The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(30)
“The Ninety-First Psalm, verses five through—five through something,” she said. “Harold has always looked terrible.” Then she fell violently asleep.
Alison’s prophecy had not gone amiss; David’s hangover that morning was the sort that pushed stout men of business out of windows. He might have considered it too, but the window was all the way on the other side of the room from the bed, and his legs appeared to have been coated with some sort of fast-setting metal alloy in the night. Did alloys set, he wondered, then decided it didn’t matter.
“I’m going to lead a finer and nobler life,” David said. He paused, noting that his tongue seemed to have tripled in weight over the night; it now appeared to terminate somewhere down in the neighborhood of his knees. “Full of integrity, and sobriety, and lemon water.” His kidneys pulsed like two fat, poisoned hearts beating in his sides.
“Are you?” Alison asked. She did not move. “Am I going to be dragged into this new nobility, or can I merely sit back and observe?”
“I was not speaking to you, woman,” David said. “I was addressing my hangover, who is a vigorous young squire of twenty-seven, with a wife and several children besides. Currently he is playing a game of horseshoes with ship anchors just underneath my skin, and cannot be disturbed. Also, you are lying down, and your eyes are closed, which would make observing anything a challenge, even for you.”
“Are we going to be introduced?” Alison asked.
“I don’t think I would like you two to meet,” he said, organizing himself into a sitting position against the headboard.
“But look,” she said, “I think he recognizes me. It would be rude of you not to acknowledge the acquaintance.”
“He is not of the best society,” David said. “You do not move in the same circles; you must be mistaken.”
“I might open my eyes if you introduced us,” she said, butting her head against his shoulder. “Then again, I may never open them again, and become a permanent addition to this bedroom. You won’t need me for the wedding breakfast; I’ll send a traitorous serving girl in a thick white veil, just like the true bride did in the fairy story, and you can marry her.”
David shook his head lightly, so as not to disturb the team of blacksmiths at work therein. “That wouldn’t work. I should know you.”
“Ah,” Alison said, “you would not know if I sent her with my mother’s gold ring, my father’s chain, and my own nut-brown hair, and her face covered besides.”
“There’s a horse in that one, I think,” David said.
“Falada. He’s dead; he’s no good to you.”
“A dead horse is extremely useful to a bridegroom who knows what he’s about,” he chided. “Aren’t you supposed to be an educated woman?”
“No. Purely decorative. I read a story once; it was terrible and my head ached for days. It’s still aching now, and if you try to make me remember another detail, I shall lose all my beauty, and you’ll have no one to marry you tomorrow but a grim and loathly lady, who keeps house with termites and rat poison.”
“The horse—” David said, or tried to.
“Falada. It’s ‘The Goose Girl’ story you’re thinking of; that’s the only version of the false bride tale that’s got a horse in it, and the horse is named Falada.”
“Falada, then. Stop interrupting,” he said, in a tone that suggested he knew she would not. “He was a gift from your mother, and no disguise can fool him, not even after the traitorous serving girl steals your clothes and your name and passes herself off as the true bride while you are reduced to tending a flock of sheep—”
“Geese.”
“Geese, then, and when the serving girl passes under the church gate, he’ll—”
“Why would a dead horse be waiting for a bridal party at the church gate?”
“A kind slaughterer nailed his head to the top of the arch. Because,” he said before she could speak again, “because the true bride begged him to, and he could not refuse her request. And when the serving girl passes under the church gate, Falada would call out, ‘Alas, if your poor mother only knew, her loving heart would break in two,’ and that’s how I’d know. Bridegrooms always know their true brides, through the strategic use of horse heads and love tokens.”
Alison shook her head. “You wouldn’t know if I sent her,” she said. “You wouldn’t know if the horse went to the tannery instead of the church gate, and lost his tongue altogether.”
David turned his head and looked at her then. “I suppose I wouldn’t,” he said. Her dark hair was fanned out over her pillow, snapping with gold in the morning light, and she smiled up at him.
“Maybe you’re not the bridegroom at all,” she said in a singsong little voice. “Maybe you’re the goose boy, chasing his hat—Blow, wind, blow, take Conrad’s hat and make him chase it, until I have braided my hair, and tied it up again. A goose boy, tumbling after nothing, while I tie up my hair.”
“Alison,” he said.
“Maybe you’re the horse’s head, nailed over the gate, telling everyone who passes below you how much their mothers’ hearts are breaking. Nailed, and dead, and staring.” Her voice rose in a steady drone, monotonous and tuneful and lovely. “Oh, Falada, Falada, thou art dead! All the joy in life has fled! Falada, Falada—”