Black Juice (12 page)

You see, the kings and queens that it’s modelled on, they’re just
so
long dead; they have
so
little to do with our lives now. They’re four revolutions ago—think about that! And what were those revolutions about?

I spoke through gritted teeth.
I don’t
care
what they were about—

About people being able to relax, and move any way they wanted, and find their own path creatively. They were about
freedom.

She was in full flight and making perfect sense. I had to stop
her before she deflected me.
Which doesn’t mean
, I said gaspingly—I had no control over my breathing, back then—
which doesn’t mean the Straitened kings and queens were all bad. I mean, people must have let them rule because they believed the way they lived
worked
in some way, don’t you think? It’s not as if they revolted after six months—those royals had power for hundreds of years! If everybody hates you, you can’t last that long
. I think I made a pretty good fist of it, considering I hadn’t even been to the Bride School Open Day yet.

Mother was too smart for me. Dad just laughed at me. Once I got through the entrance tests, all I had on my side was stubbornness. I couldn’t explain it to myself any more than I could to them. I listened; I agreed; but I dug in my heels.
It’s just something I’m
Going To Do, I said.
I’ve never imagined not doing it. I’ve always meant to
. That was all I had.

Bit by bit, the zigs and zags of the field-walls work me farther from the town. The spires turn, and the façade comes into view, the rose-window with the Saints’ linked crowns above it. But it seems to be moving farther away, not closer. The fields’ silence takes over, plopped more silent by fish, creaked more silent by breeze-shifted cabbage-leaves, startled quieter by a burst of bird out of reeds. Always there are people at middle distance or beyond, bending to the water, to the feet of the plants, wading in mirages.

This gentle, shoe-protecting walk is tiring after a while. I’m glad when I reach my friend Yakkert’s village, with its wide, flat path, where I don’t have to carry my skirts to
protect my hems. My hands feel raw from that, after two years of oiling and gloving them, two years of keeping them safe from cuts and callouses.

People are laundering at the water-race on the common. At tables outside the house-doors, children and old people are picking over dried cornsilk to make their votive dollies. ‘Madam,’ says anyone I pass near, and they lower their eyes. They all know me, and I them. Two years ago I used to come out here to fish the race regularly; I’ve made so many dollies with these people, I could do it in my sleep. But none of them will greet me by name while I’m dressed like this.

My skin feels thin, ready to perspire. It’s not that I
care
whether they talk to me. I can come back tomorrow and they’ll be as friendly as ever. I sit on a stump and Yakkert’s cat, Biddy, comes up to me. A cat’s not to know you can’t approach a bride, is she? I give her a bridely stroke of the head, instead of wrestling her over and pushing my face into her belly-fur, as I usually would.

Yakkert’s mother passes in front of me and leaves a pottery cup of cool tea on the next stump. She knows I’m supposed to save my mouth for bishop’s cake and wedding wine. But she wouldn’t—no one here would—think less of me if I drank that tea.

Which isn’t the point
, I tell myself as the circle of sky on the tea-surface stills from its rocking.
Besides, it’s enough that she’s put it there. I don’t have to actually drink it to get the benefit
.

I stand up and check my skirt-hems. At the back, the edges are grey-brown and damp from brushing the dew and the ground. And the outer edge of one shoe is sodden, in spite of my careful walking. I’ll have to walk differently, oddly, so it doesn’t get any worse. I could take the shoes off and go barefoot and faster. I could bundle up my skirts and run, and probably reach the church before the brides leave. Why can’t I find it in myself to do that?

Because it would be me, Miss Matty Weir, who never finishes things, who never does things quite right, who’d be running. It would be the person everyone expects me to be, the person everyone thinks I am.

I gather up some skirt into my sore hands, and walk away from the village. You just keep up the Bridal Gait, Mattild. Though it be among weeds and the trickle of leaking watergates, instead of across petals and floor-wax, you step and step until you get where you said—through six terms of homework and gown-fittings and gossip and abstinence-from-all-fun—where you said you were going to go. You might not get to smell the incense, or hear the pure drone of the Wedding Song from the choir, or see the visiting bishop in his magnificent tarnished ancient robe, his rings all over carbuncles. But you set yourself on this path to becoming someone not Matty, someone cool and unflustered, remote, with impermeable skin. And you’ll get there—with measured steps you’ll get there.

