Pamela Dean (58 page)

The swan got one wing free and beat her on the head with it. Janet sat down, not quite intentionally, and smothered its biting head in the smock again. There was a
whoosh
like the lighting of a Bunsen burner multiplied by a million, and she was holding not a living body but a burning brand.

Somebody was screaming. It was herself. She could not hold this thing any longer; nobody would; her arms were going to fling it from her of their own volition, as one's hand jerks back from a hot stove before the message of pain even reaches the mind. Janet rolled over so the fire was underneath her; and with a sudden thought went on rolling, until the blessed icy water of the stream engulfed them like a bed. The fire went out. The thing she was holding was suddenly heavy. She opened her eyes, and hastily dragged Thomas's head out of the water.

He was naked, which probably boded pneumonia if Medeous did not render the matter moot. Janet snagged the blanket she and Molly had brought from a bush that it had become involved with, and stood up. "If you'll get up," she said, giddily, "you can have this nice blanket."

Thomas stood up, his teeth chattering. Bony, thought Janet, definitely bony. Well, he's yours now. You can feed him up. Thomas expelled a shivering breath, and she wrapped the blanket around him. They climbed out of the stream, stumbled over some branches, and stood dripping on the gravel.

All the horses stood still on the highway, sparkling and gleaming with jewels. The glittering riders had dismounted, and made a silent clump, some holding the horses, and some just looking. Robin was standing a little to one side, looking disheveled. He had the only immediately recognizable expression: he was desperately trying not to laugh. Kit Lane's was similar; it might be that he was hiding a face of great and catlike smugness.

Anne and Odile might have just watched their team win at some bloodless and polite sport—tennis, perhaps. Professor Ferris had put his hands over his face. Melinda Wolfe was so still and so devoid of expression that she looked like a statue. The pale, stern people were remote and indecipherable, as always. Johnny Lane might have been horrified; Nick might have been astonished. He avoided Janet's gaze, but seemed to be trying to catch Thomas's.

But Thomas was not attending to any of them. Professor Medeous, her red and green rags hanging straight down and all their edges shaking as if with flame, stood two feet away and looked at them. No: looked at Janet.

"Oh, had I known," she said in her own voice, but with a wild note and a wilder accent, Scottish flavored with Welsh or French or something nobody knew; she said this much straight to Janet, and then jerked her head to address Thomas. "Tam Lin," she said,

"what this night I did see," and she looked back at Janet, "I had looked him in the eye, and turned him to a tree."

She would have; and she could have. It was in her voice: w ood; a slow vegetable life

rather than a bright swift animal one; a kind of blindness; a kind of deafness; and some death of the heart. Linear A: the alphabet no one knew. Janet clutched at Thomas, who was cold and wet and slippery, but still flesh and blood.

"There will be two then," said Medeous, still with those wild-flavored vowels, but otherwise for all the world as if she were correcting somebody's sight-reading. "In seven years, we shall have two." She looked hard at Thomas. "And two dearer," she said, clearly.

She turned, and without a word or another sign from her all the riders mounted. She climbed onto her horse as if she were one drop of water joining another on a windowpane; and silently, with no shout and no sound of hoofs, all that troupe rode up the long hill and vanished around the bend. They stood and looked at the empty black road. The stream lapped at the rocks. The wind picked up.

"Listen," said Thomas in a shivering voice. "I couldn't say it before, it wasn't fair. I love you. Will you marry me?"

"Don't be an idiot," said Janet, but she put her arms around him.

"'Had you rather hear your dog bark at a crow?'"

"Nobody else in the entire world," said Molly, coming up behind Janet, "would stand out here freezing to death so they could quote Shakespeare at each other. Come in."

"Where's Robin?" said Janet.

"He's gone riding," said Molly lightly. "It's safe now, you know."

They started walking.

"If we'd known," said Molly, "we could have brought you some clothes."

"I didn't think anybody was coming." Thomas said this with perfect composure, allowing for the chattering of his teeth. But Janet let her imagination, for the first time, consider what had been happening to him. She took his cold hand in her cold hand. Behind them, belatedly, the bagpipes made sounds as of an asthmatic giant, and lumbered into music.

