Songs without Words (14 page)

Roxie’s dark brown eyes rested momentarily on Harper, then she leaned back in her chair and said, “Thanks.”

She seemed lost in thought. Was she thinking about her husband? Harper wondered.

“Anything exciting going on with you, Harper?” she asked.

“Uh, no, not really. Well, this isn’t exciting necessarily, but Chelsea called me a week ago.”

Roxie raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”

“I didn’t talk to her. She left a message. I think she wants to get together.”

Roxie shook her head. “Harper, haven’t you learned your lesson with that woman?”

Harper shrugged. She had no friends who were not aware of the devastation she had felt when Chelsea left her, of how her spirit had been broken for months afterward.

“What she did to you,” Roxie said, “it was horrible. She served her purpose, now let her go. There are so many gorgeous, fascinating women in the world. You’re one of them, and you deserve someone who will cherish you.”

Roxie finished her wine and set her glass on the table a little harder than she probably intended. “Put on that doublet,” she said. “Let me see it on you.”

Harper put the garment on over her blouse and buttoned all but the top button. Roxie unfolded her legs, rose from her chair and stood admiring the costume. “I’ve always loved the way you look in these things,” she said, her voice a note lower than usual. “So handsome. So sexy.”

Roxie put her hands on the doublet, running them up over the shoulders, then clasping them behind Harper’s neck. Her eyes, liquid and intense, were focused on Harper’s mouth. She tilted her head sideways and leaned down to press her lips to Harper’s, kissing her sensuously with a bit of tongue. Harper, stunned, held onto the kiss until Roxie released her.

“You’re so damned cute,” she said with a sigh. “What woman wouldn’t want you? Don’t waste any more emotion on Chelsea. If I wasn’t in love with somebody else, I’d make a play for you myself.”

Harper was dumbstruck.

“I wasn’t the best wife to poor Dave,” Roxie said, as if in explanation for what she had just done. “I thought you might have figured it out by now.”

“You’re gay?” Harper asked.

Roxie nodded. “We stayed together because of the boys. Avoided custody problems and all that. But now there’s no reason for me to hide it any longer.” Her voice was casual, as if she were commenting on the weather.

“Wow,” Harper said. “I don’t know what to say. For how long—”

“Eight, nine years. My partner, her name is Elaine, and I have been together about four. Dave knew all about this, of course. He had his own romances, all very discreet.”

“My God,” Harper said, “you’ve had an entire, secret life that I knew nothing about.”

Roxie nodded. “Yes, but all that’s changed now. No more secrets. Elaine is moving in with me this fall. I want to tell you all about her, Harper. She’s a cop. Oh, my God, when she’s in her uniform—”

She fanned herself with her hand. “Well, I am a sucker for a uniform. Maybe you should take off that doublet.” Roxie looked Harper over, raising an eyebrow suggestively. “We’ll talk in the morning, okay? So how about showing me to my room? I’m beat.”

Though it was after midnight before Harper was settled in her bed, she was unable to sleep. Roxie was gay? Not only that, but Roxie had known she was gay for the entire time Harper had known her. And she had never suspected. She had thought she knew Roxie, but she had known only a small part of her. The rest of it was a sham. The part of her life where her heart lived its most vibrant moments had been concealed. She must have lived through such emotional upheavals during that time—falling in love and losing love, perhaps more than once—and she had endured all of that in silence.

What must it have been like for her
, thought Harper,
when I came to her with my happy news of Chelsea two years ago and then, a few months later, with my heartbreak, asking for sympathy?

There were so many times that Roxie must have been holding back. Five years ago at the Renaissance Faire, for instance, when she had chanced upon Harper with her arms around that girl. Hadn’t she wanted to confess something then? And when they went to the gay pride parade four years ago and Harper asked her why she was flirting with that police officer.
Oh!
Harper thought with sudden understanding,
that must have been Elaine.

Roxie was in love with that cop, and yet she had looked Harper in the eye and lied about it. Harper couldn’t imagine doing that. She didn’t think she was capable of that kind of duplicity. She was disappointed that Roxie had not trusted her, had not considered their friendship stronger.
What kind of a friendship was this if it was based on so many false assumptions?

At least Roxie wanted to talk now. In the morning she would hear the entire story and their friendship could begin again.

Good Lord,
thought Harper, rolling over to try to sleep.
Joyce is going to crap her pants when she finds out that all of her friends have gone lesbian on her.

Chapter 11

SUMMER, FIVE YEARS AGO

There weren’t many opportunities to play medieval musical instruments in public, but the Renaissance Faire definitely provided one. Every summer for the past several years, Harper had taken one of the instruments from her collection, dressed in increasingly authentic costumes and spent a long day entertaining the crowd. Roxie and Joyce usually joined her, bringing Joyce’s polished voice and Roxie’s superb Cockney accent to the party.

Harper was dressed as a boy this year. Her small breasts were simply not suited to the cinched bodices that Roxie and buxom Joyce wore. Besides, she enjoyed dressing as a boy. Clad in a tightly laced doublet, a Robin Hood-style felt cap, billowy off-white shirt and brown flannel breeches, she definitely looked the part. A leather flask filled with wine dangled from her belt. When she wasn’t playing it, she carried a mandolin by a leather strap over her shoulder. Joyce was in yellow and Roxie in green, both of them sporting many-colored ribbons and flowers in their hair and on their sleeves. Joyce had painted a red rose on her right breast, which bulged above the top of her bodice.

