In the Garden of Iden (20 page)

News from the Continent: the Emperor Charles’s health continues to worsen, and the Prince Consort has expressed concern, but any return to Spain has been ruled out at this time due to the Queen’s pregnancy, supposedly now in its third month. This isn’t stopping his countrymen, of course, and the official count of Spaniards leaving England this week was
…

“Those lucky, lucky guys.” Nef shook her head.

“You’re not serious. You want to go back to Spain?” I looked over at her, incredulous.

“Anywhere but here.”

“I thought you were all hot to get up to Northumberland.”

“If I could actually get out of here and
go
there, I’d be happy. It’s the waiting that I hate. I hope at least I’ll have some Blue Albions to work with, after all this.”

“Blue Albions? Is that a kind of beer?”

“No, dummy, it’s a cow,” she said in disgust.

“Aren’t you a little worried by the news?” I flipped a slide. “I mean, with this religious fanatic descending on England.”

“No. Who cares what the monkeys do? We know how it all comes out in the end, anyway.”

“But not how it’s going to happen. Don’t you find it interesting to follow the politics? Here’s Mary with this Council dead set against her. How’s she going to push through her pro-Catholic legislation? We know it’s going to happen, but at the moment I can’t see any way. Aren’t you curious?”

“Hell, no. If I want to find out something that badly, I’ll access a tape.”

“Well, I think it’s fascinating.”

“You sound like a cultural anthropologist.” She tossed her magazine aside.

“Gosh, excuse me.”

“How’s my little pal?” Nef leaned over and picked up the unicorn. “How are we feeling? It’s almost time for our favorite show!”

“You were the one who said I had to learn to cope with mortals.”

“I didn’t mean you had to take them up as a hobby.” She dandled the unicorn. “I remember when you couldn’t stand the idea of coming to England. The New World, that was all you talked about, morning, noon, and night. Changed your mind, haven’t you?”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “England does have its charms.”

“Get a load of her! We know the charm she’s talking about, don’t we?” she told the unicorn. “It’s big, and it has a busted nose, and it looks like a horse.”

“Oh, he does not.” I jammed a slide in the wrong way and had to pop it out. “So where would you go if you had the chance? If you could make the Doctor station you anywhere you wanted?”

“India,” she said right away, looking wistful. “No question. Anywhere in India. Or, maybe, Greece; Greece is swell.” She kissed the unicorn’s nose. “You’d like it there, wouldn’t you, sugar face.”

“Pleeeease!”

“Ssh. Ssh.” She jumped up and turned up the volume. “It’s time for the livestock report!”

But another crackling roar of interference rose, only slightly louder than her wail of protest.

Snow fell. And fell. Cardinal Pole came back to England and was welcomed with great ceremony by the Queen and our prince. Things started happening quickly, and it was worth braving the smell in Nef’s room to catch the news broadcast every day.

Poor Mary. Our prince was not such a great actor, and she must have been increasingly aware that the honeymoon was over. But Cardinal Pole was sympathetic and attentive, and had big plans for a Counter-Reformation in her kingdom.

“This is crazy.” I went into Joseph’s room, having left Nef pounding on the sputtering radio and screaming at it. “They can’t turn the clock back thirty years. They’ll never bring it off.”

“You wait.” Joseph shook his head. He had taken to listening to the radio broadcasts with me, snow static and all, as the big soap opera got moving. “You’ll see. They’ll get help.”

“From whom? The Emperor’s going to die soon and so’s the Pope.”

“You’ll see,” he repeated. “Do a fast scan if you don’t believe me.”

I didn’t want to do that. It was riveting, spell-binding to watch history as it unfolded. Why spoil it by fast-forwarding to the end? Besides, there were other stories to follow. A snowbound manor house is its own many-layered play, full of intrigues, confrontations, and twists.

It had gradually dawned on just about every inhabitant of the hall, thanks to Joan’s intelligence reports, that Nicholas and I were sleeping together. Master Ffrawney averted his eyes from me any time we were in the same room, but all the others seemed rather relieved. Angry young men are uncomfortable to have around, and apparently getting laid regularly did wonders for Nicholas’s temper. And what better way to quench a young firebrand than to have him fall in love with a nice Catholic girl? There were a few raised eyebrows over Joseph’s apparent complaisance, but he was a foreigner, after all, and anyway people were too busy watching the other scandals to question it much.

