Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse (6 page)

Sneeth took up the Buttercup’s tutelage with something approaching enthusiasm, at least he did so at first. Simple reading, writing, arithmetic, basic history – though Buttercup had the feeling that he left things out of history, either through carelessness or ignorance, or from some other motive she could not discern – and, of course, deportment. Mr Thrumm recurrently suggested the importance of deportment. Why it should be important for someone virtually expunged from the memory of the Royal Family to be instructed in the minutia of aristocratic customs and behavior made no sense at all. According to Mr Thrumm, it was important. Sneeth always complied with Mr Thrumm’s suggestions, however gently they might be phrased, and deportment became important to Sneeth.

It was Sneeth’s inclination, however, no less than Buttercup’s own, to ignore the curriculum laid down
as much as possible
, that is, at any point at which the basics were well in hand. Once the subject matter was reasonably well understood, Sneeth found no reason to continue with the dull texts prescribed by custom (or Thrumm) when there were other, more interesting – even though forbidden – books available.

And there were. The drawers in the library were packed with volumes. Others filled the lower stairway drawers and those in the back pantry. In the root cellar, where no one would expect to find books at all, Buttercup found a collection of what were possibly the most interesting volumes on the property. These included books of wonder stories, some purely fanciful and others based in fact, concerning other worlds and peoples. There was also a collection of the Palace Newspapers, a rich trove of mystery and intrigue beside which mere history (however truncated to eliminate boring detail) paled to nothing. From them, and without Sneeth’s knowledge, Buttercup learned many things she was not supposed to know. She learned, for example, what had happened to the Van Hoost consorts. She learned the ritual of Royal Challenge, during which the Heiress Presumptive, challenged by at least one other Grisl of Royal Blood, must prove herself able to emerge victorious from combat. She read with interest accounts of current and bygone fads and fashions at the Palace, who and what was in and who and what was out, and why. Though all these matters were but dimly understood, scarcely more relevant than if they had recounted the customs of savage Earthians or Jambanders, they had a certain fascination and served to fill up the vacant corners of an eager young mind.

It was in one of these same drawers that she found a small gold box, greeting this discovery with a wash of grateful emotion so ecstatic that it left her limp. Under Mouse’s direction, Buttercup took the box to her room and secreted it in one of the tiny drawers, where she, guided by Mouse, could take it out and fondle it from time to time, though she had no idea why. ‘Never mind why,’ Mouse said within her mind. ‘It’s important, that’s all.’

Sneeth and Buttercup were largely unsupervised, so long as the examiners, who arrived once each year, were satisfied with the progress of Mr Thrumm’s protégée. A Van Hoost chin, taken alone, was not sufficient to warrant actual execution, but such a chin coupled with intransigent ignorance of deportment and protocol might well be. Mr Thrumm was at some pains to point this out. As a result of this threat, the latter part of each winter was spent in a feverish attempt to master all the information which had been largely ignored since the previous spring. Buttercup rather liked these intellectual sprints. She quite enjoyed the haunted expression which Sneeth came to wear on these occasions, realizing full well that his own destiny was tied to hers. If Buttercup failed, so did Sneeth. For Buttercup, contemplation of this fact lent piquancy to what might have been an otherwise tedious span of years.

In the spring the examiners came. In company with one or two who changed from visit to visit there was always one named Fribberle who came again and again. He had a dour and reproving countenance. He sat with the others at one end of the table in the formal dining room while Buttercup stood at the other end of the table, hands folded in front of her, face composed. This was elementary deportment. One did not twitch. And, despite Cook’s example, one did not laugh. And one did not show interest beyond mere politeness. One answered briefly, accurately, demonstrating if requested. The bow direct. The bow deferential. The bow obsequious. The challenge Royal. The challenge covert. The nod of dismissal. The nod of repudiation. She learned them all and practiced them in front of her mirror. There was never any trouble with the examinations. Buttercup always passed.

