for good.  He might knock on your door and you might say it is pointless.  He might come to your door and you might never want to see him again.  By staying away there is at least the possibility.”

“That is hardly rational.”

“It is for someone desperate.”

One night she dreamed.  The dream was a mass of rectilinear pieces that fit together like teeth.  They threw dark shadows, and these fit together too—an anti-jaw.  In the dream everything was precise and had answers.  Her fingers, each containing a smaller finger-shaped tube, each in turn containing a tube-shaped answer, flew across the teeth:  a keyboard.  She looked down but she had no fingers at all.  Her arms ended not in hands but in large and intricate devices.  She looked up and the sky was the underbelly of a great machine, nippled extravagantly with rivets and bolts.  She stood still and the answer in the tube in the right finger of her right hand—fingers again!—was that nose grace, in every circumstance, lasted seven minutes.  It was the longest time one could smell burnt toast, or the sweet rot of a corpse, or any smell really, without smelling of it oneself, before it seeped into hair and skin and left a lasting taint.  If only she could drop into that castle for seven minutes and fly out of it on the brink of the eighth, she could memorize the scent and have it forever without smelling it on herself, without letting it plague her.  A giant eagle, its wings rippling with arrogant muscle, could drop her in and pluck her out just in time.

She heard it.  The eagle was outside.  It rasped at the door with a single talon.  If it lost patience it might destroy her and her home.  Roughly she roused herself.

At the door was the manservant.  A seventh visit.  He started to say something but saw she was not listening.  Her hair was reckless.  She did not invite him inside.

“He must prove his devotion,” she told the manservant.  “Tell him he must give up his wealth.”

“You will marry him if he gives up his wealth?”

“If he gives up all his wealth I will consider it.  A ‘fundamental virtue’ is what he said.  He must prove his devotion.”

“Must he lose his manservant as well?  Not to dwell on selfish concerns.”

“Consorting with the possessed does not make you a possession.”

“I’m sorry, miss?”

“No.  No, is what I mean to say.  His wealth, not you.”

The manservant breathed firmly out his nose.  His lips were tight with thought, which was why.

“How will he provide for you both?” he asked, regarding the ground as he asked it.

She brushed this away.  “He must prove himself.”

As the door closed, the manservant noticed something dragging across his pant leg.  It was a green blade of something fernish.  He leaned over and gripped the base of the main stalk.

It came out clean, without effort, like an unbarbed arrow from something already dying.

***

Almost six weeks later the manservant returned.  His face was strange.

“It is so good—”

“He has sold everything,” he interrupted.  “He has nothing.  Three days’ clothing.  A few supplies, including a used canteen but good-quality.  And me, of course.”

She did not understand.

“He actually did it?”  she asked.

“Did what?”

“Gave everything up? His wealth?”  Her heart fluttered and plummeted, like a bird full of lead and panic.

“Well, yes.  That is what you said he should do?”

“No, I said he must.  I never said he should.”  The distinction made sense to her but, she was aware, less so aloud.  “Why?  Why would he do such a thing?”

The manservant gave the soft smile of someone who had been through this circumstance before—admirable, because of course he hadn’t—and who stood ready to reassure.

“He loves you.”

“Does he tell you to say that?”

“Who?”

“Him.  Does he tell you to say things like that?  Or are you improvising?”

The manservant looked at a loss for a moment, then recomposed himself.  So completely that he looked satisfied.

“I know it with all my heart, miss.  I do.”

“Fine,” she said, angry.  “Fine.  How do I even verify this?”

The manservant clasped his hands together and held them toward her.

“Come with me if you’d like.  We’ll go to the castle.  It belongs to the Church now.  They’ve put a young friar in charge.  He can confirm it.”

If it was true, she resented the religious slant.  Was the man mocking her?  She looked at the manservant darkly.

“He’s the hospitable type,” the manservant tried.  “He’ll talk to any breathing soul happens by.  Likely has aspirations for parish priest—”

“Indeed, of course.  The good friar.  A cousin, maybe.  From the even more pious side of the family.”  She did not like herself sarcastic.  She felt thirty pounds heavier, jowly.  But she couldn’t help it.  The hot twitching behind her eyes was now in charge.

