What Moves the Dead (5)
She was swathed in gowns and blankets, so I could not see if she was as emaciated as Roderick, but her face had become so thin that I could nearly see the bones under the skin. Her lips were tinged with violet, like a drowning woman’s. I told myself it was some poorly chosen cosmetic, and then she stretched out a hand like a bird’s claw to me, and I saw that her fingernails were the same deep cyanotic violet.
“Maddy,” I said, taking her hand. Thank God for the time they spend hammering manners into officers, because it was only reflex that let me bow over her wrist and say, in a reasonably normal tone of voice, “It has been so very long.”
“You haven’t aged a day,” she said. Her voice was weak, but still very much the Maddy I remembered.
“You have grown more beautiful,” I said.
“And you have grown into an outrageous liar,” she said, but she smiled as she said it, and a tiny bit of color came into her cheeks.
I released her hand and Roderick pointed me to the other person in the room, whom I had barely noticed in my alarm over Maddy. “May I present my friend James Denton?”
Denton was a tall, lanky man with silvering hair, probably approaching fifty if not quite over the edge. He wore his clothes as if they were clothes rather than symbols of rank, and his mustache was too long for fashion.
“How do you do?” Denton said.
Ah. American. That explained the clothes and the way he stood with his legs wide and his elbows out, as if he had a great deal more space than was actually available. (I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.)
“Denton, this is my sister’s friend Lieutenant Easton, most recently of the Third Hussars.”
“A pleasure, sir,” I said.
I offered Denton my hand, because Americans will shake hands with the table if you don’t stop them. He took it automatically, then stared at me, still holding my fingers, until I let them drop.
I knew the look, of course. Another classification, though not so graceful as Miss Potter’s.
Americans, so far as I know, have no sworn, but I am given to understand that they have very lurid periodicals. Denton likely thought that a sworn soldier would be a seven-foot-tall Amazon with one breast cut off and a harem of cowed men under kan heel.
He was likely not expecting a short, stout person in a dusty greatcoat and a military haircut. I no longer bother to bind my breasts, but I never had a great deal to worry about in that direction, and my batman sees that my clothing is cut in proper military style.
Denton was not a swift social thinker, I gather, or perhaps he was thinking of the periodicals. I could see Roderick over his shoulder, tensing in case his guest should commit some serious faux pas. It took Denton a moment to clear his throat and say, “Lieutenant Easton, a pleasure. I beg your pardon, my country was not in the recent war, so I fear I have not had the privilege of serving alongside your countrymen.”
“Fortunate America,” I said dryly. “The Gallacian army … well, there are just about enough of us left to fill out a regiment, if you don’t look too closely. I cashed out when it became obvious that they were more interested in filling overfed noblemen’s private coffers than in rebuilding the ranks—and now I shall have to beg your pardon, Sir Roderick, Maddy, for speaking ill of your peers!”
Roderick laughed, with a little too much relief, and I took the glass of spirits that his servant was handing me. “I would forgive you gladly,” he said, “if there was anything to forgive. What happened there was a great crime, and I’m grateful you will still have anything to do with those of us above the salt.”
“How could I not?” I said, saluting Madeline with two fingers on the rim of my glass. “But what is the trouble of which you wrote?”
Maddy’s flush had begun to fade, and this drove the last of it from her cheeks until she, too, was white as bone. “Perhaps we might speak of it later,” she murmured, looking down at her hands.
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Whenever you like.”
Denton glanced from her to me and back again. I could see the wheels working in his head, trying to determine my relationship to his friend’s sister. It was vaguely amusing and vaguely offensive all at once.
On the whole, I much preferred Eugenia Potter’s swift classification. In some ways, it is rather refreshing to be treated in the same way as a fungus, though I might have felt differently if she insisted on taking spore prints or seeing what color I bruised.
“I am tired,” said Madeline abruptly. Roderick leapt up and helped her to the door, and seeing them together, it struck me again just how badly they had both fared. Madeline had been a slender, pale-haired wisp of a girl, and she seemed to have aged forty years, though I knew it had been less than twenty. Roderick had aged better, except for his hair. It was his manner that had not fared so well. Madeline moved slowly, like an invalid, but Roderick was full of shuddering, nervous energy. He could not keep his fingers still, moving them restlessly on the arm of her dressing gown as if playing a musical instrument. He turned his head repeatedly to the side, as if listening for something, but there was no sound that I could hear.
I could not have said, as they both moved toward the door, which of them was leading the other.