Tess of the Road Read online

  Alas, the family had been quietly creeping into debt ever since Seraphina’s scales came in, as Papa tried to placate a hurt, angry wife with clothes and servants and fine porcelain. The wife was not placated, and the house was mortgaged to the eaves. Everything still might have come out all right if the money he’d expected upon the death of his mother had come through.

  He had gotten nothing but a letter from his elder brother, Jean-Philippe, Baronet Dombegh, saying, The house in town was your inheritance, you idiot. Did you think she’d relent and write you back into her will? By the end, the old buzzard couldn’t even remember your name.

  Tess kissed a knuckle toward Heaven for her grandmother. Uncle Jean-Philippe wasn’t worth a flea on one of the “old buzzard’s” tail feathers.

  The house in town had been sold a year ago, after Tess and Jeanne had already gone to court. Half the proceeds had trickled into the gaping sinkhole of debt, and three-quarters of the rest was reserved for Jeanne’s dowry, as the investment most likely to yield a strong return.

  The new flat was only a few streets over; Tess took the back way, up alleys and through St. Brandoll’s Church. The flat was on the other side of the close, above a mapmaker’s, accessible via an outdoor flight of slick, rickety stairs festooned with icicles. Tess ran her finger along the wooden railing, sending a rain of ice shattering onto the flagstones below.

  This door required no knocking. It didn’t even lock properly. She let herself into the parlor-kitchen-dining room, where her mother was simultaneously kneading bread and tutoring Tess’s younger brothers in arithmetic. There was a common misapprehension that a Goreddi housewife wouldn’t know her sums, but any city-born woman knew how to keep an accounts book, and Anne-Marie was not just city-born but Belgioso, a surname synonymous with business. A merchant would be the first to tell you: the wife who could add and subtract—as well as multiply—was a credit to her house indeed.

  Tess pulled up a chair across from Neddie. “I have news for you, Mama,” she said, not caring that she was interrupting the lesson. Jeanne’s engagement was so momentous it couldn’t wait. Tess spilled the whole story, embroidering upon Richard’s sense of duty and omitting the kisses, innocuous though they’d been. “They’re going to announce it officially at the Queen’s Treaty Eve ball,” she concluded. Richard had sent a note saying so that morning. “You must come, of course. We’ll have to stand up next to the duke and duchess and—”

  “She might have told me herself,” said Mama, slamming the bread dough onto the table and raising a cloud of flour dust.

  “Jeanne’s stuck working today,” said Tess disbelievingly. There was no pleasing this woman, even when one had unalloyed good news. “You’re hearing the news before anyone at court. I thought you’d rather know sooner than later.”

  “You thought to steal her thunder,” muttered Mama, laying into the dough with her fists.

  A spark of anger warmed Tess’s chest; she’d chastised herself for this, but it still rankled when Mama pointed it out. “I’m here with Jeanne’s blessing. You know she dislikes a fuss.”

  “ ‘Envy is the termite of good faith,’ ” said the older of Tessie’s brothers, the Abominable Paul, quoting St. Vitt. He smoothed his dark hair with one hand and smirked at her.

  “I’m not envious,” said Tess, glowering. “What’s thirteen times seventeen?”

  “Piss off,” said Paul, who was almost thirteen and could muster considerable venom.

  “Language, Paulie,” said Mama, punching the dough. “It’s two hundred twenty-one, and you’re supposed to have that memorized by now.”

  Tess stared at her mother incredulously. “Language? Mild chastisement? When you sold the house, did you also sell your temper?”

  “Tess,” said her mother, with a quaver in her voice that made it clear she had not.

  “When I was a wee lad, Paulie, I’d’ve been spanked for not knowing my maths,” said Tess. She’d gotten smacks with the spoon equivalent to the product she’d missed; 221 had been the most she’d ever received. Every other number would disappear from her head when she was old and senile, but 221 was emblazoned there forever.

  She didn’t dare tell the whole story, though. Mama’s blond hair was drawn up under a cap and snood, and Tess could see the little vein already pulsing at her temple, a gauge for how high the steam was rising. As much as Tess told herself a lady-in-waiting was too big and dignified to be thrown over her mother’s knee, some part of her didn’t quite believe it.