‘Madam,’ say a string of gardeners’ children. Each carries
a puppy in one hand and a basket of sorted eggs in the other. The sun has lost all its morning kindness, lifting into steam, killing off the breeze. It stings through my sheer sleeves and on my neck, which is usually covered by my mess of hair. My skin feels cool, though; I’m keeping it that way.

The bells shout again. In the church the brides will be losing some of their Composure—they’ve only the photographs to go, and then they can all fall away down the porch stairs, blessed and brilliant and allowed to laugh now, to wreck their dresses, to show their legs, to hug their families. The feast awaits in flower-stuffed halls around town: many-storeyed white cakes, powder-blue wedding cachous, flavoured violets, glazed fruit, clove-studded meats, saltcrusted heart-biscuits.

Paths go off to right and left, among dank slabs of mirror whiskered with rice. But no path seems to lead to the mound of the town—not straightly, anyway. But I’ll get there, even if
not
straightly. The bishop must stay for the feasting; if the worst comes to the worst he can bless me among flowers, between mouthfuls of cake, with cake-cream on his beard.

W
HEN FINALLY
I
REACH THE GATE
I
WANT
and step out of the meadows, the town streets are empty, dim and very cool. The higher I climb, the more flower-petals are gummed to the flags, the more constant are the gusts of chatter and music channelled along the lanes. I know exactly where I am and how to avoid those halls, the sight of food, the cries of
brides with unpinned hair. My leg aches from my toe gripping the loose shoe; my hands are stiff from carrying the netting skirt; my arms cramp from lifting all the expensive cloth.

The church is stripped of its usual pennants and garlands. The church square, too, is bare of all decoration. Of all the people who choked the streets this morning, only the photographer is left, folding his black cloth on the church steps.

I rustle across the square. All those Posture, Carriage, Masque and Step lessons play themselves out in me as if I have no will of my own. The boned bodice holds my back right, and my face is rightly wooden, empty of anything—weariness, anxiety, relief, determination, anything.

The photographer glances aside from his equipment case. He sees the stained edge of my skirt and pauses.

‘Mr Pellisson,’ I say in my cold, rehearsed Bride-Voice.

‘Madam.’ His gaze remains lowered.

‘I require your sponsorship. Is the bishop within?’

‘He is, Madam.’ He closes his case with a soft, rich click. Wordlessly he precedes me up the steps.

The church is very dark, its air like cold water. It seems much larger than usual, cleared of all candles, all votives, banners, flowers. All the cosiness is gone, and the building’s ribs rise naked to separate the high lattice windows. A vein of light runs up the central aisle, a carpet of white petals. Someone is sweeping them from the altar towards us; he slips into a side-aisle and murmurs ‘Madam’ as we pass.

We reach the altar. All the monstrances with their yellowed Relics have been taken away, all the cloths and vases and prayer-trees. The only ornament is the Saint-Crown on its purple cushion on the altar, two palace guards in ceremonial black like statues either side. The only scent is of cold marble.

The photographer opens the brass altar-gate for me. The cold strikes straight up through my damp paper shoes.

We skirt the altar and enter the vestry, which is smaller, warmer, carpeted, and full of the cedar smell of vain old man. The lace trim on the hem of the bishop’s under-robe—well, none at my School could afford such stuff. I mustn’t meet his eye, mustn’t look for the outer vestments, the thorned mitre. I must keep my eyes on the red carpet, the expensive hem, the gilded paper slipper-toe.

A plain wooden kneeler is pushed in front of me. Pellisson’s hand plucks a leaf from the beading near my hem and withdraws.

I kneel, and the bishop starts the blessing:
Witness: To the holy basilica of All Saints comes this young woman, beloved of the town of Mountfort-among-the-Waters
… He doesn’t need the vestments, this man; the words vest him, vest all three of us as beautifully as the robes would. He shapes his voice to set the small, padded vestry singing.

