Under the Poppy (55 page)

We thank you for your kind attention, and let us once more gladly mention

It was wise Aesop’s true intention

That grapes be plucked, and sucked, for fancy-free!”

—as both puppets and their master bow nearly to the floor, with a wild grace and a spilled flourish of little seeds, or beads? No, they are grapes, hard wizened white grapes, sour enough for any fable, that scatter and roll across the floor like pearls from a broken necklace, to bring a final laugh as Istvan makes a final bow, then slips behind the screen, past the door concealed—

—to see, in the chilly pantry room, like a magician’s trick, Rupert, setting the concertina aside. Bruised and unshaven, the cheap white shirt like an undertaker’s shill, as Istvan pulls off the mask and reaches for him, for his face, less a name than a noise: “Mouse—You’re wounded.”

In answer Rupert puts one hand to Istvan’s chest, palm against his beating heart, a profoundly intimate touch, and “Play out your show, messire,” as soft as a breath. “What is my part?”

“Your part—your part’s to get the fuck away, and me with you.” Once more Istvan touches Rupert’s face, as one touches a creature in a dream, to prove reality, until, like waking, he pulls himself away, to pack with swift efficiency the puppets and traps to the case, as Rupert checks the movement in the parlor and the hall—“We’ll skirt out through the garden”—so “Exeunt,” says Istvan, while Rupert plucks from a sideboard serving-case a silver knife, with a bounding stag worked into its handle. As they head down the narrow servants’ passageway, low ceiling and smoking oil lamps, Istvan proffers the plague mask, still slightly damp from his own skin: “It’s a costume ball, yeah? Put it on. The hat, too.”

The guests, still chuckling in wonder from the playlet—however did the fellow make both puppets sing at once? And so dexterous, too, as many arms as branches on a tree!—have all followed Isobel in to supper, a modest one as befits a beggars’ gathering: the mutton and the pottage pies, black bread, braised river trout, with a little jest set at each place, an amuse-bouche of golden grapes in sour black-currant sauce, noted by Fernande who says, “I thought you might serve fox tonight, Isobel,” with rather more approval than not.

All at once, the pleasant post-show chatter falls into a hush, as Benjamin—unsmiling in black velvet, severe as a tarnished angel—enters the dining room. He is followed by Mr. Arrowsmith and M. Guyon, masked again, the latter murmuring as they find their places, “Will Georges make an attempt, do you suppose? He is still quite capable of harm.”

“A patron of the higher explosives, Hector, yes. But I think he will not care to burn.—
Nunc dimittis
, eh?” watching as Benjamin takes a whiskey, takes his seat at the table’s head. “He did quite well tonight, our young friend.”

Mr. Arrowsmith’s calm gaze seeks Isobel’s, then, to hold it for a moment, to give a tiny nod that she returns. Raising her voice to carry like a player’s, “We’ve wonderful news,” she says, as two maids tug in a gilded trolley heavy with champagne, while the gossipy mutter rises to a high, excited buzz. Isobel takes Benjamin’s right hand in her gloved and crippled clasp, as Christobel reaches for his left: the two women share a look, while Benjamin looks at neither, looks at nothing, his shoulders taut as a man’s in battle, feeling again in his ravaged heart that last embrace, his
maître’s
mouth rough against his own:
Go and be their master.
Go; yes. Nothing in the world he would not do…. Belle’s gazes searches his, now, then softens as if she understands, how can she understand? She squeezes his hand.

The servants hustle back and forth between the dining room and the cellars—all that champagne to carry—so only Otilie sees as Rupert, with Istvan a step behind, pushes at the servants’ door to the garden, Otilie who halts Istvan with a hand hooked to his arm—“So you’re off then, sir? Give a girl a kiss goodbye?”—while Rupert, outside in the darkness, takes his first free breath: the air is cold, yet very sweet, even through the unaccustomed mask. Behind him on the path, framed by willow branches, the empty drawing room glows, the spirits of the house fly on above:
You are the first, the very first, Monsieur, to ever see that! Except for me.
The first, yes; would to God it had not hurt him so. Benjamin… He takes another breath, a deep one, he closes his eyes—

—as “Hanzel,” a whisper at his back: the voice is the general’s, as is the knife. “Your play’s ended, then? I was waiting…. Be very still—I am not playing, now.”