"Robin didn't play," said Molly.

"He wouldn't," said Thomas. "Not for my funeral procession."

"Was that all he could think of to do? Make you die to the sounds of inept piping?"

"You don't know what it's like," said Thomas. "You don't know what it's like in that Court. It's like being wrapped up in cotton. And it's been going on for thousands of years.

And they're all old, and you know, they don't get bored or tired; the older they are, the more they want to go on living. Robin remembers Shakespeare, at least a little. Why shouldn't he go on remembering him? Who do I remember? Besides—he tried to warn me about
The
Revenger's Tragedy,
and after that he washed his hands of me. If he saved me, it might be him they'd take instead; it might be Nick. And they are all so remote there. Things take years to work their way through the cotton. They'd have wept for me, I calculate, around the year 3000. Getting a B.A. at one of the best small colleges in the country is like a vacation to them; it's like going to the beach for a week."

"Has anybody ever told you that you talk too much?" said Molly.

"I'm sorry," said Thomas. "I don't mean you should give up on Robin. He is human—and my God, Shakespeare wrote Feste for him. But you should know what you're up against."

"What did she mean, about there being two next time?"

"What she said," said Thomas.

"So she might mean Robin and Nick?"

"Well—two dearer. Anne and Odile? Or Kit and Johnny. I'm Johnny's fault; that's how she'll think of it now."

Janet thought of two other people Medeous might mean, but she said nothing. Dearer to whom, that was the question. Seven years was a long time. In seven years she might be dead, or the baby might. She was not sure she could get through the next seven minutes.

Her finger was still bleeding from the swan; her whole back smarted; there was an entire network of stings on her head. No burns, though, for what that was worth. And now she was stuck with having a baby.

They went into Forbes, garnering a few comments from students dressed, for Hallowe'en, in garments hardly less strange than Thomas's. Of course, none of them was dripping wet. Thomas let himself into his room and emerged after a moment in his bathrobe. He gave Janet a Blackstock T-shirt and a pair of Robin's jeans. He distributed towels, both his own and Robin's, which made Molly laugh, and made sure Molly had a book. Then he pointed Janet in the direction of the women's bathroom, and walked down the hall to the men's.

Janet was cold, but there was no lingering smell from the water, only a little sand and gravel painfully ingrained. She was going to be all over bruises tomorrow, and she had to stand under the water a long time before she stopped trembling. "Sorry, kid," she said to her flat, swan-clawed stomach. It was hard to believe there was anybody in there. She had no idea what was bad for embryos, except alcohol. She could research the matter. That would help.

Robin's jeans smelled like lavender. Thomas's T-shirt smelled like rue. Janet wished they would wash with chemicals like normal people.

Thomas made them tea when they were all assembled in the room again. They talked a little about Victoria Thompson and Margaret Roxburgh. "I feel as if I ought to write a book about them," said Janet, "but who would believe it?"

"Even if you left out the faerie element, it could be a very good book," said Molly. "I suppose that's bad scholarship, though, isn't it?"

"It might be good sense," said Janet. "I don't want some modern version of Pope satirizing me the way he went after Bentley."

"There are no modern versions of Pope," said Thomas.

"More's the pity."

"Who's Bentley?" said Molly.

Janet said, "He was a very great classical scholar. He also appears to have been an unpleasant person—"

"Yes," said Thomas, "when he was Master of Trinity College he was tried and very nearly tossed out for what they called despotic rule."

"Yes, I know, and what he did to Milton passes belief. That, of course, is why he's in

The Dunciad
with Colley Cibber and Nahum Tate and—"

"Robin's Colley Cibber?" said Molly. "The one who mucked with Shakespeare?

Robin despises him."

"That's him," said Janet. "And Bentley did that with Mil ton—except it was even worse, in a way, because Cibber just said he was improving Shakespeare, while Bentley said he was restoring what Milton meant to write, only his secretary wrote it down wrong and the printer screwed up. Milton's secretary, that is. I'm glad Evans can't hear me now."