…
before witnesses that she has undergone instruction and proven herself constituted of such purity of body, austerity of practice, modesty of habit and restraint and moderation of temperament as befits
…

How many times have I read those words in the liturgybook? How many times have I stopped and said to myself,
That isn’t me. I’m just not like that, moderate and pure and austere. I’ll never make it through; they’ll stop me
way
before the Day when a bishop would say those words over me. ‘What were you thinking, Matty?’ they’ll say, and laugh, and send me to the cashier to claim back the rest of the School fee
. Yet here I am, relaxed in the flow of the holy words, firm in the rightness of this, taking the blessing and knowing—as I haven’t known for two whole years, as I didn’t even know this morning, darting out of the house because I hadn’t the patience to wait for Mother to dress Winke’s hair; as I didn’t know pacing the Lanes and counting—that it’s mine to take, that I deserve it, that I’ve earned it. I’ve made myself a Bride; out among the fields today, alone and without instruction, I wedded myself to the severe and lovely ways of the old dead kings and queens at their height, when all the people loved them. And now the bishop’s thumb is dipping into the sacred oil and ash—ash that once, centuries ago, was actual kingly or queenly matter—and he’s whispering to himself the final and most secret words, in the language of the Straitened times, and applying history to my brow.

Pellisson helps the bishop take the bride-book from its box. They place it on its stand, and the bishop unlocks and opens it. He moves aside the gilded bookmark, and there’s Agnes Stork’s flourish that she practised for two years, and Felicity Doe’s loopy tangle of a name, with the two hearts
dotting the i’s. When the quill is readied and handed to me,
Mattild Weir
, I write plainly, so that anyone who looks will know that I was here, became a Bride, this day. Thereunder signs my witness: Pellisson, descended all the way from the court painters of the Straitened days.

The way to thank the bishop is with money, in a white purse a bride unties from her waist. He opens a chest and the bride-purses are piled in there like sleeping mice. A few are trimmed end to end with lace, one or two monogrammed; most are like mine, standard-issue Bride School purses, plain linen, strongly sewn.

I give an exemplary curtsy, nothing ostentatious. Rising, I look at the bishop properly for the first time. His face is round and red and weary. His white comb-over has a mitrefurrow around it. Apart from the white, double-plaited beard, he’s greatly ordinary against the magnificent vestments in their case behind him, the gold ribbons of the mitre laid just so on the shoulders of the cape.

The bishop tips his head at me, saying
get-out-of-here
as much as
nicely-executed-curtsy-bless-you-my-child
.

Now the Bride walks ahead of her sponsor, out into the body of the church, down the darkened aisle, past the glowing heap of petals at the rear.

Out on the church steps, Pellisson scatters handfuls of petals around my feet. My eyes fix on the middle distance as a good bride’s should, but I can still see him: he backs down the steps without needing to check his footing. He shakes out his
black cloth and organises his photographer’s dust. My spine is straight as a pine trunk and my face is empty of everything.

He arranges all his equipment, and then he comes up the stairs and starts to arrange
me
. It only strikes me then how unsupervised I am, as his gentle adjustments of the hem tug at my waist. There’s no crowd of matrons making sure the thing’s done right, snapping commands at him, or sighing and coming forward to fix me themselves. But he knows what he’s doing; he knows about cloth; he knows with small and professionally exact movements how to tease the maximum width, the maximum puff, out of the skirts, the maximum contrast with my slender-fied, rigidified upper half.

‘Is all satisfactory?’ I say—for he may not speak unless spoken to.

He steps back to judge. ‘If Madam would lift her chin just a touch higher?’

She would. Although she could hug Pellisson, old vinegar-bottle that he is, Madam would be pleased instead to lift her chin, to look down her regal nose past His Nobodyness.

He disappears under the cloth. The dust flashes and thuds. The smoke jumps free like a loosed kite.

‘G
ET DRESSED, BOY
,’ says Gran-Pa, shaking me awake. ‘You’re going for a long walk.’ He stands over me with the lamp while I pull on my trousers and shirt—clothes he won’t wear any more, they’re so stained and frayed. Under his other arm is one of our cheeses, all wrapped in its fancy market-paper.