New Decameron Thirty-Nine: Ellen Kushner (Patreon)

On the Island

(Scenes extracted from WIP to make a whole)

by Ellen Kushner

1.

Jessica Campion remembered the first time they took her to the theater.

It was the autumn of the year she turned eight. She was in the city, visiting her Cousin Katherine, the Duchess Tremontaine. Jess had a green velvet dress with a fringed sash, satin hair ribbons, and a bag of raisins and nuts.

Outside, there were banners, and crowds, and fiddlers, and swordfighters, and dancing dogs. Jess wanted to stay and watch those and make them jump for nuts (she had eaten all the raisins), but their footmen called, “Make way! Make way for Tremontaine!” and they passed through the crowds and up into the Tremontaine box, which had a roof and velvet seats and a door that closed behind them. Jess considered pitching nuts onto the heads of selected people below her, but Aunt Janine grabbed her wrist and the play was beginning.

The play was all big, gorgeous people with big, gorgeous voices, calling out things that should only be spoken alone just as if they didn’t know that everyone was watching them. There were declarations of love and some kissing, a great fuss over nothing. But there was also a man with a moustache and a sweeping cloak who wanted to kill everybody. And a girl in a boy costume. Everyone treated her as if she were a real man, even Lady Stella, the one everyone in the play was in love with. The girl-boy got to take out her sword and fight the man with the moustache.  

Jess adored her. She had just begun her own sword lessons, and with this play she could see the point in them. When you had a sword, people would do what you wanted.

When her family got bunches of flowers to throw at the actors at the end, Jess pitched her nosegay of sweet alyssum right at the girl with the sword.

The sword girl swooped it up with a flourish, and pivoted gracefully to bow to the senders in their box.

But then something strange happened. She looked up at Jessica, and Aunt Janine, and Cousin Katherine who was the Duchess Tremontaine, and she dropped the flowers onto the stage and ground them under her heel.

“Oh, dear!” Aunt Janine lifted her hands to her chest. “Don’t look, Jessie; I’m sure she didn’t mean it! Oh, Katherine, it was all a mistake; we shouldn’t have come, oh dear…..”

But the duchess said to her, “It doesn’t matter, mother. Just ignore it. She had to know sometime.”

“Know what?” Jessica asked. People were always saying things like that around her. Usually they told her never mind, but to her surprise, Duchess Cousin Katherine answered:

“Your mother was an actress. And a great one.”

Jessica stared at the sword girl. “Is that my mother?”

“Of course not, darling.” Aunt Janine patted her hand. “Your mother died, you know that.” 

“Will I be an actress, too, when I grow up?”

“What a thing to say! Of course you won’t be an actress, Jessica.”

Katherine said: “Your mother left the theater when she had you.”

“Did my father make her?”

Aunt Janine gave a nervous giggle.

“Your father,” Katherine said, suddenly cold, “did not even know you’d been born.”

Jess considered this. She’d heard the dairymaid saying it about the goose girl:

“She doesn’t even know she’s been born.” 

Was her father ignorant and silly like the goose girl? People called him the Mad Duke Tremontaine. Never the family, of course, but servants talked in front of children.

“Your mother kept you secret from us,” Katherine explained. “It wasn’t until she died that her friends told Tremontaine you existed.”

“And then, of course, we sent for you and made sure you have everything you need, darling,” Aunt Janine rushed in to say. Her hugs always smelt of violet water, and her jewels stung Jess’s cheek. “You like the city, don’t you? And staying with your Cousin Katherine? And isn’t the theater fun? Your father loved the theater—“

Jess disentangled herself from the hug so she could ask: “Does my father know about me now?”

“He does,” Katherine said. “I wrote to him as soon as we found you.”

That was back when she was just three. “Then why doesn’t he ever come see me?”

The two women exchanged glances: definitely a question not to be answered. That was too bad, just when Katherine was being so forthcoming. The theater was nearly empty, but the well-trained Tremontaine footmen stood patient by the door of their box, waiting for the duchess to rise. Jess picked at the frayed end of her hair ribbon, and nobody even told her to stop it.

“He can’t,” Katherine said at last. “He has to stay on his island.”

“It’s a lovely place!” Aunt Janine added. “All warm and sunny, not like here—“

The Duchess Katherine leaned forward, until her nose was almost touching Jessica’s. “Would you like to go and see it? It’s a long way away.”

