The Sweet Girl (16 page)

“That’s all?” Glycera turns back to her weaving.

“He’d choose my books.”

“And that’s so important to you?”

I have to think about that. When did I last read a book?

“I think it is,” she says. “I think it’s very important to you.”

“Is it?” I say. My face hurts, suddenly, from the effort of not crying.

“I can read, you know.” She selects another thread, a rust. “My husband taught me. He liked me to read to him. And sing, and dance. And—talk, really. He loved to talk. We would have wonderful arguments about all sorts of things. Politics and ideas and art. You’d be surprised how many men prize an intelligent woman.”

“Theophrastos doesn’t.”

“Then he’s a boor.” She sets her work down a second time and repeats the gesture from the party, lifting my chin with a single finger. “Your brows need tweezing.”

She lies me down on a couch and sits beside me. She strokes my hair back from my forehead while we wait for the slave to fetch her tools. “So brown,” she says. “You spend too much time in the sun. You’ve been a little wild thing all these years,
haven’t you? Going about on your own, swimming and reading books all day? Climbing trees, I don’t doubt. Was it true, what your father said about healing that slave?”

I tell her it wasn’t a bad infection and it probably would have healed itself. I was just a child, playing. The slave brings silver tweezers on a gold tray.

“No more talking now.” She leans over me, so close I can feel her breath on my cheek. I close my eyes. She works quickly, expertly, the pinpricks arcing first below, then above the line of my brows. From time to time she presses a fingertip to my skin, firmly, to ease the pain. She smoothes a cool cream on after, for the redness.

“No, stay,” she says, when I make to sit up. “I’m going to have a little lie-down, too.” She takes the couch across the table from mine and together we contemplate the ceiling. “You asked about my daughters. Can I tell you a secret?”

The ceiling is painted blue with clouds. I’m not sure how to answer. “Yes,” I say finally.

“I never had children,” she says. “There was something wrong with me, inside. I took those girls in when they fell on hard times. Good girls, good families. But mistakes get made, accidents, misunderstandings, passions—fate can play with a young girl. As you yourself are discovering.”

“Before your husband’s death, or after?”

“After.”

Her voice is light, high, girlish.

“I’m strict in some matters,” she’s saying. “My girls do as I tell them. I expect beauty and grace and cleanliness and hard work. But they are loved and cared for here. They have good
food and lovely clothes and time to themselves to pursue their own interests. They have spending money and freedom, providing they use that freedom in a respectable way.”

She sits up and looks at me and I understand that here comes the most important part. I sit up, too.

“All my girls can read,” she says, reaching over to tap a finger on my knee. “You’d like it here.”

I murmur appropriately, thanking her for her generosity, but demurring.

She cuts me off. “You don’t understand,” she says. “You’d be safe here.”

I think for a moment, then lean forward to kiss her scented cheek.

When I pull back, her eyes are wet. “I know you’re confused,” she says. “Sweet girl. Think about it, that’s all. And if you say no, I won’t hold it against you. You’ll still be welcome here. Your decisions are all your own, you see? That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

I look at the loom she set up for me, the single line of blue all that I managed.

“I’ll leave it there for you,” she says. “For whenever you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” I say again.

“Ah!” Her face lights up and she claps her hands. “Here is Meda to see you to the door.”

Meda is the darkest-haired of the three, with the palest skin. I remember her from the women’s room at the party. She drifts ahead of me, silently, in a dress of palest green gossamer that floats lightly behind her. Her scent is a trail of
cinnamon I want to follow into a warm, dark forest, and sleep.

“Please come back,” she says at the gate. “We get so lonely for visitors.”

“What do you like to read?”

She smiles and touches her fingertips to her throat,
me
?

Tycho stands up from the shadows to escort me home.

“Where does Master Euphranor live?” Tycho asks.

When he plays dumb like this, I want to hit him. “I have no idea,” I say sweetly.

He stands there like a mule waiting for the whip.

“Ask at the garrison,” I say. “Maybe he lives in barracks.”

“Officers don’t live in barracks.”

“Tycho!”

“Lady,” he says.

We stare at each other for a long moment. “Is there something you want to say?” I ask him.

“With your permission.”

I nod.

“Your father would have wanted you to be with your brother.”

“And Theophrastos.”

He nods.

“My father took an interest in the farm. He wanted to visit it himself. He thought it could be made more profitable. I’m doing what my father intended to do.”

“What he intended for himself,” Tycho says.

“Yes,” I say. “Let me know when you’ve returned. With a reply.”

He picks my letter up from the table. “What if I can’t—”

“Tycho!”

He goes.

Then it’s morning, the next morning, and we’re riding, Euphranor and I, he on his black beast and me on Spiffy, under the skeletal black trees on the long lane to the farms. The horses’ hooves ring out on the frozen ground. I feel the fizz in me, the wine in my blood. We’ve left the cart with the lunch and the slaves far behind. He’s quiet today, Euphranor, none of the jolly hostliness he patronized Daddy with. That suits me well enough. He smiles tentatively at me from time to time and I think he has a nice face. I like that he knows how to be quiet.

We stop at the entrance to the yard, familiar now: his own farm. Demetrios doesn’t appear. Euphranor doesn’t move to dismount or make any suggestion at all, so we just sit, silently, resting the horses. Curiosity, that fine edge, is blunted in me since Daddy’s death, an irony I’m not curious enough to puzzle through. I sit feeling sad in the bright cold air, the wind moving a few dead, clinging leaves high, high up in the trees. From far away comes the sound of footsteps on gravel, running. Closer and closer. Neither of us moves or looks at the other; I like that.