  Of course, Mama didn’t have to lift a finger to Tess, not when she had two fine deputies at that tiny table, ready to take up the mantle for her. “Maybe some of us are clever enough that we don’t need arithmetic beaten into us,” said Nedward the Terrible, who was ten, pushing sandy hair out of his eyes with the end of his pen.

  “No amount of punishment could teach our Tess,” said Paul. “That’s why she ran off to St. Bert’s, for some learning.” This last word was accompanied by an unambiguous gesture.

  That was cruel. Tess felt it keenly, even if she let her face show nothing. Worse, though, her mother said, “Boys! There’s no call to be that mean to your sister!”—as if Mama were the good one, looking out for Tess, trying to spare her feelings. Keeping her hands clean. Tess glared at her mother, blaming and raging. The boys had learned to be nasty from someone.

  And yet blame never stuck to Mama. As much as Tess wanted to hate her, she understood too well what Mama had suffered at the hands of her husband and by the humiliations of his elder daughter. Mama got that look about her now as she plopped the kneaded dough into the baking pan, the long-suffering, mournful look. “Drop this off at Loretta’s on your way out,” said Mama, handing the pan to Tess. Dismissing her.

  The flat, unlike the house where they had once lived, had no oven. One might simmer a stew in the ashes of the fire, or roast something small—a hare or capon—on a spit when the fire was roaring, but there was no way to bake bread unless you took it to the neighbors’.

  Tess hefted the pan, adjusting the towel over the top, but didn’t leave yet. She needed an answer and would bear the hostile stares of her brothers until she had it. “Mama, I think I’ve fulfilled my duties tolerably well.” Argh, no, that was a terrible start, hedging and qualifying. She tried again: “I’ve done all the family has asked of me, with no thought for myself. Jeanne will be well settled; there will be money to send these two miscreants to law school and seminary. Enough to buy you back some things you’ve had to do without—the carriage, your gowns, a decent kitchen, and a place to entertain your family.” To say nothing of Papa’s once-resplendent library, but she didn’t dare mention it; Papa was forever ignominious and disfavored in Mama’s eyes.

  “In light of all that,” Tess went on, not daring to meet her mother’s eyes, “I was hoping—”

  “What, that you might get married, too?” crowed Neddie the Terrible.

  Tess flashed him a dirty look, but Paul was already taking up the cry: “No, she wants to run off in search of World Serpents. Don’t you remember any of her old manias?”

  “I thought she was crazy for boys, not monsters,” jeered Neddie.

  “She was mad for both,” said Paul. “Nobody’s sure which got her in trouble.”

  “Saints’ knuckles, will you stop?” cried Tess, slamming the bread pan down on the table between them, making them jump.

  She looked to her mother; Mama’s eyes had gone icy and distant. “What an ugly temper you have. You’re supposing that your time is up, your task is complete, and you are free to go?”

  “Something like that,” said Tess warily. These kinds of questions were usually a setup for a lecture on why she was wrong.

  “And where do you propose to go, exactly?” said Mama, turning toward the fire and lifting the lid on the stew. It bubbled ominously. “You’ve spoiled your chances at marriage.”

&nbs
p; “Not everyone marries,” said Tess. “I could work as a seamstress.”

  “Or a harlot,” muttered Paul. Both boys burst out giggling. Mama said nothing, which stung as badly as whatever she might have said.

  There was no way not to hurt. Tess gritted her teeth against it.

  Mama scraped at the bottom of the pot, where the stew was sticking. “The boys are right: seamstress today, slattern tomorrow. It happens to undefended women all the time.” She straightened and stretched her lower back, her eyes on Tess’s. “You fell once, and we picked you up. We can’t keep doing that. A convent would keep you respectable and safe.”

  Tess opened her mouth to object, but her mother cut her off. “You’ve made your bed most abundantly, Tess. Don’t imagine you’re finished lying in it. Quoth St. Vitt: ‘Thou shalt pay for thy sins ten times ten what they cost thee, but if thou hast fallen all the way to the ground, woman, there shalt thou lie.’ ”

  “So I’m to lie and pay,” said Tess, seething, “with no recourse.”