“I know.” That wasn’t a secret. Everyone knew where the Mad Duke was. Even the goose girl. “But I’d like to go and see it. I don’t get sick in carriages, not like the Talbert twins.”

“Good.” The duchess rose back to her usual posture at the center of things. “Because he has sent for you. He wants you to come and see him.”

It was not a carriage but a ship that Jess took that autumn, while the winds were still fair. She returned home on the spring tides, and spent the rest of the year in the country with Aunt Janine. Every year after that, it was the same, with a voyage to the island of Kyros for the winter, and then return. And if sometimes the fall seas were rough, she didn’t care. Jessica Campion was a good sailor.

2.

Jessica Campion came to Kyros equipped with a certain number of tales about her father's childhood from his sister, her Aunt Janine. But Jess knew that Aunt Janine was not always reliable.

"Is it true you let all the rabbits out of their traps and the gamekeeper thrashed you?" she asked the tall, gaunt, sun-burned man standing before her at the door of the house on the hillside.

He blinked down at her. "It is. We don't lay snares for rabbits here. We chase them, and we bash them on the head. It takes years to learn to run that fast. You'd better get started, or we'll have nothing to eat."

Aunt Janine hadn't said that he was funny. Jess kept her face straight, though, just in case her father was truly mad. 

"Did you take all the eggs from the hen house and put them in your comforter to see if you could get them to hatch?"

"Of course! And it would have worked if my mother's idiot maids hadn't decided to change the sheets that week of all weeks." She bet they thrashed him for that, too, though he didn’t say. He crouched down, his face level with hers. "You see, Jessica - that's your name, yes? Jessica?" He had bright green eyes, like hers. But his had lines around them, and his nose and mouth were much bigger. "It is the warmth of the hens' bodies that hatches the eggs. And what are the hens' bodies covered with?"

"Feathers."

"And what stuffs the comforters?" 

"Feathers. But--"

"How old are you?"

"Eight."

"I was twelve. How many years before you're twelve, now?"

"Um . . . six?"

"No, four. Can you not do math? Haven't they been teaching you anything?"

"I hate math."

"Too bad. Math is what keeps you from being cheated when you buy, oh, trinkets, or gingerbread. Do you like gingerbread?"

"Do you have any?"

"Not today. I believe Marja made that disgusting honeycake she thinks we like."

"I like it," the man in the shadows said mildly. He’d been standing under the verandah with them the whole time, but so quiet Jess had thought he was just a servant.

"She never puts enough nuts in."

Jessica said, "I want to try it. I hate nuts."

"Manners," muttered her nursemaid from behind.

"Nonsense," said her father. "She is simply being honest. I like honesty. Come, child."

Inside the stone house it was much cooler. In the courtyard, a long table was set out, decorated in herbs and flowers the like of which she'd never seen, vivid as sunset. The three of them sat down to eat.

3.

The other man’s name was Richard. He was always at her father’s side.

"I can ride a horse," Jessica told them. “She’s called Sweet Pea.”

"That's nice," her father said. He had out the book of anatomy and the really sharp little knives that had come on the ship along with her, that Jessica wasn't allowed to touch because they would jump right out of their case and slash her to ribbons. Or if they did not, he certainly would.

"I liked to ride horseback when I was small," Richard said. "How did you catch her?"

"John the groom brings her to me," Jessica said. She was suddenly and painfully aware that this was not a good answer.

"All saddled and bridled for you?" Richard said amiably. "That's nice."

Jess said, "I ride better than anyone on the estate. Last year I jumped a fence all by myself, and John thrashed me for it, but then he said I was game as a pebble."

"Well try not to break your neck," her father said. 

“I wouldn’t!”

"What's the point, anyway?” He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Horses are just a way of getting from one place to another."

Richard had that smile he got when he thought her father was being funny, even when nobody else did. "Just because you fall off," he told him, "doesn't mean everyone does."

"Come here, Jessica." Her father latched shut the knife case, and set his book aside. "I'm going to teach you to cheat at cards."

"I thought cheating was bad," she said. She was not ready to trust a man who fell off horses.

"It's only wrong when you're doing mathematics."

"Why?"

"Because mathematics is pure and good and true. Cards, on the other hand," he said, pulling a worn pack from his pocket and shuffling them with an expert pasteboard hissing, "are for fools who don't know math. They'll tell you it's a game of chance, but it isn't. It's a game of skill." He reached out and put his arm around his daughter, drawing her onto the bench at his side. "Now come here, and I'll show you how to shuffle."

