The Tiger Catcher Page 35

  I’m saying what I mean.

  How can you make me fly?

  Lie down, let me show you.

  Yes, but . . . I don’t want you to do that thing, the earthly thing . . .

  That earthly thing is the most sublime flight of all, but okay. Climb down from me and lie on my bed. Lie flat on the bed and open your legs.

  She winces and retreats.

  I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do, Julian says with regret. But lie down. I’ll do other things. We’ll have happiness without consequences. It hurts even to say it. Because he doesn’t believe it. He is a fraud to her, even now. For he knows too well what follows happiness without consequences.

  Consequences.

  All you want is more.

  She lies down in his tiny bed. He lies on his side next to her, kisses her, and with his eager fingers brings her happiness in the black night, without seeing her, yet seeing only her, his eyes wide open, his heart wide open, he brings her happiness again and again, responding to her arching body, to her clutching hands, flying drunk himself on the wings of her stunned expressive moaning.

  What you have is a magic carpet.

  You just have to learn how to fly it.

  Oh, he’s learned.

  And the next night.

  And the next.

  And then, finally, without him having to ask, she says, Julian . . . do you want me to touch you?

  God, yes.

  He lies on the bed, and she wedges in between him and the wall. Her soft hand clutches him. A gasp of happiness escapes her throat, and then his throat. I like how it feels. Yes, Mary, me, too. It’s so smooth, so hard. I’m sorry I can’t give you the other thing.

  Don’t be sorry while I’m actually in your hands. But make me last, Mary. I don’t want it to be over. Go slower, softer, steadier. Yes, like that.

  She brings him lasting happiness.

  The next morning, Julian takes her to the Fortune, and waits for her for three hours in the dust like a groundling, watching her rehearse. The Fortune is quite a theatre, a noble competitor to the Globe. The crowds come to watch even the rehearsals because the only event in London more popular with the public than the theatre is an execution. “Never show the wires” might be a Hollywood axiom. But here at the playhouse in 1603, the special effects contraptions are in full view for all to see: the flying machinery, that ostentatious deus ex machina; the fire and smoke; the pig’s blood for passion and revenge in ready buckets by stage exit right; the trap door in the floor as the mouth of hell. And just over the trap door, on center stage, on display for all the masses, his one and only Mary stands, a scant and lavishly costumed soul.

  The stage is for all things under the sun, for all humanity, for all life.

  And at night she comes to him again, bringing him joy between her slick hands and pushed-together breasts.

  They begin to leave the house earlier, they forego the horse and carriage like commoners, they walk to the Fortune and back to prolong their minutes together. Mary tells her mother that Julian is helping her memorize her lines, and they need the length of the walk to rehearse them. Aurora can’t thank Julian enough for helping Mary.

  In the idylls of Fynnesbyrie Field, away from archer’s arrows and boys chasing pigeons, they sit in a leafy corner on the grass and have a picnic of pandemain and ale. He reads lines with her. They argue over her delivery.

  She dreams of him that has forgot her love, she recites.

  You dote on her that cares not for your love, he recites back.

  She counters with, that man that has a tongue, I say is no man, if with his tongue he cannot win a woman.

  I can win a woman with my tongue, Julian says, if only she would let me.

  Julian!

  I can win a woman with other things, too, if only she would let me.

  Julian!

  What light is light, he murmurs, if Mary be not seen.

  He is fed upon the shadow of her perfection, she murmurs back, their heads pressed together.

  It’s warm and June and everything blooms. They pick purple orchids from the meadow and take the long way back, between country homes and farms. The bluebells and meadowsweet carpet all their fields.

  Rain or shine, the groundlings and the gentry arrive for their daytime entertainment. Sure, the performance is speed-read as if the actors are going to be late for the four o’clock beheading, but Julian was right about Two Gentlemen. The laughs Mary gets are worth the occasional rain, and the way she lights up when she takes her exuberant final bows is worth everything.

  She climbs into his window every night, and in the darkness they learn to see.

