Chapter 8
Eight
In Memoriam
Dorotèa hovered just in front of Oste, and when he lifted his head up from the table and saw her there, he twitched and made a surprised choking sound that she flinched at. It only colored her shame-reddened cheeks more.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I thought you’d dropped dead and I got worried, and when I realized that wasn’t the case, turning around to walk back to the bar just felt… more awkward somehow.”
Oste shook his head. “You step very silently, is all.”
“I hear that sometimes.” Dorotèa followed it up with a forced, breathy laugh, but it soon died out when it left her lips. She tucked her hands behind her back and swallowed. “I can make my way home if you’d rather stay. You can trust in my quiet feet. I know my way around.”
He looked down. “It wouldn’t be proper.”
She pressed her lips together at that. “Plenty of things aren’t. People do them anyway. I’m never accompanied when I leave to attend you.”
“Well, tonight I’m not a person who allows it,” said Oste. He pushed up to his feet with a quiet grunt and let his weight settle onto his leg. He righted his chaperon, picked up his cane, then nodded towards the door. “Come on.”
“Very honorable of you, Docteur.”
“I’m putting a stop to that right now. It’s always been Oste to you.”
“Oh, but I felt so prim saying it.” She followed him outside. “I almost offered to see you home, but I think I’d have upset you very much.”
“I’d have been quite put out,” Oste agreed. “I only had three glasses of wine.”
“I know, but you’ve had that little cough, and—” Dorotèa caught herself and clamped her jaw shut with an audible snap.
Oste, however, chuckled. “You’d go damned far working in one of the hospitals.”
“I’m a woman. I can’t go to university to become a physician.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t learn medicine or take certain jobs. Some assistants like you take on care, nursing. Our best midwives are ladies.”
“Midwives,” Dorotèa repeated, “and I’m happy for them, since that’s good work, but I… I struggle to want things if I’m unable to do them in full. What if I wanted to learn more? Wanted to get a degree?”
“Jeanne feels similarly. She thinks there ought to at least be some classes to take.”
She nodded. “She’s struggled with some of the management and financials of the estate. We don’t usually inherit so much. But if she asks someone for help, then that someone could very well try to cheat her.”
“For what it’s worth, I agree with Jeanne.”
Dorotèa’s eyes widened. “You do?”
He looked down at her. “Does that surprise you?”
“Yes,” she answered in earnest. “I think plenty of men would be opposed.”
“Am I plenty of men?”
“You’re… some kind of man,” she retorted, then bit her tongue. She fought so hard to leave it at that but couldn’t. “You… You didn’t think that women should… fight. With swords. I meant—I mean with swords.”
His dark brows drew up as they started south. “I’ve offended you.”
She shrugged and tightened her body to retreat into herself. “A little, yes.”
“You asked only recently, and I’m not fencing anyone, Dorotèa.”
“I asked before that. Years ago. You might not remember.”
But I do.
The stinging in her eyes felt so unfair. She wanted to scream and kick the wall, not fall apart like the fragile soul she was afraid of being.
“I think I do, vaguely,” he murmured.
She drew in a breath. “I’m curious why you think that. I didn’t ask back then.”
Oste stared straight ahead again. “I suppose it’s because then you’d have a reason to need to know how.”
Dorotèa blinked. “Pardon?”
“A woman with a sword? If you fought in the open and carried one, do you know how many people would jab and jeer at that? They’d ask you if you knew how to use it.
They’d call it unnatural. And then people would bother you, and you’d get fined for not having a permit, and then your folks would go after me for enabling it. ”
“They wouldn’t!” Dorotèa shot back. “My father thinks women should know those skills, and so do I.”
“I don’t disagree that a woman perhaps ought to, but my earlier point stands.”
“It’s a small price to pay for protection.”
Oste coughed, then inclined his head at that. “I hear a thesis.”
“Marie,” said Dorotèa in a low tone. Oste came to a halt, and she did with him and closed her eyes.
“Countless women. Young women, old women. It doesn’t matter.
I know a sword is slower than a musket, I do, but something is better than nothing if someone wants to hurt us.
If people oppose us knowing how to protect ourselves, then they’re just angry that we’re no longer easy.
” She swallowed and rubbed her brow. “I don’t mean you, I just—I don’t know how you can think we should have classes and not have protection as one of them. ”
Oste was quiet for some time. She turned to face him.