The laundress continued steadfast in Sir Walter’s bed, but somewhat less securely as his regeneration advanced. Indeed, she began casting slit-eyed glances of hate at Nef when their paths crossed, though that was seldom, and Nef barely noticed anyway. Now that I come to think of it, maybe the laundress’s animosity didn’t stem from a jealous heart after all. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to have washed Nef’s linen, full of essence of unicorn as it was.

Nef, meanwhile, continued to respond to Sir Walter’s efforts just warmly enough to get to keep the unicorn in her room. They flirted ponderously at table, and I believe things got physical once or twice. She was interested in his livestock, he in her noble lineage. Joseph and I had to invent a long string of Castilian ancestors for her and write it down so she could memorize it, because she was no good at making things up on the spur of the moment herself. Though she was good enough at home electronics …

Bloodcurdling screams in the night!!

I sat bolt upright in bed, scanning in a two-kilometer-wide radius. Nicholas was up and on his feet, staring. When another volley of shrieking sounded in the dead winter night, he strode to the door and opened it, and leaned out looking downstairs into blackness.

“What, help, ho! Is it fire?” someone on the second floor was shouting.

“What’s the matter? Be there thieves again?” yelled somebody else, from belowstairs. There was no reply, but the screams died to hysterical sobbing, and a second voice from the same location was now heard making soothing noises.

“My master!” One of the servants came pounding up to the second-story landing. “Are you murdered? Is it the Spanish doctor?”

“Stay thou, Rose,” Nicholas told me. He made a hasty descent, and in a second I could hear him beating on Sir Walter’s door. “Sir Walter! Open, sir, if you can!”

I shivered and pulled the covers up around me. The weepy voice was moaning incoherently:

“It were on the chimney! O Jesu and St. Mary save us, I saw it!” To which the other voice—why, it was Sir Walter—replied in a hissed undertone:

“Peace, now, Alison, peace! Thou hast had no more than a dream! Hush! Thou hast roused the house, silly wench!”

“But I tell you it was the Devil! I saw his black wing!” the laundress (for it was she) shrilled.

“Sir Walter!” Nicholas couldn’t hear the old man’s frantic attempts to shut her up. “In God’s name, sir, do you live?”

“Aye! Aye!” Sir Walter shouted in annoyance.

Mendoza!
There was a dark shape pressed to our tiny window. I nearly screamed myself.

“But what’s amiss, sir?”

Let me in, for God’s sake, it’s freezing out here!

“There is naught amiss! I merely … er, merely …”

I jumped up and opened the window. Nef’s face, inexplicably upside down, stared in at me.

“Sir, are you held to hostage?” demanded one of the servants who had gathered in a small throng with Nicholas.

“Oh, God, I’ll never get in through this,” whimpered Nef through clenched teeth. “Can you break out the frame?”

“Nothing of the sort!” Sir Walter snarled. “Now go back to bed! Nicholas, bid them go!”

“I can’t break out the frame, how’ll I explain it?” I stammered. “What are you doing out there, anyway?”

“Sir, I must be assured that all is well with you,” Nicholas explained patiently.

“Well—”

“No! There’s a curse upon this house!” wailed the laundress. “I saw the Devil with mine own eyes, a-hanging from the chimneypots—” Her voice broke off in a muffled bleat, as though someone were forcing her to eat her pillow.

“Nef!” I gaped at her in dawning and horrified comprehension.

“I assure you, all is well!” Sir Walter could be heard scurrying across the floor. There was a creak as he pulled the door open an inch and (presumably) stuck his nose out.

“It was the best placement for the signal,” Nef explained through chattering teeth. “I made one of those radio antennas out of a broomstick and copper wire off the grip of that old sword of Joseph’s—oh, shit, my fingers are completely numb—”

“There! Ye see I am unmurthered. Now, get ye back to bed!” grated Sir Walter.

“And, you know, it was dark up there, and I slipped a little, but of course I didn’t fall, except—”

An indecisive muttering as people began to obey Sir Walter. Nicholas, the alarm in his voice replaced by a certain masked amusement: “It was no more than this? The woman had bad dreams?”

A thump as a window flew open one floor down and around the corner.
GET IN HERE!
thundered Joseph.

“Foolish fantasies,” Sir Walter whispered. “The silly slut gets her up to piss and frights herself with supposed shadows. This is all!”

