Chapter 21 #2
I sank slowly into the chair across from her desk, where I’d spent so many hours being bullied and berated into becoming a better scholar than I was. “Oh, Gilda.” My head was aching fiercely. “What the hell did she do to you?”
“What? Who?” She blinked rapidly, as if confused. It was not an expression I’d ever seen her attempt.
I studied her soberly. “The last time we spoke—no, I know you don’t remember it, just take my word for it—you told me there was something wrong with the history of Dominion. I wanted you to know you were right. It’s been manufactured, all of it, in service to a woman named—”
“Is this some kind of test?” Sawbridge was chewing at her lips. They were dry and scabby, as if she did it often. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I am proud to call myself a citizen of Dominion—”
“No, you don’t have to—”
“And proud to serve crown and country. What more”—her voice split, like an overworked seam—“could you possibly want from me?”
It would have been an entirely baffling speech, at odds with everything I knew about Gilda Sawbridge—except that I’d seen a familiar, weary agony in her eyes. As if her heart were buried somewhere far away, and her every word and gesture was an effort to keep it safe.
Gently, I said, “It’s the archivist, isn’t it?” I’d remembered, in a delayed rush of images from this new version of my life, that Mistress Shaw had abruptly quit her post during my third year of study. “How did it happen?”
Professor Sawbridge seemed to collapse inward, like a punctured rubber ball.
She looked, for the first time in all my lives, like what she was: an old woman.
“I don’t know how you could possibly … Well, you were always bright, when you weren’t willfully stupid.
Harrison caught us in the old observatory one night.
” She added, sounding more like herself, “Sneaking little shit stain.”
“And he … reported you for indecency?”
“I wish he had. Sylvie and I would have lost our posts, of course, maybe spent a few months in the penitentiary, but then … we would’ve been free, wouldn’t we?”
There was wistfulness to the question, as if she wanted me to tell her there was some version of her life where she was happy and safe and unshackled.
I felt nothing but sympathy; it was the same foolish, childish hope that had sent me running for nine long years, and which had brought me back, here, to try again.
Sawbridge made a sound of disgust, directed inward. “No. Harrison told someone, but not the authorities. And then—they took Sylvie away.”
“I’m sorry.” It was almost funny, in its predictability. In all her centuries of malice and manipulation, Vivian Rolfe had only ever found one lever to push, one string to pull, over and over.
“I get postcards from her. I’ve seen pictures—she’s well. She’s taken care of.” Sawbridge flashed me a guilty, resentful look. “So I’ll write a thousand craven little articles. I’ll dance like a goddamn bear if they ask me to. Because, for that, for her, it’s—”
“Worth it.” My voice cracked, falling to a jagged whisper. “Yes. I understand.” I thought there was probably no one on earth who understood better. “Love makes cowards of us all.”
Sawbridge flinched a little. She closed her eyes. “Yes.”
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know if you’ll remember I said this, but things are going to get very bad, soon.” Vivian had the book again, and soon she would have the story inside it. “Dominion will have a queen again. You have to get out before she takes the throne.”
Sawbridge opened her eyes and propped her spectacles on top of her head. “It’s that Rolfe woman, isn’t it.”
“It is, yes. You might think you’re safe, but she’s locked you up before, and she’ll do it again. And the second she doesn’t need you, she’ll kill you.”
Sawbridge absorbed this calmly, without skepticism or alarm. “Thank you, Mallory. But I think I’ll stay put.”
“But—”
“She has Sylvie.” She said it slowly, as if she were writing out a very simple equation on the board. “If I can’t run with her, then I can’t run at all. And if you can’t run”—she spread her hands—“then I suppose, if you’ll excuse the melodrama, you stand and fight.”
I sat looking at her for a while—an aging professor of history, nearsighted, slightly fat, and very, very angry—and wondered if Vivian knew what kind of enemy she’d made for herself.
I leaned across the desk and touched my lips to her cheek, as she had once kissed me. “If I don’t see you again—though I’m very afraid that I will—goodbye, Professor. Thank you, for everything.”
She fussed with papers on her desk, not looking at me. “Goodbye, boy.”
She cleared her throat before I reached the door. “About your manuscript, Mallory.” I turned to find her smiling beatifically, as if relieved of a great and awful burden. She said, with relish, “It’s absolute hog swill.”
