Riding the Serpent's Back (41 page)

Estelle stopped before the Investigator, meeting nobody’s eyes. The maid stayed by the bedroom door.

“Kneel before me,” said Ixima Trine.

Estelle knelt.

“You must realise why we’re here,” said the Principal. He took the note from his pocket and tossed it at Estelle. It drifted to the floor some distance short, but she made no move to retrieve it.

Instead, she looked at her husband for the first time. “I write such things all the time,” she said, struggling to stop her voice from wavering. “Mostly I just throw them away.”

Red watched the Investigator. Slowly, she nodded.

“And the others?” said Pieter, his voice rising petulantly. “Are they for the lover you have taken behind my back?”

Estelle stared at him for a long time. “You think that of me?” she said.

“Please,” said Ixima. “A question should be blessed with an answer, not another question.”

Estelle nodded, and swallowed. “I am very sorry that my husband feels he has to treat me in this humiliating manner,” she said. “I know why you are here, Madam Trine, and I know you can assure Pieter that I am telling the truth when I say there has only ever been room in my heart for the man who persuaded me to leave my family home in Harrat and come here to be with him in his home in Totenang. I had hoped our bond would last a lifetime. I had hoped that what had been merely convenient at first should develop into a love that would last forever, and I was greatly pleased when it did just that.”

Now Estelle was slumping back on her heels as she kneeled before the Investigator, her head turned, her eyes fixed beseechingly on those of her husband. Then she looked away, her gaze taking in the whole room before settling on her hands where they lay, knotted together in her lap.

Softly, she said, “You are my sole reason for living, the love to whom I addressed that note.”

Gradually, it had dawned on Red just how fine a line she was treading, how carefully she had rehearsed her speech. Her phrasing was so precise! Declaring her love for the man who had persuaded her to come to Totenang, then, briefly, before switching to ‘you’, she had glanced in Red’s direction!

Now, he looked at Pieter, and then at Ixima Trine. Neither seemed to have seen through Estelle’s act, her careful phrasing of what the Investigator could only confirm was true.

Estelle brushed at her eyes, then turned back to look at her husband. “Pieter,” she said. “Please stop this humiliation. I would do anything if you would just love me as you did in the beginning...if you could find it in yourself to trust me, and not make me endure such trials. Please, Pieter! I...I just wish you would believe me!” She couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. At a nod from Ixima Trine, Estelle’s maid went to her and drew her head onto her shoulder, smoothing her hair with her free hand.

Red felt helpless. He watched Pieter, Estelle, Ixima, but his feet stayed fixed to the spot.

Pieter was staring at Ixima, and for a long time the woman’s expression remained fixed. Then she looked at Estelle and again at Pieter and nodded briefly. “Your good wife speaks the truth,” she said. “She is to be commended.”

She rose from her seat, placed a hand briefly on Estelle’s head, then strode towards the door. “I must go,” she said. “As I told you: the demands on my Talent are so very great.”

Pieter hurried to escort her out.

Just before the woman left the room her eyes found Red’s. They fixed on him for the briefest of intervals, but it was long enough for her to flicker a knowing smile. Then she swept out of the room.

In the doorway, the Principal hesitated, then looked back into the room at his wife, the maid, his confidant. “See to her,” he said, distractedly, then slammed the door behind him.

Red listened to the Principal’s footsteps receding along the corridor.

When he had allowed his heart to settle, he looked up. The maid was helping Estelle back into the bedroom. He went after them and closed the door behind him.

Immediately, Estelle threw herself into his arms, sobbing, giggling, moaning. He stroked her hair, trying to soothe her, aware all the time of the watching maid.

Eventually, Estelle looked up at him. “Oh, Red,” she said. “I was so scared.” She kissed him, and he pulled away. She reached for his trousers and released the clasp of his belt.

“Please,” he said. Staring at the maid, who was shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot.

Estelle laughed, easing his trousers down. “Come on,” she said. “It’s been days.” Then she understood why he was so reticent. “Jane only sees what I tell her she can see,” she said. “Don’t you, Jane?”

The maid nodded. “Yes, madam.”