Don’t you shout at me
, Nef transmitted sullenly, but she went. She moved slowly past my window and disappeared. I stuck my head out into the night and glimpsed her crawling downward on a diagonal, until she reached the corner of the house and maneuvered around it and out of sight.

“Then I bid you good night, sir.” The door slammed, and I could hear Nicholas returning. I shut the window and was back in bed in one bound. When he climbed in beside me, he was beautifully warm, even after standing around in a drafty hallway.

There was plenty of talk in the servants’ hall the next morning, let me tell you, and plenty of venturings outside to peer and point at the chimney where His Satanic Majesty may or may not have been doing midnight gymnastics. Somehow nobody noticed the radio antenna wired unobtrusively into the leads.

There was plenty of dark speculation about the probable connection between Satan and Spaniards (perhaps he had just been looking in on us to see if there was anything we needed?), and there were plenty of molten glares between Joseph and Nef. Still, the English are rather fond of haunts and horrors in the season of ice and snow, so the denizens of Iden Hall let us go unlynched a while longer.

And our radio reception
was
much improved.

So the world turned, and so turned the small wheel of Iden Hall within the great wheel that was England, and the year rolled on toward the solstice.

“H
E MUST KEEP
Christmas well this year, what think you, Nicholas?” said Sir Walter at the dinner table.

All eyes turned to him at this announcement. We beheld, one and all, a robust fellow no more than forty years of age. He resembled a fox now more than a terrier; his hair and beard were red with just a little graying, or more correctly a yellowing, such as red-haired men get. He was bigger, he was bulkier, and his new clothes had been cut in better taste and of subtler colors. Altogether a different man.

“As you will, sir,” said Nicholas. “Your revenues shall support it.”

“Excellent well. I would have feasting, methinks, and dance. Take some care to find a consort for music. A fine consort, wanting nothing; there must be cornets and sackbuts, crumhorns and regals, and a great bass rackett—aye, and dulcians, too. I want this dull quiet hall to resound upon itself like a beating heart! Look to it, Nicholas.”

Nicholas pulled out a little octavo book and a pencil and began making notes. I looked up from my dish of sops in milk. Dancing?

“I want…” Sir Walter leaned an elbow on the table and stroked his beard. “
Young
folk about me. Send word to the Elliseys and the Brockles and Master Syssing and his daughters, bid them all come. Tell them there shall be a great dance this Christmastide at Iden Hall.”

I hadn’t danced since I left Terra Australis. I looked hopefully across the table at Nicholas as he jotted down instructions.

“And I would have Christmas masquings and guisings, too, all fantastical, such as the King used to have,” Sir Walter remembered fondly. He meant Old Henry, of course. As far as most men’s memories were concerned now, poor little Edward had disappeared right back up his dead mother’s womb.

“Master Sampson hath gilding and forms for masks.” Nicholas wrote steadily.

“Why, lad, there must be more to it than that! God’s death, these country folk have never seen the like. The whole matter of masques is that they must be some play or pageant, some spectacle. Doctor Ruy!” He looked over at Joseph. “You have been at Court. You know whereof I speak, surely.”

“Yea, I assure you,” Joseph agreed. “There are many spectacles at the Emperor’s Court, some of them greatly astonishing.”

“Just so!” Sir Walter smote the table. “I would astonish these folk! Now, you are a doctor and a learned man. Could you not then, as a friend, devise some dramatical interlude for the masquers?”

“Ah.” Joseph blinked and then smiled. “My very dear friend, you do me too much honor. I would be delighted to do as you ask, but my skills are paltry—”

“Oh, but we must have a play, a diversion such as the Emperor hath, and what man better to know that than yourself? No, it shall be a splendid thing, I have no doubt. Now, may we not also have some subtlety at table, or some gorgeous marchpane semblance of a thing, as … a ship at full sail, or a wood with deer and little men …?”

“Now where shall I find a pastry cockatrice a yard long, bearing the Iden arms upon its bosom?” said Nicholas in exasperation. He put out the candle and scrambled hastily in beside me.

“Can the cook make such a thing?” I burrowed up close to his chest. He put his arms about me, and we settled down. He replied:

“No. She cuts pastry leaves to deck baked apples: that is the whole of her craft. He wisheth a fantasy from the Queen’s own table, and belike I’ll have to go begging to the same.”

We lay looking at the square of moonlight cast on the wall. “Why should he stop with a cockatrice?” I said. “If he would make folk stare, what about the Great Whore of Babylon riding on the Beast?”