And each time the examiners left, Sneeth and Buttercup were left to their own devices once more. There were weeks and months during which they could amuse themselves, weeks and months in which Buttercup experienced virtual contentment – except for the internal voice of Mouse which sometimes wakened her in the night trying to give her unwanted advice.

Thrumm House was situated on a pleasant prominence overlooking the Welling Valley and the village of Lesser Wellingford. Greater Wellingford had been widely distributed by flood some years before and was no longer sufficiently aggregate to merit attention. Lesser Wellingford offered plentiful amusements, however. Sneeth and Buttercup could shop in the main street, or visit the parrot market or buy hot seed pies from the piemonger, and do all these things without offending against what Sneeth was pleased to call Buttercup’s ‘dignity.’ Certain other pleasures, such as watching a grisling show, were forbidden lest they result in this offense.

‘I don’t know what you mean by “dignity,” Sneeth,’ she complained when he refused for the third time to allow her to see the grisling show. The two of them were standing on the midway of a traveling circus that came frequently to the Welling Valley during the summer, and Buttercup was staring up at the banners that advertised this event. ‘I am a rogue daughter of the ruling house. I’ve been banished. I don’t know what dignity I’ve got.’

‘More than me,’ he mumbled.

‘Well, yes,’ she admitted, ‘but then I am female. That means I have more dignity that you or Thrumm or Cook and more than all the villagers, too, because you and they are all males, but that doesn’t signify much. I don’t know what it has to do with watching a grisling show.’

‘Mr Thrumm would have a fit if he found out.’

‘How in the world would he find out! He doesn’t come down to the village. None of these oafs are going to go up to Thrumm House and tell him.’

‘You won’t tell him?’

‘Of course I won’t tell him. Don’t be silly. I don’t want to get into trouble.’

Sneeth bought tickets, insisting that they enter the show through the rear tent flap and set themselves well toward the back, where they would not make themselves a part of the spectacle.

The stage was small. Grislings themselves were small. Buttercup watched, entranced, as the little females decked themselves in their finery – they had been trained to do this, of course, it was no part of the wild behavior – and then went through the classic motions of challenge and attack. A cage of males was surreptitiously placed near the platform to provoke this behavior. The little females looked almost Grisllike, almost human with their cocky little heads and delicate arms. Their ivory spurs had been replaced with false, flexible ones so they could not hurt one another, and the growth of their paralyzing fangs had been suppressed with thube. They had been cleaned and groomed until they were very pretty, and Buttercup thought that she preferred them even to the waltzing mice. They looked so very human. Almost as though they might speak at any moment, demanding access to the cage of males which had been hastily taken away as soon as battle was joined.

‘That’s not fair,’ Buttercup protested. ‘Taking the males away from the little pink one. She won the fight.’

‘Well – but,’ Sneeth stuttered, turning quite red. ‘That’s not a nice thing to say! If they had left the males there, she would have … well, it’s not something we could watch. Not good deportment, at all. Not civilized!’

She subsided, still thinking it had been quite unfair, but distracting herself with the thought of hot seed pie. She and Sneeth usually bought pies for themselves plus two to carry back, one for Gardener Ribble and one for the gardener’s boy. Ribble always had a boy, someone from the village or the surrounding area who was willing to work for three meals a day, a drawer to sleep in, and a seed pie now and again.

They wandered munchingly along the valley, licking syrup from their chins, climbing over a stile to ascend the hill toward Thrumm House, then stopping as they heard a sound in the underbrush nearby, a kind of stifled snigger.

Sneeth dithered, turning toward and then away from the noise.

‘Come on,’ instructed Buttercup. ‘I want to see what that is.’ She streaked away through the grasses, Sneeth tiptoeing guiltily behind, and threw herself at the top of an embankment to peer between two shrubs.