“And where’s Friar’s cousin living?” she continued.  “No, let me guess.  In the castle, I suppose, rent-free as a condition to the sale?  Friar likes to play landlord too, yes?”

“No, miss.  He is living in a field.  We are.  Both of us.  Currently.”

His clothing did not dispute this.  It looked clean enough but rumpled:  the uniform of the conscientious poor.

“What about everything else?  All his things, his horses?”

The manservant, once so reassuring, now looked in no mood to persuade.  He was tired, clearly.  The lack of eagerness let her know it was true.

“He gave it away.  Well, the money and gold at least.  The rest, it was easier to sell off than give for free.  Unbelievably suspicious, people.  They would rather pay pennies than get at no cost.”  He sneezed and wiped at nothing with his sleeve.  “Then he had to give away the pennies.”

She had hoped listening to all of this would put her thoughts right.  She had been holding them under this good man’s words, waiting for them to wash clean.  But she felt worse, not better.

“What am I supposed to do now?”

“Wait, he kept three days’ clothing,” the manservant said.  “Wanted me to make sure you knew that.  He’s a straight one.”

This man hasn’t slept in days, she thought.

“Devotion is fine,” she found herself saying.  “Devotion is virtue.  And without ability it amounts to a hole in the empty air.  Earn it back.”

“Earn what back?”

The manservant was not a contentious man.  He genuinely was not understanding her.  This made her indignant, made it easier to demand something absurd.

“All of it.  His wealth.  His possessions.  All of it.  Tell him to earn it back.  Without ability a man amounts to nothing.”

“How is he supposed to do that?”

“That is the question, isn’t it?”

The quickness of her own retort reminded her of the man, of that day she awoke to the thump of desultory hail.  She had opened the door and stuck her head out.  It was him, on her roof, giving her a plain look, as if was there something he could help her with?  On the ground was a bucket she did not recognize, stuffed with wet darkness.  He was cleaning her gutters.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she had asked.

He had crouched at roof’s edge, done a little hop, and landed on the ground in the same crouch.  Impressive.  She had forced herself to consider the film on the rim of the bucket, hoping to hide that she thought so.

“Looking for this,” he had said, handing her a leaf.  “It took some time.  But I finally found it.”

So absurd, she’d thought.  And she’d kept it.

“Well, what if he can’t?” the manservant was now saying.

“He can visit whenever he likes, then as now.  But then as now he will not speak of marriage.”

“Miss, please.  That is not just.”

“It is just.  Just what I require.  Or perhaps he can send me a perfumed note stating he is a man without ability.  That way I’ll have something to hold to my nostrils when I think of him over the decades.”

“He loves you very much,” the manservant said.  “Very much.”

When the manservant turned away silently for the door, she felt sorry, and this provoked her further.

“All of it,” she called from the door, as he moved, head down, into the forest.

***

This manor was wood, not stone.  Everywhere she looked, shapes launched themselves from it:  towers, dormers, oriels.  It had been years since he had given away the castle, and she had never seen it.  But she could not imagine it had been more impressive.

Her arrival would cause fanfare.  She wished to avoid that until she’d had a chance to see the gifts.  She walked the perimeter.  There were more doors than she’d anticipated.

At last she chose one on the side, with an open window nearby.  Voices, clattering.  The protuberant odor of roasting lamb.  She’d found the kitchen.

When the door opened, she asked for him by first name.  This was a mistake.  The fat cook stood there and wiped her hands on her apron, jutting a knowing chin and wiping and wiping.

It was a condemning look.  It was a look for a strange woman calling on a man’s wedding day, too low or scheming for the main entrance, brandishing a first name.  It was the look reserved in this part of the country, she realized, for whores bent on extortion.

“I’m his sister,” said the woman.  The truth would only delay her.

“Oh!  Welcome, welcome!”  The cook bustled from the waist up but did not budge.  “Of course!  Though you wouldn’t prefer the main entrance?”

