She looked at me. After a moment or two she said, “I am a very foolish woman, Oelph.”
“Mistress, you are the cleverest and most wise woman I have ever met, indeed you are one of the cleverest and most wise people I have ever met.”
“You are too kind, Oelph,” she said, staring into her goblet. “But I am still foolish. Nobody is smart in every way. It’s as though we all have to have something we’re stupid about. I have just been very stupid with the King.”
“With the King, mistress?” I asked, worried.
“Yes, Oelph. With the King.”
“Mistress, I am sure the King is most considerate and understanding and will not hold whatever you have done against you. Indeed perhaps the offence, if offence there was, seems greater to you than it does to him.”
“Oh, it wasn’t much of an offence, Oelph, it was just… stupidity.”
“I find that hard to believe, mistress.”
“Me too. I find it hard to believe. But I did it.”
I took the merest sip from my goblet. “Can you tell me what happened, mistress?”
She looked unsteadily at me again. “Will you keep what I tell you…” she began, and I confess that my heart seemed to sink into my boots at these words. But I was saved from a further extension of my perjury and betrayal, or from a wantonly rash admission of my own, by her next words. “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head and rubbing her face with her free hand. “No, it doesn’t matter. People will hear if the King wants them to. It doesn’t matter anyway. Who cares?”
I said nothing. She bit her lower lip, then took another drink. She smiled sadly at me as she said, “I told the King how I feel about him, Oelph,” she said, and sighed. She gave a shrug as though to say, Well, there you are.
I looked down at the floor. “And how is that, mistress?” I asked quietly.
“I think you might be able to guess, Oelph,” she said.
I found that I too was biting my lip now. I took a drink, for something to do. “I’m sure we both love the King, mistress.”
“Everybody loves the King,” she said bitterly. “Or says that they do. It is what one is supposed to feel, what one is obliged to feel. I felt something else. Something it was very stupid and unprofessional of me to admit to, but I did. After the audience with gaan Kuduhn — you know I do believe that old bastard Walen thought he was setting me up?” she said, as though interrupting herself. I choked on my drink. I was unused to hearing the Doctor swear. It distressed me. “Yes,” she said. “I think he thought that I wasn’t… that I was… well, anyway, it was after the audience with the gaan. We were alone. Just him and me. A stiff neck. I don’t know,” she said miserably. “Maybe I was excited at having met somebody from home.”
Suddenly she sobbed, and I looked up to see her bending forward so that her head was lowered towards her knees. She put the goblet down with a thud on the workbench and held her head in her hands. “Oh, Oelph,” she whispered. “I have done such terrible things.”
I stared at her, wondering what in Providence she could be talking about. She sniffed, wiped her eyes and nose with her sleeve, then put her hand out to the goblet again. It hesitated by the old dagger lying nearby, then grasped the goblet and brought it towards her lips. “I can’t believe I did that, Oelph. I can’t believe that I told him. And do you know what he told me?” she asked, with a hopeless, wavering smile. I shook my head.
“He told me that of course he knew. Did I think he was stupid? And oh, he was flattered, but it would be even more unwise for him to respond to me than it had been for me to make the declaration in the first place. Besides, he only liked, he only felt comfortable with pretty, dainty, delicate women who had no brains. That was what he liked. Not wit, not intelligence, certainly not learning.” She snorted. “Vacuity. That’s what he wants. A pretty face fronting an empty head! Ha!” She threw back the last of her drink, then refilled the goblet, spilling some of the liquor on her gown and the floor.
“You fucking cretin, Vosill,” she muttered to herself.
My blood ran cold at her words. I wanted to hug her, to hold her, to take her in my arms… and at the same time I wanted to be anywhere else but there, then.
“He wants stupidity, well… Oh, do you see the irony of it, Oelph?” she said. “The only moronic thing I’ve done since I landed was to tell him I loved him. It was utterly, completely, definitively and absolutely imbecilic, and yet it still isn’t enough. He wants consistent dim-wittedness.” She stared into her goblet. “Can’t say I blame him.” She drank. She coughed, and had to put the goblet down on the bench. The goblet’s base settled on her old dagger, so that the vessel over-balanced and fell with a crash to the floor, breaking and splashing the alcohol across the boards. She brought her feet down from the bench and put them under the chair she sat on, her head in her hands again as she curled up and started to weep.
“Oh, Oelph,” she cried. “What have I done?” She rocked to and fro on the seat, her face buried in her hands, her long fingers like a cage around her tangle of red hair. “What have I done? What have I done?”
I felt terrified. I did not know what to do. I had been feeling so mature, so grown up, so capable and in control over these last couple of seasons, but now I felt like a child again, quite perfectly unsure what to do when confronted with the pain and distress of an adult.
I hesitated, a terrible feeling growing in me that whatever I did next it would be the wrong thing, the wrong thing entirely, and I would suffer for it for ever more and worse still so might she, but eventually, while she rocked back and forth and moaned piteously to herself, I put my goblet down at my feet and got out of my seat and went to squat by her. I reached out one hand and placed it gently on her shoulder. She did not react. I let my hand go back and forth with her rocking, then slid my arm further round her shoulders. Somehow, touching her like that, she suddenly seemed smaller than I had always thought her.
Still she did not seem to think I had committed any terrible transgression by touching her so, and, finding my courage and taking it by the scruff of its neck, I moved closer to her and put both my arms around her, holding her, slowly stopping her rocking, feeling the warmth of her body and tasting the sweet air of her breath. She let me hold her.
I was doing what I had imagined doing only moments earlier, doing something I had imagined doing for the last year, something I thought would. never, could never happen, something I had dreamed about night after night after night for season upon season, and something that I had hoped, and still hoped somehow might lead to an even more intimate embrace, no matter that that had seemed almost absurdly unlikely, and indeed still did.
I felt her grip on her head loosen. She brought her arms out and put them round me. Embraced by her. My head seemed to swim. Her face, hot and wet from her tears, was next to mine now. I shook with terror, wondering if I dare turn my face towards hers, bring my mouth close to her lips.
“Oh, Oelph,” she said into my shoulder. “It is not fair to use you so.”
“You may use me as you wish, mistress,” I said, gulping on the words. I could smell some delicate perfume rising from her warm body, its tender scent not swamped by the fumes of the alcohol, and infinitely more heady. “Is it…?” I began, then had to stop to swallow on a dry mouth. “Is it so terrible to take the risk of telling somebody the feelings you have for them, even if you suspect they feel nothing similar for you? Is it wrong, mistress?”
She pushed herself gently away from me. Her face, tearstreaked, puffy-eyed and red, was still calmly beautiful. Her eyes seemed to search mine. “It is never wrong, Oelph,” she said softly. She reached down and took both my hands in hers. “But I am no more blind than the King. Nor any more able to offer requital.”