There was silence for a moment, and then he began to giggle. “Painted in scarlet and purple, with seven wires stuck up the necks of the Beast to hold them still,” he said. “That’d set tongues wagging!”

“Yet I would see this English Christmas.” I wriggled around to look at him. “England is famous among all nations for celebration of this season.” Though of course Dickens hadn’t been born yet.

“Is it so?” He looked amused. “Have they no mummery, no masques and spiced ale in Europe?”

“Last year in Spain I prayed at High Mass until midnight, and then came home in falling sleet,” I remembered.

“Bid thy heart be of good cheer, then, for we have no Romish Mass in this land,” he said.

This made me acutely uncomfortable, because Parliament had already met to restore the Mass, and it would go through by a landslide. It had been on the radio this morning. Well, what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

“Though, to be sure, prayer is more fitting for celebrating the birth of Christ than drunkenness and revels,” he continued thoughtfully.

“But thou must not put an end to Christmas revels!” I protested, and added, “When first I heard we should come into this land, I thought, At last I shall dance! Which I have not done yet, save only the shaking of the sheets with thee.”

He grinned. “There shall be dances and sweet cakes to spare, my heart. As in sooth there must have been in France when thou wast a child. Is it not so? Or was it in Egypt thou toldest me last time?”

“Very likely,” I said. “Or far Cathay.”

“And do they hold Christmas revels in far Cathay?” He put his nose to mine. I thought about my childhood at the base. We celebrated a holiday loosely fashioned after the old Roman solstice festivals, and at Terra Australis it was in the summer anyway. I remembered hot dry horizons, sports matches, swimming parties.

“Be assured they do,” I said. “And small apes climb palm trees at midnight to ring Christmastide bells.”

“Sweet liar.” He rolled over, and then we did something else.

“Whatever you do, don’t touch the peacock,” said Joseph, entering the room. “They’ve got it killed and hanging up already, and the party’s over a week away.” He looked at me, busy at my credenza, and at Nef, who was combing the unicorn’s fur. “Not that the smell will bother you much,” he went on. “But it’ll be bacillus under glass by the time it’s served.”

“The Lollard statutes were voted in today,” I told him angrily.

“The what?” he said, and did a fast scan. “Oh. The anti-Protestant laws, huh? Say, have either of you had any ideas about a Christmas masque I can write?”

“They aren’t just anti-Protestant laws,” I fumed. “They’re special statutes that put the bishops above the law. They can arrest people, judge them, condemn them,
and
execute them—and the civil courts can’t interfere! The Parliament just voted them in!”

“Did you think it couldn’t happen here?” Joseph grinned briefly.

“For God’s sake, it’s crazy! These people are giving up their civil rights! It’s a step back into the Middle Ages!”

“Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”

“But this doesn’t have anything to do with intellect!” I protested. “It’s a question of survival! Don’t they realize they’ve just voted absolute power to their enemies? My God, where’s their common sense?”

Joseph and Nef just laughed, such a hollow sound that I wanted to run from the room. Joseph flung his hat up to the near bedpost, where it caught neatly and swung. “You think this is bad? You should have seen the stuff the English stood for under Henry the Eighth. Screw the monkeys anyway. Can’t either of you come up with some jolly Yuletide high jinks for the old man?”

“Why don’t you adapt something from Dickens?” Nef suggested. “Who’s to know, anyway?”

I reached for my cloak. “I think I’ll go out for a while.”

The snow packed us in and insulated us from any news by word of mouth; so the mortals got busy with their Christmas in the merriest of moods, and tacked up big swags of holly in the great hall, all blissful ignorance.

I had expected that we, as Spaniards, would be asked to stay in the background through most of the festivities. I got a big surprise: far from being an embarrassment, we were suddenly considered social assets. Sir Walter planned Spanish dances and Spanish refreshments and was confidently expecting some theatrical extravaganza from Joseph. Every time he asked about it, Joseph smiled wider and with increasing desperation. Nef and I gave him all sorts of helpful ideas, the best of which, as I recall, had the Man of La Mancha meeting the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, but Joseph finally came up with something on his own that required large amounts of pasteboard and secrecy.

He had lots of time, at least. In the sixteenth century, Christmas was celebrated from Christmas Day to January 6. In future times, of course, it would shift forward until it began in November and ended abruptly on Christmas Eve, which was how it was calendared at Company bases. I observed the Solstice by climbing from bed to watch the red sun rise out of black cloud, and marked his flaming early death that evening through black leafless branches. So the mystery passed, and the mortals hadn’t even begun their celebration yet.

