“I’m sorry I ever said I was curious. I’m curious about death, too, but I can wait to find out, thank you. Get lost, Avaric. Better go catch up with your friends. Enjoy the Kumbric antics, which by the way I expect is false advertising. Kumbric Witch talents went out hundreds of years ago. If indeed they ever existed.”
Avaric turned up the second collar of his tunic-jacket. The inside was lined with a deep red velvet plush. Against his elegant shaven neck the lining seemed like a single ribbon of privilege. Boq found himself, once again, making mental comparisons between himself and handsome Avaric, and coming up—well, coming up short. “What, Avaric,” he said, as impatient with himself as he was with his friend.
“Something has happened to you,” said Avaric. “I’m not that dull. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” said Boq.
“Tell me to mind my own business, tell me to go fuck myself, to piss off, go on, say it, but don’t tell me nothing’s wrong. For you’re not that good a liar, and I’m not that stupid. Even for a dissipated Gillikinese of decaying nobility.” His expression was soft, and Boq, momentarily, was tempted. His mouth opened as he thought of what to say, but at the sound of bells in Ozma Towers, chiming the hour, Avaric’s head turned just a fraction. For all his concern, Avaric wasn’t entirely here. Boq closed his mouth, thought some more, and said, “Call it Munchkinlander stolidity. I won’t lie, Avaric, you’re too good a friend to lie to. But there’s nothing to say now. Now go on and enjoy yourself. But be careful.” He was about to add a word of warning against the Philosophy Club, but checked it. If Avaric was annoyed enough, then Boq’s nannyish worrying might backfire and goad Avaric into going there.
Avaric came forward and kissed him on both cheeks and on the forehead, an upper-class northern custom that always made Boq profoundly ill at ease. Then with a wink and a dirty gesture, he disappeared.
Boq’s room looked out over a cobblestoned alley, down which Avaric and his cronies were swooping and weaving. Boq stood back, in the shadows, but needn’t have worried; his friends weren’t thinking of him now. They had made it through the halfway point in their exams and had a breather for a couple of days. After the exams, the campus would lie vacant except for the more befuddled of the professors and the poorer of the boys. Boq had lived through this before. He preferred study, however, to scrubbing old manuscripts with a five-haired teck-fur brush, which was what he would be employed to do in the Three Queens library all summer long.
Across the alley ran the bluestone wall of a private stable, attached to some mansion house a few streets away on a fashionable square. Beyond the stable roof you could see the rounded tops of a few fruit trees, in the kitchen garden of Crage Hall, and above them glowed the lancet windows of the dormitories and classrooms. When the girls forgot to draw their drapes—which was astoundingly often—you could see them in various stages of undress. Never the whole body naked, of course; in that case he would have looked away, or told himself sternly that he had better. But the pinkness and whiteness of underskirts and camisoles, the frilliness of foundation garments, the rustle about the bustle and the fuss about the bust. It was an education in lingerie if nothing else. Boq, who had no sisters, merely looked.
The Crage Hall dormitory was just far enough away that he couldn’t make out the individual girls. And Boq was flushed with desire to see his heartthrob again. Damn! Double damn! He couldn’t concentrate. He’d be sent down if he queered his exams! He’d let down his father, old Bfee, and his village, and the other villages.
Hell and hell. Life was hard and barley just wasn’t enough. Boq found himself suddenly leaping over the footstool, grabbing his student cape, charging down the corridors, and plummeting around the stone spiral stairs in the corner tower. He couldn’t wait any more. He had to do something, and an idea had come to him.
He nodded to the porter on duty, turned left out of the gate, and hurried along the road, in the dusk avoiding as best he could the generous heaps of horse manure. At least with his classmates off gallivanting, he would make no fool of himself in their line of vision. There wasn’t a soul left in Briscoe. So he turned left, then left again, and soon was pacing the alley by the stable. A rick of cordwood, the protruding edge of a swollen shutter, the iron bracket of a hoist. Boq was small but he was nimble too, and with hardly a scrape of his knuckles he had swung himself to the tin gutter of the stable, and then was scrabbling like a lake crab up the steeply pitched roof.
Aha! He might have thought of this weeks ago, months ago! But the night that all the boys would be out celebrating, the night he could be sure he himself wouldn’t be seen from Briscoe Hall: that was tonight, and maybe only tonight. Some fate had insisted he resist Avaric’s invitation out. For now he was mounted on the stable roof, and the wind coursing through the wet leaves of the crawberry and pear trees made a soft fanfare. And there proceeded the girls into their hall—as if they’d been waiting in the corridor until he was properly positioned—as if they’d known he was coming!
Closer up they were not, on the whole, as pretty. . .
But where was the one?
And pretty or not, they were clear. The fingers they dove into clumps of satin bow, to untie them, the fingers they peeled gloves off with, and worked cunning rows of forty miniature pearl buttons with, the fingers they loaned to each other, at the inside laces and the private places that college boys knew only by mythology! The unexpected tufts of hair—how tender! How marvelously animallike! His hands clenched and unclenched themselves, of their own accord, but hungry for what he hardly knew—and where was she?
“What the hell are you doing up there?”
So he slipped, of course, because he was startled, and because fate, having been so kind as to award him this ecstasy, retributively was going to kill him now. He lost his footing and grabbed for the chimney but missed. Head over thighs he rolled out like a child’s toy, smashed into the poking branches of the damn pear tree, which probably saved his life, breaking his fall. He landed with a thud on a bed of lettuces, and the wind was loudly knocked out of him, mortifyingly so, through all available orifices.
“Oh, brilliant,” said the voice. “The trees are dropping their fruits early this year.”
He had a last, lost hope that the person speaking would be his love. He tried to look urbane, though his spectacles had bounced somewhere.
“How do you do,” he said uncertainly, sitting up. “This isn’t how I intended to arrive.”
Barefoot and aproned, she came out from behind an arbor of pink Pertha grapes. It wasn’t she, it wasn’t the one. It was the other one. He could tell even without his glasses. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, trying not to sound devastated.
She had a colander with baby grapes in it, the sour ones used in spring salads. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, coming closer. “I know you.”
“Master Boq, at your service.”
“You mean Master Boq, in my lettuces.” She picked up his spectacles from the runner beans, and handed them back.
“How are you, Miss Elphie?”
“I am not as tart as a grape and not as squished as a lettuce,” she said. “How are you, Master Boq?”
“I am,” he said, “considerably embarrassed. Am I going to get in trouble here?”
“I ca
n arrange it if you like.”
“Don’t go to the effort. I’ll let myself out the way I came in.” He looked up at the pear tree. “Poor thing, I’ve splintered some good-size limbs.”