  46

  Consequences of Happiness

  THE BED THEY SHARE IS A MONK’S BED, NARROW AND HARD. Julian is not himself narrow. Neither is Mary. They take up all available space. The horsehair mattress shifts under their bodies.

  I don’t want it like this anymore, she says, groping for him in the dark, her hands seeking him out, grasping him, freeing him from the shackles of his life, both new and old.

  What do you want, Mary.

  What do you want?

  All I want is you.

  It’s good that Julian finally has an answer to his most pressing question.

  He wants to say to her some other words he carries on the tip of his tongue. You can’t marry Lord Falk. You cannot bear his children. But Julian knows he can’t make an offer of marriage to Mary until he can support her. She can’t ever feel that she’s wasting her time on him. He needs to execute a plan, because the days and nights are racing by in bliss and fear.

  In response to his fractured silence Mary says, I shall hang myself if Lord Falk ends up being my fate.

  Don’t say that. Julian turns his head to the wall. Please. Even in jest.

  Do I sound to you as if I jest? Why do you keep saying no, Julian? No to me, no to Cornelius. The only one you say yes to is Krea. She asks you for something, and you’re always ready to help. But why is your first word to the rest of us always the cautious n-n-no? Can’t you say yes to something for once? Say yes to me, say, yes, Mary, you can’t marry another man and have his children.

  Yes, Mary, Julian whispers inaudibly. You can’t marry another man. You can’t bear his children.

  When will they trade his stony mattress for her feather bed? Every blessed day they are together draws her dreaded wedding day nearer.

  Julian grows consumed with figuring out a way to get them out. He travels to the Thames docks past London Bridge and talks to the seamen. When do the merchant ships come? Where do they go? Can he buy a passage for two? How much does it cost? He saves every shilling Aurora pays him. He needs a few months and then he’ll have enough to get them out of London. But he doesn’t have a few months. He has weeks. He needs another solution to the crisis they’re facing.

  They can’t talk about it, even lightly, even in hypotheticals. It’s too real. They withdraw from the impossible and talk about what they can. They hide behind the gentlemen and ladies of Verona. They hide behind Krea.

  “You’re quite chummy with Krea,” Mary says.

  Julian demurs. Not chummy. He owes her. She has taught him well. He has skills because of her. He can get work elsewhere. Soon he will tell Mary of his plan. He and she can hide south of the river until he can make enough money to buy them a sea crossing to far away.

  “Krea is a peasant, Julian, remember that,” Mary says. “They live by a different code than noblemen or merchants or even yeomen like yourself. When Krea was a child, a pig wandered into the hut they lived in, in the middle of London, no less, and took her baby sister. In my opinion this event has made Krea emulate the pig in her dealings with people. She can be vicious.”

  “And though she be but little, she is fierce,” Julian recites. “I agree, Krea can be a tough old bird, but she’s been nothing but helpful to me.”

  “She’s fattening you up,” Mary says. “The shambles is just down the road.” The shambles is a street
in Clerkenwell with the butchers and slaughterhouses.

  “So, in your scenario,” says Julian, “is she the pig or am I the pig?”

  Mary laughs. “Both,” she says.

  As their time together shortens even as the gloaming June days lengthen, she finally invites Julian to scale the wall trellis to her bed chamber after everyone has gone to sleep. But that night, Krea is in the kitchen so long, cleaning, making bread, and drying out the sprouted grain for the ale mash in the warm oven, that Julian himself falls asleep before he can climb through Mary’s window.

  In recent weeks, Julian has noticed that Krea has become less friendly with him. He doesn’t understand why and doesn’t want to. The seeds of suspicion Mary has planted inside him about Krea have taken root. The little maid acts as if she’s no longer his friend. She refuses to help him boil the potash, refuses to braid the linen into wick for his candles. She claims she’s too busy. She used to help him gladly. No more.

  The following evening when Julian sneaks out, he collides with Dunham who is splayed on the ground below Mary’s windows, smoking a cigar and drinking mash. When Julian asks the latrine boy why he isn’t in bed, Dunham replies that this is where he sleeps. “Why aren’t you in bed, Master Julian?”

