Chapter 21
SEVERAL YEARS AFTER the war—what war?—during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript—what manuscript?—I received a book in the post.
No. It was not the affable, chap-cheeked campus postman who delivered the book. It was a handsome woman who smelled, sickeningly, of summer flowers. She was very tall; how had I never noticed how tall she was?
This time, when I saw the book, I felt no awe or terror or ambition. I felt nothing at all. How could I? I had left my heart beneath the yew.
Vivian Rolfe cleared off a corner of my desk and sat, fishing comfortably through the detritus until she found a stray cigarette and a book of matches. She did not hurry; why would she?
As she shook out the match, she said, “Welcome back to the modern age, Corporal.” Her lips twisted. “More or less.”
I didn’t know what she meant, for a moment. But I soon discovered a brand-new set of memories stacked neatly in my skull, like towels in a guest bathroom. They unfolded all at once, a suffocating mass.
This was not the Dominion I’d left behind.
It was not an empire, or even a great power of the world, but merely one fractious, troubled state among many, jostling restlessly against its neighbors.
Cantford was not the pinnacle of all learned scholarship, but only a backward little college in a backward little country.
There were no munitions plants spewing black smoke into the sky, no grand crusades, no processions of troops in bright Dominion red.
We did not have wars, but only petty skirmishes and border disputes.
The current Chancellor was a zealous, sallow young man, who talked often of God and destiny and the days when Dominion’s borders had reached from one sea to the other.
I’d heard his speeches on the wireless; they were familiar.
I suspected now—observing the woman sitting comfortably on my desk, looking out at the mossy green steeples of Cantford—that he hadn’t written them himself.
Dominion was much diminished, but it still belonged to Vivian Rolfe.
“How did you—” I stopped. In nine years, I’d grown used to my voice, even a little vain of it: It was sweet and resonant, like a struck bell. I had sung our children to sleep with that voice, and later, in the dark, I’d used it to whisper in your ear.
Now it was my old voice that emerged, ragged as a broken fingernail. I touched my throat and found slick, puckered scars. Another memory unfolded: a burglary when I was nineteen, followed by a long fever. Random, as nothing in Dominion truly was.
I frowned, tiredly, at Vivian. “Was this really necessary?”
“No, but it was prudent. It will be easier for you if everything is as it was, before.”
I swallowed, feeling the foreign-familiar pull of scar tissue, and tried again. “How did you accomplish all this? Without the book, without Una—”
“Honestly, did you think you’d dealt Dominion a death blow?
” Vivian blew a neat stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth.
“I still had three-quarters of a national mythology and several centuries of hard, careful work. What kind of mastermind would I be if I let the whole of my strategy rest on a pair of pawns?”
She tapped her cigarette twice on the rim of my teacup.
The tea inside had long since evaporated, leaving brown stains behind like the rings of a tree.
“But—and I want you to think about this, really—if it weren’t me, it would be someone else.
I did not single-handedly invent the crown, or the chancellorship.
Where there is power, someone will wield it.
Is it really so intolerable that it would be me? ”
“Yes,” I said, instantly. I could still hear our son’s voice asking why, over and over.
“Oh, don’t be so myopic. Look around!” Vivian gestured out the window. “Did you save the poor downtrodden folk of Dominion from the wicked queen—or did you ruin their favorite bedtime story? Did you strike a blow for freedom, or did you just steal a little bit for yourselves?”
I didn’t know. There were too many versions of history in my head, too many chains of cause and effect—and I wasn’t sure I cared about any of them, really, or if I only cared about you, and a pair of children who no longer existed.
“Well, it hardly matters.” Vivian ground her cigarette into the bottom of the teacup and slid from the desk. “You’ll play your part, whether you go marching or dancing. I don’t think there’s any need for speeches or set-dressing this time, so if you’ll open the book, I can send you on your wa—”
“There you are.” Harrison rounded the corner and began his usual performative slouch against the doorframe. But, as soon as he saw Vivian Rolfe, his body jerked strangely, like a puppet whose strings have gotten tangled.
“Oh,” he said, and then, a little too loudly, “Jeremy Harrison, Professor of History.” He extended his hand woodenly.