  “You knew this before you set off bullheadedly down the road to damnation,” said Mama, cold as well water. “I brought you up in full knowledge of the scriptures. Whatever you’ve done, you’ve done with your eyes open and your chin set defiantly against me.”

  Tess’s chin quivered now, her defiance spent. There was no talking to Mama once she started quoting scripture. All authority was ceded to St. Vitt, the most implacable and unsympathetic Saint in Heaven.

  One would have thought, after St. Jannoula’s War and the apparition of St. Pandowdy (Heaven shine upon his scaly hide), that the Saints might have relaxed their grip upon the hearts of Goreddis, just a little. The Saints of old had been revealed as ityasaari, half dragon, and that should have created more room for doubts, not less. Tess’s half sister, Seraphina, was a Saint by that definition, and Tess felt that should have been enough to make anyone question the whole setup. Tess could have made a list of Seraphina’s un-Saintly qualities—her morning breath and noisy chewing, how she’d twist your arm if you came into her room without asking, burps and farts and every common, earthy thing—but somehow the actions of one sister were not enough to cast aspersions upon an entire pantheon of Saints.

  Tess’s mother, after the war, had dug into her piety all the more deeply, like a tick burrowing into a dog’s ear.

  There were no arguments. Not only was Mama’s faith intractable, but Tess knew in her heart that she was right. However bitterly Tess might protest, she had done this to herself and she deserved what she got. In a way, she was lucky: St. Vitt had advocated the stoning of women like her, but in this day and age her mother could never have gotten away with that.

  Or rather, she could, but only if the stones were words.

  * * *

  In the end, Mama and the boys couldn’t make it to the Treaty Eve ball for the betrothal. Two days before the happy event, they came down with influenza—perhaps contracted from the neighbor’s toddler, who’d coughed on their fresh-baked bread, or perhaps brought home from Mass. Only Papa was well enough to come; he never set foot in church (which suggested the bread was blameless) and had too little meaningful contact with his wife to catch it from her.

  Four couples announced their engagements at the ball. Lord Thorsten, apparently inspired by all the romance in the air, proposed to Lady Eglantine in front of everyone, which was merely embarrassing for Lord Thorsten. Tess could have told him he had no chance with Lady Eglantine; Tess knew everyone’s business.

  That was one thing she’d miss about court. Did nuns gossip? With her luck, that would be considered a sin. Tess grimaced, feeling like she’d already glimpsed the first way she’d get in trouble at the convent. It was nice to know these things in advance.

  The families of the four betrothed couples stood upon the dais at the head of the hall while the whole party applauded. Tess felt sad for Jeanne’s paltry showing, only two people, and Papa barely counted. He’d grown so thin since he’d lost his law practice that he could hardly be seen from the other end of the hall. Jeanne took his arm, however, and nodded at Tess, who understood to do the same, and maybe that was sufficient. Maybe they’d be remembered as the Dombegh twins, bearing a twig between them.

  The in-laws-to-be were invited for a private reception in the Blue Salon, where Queen Glisselda would congratulate them personally. Jeanne went ahead with Lord Richard’s family, who’d traveled from Ducana province for the betrothal announcement: his parents, Duke and Duchess Pfanzlig, and his middle brother, a congenial, pumpkin-headed fellow called Lord Heinrigh. Tess took her father’s arm so he couldn’t disappear and led him doggedly after.

  “We couldn’t skip this?” Papa muttered as they entered the salon. “The announcement’s made. Surely we’ve done our due dilige—”

  “Jeanne needs you here,” Tessie snapped. She had no patience for her father; everything about him irritated her, from his balding pate to his dated houppelande to his meek posture, like an apology for being alive. “You do little enough for us. You can suck it up and socialize.”

  She scanned the room for where they needed to be. Richard and Jeanne were talking to the Queen at the farthest point of the room. The duke and duchess and Lord Heinrigh stood near the center with a small group. They were the ones Papa should be meeting; Tess hauled him forward. Duke Lionel was speaking grandiloquently, and Tess slowed her steps, knowing it would not do to interrupt a duke. As the Queen’s second cousin once removed, he outranked everyone but Her Highness and the prince consort.