  “You sleep outside near the refuse moat?”

  “This is where I sleeps,” Dunham repeats, puffing away. Julian is forced to return to his room, climb through his own window like a thwarted thief, only to hear Krea in the next room, scrubbing the suet off the stone tile.

  Mary can’t believe Dunham sleeps outside her open windows. Apparently, no one else can believe it either, because when Mary confronts her mother about it, who confronts Cornelius, everyone acts surprised that Dunham sleeps outdoors. But also—everyone is surprised that Lady Mary would care a whit where Dunham sleeps. Cornelius is surprised the lady knows Dunham’s name. Mary and Julian drop it, and Dunham continues to loiter outside her windows.

  Notwithstanding their frenetic pettings—two teenage lovers in the backseat of a car fumbling toward ecstasy—they still haven’t been together, and just when they need each other most and when their time feels like it’s running out, they begin to have an increasingly difficult time getting together at all, even in Julian’s bed. Krea stays awake into the midnight hours, either in the kitchen or in the chandlery, carrying the suet to and fro.

  Her constant wakefulness gets so frustrating that Julian talks to Aurora. To his surprise, Mary’s mother defends Krea! Krea is preparing for the wedding, Aurora says, and knows how much ale needs to be made, how many candles need to be hardened, and how much meat needs to be smoked. Julian doesn’t know what’s happening in the topsy turvy world in which Lady Collins takes the scullion maid’s side over his.

  He tries talking to Krea directly.

  “We used to be friends, Master Julian,” the aviary woman says to him, “and now you’re tattling on me to Lady because you think I work too hard?” Aurora has told Krea about Julian’s request? Wow.

  “I didn’t tattle on you, Krea,” Julian says. “I’m concerned for you. You are working too hard.”

  “Why do you care how hard I work?”

  “Because you’re always banging the pots, spilling grease, swearing, cleaning up in the dark. I also work hard, and I can’t get to sleep because of you.”

  “Are you sure it’s because of me, Master Julian?”

  He squints. Darkly she squints back.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just askin’ a question.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it’s because of you, Krea.”

  And to Mary in the fields the next day Julian says, “Krea knows about us.”

  “She’s a half-wit, she knows nothing.”

  “She may be a half-wit. But she’s smart enough to know what’s right in front of her face.”

  “Are you saying she’s smarter than Mother?”

  “Oh, your mother also knows,” Julian says. “She just pretends not to.” Perhaps that explains Aurora’s cooling toward him.

  They pass a house on Golding Lane they’ve passed every day, but today, on the wooden frame above the entrance, a dripping blood-red cross is sloppily drawn and below it on the door the words: “Lord have mercy upon us.”

  Mary rushes past, eyes to the ground.

  “What happened there?” Julian glances back.

  “Catastrophe.” She takes his arm. “Avoid that house like the plague.” Under the oaks she stops him and pulls him close. “Julian,” Mary says, “Dunham will not decide for me how I choose to live in my last free days.”

  “These are not your last free days.” Julian’s heart tightens.

  “Will the gong farmer choose for you? Will Krea choose for you? Come to me tonight. No matter what. After supper, I’m telling Mother I’m taking a bath early to get ready for tomorrow.”

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  “Julian, have you not been paying attention?”

  “Literally to nothing but you, Mary.” And to the termite hill Julian is building lint by lint, penny by penny for their future together. “What’s tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow Lord Falk is coming to stay the weekend.”

  “What? No! Why?”

  “It’s tradition. The groom comes a fortnight before the wedding to make sure all is well in the house of the woman he is about to take as his wife.”

  Julian’s spirits fall. That’s why the entire staff has been like dervishes, the servants polishing the silver and oiling the floors.

  “Of course, that’s why. Mother’s been anxious about it for weeks. How could you not have noticed?”

  Oh, he noticed. He just didn’t want to see.

  “You will finally have the pleasure of meeting him. You can tell me if you think I should marry him.”

  “I don’t need to meet him,” Julian says, “to know you should not.”

