The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (42 page)

“Is it me you’re concerned about or yourself and yer plans, Willy?”

He didn’t respond, only looked at her. After a moment, Susan dropped her eyes.

“I’m sorry, that was cruel. No, she’ll not tax me. I often ride at night, although not often so far from the house.”

“She won’t know how far you’ve ridden?”

“Nay. And these days we tread carefully around each other. It’s like having two powder magazines in the same house.” She reached out her hands. She had tucked her gloves into her belt, and the fingers which grasped his fingers were cold. “This’ll have no good end,” she said in a whisper.

“Don’t say that, Susan.”

“Aye, I do. I must. But whatever comes, I love thee, Roland.”

He took her in his arms and kissed her. When he released her lips, she put them to his ear and whispered, “If you love me, then love me. Make me break my promise.”

For a long moment when her heart didn’t beat, there was no response from him, and she allowed herself to hope. Then he shook his head—only the one time, but firmly. “Susan, I cannot.”

“Is yer honor so much greater than yer professed love for me, then? Aye? Then let it be so.” She pulled out of his arms, beginning to cry, ignoring his hand on her boot as she swung up into the saddle—his low call to wait, as well. She yanked free the slipknot with which Pylon had been tethered and turned him with one spurless foot. Roland was still calling to her, louder now, but she flung Pylon into a gallop and away from him before her brief flare of rage could go out. He
would not take her used, and her promise to Thorin had been made before she knew Roland walked the face of the earth. That being so, how dare he insist that the loss of honor and consequent shame be hers alone? Later, lying in her sleepless bed, she would realize he had insisted nothing. And she was not even clear of the orange grove before raising her left hand to the side of her face, feeling the wetness there, and realizing that he had been crying, too.

Roland rode the lanes outside town until well past moonset, trying to get his roaring emotions under some kind of control. He would wonder for awhile what he was going to do about their discovery at Citgo, and then his thoughts would shift to Susan again. Was he a fool for not taking her when she wanted to be taken? For not sharing what she wanted to share?
If you love me, then love me.
Those words had nearly torn him open. Yet in the deep rooms of his heart—rooms where the clearest voice was that of his father—he felt he had not been wrong. Nor was it just a matter of honor, whatever she might think. But let her think that if she would; better she should hate him a little, perhaps, than realize how deep the danger was for both of them.

Around three o’ the clock, as he was about to turn for the Bar K, he heard the rapid drumming of hoofbeats on the main road, approaching from the west. Without thinking about why it seemed so important to do so, Roland swung back in that direction, then brought Rusher to a stop behind a high line of run-to-riot hedges. For nearly ten minutes the sound of the hoofbeats continued to swell—sound carried far in the deep quiet of early morning—and that was quite enough time for Roland to feel he knew who was riding toward Hambry hell-for-leather just two hours before dawn. Nor was he mistaken. The moon was down, but he had no trouble, even through the brambly interstices of the hedge, recognizing Roy Depape. By dawn the Big Coffin Hunters would be three again.

Roland turned Rusher back the way he had been heading, and rode to rejoin his own friends.

The most important day of Susan Delgado’s life—the day upon which her life turned like a stone upon a pivot—came about two weeks after her moonlit tour of the oilpatch with Roland. Since then she had seen him only half a dozen times, always at a distance, and they had raised their hands as passing acquaintances do when their errands bring them briefly into sight of one another. Each time this happened, she felt a pain as sharp as a knife twisting in her . . . and though it was no doubt cruel, she hoped he felt the same twist of the knife. If there was anything good about those two miserable weeks, it was only that her great fear—that gossip might begin about herself and the young man who called himself Will Dearborn—subsided, and she found herself actually sorry to feel it ebb. Gossip? There was nothing to gossip
about.

Then, on a day between the passing of the Peddler’s Moon and the rise of the Huntress,
ka
finally came and blew her away—house and barn and all. It began with someone at the door.

She had been finishing the washing—a light enough chore with only two women to do it for—when the knock came.

“If it’s the ragman, send him away, ye mind!” Aunt Cord called from the other room, where she was turning bed-linen.