Estelle pulled Red farther into the room. “Wait outside the bedroom, Jane,” she said. “Please. You’re making Red uncomfortable.”

~

Weeks passed, in which Red and Estelle slipped back into their routine of illicit meetings, secret messages, coded signals.

After a few days of surliness, the Principal started to woo his wife with presents and trips. He never raised the matter with Red again: Red had witnessed the humiliation of his accusations being shown to be groundless by Estelle’s performance before the Investigator. Red realised his own prospects had been damaged as a result, but he hardly cared as his affair with Estelle continued so smoothly after he had been convinced it was over.

Finally, one evening, he found a note tucked behind the plaque of one of the statues – one of Estelle’s regular hiding places for messages. Scrawled on the front, in hurried Avernan, were the words,
Do not go to the summer house to read this! It might be watched!

Red tucked it into his pocket and strolled back through the Garden of Statues, then went straight to his room. With the door shut behind him, he stared at the note for a long time before easing apart its gummed edge.

He knew that this must be it: the end he had dreaded.

The note was written in plain Avernan.

My dearest love, it read. It is over. Pieter knows about our love. A maid called Hellia Corder has told him about my visits to your room. She followed you to the summer house, too. You must leave immediately.

You asked me long ago if I would leave Totenang with you. I refused because I thought I could have it all; I thought it was just a game, then. Ask again and I would join you without hesitation. But now it is not possible. I am under guard, and Pieter has vowed to kill me as soon as he has your confession.

Please go, Red. Do not try anything foolish, just flee. All I can do is hope this letter reaches you before Pieter’s guards. My only solace is to think that you will not be killed on my account. So RUN, Red! Let me live on in your heart!

Always yours, E.

He took a few things from a cupboard and threw them into a bag. And then, with a brief glance around his room, he went to the door and pulled it open.

Captain Eliazar of the city army barred his way.

Ibby recognised him! He would have hugged her if such an act could have been conceivable with the woman who had been nanny and confidante to him for eighteen years.

She opened the door of the family home, looked at him and nodded. “Mister Leeth,” she said. “Will you be wantin’ your room, then?” She stepped back, a blank expression on her face. In all her time with the family, Leeth had never known Ibby to be surprised by anything.

He tried to match her coolness. “Please, Ibby,” he said. “Are my parents in?” He knew they were. He had chosen the time – early evening – carefully so that his father would be back from Senate. Just to be sure, he had sneaked along the top of a neighbouring wall to a vantage point he had often used as a boy. From there he had seen across the private terrace to the dining room. His parents were there, and so too was his cousin Ellen, always a frequent visitor.

“Eatin’ their dinner, Mister Leeth. Shall I announce you?” That was Ibby’s first concession to surprise: the suggestion that she might warn his parents that he was here.

Leeth nodded. He followed her through the house, feeling oddly out of place. It was modest for a Senator’s residence, no more than a couple of reception rooms, a bedroom each and the servants’ quarters and kitchen. His father’s only indulgence was in the offices of the family merchantry business which were in a sumptuous complex that fronted onto the docks. Even that was only to impress clients. Leeth had heard it said more than once that if tight-fistedness was a True Family Talent, then Gudrun Hamera must be its ultimate earthly embodiment.

The only relief to the plain, utilitarian look of the house was a scattering of his mother’s Charmed sculptures, arranged haphazardly on any available surface. A number of masks had clearly been modelled on Ellen, who had always been a favourite of his mother’s. Some wooden birds hung from a mobile, Charmed so that they endlessly circled about the construction’s axis. He was surprised to see a mask of his own face, staring back at him from the wall. There was something not quite right about it, a distortion; he decided the inaccuracy must be a result of his mother making it from memory after he had left.

He heard Ibby speaking and then there was silence from the dining room. He moved into the archway and saw repeated the scene he had viewed from his vantage point only a few minutes before.

His father, Gudrun, was a hunched figure, looking much older than before, but with the same steady gaze and a stubbly, grey fringe of beard that encircled his mouth in an O. He sat at one end of the table with a pile of papers arranged before him so that mere eating would not interrupt his work.