“I know it’s early yet.  I didn’t want to be a bother.  I hoped to get a quick word with him before it gets underway in earnest.”

“Wait here.  Please, sit.  Wait here.  I’ll see if we can’t get him.”

She sat at a side table.  The top was white granite and gleamed.  It made her hot hands feel a mess and she took them away.  She watched the two remaining cooks.  They worked a wall of stoves and ovens.  Motion came off them like a spray.

This kitchen alone, she thought.

The one in her home consisted of the yellow stove and the piece of floor under it.  It had all started with that square sun of a stove.  The air that day had verged on cloud.  Once indoors the men had ached to congratulate themselves with stamping and rubbing, but were cowed stiff by strange hospitality.  A dog of exquisite alertness.  A pot of spiced tea.

This kitchen alone was larger than the only home she’d known.

The cook returned, pink and breathing with her mouth.

“And there she is,” she announced.

The man was behind her.

It was shocking how little he’d changed.  His hair was still a rich brown.  A strand of it wisped across his forehead.  She reproved herself for expecting a diminished man, for overestimating her weight on things.

The feeling went away.  She was left with a sensation of her abdomen as rubbery ullage.  But only for a moment, before it filled with elation.

He stared at her silently.  Long enough that the three cooks stared too.  The fat one had time to sit down.

“You’re an hour early,” he said.

“You’re three years late,” she said.

He took her by the shoulders.  They kissed.  She pulled away.

“This is important,” she said.  “Do not let me be a burden.”

He looked at her.

“Now, or later, when we’re older.  When I’m older.  I will not be a burden.  To anyone.”

He narrowed his eyes and did not let himself smile.

“If you are ever a burden,” he said, “I get to carry you with two hands.  Not just hold you with one.  And my grand plan of three years will have succeeded wildly.”

She put a chiding hand against his chest but kissed him a second time.  They were making up for the wait.

The fat cook looked scandalized and left.

Again the woman pulled away.

“Take me to the room with the gifts,” she said, not looking him in the face.

“The gifts.”

“I must see them.”

“The wedding gifts?”

“Yes.”

“What—  You want to see the wedding gifts?”  He took his hands down.  He had abandoned them in mid-air, in mid-reach, when she’d pulled away.

“I don’t want to see them.  I must.  Now.”

The man watched her, his head back a little.

“You are something,” he said.

The junior cooks glanced at each other.  They were enjoying themselves.

“Had I realized it was a feast that cooked itself,” he continued, no more loudly than before, still looking at the woman, “I might have given the kitchen a month off.”

Clattering.  No voices.

***

She’d seen the manservant just a week before.  It was he who had come to her little house, politely declined to enter, announced the man had earned it all back.  A ceremony was being arranged.  Perhaps she’d like to attend her own wedding.

He looked exactly a few years older.  Under his eyes were dark bands; at last the eyebrows had their reflections.  Wrinkles formed like ripples where forehead pooled over nose.  Words with the letter “m” sent a hair of coarse silver shivering out a nostril and back in.

Now, at the foot of the stairs on the morning of her wedding day, his words were warm.  The rest of him, however, was different.  He stood more than straight.  He kept his arms at his sides, but tucked his hands back into hiding.  And he let her see more of his hands than his eyes.

The man had excused himself for last-minute preparations.  The manservant was leading her to the gifts.  They took the stairs from the first floor to the third.

“The guests, they’re all coming?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, watching his feet on the steps.

“Everyone who was invited?” she asked.

“Yes, everyone, ma’am.”  He cricked his neck down to look at her, but briefly.  “Including, at the bride’s request, everyone from whom the groom has profited.”

She said nothing.

“Over the last three years.”  He was smiling.  “Because I believe that was her official request?”

Men unused to making light did it too heavily, she thought.

“Was that when she was a ma’am or a miss?” she asked.

“I’m sorry?”

Instantly it was she who was.

“Tell me,” she said, “how have you been?”

“I’ve been fine, fine,” he said.  “I’m fine.  You?”

“In a daze, frankly.”  She coughed once; a small laugh, but this was clear only after it finished.

When they reached the third floor he took her to a set of double doors and opened them.