“Ah, kind sir,” Joyce begged, stopping a wealthy merchant with a huge yellow feather in his hat, “I’m so thirsty what with all the dust and the singin’. Could ye spare a drop of ale for a poor wanderin’ minstrel?”

He laughed cheerily and handed her his mug. “Here ye go, ye wretched creature.”

She turned the mug up, unceremoniously pouring the contents down her throat.

“Hey, there, go easy,” he complained, grabbing the mug back. “A drop indeed! Come here, my pretty wench.” He took her roughly in his arms and kissed her, grabbing her ass through the thick cloth of her skirt. “Ah!” he said, releasing her. “Meet me later, lass, at the wishing well.” He winked and walked on.

“Fun’s fun,” Harper said, “but you’re asking for trouble kissing strangers.”

“He’s no stranger,” Joyce replied. “That’s Lloyd Harkins, my accountant. And it’s not the first time he’s kissed me.” She grinned. It wasn’t that much of a stretch, Harper thought, for Joyce to play the part of lusty maid.

“I tried to get Dave to come,” Roxie said, referring to her husband. “But he has no interest in dressing up and playacting. Thinks it’s silly. It wouldn’t hurt him a bit to loosen up and be a little silly once in a while.”

Harper laughed, thinking of Dave in a Renaissance costume, stockings on his legs, baggy breeches on his lanky frame. “It’s hard to imagine Dave dressing up, I have to say. But if you had brought him, it would have at least given you a fellow to play with.”

Roxie grabbed Harper’s belt. “Oh, we’ve got a fellow. Little ’arper ’ere. Isn’t he cute?” Roxie hugged her playfully and kissed her cheek. In her normal voice, she said, “I should have been a boy. This skirt is damned uncomfortable and insufferably hot.”

“Oh, the summertime is coming,” sang Harper, strumming the mandolin. “And the trees are sweetly blooming, and the wild mountain thyme grows around the purple heather.”

Joyce and Roxie joined in for the chorus, Roxie playing her small wooden flute. When their song was finished, Roxie announced, “I’m hungry. Let’s go find some food.”

Leading the way, Harper played the mandolin and sang, Joyce’s tambourine rattling behind her. “Will ye go, lassie, go? And we’ll all go together to pull wild mountain thyme all around the blooming heather. Will ye go, lassie, go?”

Joyce had a rich contralto voice, well suited to these country lilts. Roxie’s voice was so-so, but her ability on the flute was outstanding. They made a fine trio, and although this was mainly for fun, all three of them took the effort seriously, practicing before the event, for instance.

They succumbed easily to the hawkish speech of a food merchant and each bought a toad-in-the-hole, sitting on bales of hay to eat them. “This is awful,” Joyce said after two bites.

“Authentically awful,” Harper told her. “That’s part of the fun. Go with it.”

Joyce, disgruntled, finished her lunch in silence. Harper washed hers down with a good portion of the wine in her flask. As they ate, they watched the revelers. There was a mock fight between two fat women and a man in a pillory begging passersby for water. An itinerant bard was spouting sonnets, doffing his hat at the ladies and kissing hands. On a nearby stage, a band featuring a drum, two bagpipes, a bass and a dulcimer played Celtic instrumentals.

Sufficiently rested, Harper stood, brushed the crumbs off her pants, and said, “I want to have my fortune told.”

“I want more beer,” Roxie announced. “We’ll meet up again in an hour right here, okay?”

Harper struck out on her own under the oak trees. Soon she came to a lane of merchants and weekend mystics of all sorts. Under a striped yellow and white lean-to, a woman with scarves around her head, wearing flowing Madras cotton robes, sat at a small round table covered with gold cloth. She beckoned to Harper with a many-ringed hand. Harper sat down across the table from her. The woman was not as old as her mannerisms suggested. She was close to Harper’s age, in fact.

“How are you enjoying the fair, my dear?” asked the divinator.

“It’s great. A lot of fun.”

The woman introduced herself as Madame Zelda. She spoke with flourishing hand and arm gestures, long red fingernails slashing the air. “So, will it be a tarot reading?”

Harper nodded.

“Have you had a reading before?”

“Once. Several years ago.”

“You must open your mind, my dear, if this is to work. Are you willing to do that?”

“Yes,” Harper assured her.

“Good. What is it that you want to know? Do you have a question?”

“Well, the obvious thing, I guess, would be something about my love life. Am I going to get married or meet someone new or end up alone and unloved.”

Madame Zelda smiled and let Harper shuffle the cards. With exaggerated deliberation, she turned up ten cards, one at a time, and arranged them in a precise pattern, pronouncing, after each, its role, until the cards were on the table in the form of a cross with four alongside.

Madame Zelda sat quietly contemplating the pattern for a moment. “Here is the Fool, “ she announced. “He’s a free spirit and represents an adventure into the unknown. The Fool’s journey requires the ability to act on impulse, to take a chance.”

Harper liked the sound of that. “To follow your heart?” she asked.

“Yes, exactly.” Zelda continued. “We have the King of Swords. The man in your life, perhaps. The King of Swords is an intellectual, a master of reason and logic.”

“Well,” Harper remarked, “that would have to be Eliot.”