Below her in a tiny clearing was the latest gardener’s boy, and on the earth before him were two wild grislings engaged in battle. They were in no wise as lovely as the groomed ones Buttercup had seen so recently upon the stage but no less human-looking for that. Buttercup drew in her breath, letting it out in one long shriek of fury. The boy, the filthy
boy
, had cut the spurs from one of the grislings leaving her helpless before the paralyzing attack of the other. She had already been cut to ribbons while the boy sat there sniggering and playing with himself.

Buttercup was about to launch herself at him, with no clear idea of what she might accomplish – he outweighed her by half – when Sneeth came down the embankment, lashing away with his cane, catching the boy full across his face and sending him screaming away across the fields, blood streaming down his neck.

Buttercup cradled the maimed grisling, but it was far too late. As she held the little creature it sighed and expired in her arms.

She turned, hiding tears with difficulty. Only her long study of deportment let her continue the journey home without showing her feelings on her face. When they arrived there, she went up the stairs, intending to shut herself into her room, but was stopped halfway down the hall by the sound of conversation in the foyer below.

‘… whipped him and he ran off, but she had already seen it.
Never
should have been done where she could see it!’

Where she could see it?
What had Sneeth meant by that? The rigged battle had been something
no
one should ever have to see. A fair fight in nature is one thing, she told herself. Nature is bloody and violent, as many of the books she had read had made quite clear. A battle during which one opponent is rendered helpless, however, was simply not to be thought of without disgust, even a battle between creatures as tiny as wild grislings.
Where she could see it
, indeed. Buttercup was angry all over again, and it took a long evening alone with the mice – feeding them the seed pie which had been destined for the gardener’s boy – before she could show herself with an unperturbed face.

That night she had particularly violent dreams in which a previously indulgent voice directed her with some hostility to quit fooling around and pay attention to what was going on. The dream, like most dreams, bothered her on first awaking and was forgotten by breakfast time. Inside Buttercup, Mouse was in a state.

Since it was a holiday, breakfast was served in the gloomy kitchen. On holidays the shutters were left closed all day. Those civilized beings so foolish as to leave secure shelter on holidays were said to deserve whatever happened to them, as those were the days when the tribes of wild Grisls moved down out of the mountains seeking – well – seeking whatever they sought. What they sought was never specified in Buttercup’s presence, and she had imagined several things which they might be after, some of which brought shivers of revulsion.

When Nursey had been present, she had insisted upon spending all of every holiday in the kitchen, as it had the fewest windows. Sneeth, however, considered it appropriate to sit in the schoolroom and do whatever work was needed, and he repaired there with Buttercup as soon as Cook cleared the table. Sneeth, unaccountably sleepy-looking, as though he had spent a wakeful night, managed to maintain an instructive manner for only about an hour, after which repeated yawns turned into a breathy snore and he laid his head upon his desk and slept.

Buttercup, at a loss for anything interesting to do, went to a shutter which was tightly closed across one of the classroom windows and found a knot at which she had been working for some time. A bit more prying and the knot popped into her hand, leaving behind a large, slanted knothole through which she could examine the hidden outer world of holiday-time.

And how strange an outer world it proved to be! Thrumm House had been invaded by wild Grisls. At least three camps of them huddled beneath the trees at the edge of the meadow. On the meadow itself, half a dozen robed females engaged in a stately dance. Observing them from the shelter of the trees were a number of males including a number whom Buttercup recognized from the village.

The tempo of the dance increased. Buttercup cast a quick glance at Sneeth, but he was quite unconscious of her misbehavior. She applied her eye to the knothole once more.

One by one the Grisls removed their robes until all six of them were standing quite naked except for their rather tawdry veils and gems. They began to display, rumps flushing crimson, eyes flashing, venom tooth gleaming, spurs positively glittering in the sun. Oh, the lovely length of those spurs, as white and unsullied as peeled wood, gently curved, sharp as needles. Here was no pretense! No flexible spurs to save wounding!