True or untrue, the graveyard was considered haunted by the ghosts of the lovers, who could be seen (it was said) walking hand-in-hand among the markers, covered with blood and looking wistful. It was thus seldom visited at night, and was a logical spot for Roland, Cuthbert, Alain, and Susan to meet.
By the time the meeting took place, Roland had begun to feel increasingly worried . . . even desperate. Susan was the problem—or, more properly put, Susan’s aunt. Even without Rhea’s poisonous letter to help the process along, Cordelia’s suspicions of Susan and Roland had hardened into a near certainty. On a day less than a week before the meeting in the cemetery, Cordelia had begun shrieking at Susan almost as soon as she stepped through the house door with her basket over her arm.
“Ye’ve been with him! Ye have, ye bad girl, it’s written all over yer face!”
Susan, who had that day been nowhere near Roland, could at first only gape at her aunt. “Been with who?”
“Oh, be not coy with me, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty! Be not coy, I pray! Who does all but wiggle his tongue at ye when he passes our door? Dearborn, that’s who! Dearborn! Dearborn! I’ll say it a thousand times! Oh, shame on ye! Shame!
Look at yer trousers! Green from the grass the two of ye have been rolling in, they
are! I’m surprised they’re not torn open at the crutch as well!” By then Aunt Cord had been nearly shrieking. The veins in her neck stood out like rope.
Susan, bemused, had looked down at the old khaki pants she was wearing.
“Aunt, it’s paint—don’t you see it is? Chetta and I’ve been making Fair-Day decorations up at Mayor’s House. What’s on my bottom got there when Hart Thorin- not Dearborn but Thorin—came upon me in the shed where the decorations and fireworks are stored. He decided it was as good a time and place as any to have another little wrestle. He got on top of me, shot his squirt into his pants again, and went off happy. Humming, he was.” She wrinkled her nose, although the most she felt for Thorin these days was a kind of sad distaste. Her fear of him had passed.
Aunt Cord, meanwhile, had been looking at her with glittery eyes. For the first time, Susan found herself wondering consciously about Cordelia’s sanity.
“A likely story,” Cordelia whispered at last. There were little beads of perspiration above her eyebrows, and the nestles of blue veins at her temples ticked like clocks.
She even had a smell, these days, no matter if she bathed or not—a rancid, acrid one. “Did ye work it out together as ye cuddled afterward, thee and him?”
Susan had stepped forward, grabbed her aunt’s bony wrist, and clapped it to the stain on one of her knees. Cordelia cried out and tried to pull away, but Susan held fast. She then raised the hand to her aunt’s face, holding it there until she knew Cordelia had smelled what was on her palm.
“Does thee smell it. Aunt? Paint! We used it on rice-paper for colored lanterns!”
The tension had slowly gone out of the wrist in Susan’s hand. The eyes looking into hers regained a measure of clarity. “Aye,” she had said at last. “Paint.” A pause. “This time.”
Since then, Susan had all too often turned her head to see a narrow-hipped figure gliding after her in the street, or one of her aunt’s many friends marking her course with suspicious eyes. When she rode on the Drop, she now always had the sensation of being watched. Twice before the four of them came together in the graveyard, she had agreed to meet Roland and his friends. Both times she had been forced to break off, the second at the very last moment. On that occasion she had seen Brian Hockey’s eldest son watching her in an odd, intent way. It had only been intuition … but strong intuition.
What made matters worse for her was that she was as frantic for a meeting as
Roland himself, and not just for palaver. She needed to see his face, and to clasp one of his hands between both of hers. The rest, sweet as it was, could wait, but she needed to see him and touch him; needed to make sure he wasn’t Just a dream spun by a lonely, frightened girl to comfort herself.
In the end, Maria had helped her—gods bless the little maid, who perhaps understood more than Susan could ever guess. It was Maria who had gone to Cordelia with a note saying that Susan would be spending the night in the guest wing at Seafront. The note was from Olive Thorin, and in spite of all her suspicions, Cordelia could not quite believe it a forgery. As it was not. Olive had written it, listlessly and without questions, when Susan asked.
“What’s wrong with my niece?” Cordelia had snapped. “She tired, sai. And with the dolor de garganta.”
“Sore throat? So close before Fair-Day? Ridiculous! I don’t believe it! Susan’s never sick!”
“Dolor de garganta,” Maria repeated, impassive as only a peasant woman can be in the face of disbelief, and with that Cordelia had to be satisfied. Maria herself had no idea what Susan was up to, and that was just the way Susan liked it.
She’d gone over the balcony, moving nimbly down the fifteen feet of tangled vines growing up the north side of the building, and through the rear servants’ door in the wall. There Roland had been waiting, and after two warm minutes with which we need not concern ourselves, they rode double on Rusher to the graveyard, where Cuthbert and Alain waited, full of expectation and nervous hope.
3
Susan looked first at the placid blond one with the round face, whose name was not Richard Stockworth but Alain Johns. Then at the other one—he from whom she had sensed such doubt of her and perhaps even anger at her. Cuthbert Allgood was his name.
They sat side by side on a fallen gravestone which had been overrun with ivy, their feet in a little brook of mist. Susan slid from Rusher’s back and approached them slowly. They stood up. Alain made an In-World bow, leg out, knee locked, heel stiffly planted. “Lady,” he said. “Long days—”
Now the other was beside him—thin and dark, with a face that would have been
handsome had it not seemed so restless. His dark eyes were really quite beautiful.
“- and pleasant nights,” Cuthbert finished, doubling Alain’s bow. I he two of them looked so like comic courtiers in a Fair-Day sketch that Susan laughed. She couldn’t help herself. Then she curtseyed to them deeply, spreading her arms to mime the skirts she wasn’t wearing. “And may you have twice the number, gentlemen.”
Then they simply looked at each other, three young people who were uncertain exactly how to proceed. Roland didn’t help; he sat astride K usher and only watched carefully.
Susan took a tentative step forward, not laughing now. There were still dimples at the comers of her lips, but her eyes were anxious.
“I hope you don’t hate me,” she said. “I’d understand it if you did— I’ve come into your plans … and between the three of you, as well—but I couldn’t help it.” Her hands were still out at her sides. Now she raised them to Alain and Cuthbert, palms up. “I love him.”
“We don’t hate you,” Alain said. “Do we, Bert?”
For a terrible moment Cuthbert was silent, looking over Susan’s shoulder, seeming to study the waxing Demon Moon. She felt her heart stop. Then his gaze returned to her and he gave a smile of such sweetness that a confused but brilliant thought (If I’d met this one first—, it began) shot through her mind like a comet.
“Roland’s love is my love,” Cuthbert said. He reached out, took her hands, and drew her forward so she stood between him and Alain like a sister with her two brothers. “For we have been friends since we wore cradle-clothes, and we’ll continue as friends until one of us leaves the path and enters the clearing.” Then he grinned like a kid. “Mayhap we’ll all find the end of the path together, the way things are going.”
“And soon,” Alain added.
“Just so long,” Susan Delgado finished, “as my Aunt Cordelia doesn’t come along as our chaperone.”
4
“We are ka-tet,” Roland said. “We are one from many.”
He looked at each in turn, and saw no disagreement in their eyes. They had
repaired to the mausoleum, and their breath smoked from their mouths and noses.
Roland squatted on his hunkers, looking at the other three, who sat in a line on a stone meditation bench flanked by skeletal bouquets in stone pots. The floor was scattered with the petals of dead roses. Cuthbert and Alain, on either side of Susan, had their arms around her in quite unselfconscious fashion. Again Roland thought of one sister and two protective brothers.