  She kisses him. “Tonight, Julian,” she says. “I’ll be in my bed, waiting. You want me? Come and take me.” After saying that, she barely manages to wrest herself away from him, out in the open, in Fynnesbyrie Field, under the linden trees.

  Not that anything could keep him from her bed, but that night he is in luck because Krea either exhausts herself or has an inordinate amount of fermented mash; either way, she vanishes. She usually sleeps in the far corner of the kitchen, but Julian can’t see her anywhere. Instead of going outside where the rancid Dunham is lounging in the mud under the trellis, Julian tip-toes through the nighttime manor in stealth, takes the servants’ stairs to the second floor, creeps down the darkened corridor and feels his way to Mary’s bedchamber. Hers is the seventh door on the right.

  He comes in without knocking. She is lying on her four-poster bed. There is no light, not even a candle. Only the moon outside, almost full, shines a silver beam to illumine the room, the decanter full of wine, Mary under the canopy, wig off, naked in the white sheets, the soft quilt thrown to the side.

  Here, finally, is the consequence of happiness.

  The consummation.

  Are you going to take off your necklace?

  No, it never comes off.

  Why did you bring the beret with you? Do you want me to wear it?

  Yes—and nothing else.

  But when she puts it on, the red beret looks black, like blood in darkness. Unsmiling she falls back on the bed when she sees the bottomless expression in his eyes. Julian takes the beret off her before he can touch her.

  He traces the outline of her body with his fingers. He proves to himself she is real and alive through his five senses. He can touch her: his passionate palms caress her, her curved back, her round hips, her ample thighs. He can hear her: they’re panting, her moaning body stretching over his. He can feel her: her elbows as they squeeze his head in a vise, the weight of her body as she moves up and down on him, slides back and forth as if she’s rowing across the river. He can smell her: rosewater and lavender, meadowsweet and clover. He can taste her: his lips kiss the salt on her neck, o
n her breasts, in the center of her heart, at the softness of her belly. The guardian angel shows him living water in the delta of life.

  He has much to offer, much to bestow. His love is soft and diamond hard. He is open mouthed at her response to him. He fears the precipitous end.

  But the end doesn’t come. Not even now when relief and lust and love is crystal cut across his body. He turns her onto her back. He holds her wrists above her head. She is wrapped around him, as he lowers his weight on her, presents himself to her like a gift of gold and myrrh. Belatedly he realizes that myrrh is a wrong word, a bad word. Myrrh is what they give to Jesus to prepare Him for His burial. To remember that, at this most alive of moments, upsets Julian, upsets him just enough to stop him from finishing. To regroup, he slows to kiss her, to give her a chance to catch her breath.

  Come night, come, come day in night.

  “Julian,” Mary whispers, “who are you? Where did you come from?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m dreading the day you’ll return to that place and I’ll be left here dreary and alone without you.”

  “I won’t leave you,” he says. “I will never leave you.” He struggles with himself—to ask or not to ask? “Did Massimo leave you? Did he break your heart?”

  “A little bit.” She shrugs. “He acted as if he wanted me, but he only wanted the part he could see. Nothing else. I was more angry than anything.” Mary’s arms bind around Julian. “But I tasted the thrill of the stage because of him,” she says. “And then just like that—it was all over. Him, the stage, everything. And worse, he left something unwanted behind with me.” She emits a cracked moan of anguish. “I won’t deny, I was devastated. I boiled up some plants, I prayed. Then the blood came. It was such a relief. I was so grateful that it wasn’t to be. I couldn’t even feel guilty for being grateful. It was as if the good Lord had answered my prayers. Mother said that the Lord didn’t answer those kinds of prayers, to do away with the life growing inside you, but who does then? I had prayed so fervently. And someone most assuredly answered.” She pauses through Julian’s silence. “Do you know how many women die in childbirth? I didn’t want it to be me. I wanted to live, live! I wanted to dress in finery, stand above the world on a stage with my arms outstretched, take another bow, and another. I didn’t want to be a mother.”