His eyes had drifted off to the side to stare at a distant crate that had fallen over, its contents long since dispersed.
He blinked slowly, thoughtfully, and ran his thumb over his chin and jaw, deep in thought.
Dorotèa was never one for silence, and his made her almost shake with anticipation, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him to get on with it.
“I hadn’t really considered it,” he answered slowly, after that long while had passed. “It’s not something I’ve experienced in the same way.”
Dorotèa drew her head back and parted her lips. She blinked rapidly back at him, where, standing, he continued to rub his face and ponder. She was ready for a defense. A fight, or even him rolling over entirely, as he was prone to doing. Not… consideration.
Dorotèa squinted. “People don’t normally admit that.”
“Well, it’s not like I want to be dishonest. I know what it’s like to be different, to be sure, but obviously not what it’s like to be a woman.”
“Right, right.”
“It’s not as if a woman couldn’t fence, either. Even with a different physique, different tactics could allow them to hold their own.”
“Quite. Mmh.”
“I’m ignorant on several fronts, Dorotèa,” Oste admitted. “I’ve not enough fingers to count all of them. I concede and add this matter as one, and I’d not be bothered if you wished to exchange wits about it.”
She almost ran into him and shook him. Her voice was nearly rabid to match. “Then you’d fight me?!”
He flinched. “Well, I meant—I’m speaking in hypotheticals, Dorotèa! I’m not fighting a soul right now. I didn’t even agree to it with the Duelist of Aix-en-Provence. I still don’t know if it’s the best idea for you to; I think it’s something that could use some tactics and discretion.”
“I… I don’t understand why,” Dorotèa allowed to slip out.
Her exhale came out in a shudder. “I’ve seen you fight.
I’ve hardly seen you so happy as when you’re having a scrap.
God, I watched you face down Flassans and all those men with only a sword that night, and I thought magic would happen.
It’s always seemed like it’s there when you have your rapier in your hand.
It was the worst thing I ever felt when I watched you fall. ”
“Dorotèa,” Oste whispered.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to bring that up. It’s hard. I… I don’t know how hard it is for you. That’s something I don’t know. I just know that you’re extraordinary. I believe that.”
Oste reached out, but she shook her head and carried on.
“It doesn’t make sense to me. I’m stuck in my own head and always have been.
If I don’t come up with something myself, then I struggle wrapping my mind around it.
I see you, and your talent, and something I know you like, and I can’t figure out why you wouldn’t try to do it.
I lied when I said I wouldn’t judge you, because, frankly, my head is a mean and nasty place sometimes, and you’ve pissed me off because I don’t get it.
But I’m not going to judge what you tell me now.
I want to understand better. If you’re… if you’re sad, then tell me you’re sad, and that’ll make sense.
I don’t get sad much, so I wouldn’t have quite gotten it. I get angry instead, you see.”
The physician lifted his head to blink up at the stars. He let them settle closed, slowly, then ran two fingers down the bridge of his nose. She noticed then that his eyelashes glinted with a faint dampness, and she felt at once they grew closer in their commiserations.
“It’s hard for me to figure it out most of the time, too.”
“Oh.”
“I think sometimes I feel so much at once that suddenly I don’t feel or do anything at all.”
“That makes sense.”
“I think—” Oste cut himself off to look directly at her. “It’ll sound stupid.”
She shook her head. “It won’t. But even if it does, I don’t care.”
“It makes me sound like a coward.”
“You’re not. You know I was there that night, so I could never think that.”
“My legs are braver than my head.”
“Thinking is a very hard thing to do. I try to avoid it.”
Oste smiled at that. Dorotèa gazed back, and in a moment of fleeting impulse, reached out and wove her pinky into his—just as she’d done in the alley those weeks ago. He didn’t react at first, but then he returned the gesture and let them remain linked.
She wondered if the realization might hit him; it didn’t. He gave her a different honesty instead.
“I’ve always fretted, as you know, and when my body didn’t respond the same as before it made me even more nervous.
I get what you meant about feeling like you want to protect yourself.
I hate not feeling like I can, especially when whatever, or…
whoever I could need to deal with already worries me.
But I think I’m even more afraid of trying anyway and not meeting the same standard.
Of… not being able to do it anymore, as I did, whether from my body not holding up, or both my head and my legs betraying me and sending me running.
So I found it’s easier to not pick up the sword at all. ”