Rupert does not move. The knife blade lies colder than the air against his skin; its tip slides in, a red pain just below his jaw. He can hear his own dry breathing through the mask.

“That letter from the dear departed—” The General’s arm is like iron, he smells of rum punch and rage. “All have seen it, but no one seems to have it. Do you have it, Hanzel? Or it is just a bluff?” as something rustles on the path, something small climbs through the detritus—rotten leaves, dead branches, potsherds and broken twigs—heaped waist-high for burning beside the greenhouse walls. “Either way, we will find it out together. Walk forward, now. Walk to the gate—”

Rupert takes two steps, four, careful steps, the knife urging him on. Beyond, past the artful curve of the path, a wee whistle echoes, antic and eerie; the knife hesitates; the whistle sounds again. Almost but not quite a child’s, a child at dark play in the empty garden, and the General pauses, to peer anew at the man he holds, head to one side: “Hanzel—”

—as Istvan, come up from behind like a puppet through a stage trapdoor, shoves the planing knife to the very hilt between the General’s ribs, while Rupert, bleeding from the throat, swivels in his loosened grasp, grasping the stag-worked knife as the General takes a breath of great surprise, does even he know whose blade splits him first? though it is certain that masked Rupert’s is the last face he sees, Rupert gripping his shoulders as he sags, as Istvan’s voice breathes in his ear, the culmination of a life’s work, “
Hors de combat,
you old fuck.”

The three, then two, stand close together, as if they confer without words, colleagues in a most confidential alliance. Once more Istvan makes the child’s whistle, this time sounding from the head of the path, then a hard little laugh. Dinner music begins to drift from the house, a droll peasant’s air, perhaps
Till Eulenspiegel,
as the General is dragged behind the greenhouse and left to contemplate eternity. Rupert pulls off the plague mask and assumes the dropped puppet case, while Istvan unbolts the gate that leads to the stables and the quiet landscape of the street beyond. A portly man, waiting alone past the line of the guests’ carriages—is it César? in a military hat?—seems to mark as they pass, but does not pursue as they turn the corner, then another corner, finding in the rising fog an idle cab a street or two away—

—but the driver takes one look and shakes his head, shakes the reins to take himself briskly from harm’s way: both men are splashed with blood. So “We’ll walk,” says Rupert, and they do: beneath the stately lindens to the humbler avenues, ashcans and turnip carts, an infant crying in a third-floor window, down to the arcades, where the night is in full swing, and men in a private hurry are not so much remarked upon, bloodied or no. A mazey little alleyway, the smell of fish cakes and pipe tobacco, a courtyard loud with revelers and a fat girl flaunting tit, a rusted iron staircase to a door that—“A moment”—Istvan unlocks with an even rustier key—

—and then they are inside, and safe, alone. The case is set onto the floor, and the other puppet players, in various stages of life—just-born or dismantled, heads and limbs, rags and straw and shiny glass-marble eyes—watch as Rupert secures the door, Istvan lights the lamp, then tugs a boiled-wool coverlet from an ancient horsehair divan, disturbing a brief skitter of rug-bugs, but they have slept in much worse, many times before.

“Now,” says Istvan, frowning, “let’s see your souvenir,” but Rupert shakes his head: there is blood, yes, but most of it Georges’, it is just a small wound after all. “What bothers me is this,” tapping lightly beneath his left eye, the dark spoor of the blow. “It was the butt-end of a truncheon—I can’t see much beyond shadows, now, except in brightest light.”