But it wasn’t the ragman. It was Maria, her maid from Seafront, looking woeful. The second dress Susan was to
wear on Reaping Day—the silk meant for luncheon at Mayor’s House and the Conversational afterward—was ruined, Maria said, and she was in hack because of it. Would be sent back to Onnie’s Ford if she wasn’t lucky, and she the only support of her mother and father—oh, it was hard, much too hard, so it was. Could Susan come? Please?

Susan was happy to come—was always happy to get out of the house these days, and away from her aunt’s shrewish, nagging voice. The closer Reaping came, the less she and Aunt Cord could abide each other, it seemed.

They took Pylon, who was happy enough to carry two girls riding double through the morning cool, and Maria’s story was quickly told. Susan understood almost at once that Maria’s position at Seafront wasn’t really in much jeopardy; the little dark-haired maid had simply been using her innate (and rather charming) penchant for creating drama out of what was really not very dramatic at all.

The second Reaping dress (which Susan thought of as Blue Dress With Beads; the first, her breakfast dress, was White Dress With High Waist and Puffed Sleeves) had been kept apart from the others—it needed a bit of work yet—and something had gotten into the first-floor sewing room and gnawed it pretty much to rags. If this had been the costume she was to wear to the bonfire-lighting, or the one she was to wear to the ballroom dance after the bonfire had been lit, the matter would indeed have been serious. But Blue Dress With Beads was essentially just a fancified day receiving dress, and could easily be replaced in the two months between now and the Reap. Only two! Once—on the night the old witch had granted her her reprieve—it had seemed like eons before she would have to begin her bed-service to Mayor Thorin. And now it was only two months! She twisted in a kind of involuntary protest at the thought.

“Mum?” Maria asked. Susan wouldn’t allow the girl to call her sai, and Maria, who seemed incapable of calling her mistress by her given name, had settled on this compromise. Susan found the term amusing, given the fact that she was only sixteen, and Maria herself probably just two or three years older. “Mum, are you all right?”

“Just a crick in my back, Maria, that’s all.”

“Aye, I get those. Fair bad, they are. I’ve had three aunts
who’ve died of the wasting disease, and when I get those twinges, I’m always afeard that—”

“What kind of animal chewed up Blue Dress? Do ye know?”

Maria leaned forward so she could speak confidentially into her mistress’s ear, as if they were in a crowded marketplace alley instead of on the road to Seafront. “It’s put about that a raccoon got in through a window that ’us opened during the heat of the day and was then forgot at day’s end, but I had a good sniff of that room, and Kimba Rimer did, too, when he came down to inspect. Just before he sent me after you, that was.”

“What did you smell?”

Maria leaned close again, and this time she actually whispered, although there was no one on the road to overhear: “Dog farts.”

There was a moment of thunderstruck silence, and then Susan began to laugh. She laughed until her stomach hurt and tears went streaming down her cheeks.

“Are ye saying that W-W-Wolf . . . the Mayor’s own
d-d-dog
 . . . got into the downstairs seamstress’s closet and chewed up my Conversational d-d—” But she couldn’t finish. She was simply laughing too hard.

“Aye,” Maria said stoutly. She seemed to find nothing unusual about Susan’s laughter . . . which was one of the things Susan loved about her. “But he’s not to be blamed, so I say, for a dog will follow his natural instincts, if the way is open for him to do so. The downstairs maids—” She broke off. “You’d not tell the Mayor or Kimba Rimer this, I suppose, Mum?”

“Maria, I’m shocked at you—ye play me cheap.”

“No, Mum, I play ye dear, so I do, but it’s always best to be safe. All I meant to say was that, on hot days, the downstairs maids sometimes go into that sewing closet for their fives. It lies directly in the shadow of the watchtower, ye know, and is the coolest room in the house—even cooler than the main receiving rooms.”

“I’ll remember that,” Susan said. She thought of holding the Luncheon and Conversational in the seamstress’s beck beyond the kitchen when the great day came, and began to giggle again. “Go on.”