"What's
The Dunciad?
"

Janet and Thomas looked at each other. Thomas said, a little helplessly, "It's a mock epic on the history and nature of Dullness and its eventual conquest of the world. It's hilarious if you've read Homer." He pushed his wet hair out of his eyes and recited, "'Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain. Critics like me will make it Prose again.'"

"I thought you had trouble in that class," said Janet.

"I had trouble with Swift. Pope is a wonder."

"Anyway,"
said Janet, "regardless of all his bad qualities, Bentley really was a very great classical scholar, and he invented practically single-handed the science of textual criticism—except he hadn't the tools for it, which is why he made such a mess of Milton—and he was responsible for one of the most important discoveries ever made in Homeric scholarship. But Pope couldn't see that."

"Was it fair to expect him to?" said Molly.

"Maybe not. Similarly, it's probably not fair to expect anybody who might read any book I might write to give credit to the parts they think are sensible while pooh-poohing the supernatural elements."

"This is far too hypothetical for me," said Molly, yawning and standing up. She set her teacup neatly in the middle of Robin's open volume of the Greek New Testament. "I am going home to my cold couch."

Janet got up.

"You stay right here," said Molly. "If you come home in less than an hour I'll kick you out. The Meebe and I." She scooped up her sweater and effected a majestic exit.

The door clicked behind her. Janet looked at Thomas, who cleared his throat. "If," he said, "I did my best not to be an idiot—"

"Don't. Let's take this one thing at a time, okay? I understand that you don't want to marry me just because you got me—we got me—what a silly language—pregnant. Well, I don't want to marry you just because I'm pregnant. Let's make it easy for those disgusting people who count the months between the wedding anniversary and the child's birthday, shall we? Let's get married on the kid's first birthday, and put the kid in the wedding pictures. If I'm going to make myself a scandal and a hissing, I might as well enjoy it."

"What should you like to do in the meantime?"

"Finish my senior year, and you should do the same. Oh, God, I'll be eight months pregnant when I take my comprehensives."

"Take a leave of absence and finish up the following fall," said Thomas. "You wanted another autumn at Blackstock." He looked thoughtful. "Maybe nobody will throw any books," he said. "Maybe Victoria and Margaret are avenged."

"What will you do? Don't you want to go to graduate school?"

"Having taken seven years to get my B.A., I won't be thought odd at all for taking a year off between undergraduate and graduate work. I could get a job; I understand babies are expensive."

"This really isn't going to work, Thomas; there's a recession, for God's sake."

"I understand that the publishing industry is unaffected by recessions," said Thomas, still thoughtfully. "We might look into that. I might like digging ditches—you never can tell."

"You're hopeless."

"Not as hopeless as I was earlier this evening."

Janet looked at him. "I'm sorry I hesitated for a minute," she said. "It's not as if I had Robin's excuse."

"Don't. You didn't more than half believe me; and if you resented being suddenly bullied into the female role, who could blame you?" He rubbed his eyes.

Janet got up from his desk chair and walked over to the bed, where he was sitting. She put a hand on his damp head. Two next time, Medeous had said. By then, if all went well, there would be three of them. No, you don't get us, thought Janet. You had your chance.

She wondered about the rest of them. But when Medeous said two next time, she thought, nobody said a word of protest.

"It really would be better," said Thomas from under his hand, "if youth
could
sleep out the rest. But since we can't, let us tell one another stories around the campfire until the sun of maturity rises over the hills." He dropped his hand and began to laugh. 'God, what would Pope say about that metaphor?"

"I don't know," said Janet slowly, "but—" She made a bound at the desk, flung herself into the chair again, rummaged a pen out of the center drawer, and found a piece of typewritten manuscript with a line drawn violently across its diagonal. She turned it over; the back was usefully blank.

"Janet, for God's sake come to bed."

"In a minute," said Janet. "I'm writing you a poem."

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Readers acquainted with Carleton College will find much that is familiar to them in the architecture, landscape, classes, terminology, and general atmosphere of Blackstock.

They are earnestly advised that it would be unwise to refine too much upon this.