Vivian took it. “What an honor,” she said, with the false sobriety of an adult humoring a child’s game of pretend. “But I’m afraid Professor Mallory and I are rather in the middle of something.”
“Of course, of course.” His eyes found the book in my hands—unwrapped, your device perfectly visible—and his features twisted with pure, unadulterated avarice.
But he looked back at Vivian, who gave him the faint smile of someone very important who wonders why their time is being wasted, and ducked his head.
“Far be it from me to stand between a historian and his duty,” he sneered, recovering his old-money unction, and scuttled away.
I waited for his steps to retreat down the hall before I observed, calmly, “He knows you.”
“I should hope so. I’m the one who paid for every single cent of his education, and all those silly jackets with patches on the elbows.” She took another contemplative drag. “His family are swede farmers, you know. He’d have been nothing, without me.”
I thought of Harrison’s pure and hateful condescension, almost comforting in its constancy. Of his desperate zeal to prove himself socially, intellectually, and sartorially superior. The product of inherited wealth, I’d thought—but actually the product of its absence.
I asked, “Why?”
“Because the only people you truly own are the ones you make. I made him—from nothing, from filth and obscurity—and so he’s mine. Well, not literally mine.” A sly, sidelong look here. “I was only a mother the one time.”
It was bait; I declined to take it.
Vivian reeled her line back in, disappointed.
“Anyway. The Harrison boy failed to fill your role, obviously, but he keeps an eye on you and your father for me, and that spiteful old woman.” Sawbridge?
“And there’s nothing like a good sibling rivalry to keep you sharp.
Una fought twice as hard once I made Ancel for her to compete with. ”
I thought of Ancel’s face as he died, the rueful, weary expression of a man whose whole life had been spent merely to further the plot of someone else’s story.
I swallowed sudden sympathy. “Let Harrison translate the book, when I finish it for you.” Let him have the glory and the big desk, the money and the reputation so unassailable that no one would ever inquire after his family again. “He deserves … something.”
“Why not?” Vivian answered easily, but she had paused slightly before she said it. That pause bothered me very much, I found.
She opened the book, the wooden cover clacking hard against my desk, and drew a familiar silver knife from her hip pocket. “Your hand, Corporal.”
“Wait.” I kept my voice carefully innocent, unshaded by suspicion. “May I say my goodbyes?”
Vivian frowned a little. She was—and this, too, bothered me—genuinely baffled.
“To my father, and my friends, I mean.” I shrugged to disguise the sudden tremor of my hands. “Since I won’t be returning to this time again.”
Vivian ran her tongue over her canine. “Of course. God knows we have nothing but time. Meet me here, when you’re ready.” She tucked the book under her arm and handed me a card printed on cheap, grayish paper. It bore no name, but only an address.
Professor Sawbridge was in her office, naturally, because she hadn’t been called away to discover the tomb of Una Everlasting, because there was no tomb to discover, this time. You had died anonymously, deep in the woods, and your body had been buried by rain and rot and small, scrounging animals.
Her office was less grand than I remembered—all of Dominion was—and much cleaner. There were no architecturally unsound towers of books, no bundles of political pamphlets. There were not even any cheaply bound editions of racy novels on her shelves.
She looked up as I entered—and beamed at me. “Mr. Mallory! What can I do for my favorite protégé?”
“I—pardon?” I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard her make use of an exclamation point.
Her smile was very wide, like the painted grin of a marionette. “How’s the manuscript? It’ll win you the endowed faculty spot if you ever finish it.”
I stared at her. “But you hate my book. You called it ‘Grade-A hog swill.’”
A flicker in her eyes, indecipherable. “Hate it? Why, I think it’s a fine piece of scholarship. Just what the country needs.”
I recalled suddenly that she’d expressed similar sentiments, many times, in this version of my life.
Because this Gilda Sawbridge had undergone a sudden and thorough change of heart.
She was no longer a known radical and thorn in the side of the Cantford Board of Fellows; instead, she was one of the most fervent academic voices behind the new Chancellor.
She wrote editorials decrying the corruption of modern Dominion culture, and the lack of national spirit in our curriculum.
She had even—and here I knew something had gone profoundly, hideously wrong—described my latest article as “something of a little triumph.”