Tycho appears through the trees. He stops a dozen paces away and simply stands, breathing heavily. Nothing to deliver, nothing to say. I understand he didn’t like letting me out of his sight, didn’t like me riding with Euphranor unescorted. I understand and dismiss the understanding, let it float out of
my mind like fumes. It’s not his place to worry about such things, and beneath me to notice a slave’s worry. I will let it go.

“We’re just over here,” Euphranor says, as though he’s received some signal I can’t hear, like a dog. He’s let Tycho catch his breath. Another thought I allow to float away. Noticing an officer noticing a slave, and liking that about him, disliking myself for liking that—it’s all too complicated. I open my mind’s hand and release the thought like a birdie.
Fly away, don’t bother me
.

We ride a few hundred paces farther down the lane to the derelict property we would have visited had Daddy not twisted his ankle. I understand—without surprise, in my dream-like state—this place is Daddy’s. Is mine. The shack in the yard has a staved-in roof. The fields are choked with dead grass. If the place has borne a crop in the last ten years, there’s no evidence of it.

Euphranor helps me down from Spiffy and hands the reins to Tycho. We walk a little way into the yard. No flowers, no herbs, no kitchen patch. No hens, no pigs, no goats, no berries, no vines, no rustics working the fields, no country girls singing over their tasks. It’s winter, of course, but metaphorically.

“It’s bad,” I say to Euphranor.

He walks around the shack, kicking the foundation stones, peering in the black windows.

“How long has it been like this?”

He waves me over. Through the window I see yellow grass longer than my hair, sprouting in the corners.

“I’ve done what I can, over the years,” he says. “We used to
bring in the fruit before the trees went bad. Demetrios tried to harvest the fields one year, but it was too much work. It’s a big property. You need someone here full-time.”

“I thought there was.”

Euphranor gestures at the shack.

“I don’t think Daddy knew.”

“Not a worldly man,” Euphranor says. Commiseration or contempt? “The foundation’s still solid. First thing is, you get that roof fixed and get someone living in here.”

“A caretaker,” I say.

“A farmer.” Euphranor gives me a look, long and clear and cool as water. “You want to turn a profit as quickly as possible, yes?”

Behind us, the remaining slaves have trundled into the yard with the cart, and are awaiting instruction.

“Do you have someone in mind?”

He shrugs. “I said it was too much work for Demetrios. That’s without recompense, you understand. We might come to an arrangement.”

“I don’t understand.” I kick a dead leaf from my foot reflexively. “You never made this offer to Daddy? How’s he had income from the farm all these years if it’s been like this?”

“Maybe he was muddled,” Euphranor says. “Some men aren’t careful with money, particularly if they have it coming in from many sources. It probably just got lost in the accounts.”

“You never wrote to him?” I persist.

“I never knew who owned the place until your family arrived in Chalcis. Don’t be angry at
me
, girl. I’m trying to help.”

O he should not have called me that.

“I know the situation you’re in,” he says. “These things get around. I don’t really see how you’ve got a choice.”

I understand he’s taking the farm.

“Are there outbuildings?”

“Worse than this.” He kicks the foundation, again. I want to say,
Excuse me, please, but you don’t kick that. That’s mine
. “You can’t live here,” he says, reading my mind.

“Equipment?”

“Stolen.” He nods. “I remember, a couple of years back, Demetrios telling me he’d checked the barn one day and everything was gone.” He holds my look, daring me to challenge him. I know where the equipment is, and he knows I know.

“I’ll buy new.”

“What will you buy?” Of course I have no idea. “There’s no seed, either,” he says when I don’t answer. “Must have been stolen at the same time.”

“Must have been,” I say.

We look at each other.

“Which bedroom did you take?” he asks. “The birds, or the butterflies?”

I close my eyes, open them.

“I’ve been kind to your family,” he says softly, though there’s no one but slaves to overhear. “I was assured your people were—solvent. It’s a big house for one man, but I’m fond of it all the same. I’ve given you more than enough time to grieve. Any court would say I’d be well within my rights to take it back.”

Any court is Plios, the magistrate. I could risk it, maybe.

Suddenly Euphranor’s mood seems to shift. “Don’t let’s
fight,” he says. “We should eat, instead. Things always look better on a full stomach. Come on, little one, don’t look so gloomy. I’m trying to be nice to you. Still fancy that swim? I sent ahead to have Demetrios clear the pond.”

“No, thank you,” I say. “It’s too cold.”

“Oh, but I know how you love to swim.”

The tone of his voice.

“You have a birthmark, lighter skin rather than darker. Just here.” He touches himself. “I understand those are quite rare, the light ones. Quite—distinctive.”

I blush, as he intends.

We ride back to his farm, where the slaves lay out the picnic on a table in the yard. We eat.

“Have Thaulos stop sending his couriers, then,” I say.

Triumph; but he takes it quietly. “Actually, that’s out of my hands.” He doesn’t look up from his bread. “He
was
promised a—gift, shall we say, to arrange things. By that brother of yours. The one who fancied himself a gambler.”

“How big a gift?”

Euphranor tells me he’ll make enquiries, and see if he can negotiate a settlement on my behalf. As the slaves are packing up, he says, “Sure you don’t want that swim?”

My first kiss, there in the yard, so quick the slaves don’t even look up. I manage to twirl out of it, like Glycera in the silk.

“Birds or butterflies?” he whispers.

I wipe my lips hard on the back of my hand and he smiles, but sadly. Odd.