She did not look inside.  She looked down the hallway, where something moved.

It was Basil.  He was portly now, a furry trolley.  Skinny legs but flanks so excessive they continually arranged themselves as the legs made progress.

He sniffed the floor, making as if he had no particular anxiety to see her.  But he let himself steal looks.  And each bat of his tail brought rump with it.

She milked his ears.  He wet the floor.  She scritched his snout.  He raised a genial leg after the fact.

When he opened his eyes again, she straightened.  She looked past the double doors into the room.  This is what she saw:

Stacks of fine count linen; a bronze candelabra on the floor; its twin squatting on a harpsichord bench; the harpsichord itself, an old thing, its ivory keyboard scrimshawed with a mural of a forest scene, its high D a dryad involving herself with a woodsman; a French duck press; two sets of dyed velvet drapes, one indigo, the other cochineal, draped over a rocking horse like a mane that a unicorn might shake his head at; a man’s watch fastened frivolously around a string of pearls; an armoire with his initial carved in the left door and hers in the right, barely legible for all the finials; a mahogany serving table; resting on top of it (and perched near a corner as if considering flight) a brooch in the shape of a butterfly; a set of seventy-three volumes, each a book of the Bible, bound in what she was sure was lambskin; four lamps (two lit) wearing stained-glass shades that ignited their paneled colors but threw whitest light; three suits of armor; Luxembourgeois china, settings and settings, showing hand-painted vines and leaves mingling as in nature with shoots and blooms embroidered in gold along undulating circumferences; a roll-top desk quiet as a blinking eye; a silver trumpet; a crystal cask.

Beyond these, further into the room, there was more.  It was overwhelming.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” she said to the manservant.

“You don’t need to see the other rooms then?”

“Other rooms?”

She followed as he showed her the rest.  Every room on the floor was littered with treasure.  Every room was an opportunity for Basil to wreath his big body around it all.  Somehow he knew to slap his tail against the sturdy objects and not the fragile.

The dog’s glee proved convenient.  She used it to mask her indifference, observing its duration as a measure for waiting and pretending to admire.

For really she cared little about these objects except as evidence.  They showed the man’s goodness to the people with whom he’d dealt.  Other inferences were possible, no doubt.  The gifts could mean merely that he was being cultivated for future business.  But the nature of these items—considered, idiosyncratic, warmly generous—suggested otherwise.

He had proven his character.

The ceremony started promptly at noon.  It lasted a good time, because talking was the friar’s favorite.  The groom and bride showed the same questionable discipline as Basil, stealing looks by turn while the other paid attention.

He thought about her cheekbones, how his lips wanted to take care of them.

She thought about the wisp of hair that floated over his forehead, how she could hang on it all her misgivings.

At the end he kissed her.  She looked flushed.

“Are you all right?” he asked.  “Do you need anything?”

“Nothing at all,” she said, moving that wisp of hair back into place, because she did not need it.

The receiving line was a blur.  With all the people her head whipped this way and that.  She took a hand and discovered the fat cook on the end of it.

“It’s not right, you know,” said the cook who, grimacing, gave the captive forearm a quick rap and moved on.

***

They spent the night in the manor.  The next morning they slept in, ate, did little that mattered.

The boredom got to her.  She was anxious to get outside, take a day trip somewhere.  She reminded him she needed to get her things, from her old house.

“Love is lazy,” he said.  “Love reclines.”

“So lazy it proposes fifty times,” she said, running a fingertip across his lower lip, “and cleans gutters.”

He prevailed and stayed on the sofa.  She got up and went to the other side of the room.

“Whose gift was this?” she asked, sitting down at the harpsichord.

“Don’t know,” he said, lighting a pipe.  “I don’t remember it arriving, actually.”

A few keys stuck.  A low F-sharp was silent altogether.  But the sound was like winter sun, precise and beautiful.