“What else?” reaching to turn Rupert’s face, to trace the last of the yellowed bruising, unfasten the borrowed shirt to find, and mark, each of the hurts, all of the pains inflicted since they parted, as Rupert—slowly, gravely—does the same, until they lie together, scarred and naked and whole. In the landscape of the players around them, actors of all known desires, they reenact their own, the cherished rhythms of passion, the sweet familiar skin: Istvan’s fingers quick and tender, Rupert’s lips upon the ropy, pinkish scars, that other bleak memento, the old harm made well at last. The lamp smolders and burns out, the courtyard quiets, the coverlet is wide enough to wrap them both, and so it does: like an old overcoat, a greatcoat, containing all the warmth there is or ever need be, against the lifelong onslaught of the cold.

Later, in the earliest pearl of dawn: “All this time…I was a monk, yeah?”

A sleepy murmur of deep content: “You’re a liar.”

“A monk in my heart, yeah? You, now—And how did you winkle yourself from that jail?” but it is full morning before that tale is told, in a few dry sentences—a visit, a letter, the open door—to make Istvan shake his head: “A trump to Arrowsmith, and all his clockwork plans. Mine, too.”

“You,” as Rupert feeds the stove, “you and your Twelfth Night frolic, you had me—foxed, at first. Cur fox,” with a little smile, with infinite love.

Istvan shrugs. “I did as needed to be done…. So it was little Master Puck engineered that sleight-of-hand, did he? Hey bravo.”

On one knee by the grate, Rupert pauses, and looks up. “Give him his name.”

A shadow in his voice, upon his face; Istvan sees both. Gently: “Benjamin, then. He did well.” Rupert says nothing, stands, and dusts his hands, black rime of coal and the gleam of rose-gold, the Greek warrior; Istvan sees that, too: “A bonny bauble. But where is your ring?”

“This is my ring.”

“And this,” reaching for him, “this, Mouse, is the world,” drawing him back down upon the divan, back beneath the coverlet, until the grimy window shines with noon, the courtyard yawns and quickens, and Boilfast comes quietly with his own key, to share a pint of vin ordinaire and several black Indian cheroots, and a tale of a man found dead in a garden, and dumped at the docks, a much-respected military general, whose assailants, alas, had stolen entirely away.

Lucy

Our Jack was quite the day’s sensation, even if I say it myself. Mickey looked brave in the jingling motley—you could hear the bells from the balcony, Pinky said—and he and Rosa played it out like troupers: never missed a cue, never lost a line, as fine as players twice their age or more. I told them so, how proud a sight it was, and Pimm gave them the little toys he’d made, each for each: a locket for Rosa, with a tiny carven rose inside, and a jack-in-the-box for Mickey, with a monkey-Jack who popped you in the nose if you cranked it up too close. Pimm was a fair master of revels—only I could tell he had the nerves—and he strutted about some afterward in the costume and cocked hat:
Why, I’ll wear it for our wedding, hey? With a cabbage in my buttonhole, and Mickey for my man-at-arms!

But when the day came, you never saw a sweeter sight than my Pimm, hair brushed clean and flat with quince-seed jelly, a toff’s top hat beneath his arm, all spiffed and fine. And when he said “I will” the whole house heard him, I think they heard him in the street outside: for we did it here, of course, with Didier’s uncle for our parson, who is a curé in his own village, and Rosa’s mamma to dress the stage with flowers, she and I worked half the night to get the garlands hanging straight. It was Mme. de Metz who surprised me, with the servants and the champagne, ’twas Pinky told her when they cried the banns—and Pinky there too, of course, he was the one gave me away…. If only it had been Mr. Rupert. That was my single sadness, that neither of them saw, or were there, though it was Istvan who made me the best bride’s-gift of anyone:
All of them?
I said. I cried then, like a child, I couldn’t help it, there by the worktable and the scatter of the tools.
You’re giving me all your puppets?

And their accoutrements, too,
showing me all the cunning little drawers in the trap-cases, the rods and mending-loops and costumes, the way to lock the trunks without the key, and
Who better to have them, Puss?
with a kiss on my cheek.
They’ll have a proper home here, with you and your
troupe—though I’d not star Pan and Mickey in the same show, not until the lad is older.
Smoothing the black cloth soft down across that carven face, tucking in the ends like a babe beneath a blanket—it was a sad sight to see, you could tell he was that grieved to let him go.