  “I disapprove the Queen’s decision, and I don’t mind saying so,” he said, tossing his mane of white hair.

  Tess froze, fearful of what the duke might say next. One criticism of the Queen reflected upon her own family: the royal cousins’ peculiar relationship with Seraphina. Nobody, not even Seraphina’s sisters, knew much for certain, beyond the fact that Seraphina lived in the royal family’s wing of the palace. That was quite enough fodder for speculation, however—and enough to stain Jeanne’s reputation if one were of strict and censorious mind. They’d been lucky, Tess felt, that no one had thought to paint them with that particular brush.

  “Saints’ balls, I’ve said so to her face,” Duke Lionel pontificated, unaware of Tess’s anxious presence behind him. “ ‘It is wrong to let quigs roam free and terrorize innocent people,’ I told her. ‘Lock them in at night, like your grandmother used to, or this is going to come back and bite you in the arse.’ And it will, too—perhaps literally!”

  Gasps went up all around him, shock that he would dare to speak so bluntly of the Queen’s derriere. “Whatever did she say to that?” cried an elderly baronet.

  Duke Lionel shrugged his powerful shoulders. “She knows in her heart that I’m right. It’s that idealist, the prince consort, who puts such notions in her head. Him, or St. Seraphina.”

  Tess bristled at hearing Saint appended to her sister’s name, and yet it was a relief in this case. That would be why they weren’t holding Seraphina’s questionable relationships against Jeanne. They were believers. A Saint could, by definition, do no wrong.

  Unlike Tess. Tess had to rely on keeping her sins well hidden.

  She edged closer with her father. “I beg your pardon, Duke Lionel, Duchess Elga, Lord Heinrigh,” she said, giving full courtesy to each. There was supposed to be a third son, Lord Jacomo, the youngest, but he seemed not to be present.

  “Tess Dombegh, if I’m not mistaken,” said Duke Lionel, like a man who felt he’d never truly been mistaken in his life. “Jeanne’s fraternal twin, the younger. Is this your father?”

  “Yes,” said Tess, but Duke Lionel was already holding out his enormous hand, crushing Papa’s flaccid fingers in his grip. Papa squeaked in alarm. Tess winced.

  “Well met, sir,” cried the duke. His heartiness seemed only to make Papa wilt further. “Your Jeanne is quite a girl. Richard is utterly smitten with
her, and even my wife can find nothing to complain about. We could put a pea under Jeanne’s mattress, and it would beat her black and blue by morning, no doubt.”

  He accompanied this pronouncement with an appalling wink. Duchess Elga, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back under a Samsamese snood, seemed offended by this, and was perhaps on the verge of saying so when Heinrigh burst in: “We never thought he’d find anyone good enough for Mother! You should have seen the girls she rejected. I tell you, I’ve learned my lesson. Better to let her do the choosing, and save yourself a deal of grief!”

  The duchess’s expression moved from offended to livid, but Heinrigh seemed not to notice. He gave a wide, vacant smile, like a sweet-natured spaniel that has no idea how the drapes ended up on the floor with muddy prints all over them. He was appalling, and yet Tess found herself half wanting to scratch behind his ears.

  “It is rare to find a young lady as pure in spirit as your Jeanne,” said the duchess at last in a pained voice. “You’ve brought her up piously, Counselor Dombegh.”

  “We tried,” said Papa, bowing his head. Tess struggled not to roll her eyes. Papa and pious didn’t belong in the same sentence, and pure in spirit, she knew, was a euphemism for virginity. Pure in body was more to the point, but the duchess would never be so crass as to utter the word body. She probably never even thought the word.

  Tess accepted a glass of sparkling wine from a page boy and took a quick sip. It settled her stomach, which had become lightly queasy at this discussion of Jeanne, as if she were some heifer at market. Nicely fattened. Never known the bull.

  “Go fetch them,” the duke said to his wife and middle son, waving his hand dismissively. “Bring Richard and Jeanne here to us.” When they had dutifully departed, and most of the circle of nobles had scattered, the duke put his arm around Papa’s bony shoulders. “Now, remind me, you are the father of St. Seraphina, are you not? Your first wife was the dragon?”