He blew rings to match the mood of the music.  Carefree at first, the shapes of the rings changed right away and continued to change:  uncertain, inquisitive, surprised, delighted.  She’d continued playing even after making her discovery.  The scrimshaw on the keyboard crept down the sides of keys.  The hidden carvings were like secrets stuck between feasting teeth, showing only when adjacent notes were pressed.  They kept the mural whole, seamless, as the instrument was played.  But they also amplified it, adding new scenes, new details of scenes, with each sound.  There was a boy who, having just sold his hands to a witch, held the purchase money in his teeth; a hunter walking on the tops of trees with the slack carcass of a cloud over his shoulder; a needle-fanged infant of a porcupine hatching from a pinecone; a naked man crouching and blowing into the trunk of a tall tree perforated along its height with seven bird-sized holes; seven birds, some landing on the holes and some flitting just off of them, directed by an elaborately gowned woman using a disembodied beak to conduct; a fisherman caught by the boot between two rocks at the top of an enormous cataract, his basket blown to bits in the churn below; a river flowing into the front door of a cabin in whose second-story window an empty rowboat was just visible; a mother with triplet babies, two suckling at her breasts and the third on the knob of her anklebone.

She remembered the young lovers.  There they were, on high D.  She played them and leaned to inspect what their neighbor was hiding.

On the near side of high E was the same nymph from D, but older, and wearing something dark.  A black dress?  The somber figure held with her fingertips the edges of the gown falling off her younger rapturing D-self and flowing from the face of one key up the side of the next.

The widow was not gazing directly at the lovers embracing.  Nor was she looking down.  She was staring away, at a point in space above the middle of the keyboard.  She’d been carved to look the player of the instrument in the face.  Her expression—though tinily rendered—was recognizable.  It was not the look of remembering, but of considering what might have been.

“It is beautiful,” he said.

She gave a start.  “What?”

He was looking out the window.  “Outside.  It’s a wonderful day.”

He was talking, she realized, because she had stopped playing.

“Someone should experience it before it ends,” she said.

She joined him where he sat.  An hour later, wife and husband for exactly a day, they chastised each other happily for having done nothing about going outdoors.   Finally the man found the manservant to fit out the horse and buggy.

“Maybe the carriage instead?” the manservant suggested, rather woodenly.  “I’ll drive and let the two of you enjoy.”  He glanced nervously at the woman and back at the man.

“The buggy’s fine,” said the man.  “We’ll make up for our idle morning.”

It had not rained in a while.  The ground made for smooth riding—no mud, no debris from wind or rain.  Above, equally perfect.  The sky was packed blue dirt.  They wandered for hours.

Just after they turned to head home, they passed under a series of low boughs.  The man stood impulsively and snatched at a leaf.  At the same moment the buggy lurched to the right.  He nearly fell out.

Sitting back down he gave her the leaf.

“The twin I’ve been looking for,” he announced.

“Put up quite a fight, didn’t it?” she said.

“It is fierce,” he said.  “Know that it may not survive in captivity.”

They returned at sunset.  The manor not yet visible, they saw smoke.  The woman’s head went clear with alarm.  As they got closer, the man noted the smoke was not pouring freely.  It was the traipsing smoke of a fire already extinguished.

They arrived.  A jagged smoldering pile.  Where the manor should have been.

Their home had burned to the ground.

One lump on the grass was different from the rest:  an island off a mainland of devastation.  It was the silhouette of a dog.  Basil had his head on his paws, his lids half-closed against the smoke but his eyes alert.

The woman stood there, both hands on her head, staring.

“What’s happened?” she asked the man.

The man said nothing.  The manservant, who had been working on the far side of the property, made his way over.

“What’s happened?” the woman asked the manservant.

The manservant approached but said nothing.

“Why is the ground wet?” the woman asked again.

It was all too much to fathom.  She would get command of one thing at a time.  She wondered why the man wasn’t saying anything.

“No need for the grass to die,” said the manservant.

“Where were you?” she asked him.

“Here, right here.”

“I—,” the man interjected, but the woman did not let him finish.

“Are you all right?” she asked the manservant.

“Perfectly.”

“Why is the ground wet?”

“I dampened it before starting the fire.  In a circle, to keep the flames close.  No need for the grass to die.”

“You started the fire?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The woman looked at the man, then back at the manservant.

