Blue Dress With Beads was to be replaced by Pink Dress With Applique, it seemed. Susan stepped into it, raised the straps, and stood patiently while Conchetta bent and measured and muttered, sometimes using a bit of chalk to write numbers on a wall-stone, sometimes grabbing a swag of material and pulling it tighter against Susan’s hip or waist, checking the look in the full-length mirror on the far wall. As always during this process, Susan slipped away mentally, allowing her mind to go where it wanted. Where it wanted to go most frequently these days was into a daydream of riding along the Drop with Roland, the two of them side by side, finally stopping in a willow grove she knew that overlooked Hambry Creek.
“Stand there still as you can,” Conchetta said curtly. “I be back.”
Susan was hardly aware she was gone; was hardly aware she was in Mayor’s House at all. The part of her that really mattered wasn’t there. That part was in the willow grove with Roland. She could smell the faint half-sweet, half-acrid perfume of the trees and hear the quiet gossip of the stream as they lay down together forehead to forehead. He traced the shape of her face with the palm of his hand before taking her in his arms .. .
This daydream was so strong that at first Susan responded to the arms which curled around her waist from behind, arching her back as they first caressed her stomach and then rose to cup her breasts. Then she heard a kind of plowing, snorting breath in her ear, smelled tobacco, and understood what was happening.
Not Roland touching her breasts, but Hart Thorin’s long and skinny fingers. She looked in the mirror and saw him looming over her left shoulder like an incubus.
His eyes were bulging, there were big drops of sweat on his forehead in spite of the room’s coolness, and his tongue was actually hanging out, like a dog’s on a hot day. Revulsion rose in her throat like the taste of rotten food. She tried to pull away and his hands tightened their hold, pulling her against him. His knuckles cracked obscenely, and now she could feel the hard lump at the center of him.
At times over the last few weeks, Susan had allowed herself to hope that, when the time came, Thorin would be incapable—that he would be able to make no iron at the forge. She had heard this often happened to men when they got older. The hard, throbbing column which lay against her bottom disabused her of that wistful notion in a hurry.
She had managed at least a degree of diplomacy by simply putting her hands over his and attempting to draw them off her breasts instead of pulling away from him again (Cordelia, impassive, not showing the great relief she felt at this).
“Mayor Thorin—Hart—you mustn’t—this is hardly the place and not yet the time—Rhea said—”
“Balls to her and all witches!” His cultured politician’s tones had been replaced by an accent as thick as that in the voice of any back-country farmhand from Onnie’s Ford. “I must have something, a bonbon, aye, so I must. Balls to the witch, I say!
Owlshit to ‘er!” The smell of tobacco a thick reek around her head. She thought that she would vomit if she had to smell it much longer. “Just stand still, girl.
Stand still, my temptation. Mind me well!”
Somehow she did. There was even some distant part of her mind, a part totally dedicated to self-preservation, that hoped he would mistake her shudders of revulsion for maidenly excitement. He had drawn her tight against him, hands working energetically on her breasts, his respiration a stinky steam-engine in her ear. She stood back to him, her eyes closed, tears squeezing out from beneath the lids and through the fringes of her lashes.
It didn’t take him long. He rocked back and forth against her, moaning like a man with stomach cramps. At one point he licked the lobe of her ear, and Susan thought her skin would crawl right off her body in its revulsion. Finally, thankfully, she felt him begin to spasm against her.
“Oh, aye, get out, ye damned poison!” he said in a voice that was almost a squeal.
He pushed so hard she had to brace her hands against the wall to keep from being driven face-first into it. Then he at last stepped back.
For a moment Susan only stood as she was, with her palms against the rough cold stone of the sewing room wall. She could see Thorin in the mirror, and in his image she saw the ordinary doom that was rushing at her, the ordinary doom of which this was but a foretaste: the end of girlhood, the end of romance, the end of dreams where she and Roland lay together in the willow grove with their foreheads touching. The man in the mirror looked oddly like a boy himself, one who’s been up to something he wouldn’t tell his mother about. Just a tall and gangly lad with strange gray hair and narrow twitching shoulders and a wet spot on the front of his trousers. Hart Thorin looked as if he didn’t quite know where he was. In that moment the lust was flushed out of his face, but what replaced it was no better—that vacant confusion. It was as if he were a bucket with a hole in the bottom: no matter what you put in it, or how much, it always ran out before long.
He ‘II do it again, she thought, and felt an immense tiredness creep over her. Now that he’s done it once, he ‘II do it every chance he gets, likely. From now on coming up here is going to be like . . . well . . .
Like Castles. Like playing at Castles.
Thorin looked at her a moment longer. Slowly, like a man in a dream, he pulled the tail of his billowy white shirt out of his pants and let it drop around him like a skirt, covering the wet spot. His chin gleamed; he had drooled in his excitement.
He seemed to feel this and wiped the wetness away with the heel of one hand, looking at her with those empty eyes all the while. Then some expression at last came into them, and without another word he turned and left the room.
There was a little scuffling thud in the hall as he collided with someone out there.
Susan heard him mutter “Sorry! Sorry!” under his breath (it was more apology than he’d given her, muttered or not), and then Conchetta stepped back into the room. The swatch of cloth she’d gone after was draped around her shoulders like a stole. She took in Susan’s pale face and tearstained cheeks at once. She’ll say nothing, Susan thought. None of them will, just as none of them will lift a finger to help me off this stick I’ve run myself on. “Ye sharpened it yourself, gilly,” they’d say if I called for help, and that’ll be their excuse for leaving me to wriggle.
But Conchetta had surprised her. “Life’s hard, missy, so it is. Best get used to it.”
5
Susan’s voice—dry, by now pretty much stripped of emotion—at last ceased. Aunt Cord put her knitting aside, got up, and put the kettle on for tea.
“Ye dramatize, Susan.” She spoke in a voice that strove to be both kind and wise, and succeeded at neither. “It’s a trait ye get from your Manchester side—half of them fancied themselves poets, t’other half fancied themselves painters, and almost all of them spent their nights too drunk to tapdance. He grabbed yer titties and gave yer a dry-hump, that’s all. Nothing to be so upset over. Certainly nothing to lose sleep over.”
“How would you know?” Susan asked. It was disrespectful, but she was beyond caring. She thought she’d reached a point where she could bear anything from her aunt except that patronizing worldly-wise tone of voice. It stung like a fresh scrape.
Cordelia raised an eyebrow and spoke without rancor. “How ye do love to throw that up to me! Aunt Cord, the dry old stick. Aunt Cord the spinster. Aunt Cord the graying virgin. Aye? Well, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, virgin I might be, but I had a lover or two back when I was young . . . before the world moved on, ye might say. Mayhap one was the great Fran Lengyll.”
And mayhap not, Susan thought; Fran Lengyll was her aunt’s senior by at least fifteen years, perhaps as many as twenty-five.
“I’ve felt old Tom’s goat on my backside a time or two, Susan. Aye, and on my frontside as well.”
“And were any of these lovers sixty, with bad breath and knuckles that cracked when they squeezed your titties, Aunt? Did any of them try to push you through the nearest wall when old Tom began to wag his beard and say baa-baa-baa?”