The first thing I saw on Christmas Day was, appropriately enough, the New Testament. Nicholas had it open on his chest and was reading in silence from the first chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke. I yawned and stretched, and leaned up on my elbow to peer at the staggering black letters. It was a beautiful little story he was reading, and a perfectly simple one. How all those bishops and grand inquisitors drew what they did from it is beyond me.

I lay back and watched Nicholas’s profile as he read. He was always pale when he first awoke, as though it took a little time for the blood to rise into his face. So at this hour he looked severe and autocratic, carved from ivory, and his light eyes flickered restlessly over the Word of God, or their pupils dilated in the crystal when a particular verse moved him.

He closed the book and blinked back tears. What was it like to believe in something that much?

The rooms smelled of spice, smoke, cut green branches, and mortals. They began arriving before noon, in wagons drawn by great stamping horses that had Nef running to the windows with cries of delight. Little mortal males in furred robes, the older ones clean-shaven, the younger ones with styled and pointed beards. Little mortal females in the latest fashions. I realized with a pang that my green gown, which I had planned to wear that day, was now hopelessly out of style. I spent a frantic hour sewing glass aglets on my peach outfit to cover the moth holes.

But my fussing was minimal compared to the scenes that were going on in the kitchen, and as for the great hall—
caramba
. A cartload of consort drove up, unloading musicians and their instruments, and for a desperate half hour no one could figure out how to let them into the minstrels’ gallery, which hadn’t been opened in thirty years. A makeshift bandstand was being hammered together in a corner when somebody finally located the key, in a tin box at the back of a shelf. Most of this business Nicholas had to supervise, as well as a host of minor things forgotten until the last minute. Sir Walter was too far gone in hand-kissing and back-slapping among his guests to be reminded he had not made a final decision on whether he wanted the consort playing before, during, or after the feast. So they started about ten o’clock and just tootled away, growing ever louder as the level in their ale barrel dropped.

The entrance of the Evil Spaniards was delayed, thanks to me.

“I can’t wear this!” I wailed. “I stuck on every shiny doodad I own, and there’s three big moth holes I didn’t even see on the sleeve!”

“So take the sleeves off.” Joseph examined his beard in the reflective surface of the credenza.

“Are you nuts? Every single one of those ladies downstairs has an outfit with matching sleeves,” I said. “I can’t look like a frump in front of Englishwomen!”

“So start a new fashion.”

“If you’d put in the requisition for field dress like I’d asked you to—”

“Oh, here.” Nef dove into her wardrobe and found a big pink ribbon, which she tied hastily around my arm. “Look, they’ll never know.”

“The color doesn’t match,” I fretted.

“Think of it as an accent.”

“And it’s cutting off my circulation.”

“You want to see some circulation cut off?” Joseph started across the room menacingly. “It’s going to be hard enough making an entrance in front of all those monkeys without being late, too.”

“Will you both please shut up?” Nef demanded. Easy for her to say: she had a gorgeous plum-colored gown that was practically new. She grabbed my hand, hooked one arm through Joseph’s, and dragged us out into the corridor. “Anybody would think you’d never been to a mortal party before,” she scolded Joseph.

“Artist’s nerves. I never wrote an entertainment before,” Joseph muttered. We started unobtrusively down the stairs. People were milling all about.

“Well, you didn’t really write this one, did you?” said Nef. “You copied it from—”

“Good gentles all, give greeting to the most renowned Doctor Ruy of Ansolebar, most learned physician to the Court of the Most Gracious, Serene, and Catholic Emperor Charles!” yelled Master Ffrawney, popping out unexpectedly from the foot of the stairs. We froze in midstep. All those mortal folk turned to look at us.

Only Nef’s grip on my arm kept me from backing rapidly up the stairs. A great suffocating wave of smell came up to me. It was mortal fear, and a good quantity of mortal hatred, too. Riper than the holiday food. More pungent than the evergreen boughs. So bright in their Christmas finery, the little mortals regarded us out of animal eyes. Then, unnervingly, they all smiled. The males bowed; the females curtseyed.

“Oh, Master Ffrawney, you flatter me,” said Joseph, with no trace of a Spanish accent at all. “To be sure, good people, I am only Sir Walter’s old friend. Why, were we not boys together?”