4.

The winter after that, she’d returned to Kyros, and run brown and barefoot on the island again. Her father’s friend Richard, who lived in the house with him, and who’d once been a great and deadly swordsman, had shown her some tricks. She taught the other children to fight with sticks, for the pleasure of disarming them, until they refused to play swords with her anymore. She ran barefoot on sunny hillsides, stolen grapes and figs from the orchards, and honeycomb from the bees that sang in the thyme all day. She herded goats with the other children, and learned to make a whistle out of reeds. 

Her nurse took ill there, and when the ship came to take Jessica home, they had to leave Nurse on Kyros. So Marja came back to the city with Jessica to look after her, and had been with her ever since.

Jess still had the reed whistle, at the bottom of a chest. And a stone – just a pebble, really, collected on the beach where the waves crashed hard against the rocks below her father’s house. The white house with columns to shade you from the sun as you sat and looked out to sea.

Marja told her that they’d seen her ship from there first coming from far away. Its sails were white, the masthead proud, and an albatross had circled it slowly and majestically, heralding good fortune. Her father had scowled at that, and said you shouldn’t lie to children. But Jessica liked to think of Marja looking out over the waves, watching for her ship the next year . . . . . 

5.

Jess knew exactly why the duke had left, and what he was doing on that island. He had killed someone, because Richard, who was a swordsman, couldn’t do it for him. The whole city was mad at him then, so he left. But Richard found out and came away with him over the sea.

Her father never talked about her mother, and somehow she never asked. It just didn’t seem important, there on Kyros. In the city, when she did want to know, he wasn’t there to ask.

She remembered the way her father’s eyes had followed Richard, always, when he was around. She remembered seeing them together at sunset, sitting on a bench on the veranda over the sea, faces turned to the setting sun. Even when she was small.

“Jess,” her father had said, “stop doing what you’re doing and come here.”

She had been digging holes for an imaginary city.

“She’ll see plenty more sunsets; let her play,” Richard said.  

It wasn’t playing, not really; but he had the right idea, so she didn’t correct him. She had a pile of white stones for the walls. They were turning pink in the flaming light.

“What are you making?” Her father turned away from the sun to look at her.

“A city.”

“Like the one you came from?”

“No, a new one.” She started laying the first round of foundation stones down in order.

“Who lives there?”

She hadn’t thought about that. “Nobody. Just me.”

“Can I help?”

Did she have to let him? Sometimes he was fun, but sometimes he tried to take over.

“Not now, Alec,” Richard said. “You’re always wandering off. Stay here, and tell me when the stars come out.”

She wandered over as it grew too dark to see her work. The two men were so close together, there was no space between them. Her father’s head was tilted up, and he was murmuring the names of stars.

Richard sensed her there, and put out one arm to draw her in. She liked the way he always smelled of leather and smoke, even when there wasn’t any. She nestled against him, and heard him say: “How did you make such a perfect creature?”

“I’ve no idea. It certainly wasn’t on purpose. I wouldn’t have thought I could.” Were they talking about her? she wondered sleepily. “Her mother did all the work, you know.”

“I know. I met her once.”

“She should have told me. Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Oh, you know.”

“She didn’t trust me? She didn’t want to?”

“You were gone.”

“I can count, Richard. I wasn’t gone. Not yet.”

“Well, I don’t know, then. Shhh, the kid’s asleep.”

She wasn’t asleep, but they didn’t know that. She let them carry her to bed, and lay her down, and spread the blankets over her, and blow out the light.

finis

*******************************************************

"Oh I want more," Maya says.

"Well you'll have to wait. The rest isn't finished yet," he says. "Kushner doesn't write fast. But that was great. Want some nuts without any raisins left? How about some honeycake?"

"There was loads more food than that," Maya says, accepting the sticky layered honeycake."

"Yes... but the story was so good I got distracted and forgot to grab it," he admits, grinning. "It's starting to get dark again. Shall we take our next book down to the back table, and then go to bed?"

"All right," Maya says, licking crumbs off her fingers. "What have we got?"

"It's Harry Turtledove's The Talking Cat," he says. The library cat gives a faint mew of protest and stalks off ahead of them. Maya laughs. They follow the cat downstairs, stopping to wash their hands and drink some water in the bathrooms. Then they switch on the green shaded light in the corner where nobody can see it, and read.