Next to him sat Leeth’s mother, Cora. She looked no different, with her sandy hair pinned up so that a loose hank hung casually across each cheek. She never had been the tidiest of people.

Ellen sat opposite, twisting to look back over her shoulder. All three were staring, but none more so than Ellen as she recognised Leeth as the man who had called to her in the street.

Ellen pushed a chair away from the table so that he could sit.

Leeth glanced across at Cora and Gudrun, but they still gave no indication of what was expected of him. He nodded at Ellen and sat. “It’s strange to be back,” he said awkwardly. He had almost said ‘good’, but he saw that they would know it as a lie.

“You’ve changed,” said Gudrun gruffly.

Leeth laughed, then realised he was the only one who understood the joke. “So have you all,” he said. “It’s been five years.”

Gudrun gestured at the platter of sliced white meat and pilau lying on the table. “You’ll eat?”

Leeth smiled as Ibby appeared with a spare plate. He had never expected such relative warmth from Gudrun. It had seemed far more likely that he would be turned away, or that they would immediately insist he resumed his studies. Perhaps Gudrun realised what a lucky escape the family business had made with Leeth no longer involved in its running.

He had expected the warmth, if any, to come from Cora. When he had filled a plate, he glanced at his mother and saw that she was still staring at him. She seemed almost to be in shock, but that wasn’t quite it: she was studying him warily, as if he was a stranger invading her territory.

All the time he had been away he had carried a clear picture of her in his head: the one person who might genuinely miss him, and the one that he, in turn, genuinely missed. Now he was here, he remembered how irritating she had often been, how she never seemed to notice the important things, how she had always been so flighty and inconstant.

She was still staring at him. It made him feel uncomfortable. Guilty, even. Suddenly, all the old wounds were open again – the resentments, the weight of expectations – and it was not, as he had expected, Gudrun who was responsible, but his dumb, staring mother.

He turned to Ellen and said, “You’ve changed more than any.”

She tipped her head to one side and batted her eyelids at him, clearly aware of her own appeal. “If that’s so,” she said, “then why is it that you recognised me this afternoon whereas I failed to recognise you?”

“You recognise me now?”

She nodded. “But that’s not answering my question.”

“Perhaps I’m more observant,” Leeth said, irritated that he should be descending into bickering so soon. “Or perhaps it’s because I was expecting to see you but you had no idea I was back.”

Ellen smiled, demurely. “Or perhaps,” she said, “it is because I had hoped
never
to see you back?”

“Ellen!” Cora spoke for the first time, but only to chastise her niece. Then she looked at Leeth again and said, “Where have you been?”

He was prepared for this. There was so much he couldn’t tell them, so much he wouldn’t tell them. He settled for a sanitised traveller’s tale: his years working on the Serpent’s Back, his visits to the Shelf and the cities of the Hamadryad.

And already he was thinking longingly of how soon he could leave Laisan again. He had been hoping for a new start, but all this city had to offer was a
re
start, a chance to slot back in which would almost certainly end up hurting more people than before.

~

He lazed about in bed until mid-morning. It seemed a natural thing to do, in such familiar surrounds.

He dozed and woke several times before finally being woken by a sudden weight descending on the foot of his bed. “What...?” He jerked upright, reaching automatically under his pillow for the knife he had learnt to keep close at hand.

Ellen sat there, sniggering. She was trying to look superior, but Leeth was sure he saw an element of fear and shock hidden under all her layers of superfice. He saw her eyes flit towards his hand, half under the pillow, could almost hear her brain struggling to crank out the answer: what does he keep under there?

He sat up against the wall, keeping the sheet pulled up to his middle. Casually, he pulled the knife out and pointed it at her. “One time in Edge City I woke up with a garrotte around my neck. Ever since then I’ve been more careful.” He didn’t explain that the garrotte had been wielded by a three year-old intent on teaching him that he should never drop his guard.

“Ooh,” said Ellen, in a mocking tone. “Man of the world, now, aren’t you?” She flounced back against the wall and her flimsy silk wrap rode up her thighs to reveal the frilled edge of her underwear. She saw him looking and, after an immodest hesitation, covered herself again. “We could have been married by now,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t have to steal peeks at my kecks.”