“You started this fire?”

The manservant looked at the man uncertainly and opened his mouth, and the man opened his mouth, and before either spoke the woman took two quick steps and put the heel of her hand in the manservant’s face.

It landed hard under his nose, as if she meant to take it off.  The manservant fell back and lay on the ground and did not move.  He blinked, but did not move.

Gently the man helped her victim up, brushed the nettles out of his hair.  The man looked over at the woman—warily, admiringly—as he did so.

And then he explained everything.

***

The four of them walked the ruins.  They took shallow breaths because the smoke was still sharp.

The woman walked alone.  They had burned her little house too.  The man had done it himself, after she’d arrived on the morning of the ceremony.  He told her this with the face of a man swallowing glass.  She wanted to hit him anyway.  But she had no more violence in her, and instead withdrew.

She considered the man’s reasoning.  She had proven her character.  She had put fantastic will behind a desire for a worthy man.

Her ability, too.  She had secured him finally, and on precisely her terms.

But not her devotion, the man pointed out.  Not yet.

They were penniless.  They had nothing in the world.  Except two animals and a serviceable buggy.

If she stayed with this man, it would be because she had to.  It would be a ransom for cruelty.  It would be the kind of devotion a beating brings.  But who was she to call cruelty, she who had played with another man’s life with pigtail petulance?  If she left this man, it would be for spite—an abandonment for two arsons.  It was likely not the worst reason to do something, but maybe the least principled given all she’d burn down doing it.

She looked up.  Man and manservant were circling the property.  They picked their way slowly, gazing down, grimly.  She had not seen anyone move like this; it was the walk of people in a graveyard who knew all the buried.

He was wrong.  For him it was a test of devotion.  Her devotion had nothing to do with it.  She craved that man’s face and hands, her sweetest concern was what he would say next, the air she liked best had the damp of his breath in it.

He must have felt relief when she flattened the manservant, she thought.  Likely he’d feared her reaction and believed that was the worst of it.  Part of her wanted to devise something worse, something subtle and brilliant and obvious only in retrospect.  But she was not that kind of person.

She could not remember with clarity the kind of person she’d been before.  Who would she be without?

Devotion was beside the point.  But character.  What kind let itself be subjugated?  What kind destroyed itself so it could say it had not been subjugated?

What had seemed a long time was seven minutes.  Seven minutes in that reprehensible smoke was all the woman needed to decide.

She stayed.  Even though he had taken from her everything in the world.

She did.

She stayed with him.  Nothing else in the world mattered.

For a night they camped in the woods.  For a day they went around with only the clothes they wore.  The manservant stayed behind with horse, buggy, and dog.  One of these looked hungry.

“What do we do now?” asked the man, as he and the woman walked up their seventh hillside.

“Go to the city?”

“Maybe.”

“Or not.”

“Maybe deeper into the country.  Where seeing another human being is a surprise.”

She grabbed his hand.  “Yes, surprise.  From another human being.  I haven’t had much of that lately.”

They returned.  Basil was asleep.  Nothing else had changed.  The man asked the manservant to fit out the buggy and horse.  He ignored the woman’s inquiring eyebrows.

They got in.  The dog cocked back his whole body with arthritic preciousness before taking two hops—to floor, to seat—and wedged himself between them.  He did not care where his flankmeat fell. The manservant rode standing, single-footed on the side step opposite from the man.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

The man took the reins.

“Deeper into the country.  You said so.”

He gave the reins a snap.  Basil gave the air a yelp.

They skirted the valley, cut through a peninsula of forest, and emerged into a clearing.  Near the center stood two enormous oaks.  Each had dropped an extraordinary acorn.  Or so it seemed to the woman, giddy from not having eaten.  One was in the shape of a modest home, the other a full-sized barn.

The front door to this home, like the rest of it, was freshly painted.  The man asked the manservant to open it.  He did. The man entered and waited for her inside.

“What is this?” she asked.

The house was small enough that the man could afford it after selling most of the gifts, and large enough that it fit the rest of them.  The broker had found it in less than a week.  This was half the time the same broker had taken, and so discreetly, with an earlier request from the manservant:  a harpsichord, ancient but serviceable, for two chandeliers.