“No more to say, Mum,” Maria told her, as if all else were
too obvious for conversation. “The maids eat their cakes and leave the crumbs. I reckon Wolf smelled em and this time the door was left open. When the crumbs was gone, he tried the dress. For a second course, like.”

This time they laughed together.

But she wasn’t laughing when she came home.

Cordelia Delgado, who thought the happiest day of her life would be the one when she finally saw her troublesome niece out the door and the annoying business of her defloration finally over, bolted out of her chair and hurried to the kitchen window when she heard the gallop of approaching hoofs about two hours after Susan had left with that little scrap of a maid to have one of her dresses refitted. She never doubted that it was Susan returning, and she never doubted it was trouble. In ordinary circumstances, the silly twist would never gallop one of her beloved horses on a hot day.

She watched, nervously dry-washing her hands, as Susan pulled Pylon up in a very unDelgado–like scrunch, then dismounted in an unladylike leap. Her braid had come half undone, spraying that damned blonde hair that was her vanity (and her curse) in all directions. Her skin was pale, except for twin patches of color flaring high on her cheekbones. Cordelia didn’t like the look of those at all. Pat had always flared in that same place when he was scared or angry.

She stood at the sink, now biting her lips as well as working her hands. Oh, ’twould be so good to see the back of that troublesome she. “Ye haven’t made trouble, have ye?” she whispered as Susan pulled the saddle from Pylon’s back and then led him toward the barn. “You better not have, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. Not at this late date. You better not have.”

When Susan came in twenty minutes later, there was no sign of her aunt’s strain and rage; Cordelia had put them away as one might store a dangerous weapon—a gun, say—on a high closet shelf. She was back in her rocker, knitting, and the face she turned to Susan’s entry had a surface serenity. She watched
the girl go to the sink, pump cold water into the basin, and then splash it on her face. Instead of reaching for a towel to pat herself dry, Susan only looked out the window with an expression that frightened Cordelia badly. The girl no doubt fancied that look haunted and desperate; to Cordelia, it looked only childishly willful.

“All right, Susan,” she said in a calm, modulated voice. The girl would never know what a strain it was to achieve that tone, let alone maintain it. Unless she was faced with a willful teenager of her own one day, that was. “What’s fashed thee so?”

Susan turned to her—Cordelia Delgado, just sitting there in her rocker, calm as a stone. In that moment Susan felt she could fly at her aunt and claw her thin, self-righteous face to strings, screaming
This is your fault! Yours! All yours!
She felt soiled—no, that wasn’t strong enough; she felt
filthy,
and nothing had really happened. In a way, that was the horror of it. Nothing had really happened
yet.

“It shows?” was all she said.

“Of course it does,” Cordelia replied. “Now tell me, girl. Has he been on thee?”

“Yes. . .no. . .no.”

Aunt Cord sat in her chair, knitting in her lap, eyebrows raised, waiting for more.

At last Susan told her what had happened, speaking in a tone that was mostly flat—a little tremble intruded toward the end, but that was all. Aunt Cord began to feel a cautious sort of relief. Perhaps more goose-girl nerves was all it came down to, after all!

The substitute gown, like all the substitutes, hadn’t been finished off; there was too much else to do. Maria had therefore turned Susan over to blade-faced Conchetta Morgen-stern, the chief seamstress, who had led Susan into the downstairs sewing room without saying anything—if saved words were gold, Susan had sometimes reflected, Conchetta would be as rich as the Mayor’s sister was reputed to be.

Blue Dress With Beads was draped over a headless dressmaker’s dummy crouched beneath one low eave, and although Susan could see ragged places on the hem and one small hole around to the back, it was by no means the tattered ruin she had been expecting.

“Can it not be saved?” she asked, rather timidly.

“No,” Conchetta said curtly. “Get out of those trousers, girl. Shirt, too.”

Susan did as she was bid, standing barefoot in the cool little room with her arms crossed over her bosom . . . not that Conchetta had ever shown the slightest interest in what she had, back or front, above or below.

Blue Dress With Beads was to be replaced by Pink Dress With Appliqué, 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.