My father still lived in Queenswald, but he’d long since lost the narrow gray row house.
Instead, he’d worked out what he called “a cordial arrangement” with both the barkeep and her husband, which—once I’d interpreted the merry waggling of his eyebrows—I’d found indecent, illegal, blasphemous, and entirely humiliating.
It had been the beginning of our worst fight.
Now, as I ducked into the amber-lit tavern, I felt nothing but gratitude, and a certain embarrassed irritation with my previous selves. I’d abandoned my father over and over, in every life I’d lived, and I was about to do it again; at least I wouldn’t be leaving him alone.
It was past supper, which meant my father was drifting between verb tenses, transitioning gently from drinking to drunk.
I’d caught him just after the pain eased but before the weeping started, when his cheeks turned a cherubic red and his eyes crimped with goodwill.
He used to sing to me, sometimes, in this mood. He had a lovely voice.
He saw me first through the bottom of his pint glass. His eye, magnified by beer, widened suddenly. The expression in it was intimately familiar to me, now: relief and irritation and joy. I’d had children of my own since the last time I’d seen him.
Thank God my heart was elsewhere; it would have hurt badly, just then.
“Well, well!” My father thumped his glass on the table. “If it isn’t the pride of the Cantford Department of Propaganda!”
“Hello, Dad.” He was less changed than Sawbridge had been, in this iteration of himself.
I knew from my fresh-made memories that he’d still gone to war and still come back with a bad leg and a baby.
He still embarrassed me; I still disappointed him; we still loved each other, however clumsily.
We hadn’t yet had our biggest fight, but we were about to.
My father tilted back in his chair, balancing it on two legs. “What brings you here, son?”
I couldn’t even remember why I’d come, all those previous times.
I’d made different excuses: I’d come to request that he stop sending his pamphlets to my campus address, for the sake of my career; I’d come to beg him to rent a flat of his own, for the sake of decency.
But actually, I’d come for the same reason I always did.
“Just wanted to see you,” I said, and it was the truth.
My father squinted a little, uncertainly. Then he drew a curled-up magazine from his breast pocket and slapped it on the counter. The Journal of Middle Dominion Studies, issue 3, volume 44. “Read your latest, of course.”
The scorn in his voice had scalded me, once.
I’d been proud of that article, and I’d wanted him to be proud, too, despite our differences.
What an idiot I’d been: Why else, save pride, would a man who couldn’t make rent subscribe to all the leading history journals?
What else would make him dog-ear the pages I’d written, and carry it close to his chest?
“I tried to raise you right. Tried to teach you wrong from right.” My father shook his head, dolefully. “And what have I raised? A bootlicker, it seems! A child, who still believes in fairy tales!” Here was a man who used twice the normal allotment of exclamation points.
I considered him, wondering a little. “Were you—are you trying to pick a fight with me?”
His squint deepened, but my father didn’t abandon his script. “I don’t know,” he pronounced, enunciating very clearly, “how you sleep at night, with the blood of your countrymen on your hands.”
He let this statement hang, full of portent. I marveled. “You were. God, Dad, couldn’t you have found a better way to tell me about my mother?”
But I didn’t think he could have. He was an ex-soldier and a lifelong radical; fighting was the only thing he knew how to do.
If he had something to say, he’d shout it.
If he had something to lose, he’d hide it.
It occurred to me that our most honest conversation had taken place in a jail cell, across an interrogation table.
My father’s mouth had fallen slightly open. “You’re not—you knew?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling older than myself, older than my own father. “I know everything. It’s alright. You already told me.”
He frowned uncertainly, but a drunk never trusts his own memory. He sat blinking absurdly, like a man who’s shown up for battle on the wrong day.
I’d only come to say goodbye—and to leave things a little better than I had the previous times, perhaps—but I found myself flagging down the barkeep’s daughter.
She was full-grown now, and pretty in an innocent, maidenly way that made me hope she didn’t know what our parents got up to in the bedroom above the bar.
I ordered two more pints and she said, “Yes, sir,” in a breezy manner that made me feel a thousand years old.
I slid a glass across the table to my father when they arrived. “Can I ask you something?” He was peering hopefully down into his beer, as if it might help him make sense of this conversation. “What did you want to do with your life, before the war?”