On her way in, she could think of nothing clever, and simply smoothed a wisp of his hair with a hand that trembled.

“What’s in there?”  She pointed at one of the rooms.

“Occupied,” said the man.

“By whom?”

“Your things.  From your house.  Before I—before it went—”

She flicked her handkerchief up at him.  She’d been using it for her eyes.  It landed softly on his cheek, as if forgiveness had intervened.

“I should stay close,” she said.  “If I turn around you might burn them.”

They repaired to their bedrooms for the night, the couple upstairs, the manservant on the first floor, near the door.

Before going to bed the man went for a walk outside.  It was cold but he did not bring a coat.  He saw near the door of this small new home the beginning of a dogstile.  It did not quite reach across the door.  It would in time.

Before going to bed the woman sat down at the harpsichord.  She ran her fingers lightly over the keys in mute glissandos.  Things rippled in and out of view.  Her fingers did not feel like they contained answers at all.  She put two of them on the notes on either side of the high D, and pushed in and down.  The square front edge bore painfully into the soft web between her fingers.  For the first time the sides of the high D were revealed.  On the near side was a picture of the woodsman’s boots.  He had taken them off before commencing.  One was tumbled over on its side, the other still upright though half-buried under its fallen brother.  The boots did not match; peeking from the top of the standing one was the fleeting tip of a snake’s tail.  On the far side of the same key was another addendum to the lovers’ scene—just the woman’s forearm and hand, wandering out in mid-air and hanging free of everything else.  The fingers were curiously depicted.  They were neither calm nor tightly closed, but outstretched, wavering in half-rigid extension.  And then she remembered the widow on the adjacent side of the next key up.  The young woman was holding her hand out toward her.  Perhaps the woman was reaching to herself.  Perhaps she was already conscious in mid-experience that one day it would be a memory.  Or that years later the longing would not have gone away.

The manservant was exhausted from doing things he had never done before:  systematically emptying a house, systematically burning it, giving up his seat to a dog.  He stayed in and dreamed.

***

Just before dawn the woman awoke.  She heard a noise, noises, like whining or crying.  The man still slept.  She dressed quickly and went downstairs.

It was the dog Basil.  He was at the manservant’s door, scratching furiously, moaning.  She stood to the side.  She did not want to get in the way of all that dog.

She knocked.  Emboldened the dog began to bark.  No answer came.  She pushed the door open.

There, not in the barn, or from one of the oaks outside, but in the close humility of his new adopted room, hung the manservant, from a squat rope looking of wizened wood.

The body was pure weight.  The cord, stiff from strain, was too short.  She refused to consider this.  It meant a slow choking.

***

Only years later, there in the same house, smaller for three children and an obese dog, did it occur to her to look.  It had been so long since she’d touched the instrument.  Always too busy.  The key stood out starkly now, the high C, the next key down from the affair.  The top of it was provocative in its blandness, showing only a few clouds.  The house was all hush and cool spaces; children down for a rare nap, man and dog ignorant of this and out hunting their own quiet.  She sat.  The lovers sank down in their throes.  She rose again, keeping her finger there.  She shifted from the center of the keyboard to the other side of them. She looked back over the tangled bodies at that quiet neighbor rib of ivory.  She did these things and felt the stun of too many implausibilities:  that she had never looked before; that she had no idea what it would show; that she believed it could mean anything.  It was her guess, her hope, that the scale of it would be too small for rendering the entirety of that foolish, wandering, sunwashed day, that day spent in the woods, three days after their first meeting, when the manservant had tried to kiss her—no, he had kissed her—after calling her miss.  It would be too small to show her mouthing the word, without thinking about it, its first letter perfect for a kiss.

It was the woodsman, alone.  He carried a smoking torch and walked into the hills.  One of these was marked like a scar by the shadow of an eagle overhead.  He looked over his shoulder at himself and his love, the scene indeed small, his face smaller still, his eyes impossible at this scale to depict, but his brows solemn and their reflections too, a man considering what should have been.