07/27
Words: 3000

In the final pages of The Amber Spyglass, the protagonist - teetering on the brink of a pubescent awakening - hears a grown woman speaking of the temptations of being a full and complete human after a lifetime of self-denial, and imagines within herself a suite of hitherto-unknown doors opening in the house that is her heart.

It was a good analogy. Joy had thought of it often throughout the vagaries of her lifetime of self-discovery and self-assertion. But she had never expected to find herself in any kind of literal reflection of it, especially as inward doors were opening in a heart she had felt had no further corners left to explore. But the doors were opening, nonetheless, and so reality seemed to have a mocking quality to it as she moved from chamber to chamber in the keep, landing to landing, and peeped into rooms that she had not bothered to look into in weeks.

“Maybe I should stop scrubbing floors,” she said flatly as she looked into a previously dilapidated chamber, where now a couple of canopied beds would have been ready to receive guests, had there been any coverlets on their aired mattresses. “They’re scrubbing themselves, now.”

“I believe,” said Gouvernail mildly, after a moment of reflection, “that they are responding to the scrubbing you are doing elsewhere.”

She had had the same thought, of course; she said nothing, therefore, for a long few seconds. “Maybe I should move my stuff up here,” she said. “Into, like. An actual bedroom. Although I’ll be honest, I’ve been kinda enjoying the blasphemy of sleeping on an altar.”

“Is it blasphemy,” he asked, “if you have allowed yourself to be canonized as a saint?”

She snorted, and passed over the idea that she had allowed herself to be canonized - passed over pointing out that he had been the one doing the canonizing. She was still contending with those wretched open doors in her heart, and was determined to slam them with a vengeance once she could master her courage enough to get close to them without needing to see what was beyond them. Joking with him was too close to taking a look.

She was exhausted already from a day of pulling ivy and bramble off the gatehouse ruins, trying to clear an easier path to the river. But she was too intrigued, now, to avoid an updated tour of the place. She ascended the stairs again, to another chamber that had had nothing but collapsed furniture and threadbare tapestries in it months ago, and which she had passed only twice, briefly and without looking in, when she had been busy on the errand of flying the keep’s banners once again on the roof.

She was only slightly surprised that when she opened the door she found, again, the evidence of that continual progress. She had been hoping to find it in the still-chaotic trophy room - hoped to find the antlers and skulls arrayed neatly on the stone walls and the tapestries restored - but it, as with the still-disintegrated outbuildings, stubbornly resisted whatever cure was working its way through the Garde’s lifeblood.

This, however.

She moved across the room towards the windows: tall and narrow, fringed by the ivy that so heavily clung to this wall that she was not certain, beyond magic, how it had not been pulled down centuries ago. They were largely unglazed, as, she supposed, they had been then - the shutters not yet returned, the heavy tapestries no longer there to be pulled aside when the sun shone and dropped back into place when the rain blew. But there were little round panes around the top of the room in bright colors, and although they bore only the somewhat abstract shapes of flowers and celestial objects, they were surrounded by that brightly painted plaster that covered so much of the keep’s interior and which had - when she had last seen this room - been nothing but faded scraps. These, however, depicted the customary scenes of leisure hunting and of fair ladies arm in arm with their mail-clad knights, followed by their coterie of hounds and terriers. The wisp that had been persistently following her settled on the edge of a windowsill, its light pulsing like the gentle movement of a butterfly’s wings, as if laying claim to this little patch of stone as its own.

And there was, at the center of the room, the canopied bed in its neatly worked but heavy frame, which had been a pile of half-rotted lumber six months ago. This, too, was still bare of covering, but it was clean - she touched it with a tentative hand, expecting a cloud of dust which did not come - and there was at the foot of it a little velvet seat, such as one might use to put on their shoes - a domestic little addition, suggestive of life, that seemed to suggest that any moment someone might use the place again. She sat gingerly down on the edge of the bed, her feet on this little stool, and she looked out the open window towards the broad river, her hands folded in her lap like a thoughtful child.

“I think,” she said absently, “that you could see down to the ocean in winter, when the leaves were off the trees.”

“You could,” he agreed quietly.

She had almost forgotten him, standing there in the doorframe, swallowed up by the darkness of the stairwell behind himself and nearly invisible. But of course he would have known, intimately, what views could be had from any window of the place. A thought occurred to her, and she hesitated before asking it.

“Was it yours? This room.”

“Yes.”

“I thought so,” she said after a pause, “because the other seemed like it was made for visitors, and I don’t think any of the others had beds in them. It has the best windows, I think, besides the Hall.”

It felt strange, then, to sit on that bed. It felt wrong - it felt in a strange way a little exhilarating, in a way that made her disgusted with herself. This was not sitting down on some crush’s narrow dorm bed while he pretended to do something across the room. She was seated on a dead man’s mattress a thousand years after the last time he could have used it. He might, she realized, have died on it, for all she knew.

A thought flitted through her mind: try the masks here, it said, and she dismissed it, repulsed by her own weakness. She had set them aside for a couple of days already, desperate for real sleep, and this would have been the most humiliating temptation possible to make her break her resolve not to use them again until it was needful.

He spoke again, still without crossing the threshold. “Will you move your things here?”

She resisted an effort to find some meaning in his tone of detached curiosity. “No,” she said, after a long pause. “I like them where they are. Blasphemy and all.” And then, impulsively: “Would you like me to - to make it more -”

“Livable?” he finished for her, sardonic.

“Yes.”

“To what end, Lady?”

It had been a wounded cry of offered kindness on her part - the idea that even if the world was no longer real to him, he might like to have his own place in it again anyway. She knew it, and did not answer.

“I need to go back to the water,” she said, feeling joyless and dreary. “I’m too ******** grimy to sleep.”

He turned, then, and as he always did he stood aside to let her pass, as if he took up any space at all, and he followed her down to the bailey, where she stood for a moment in the breeze and sunshine and listened to the ringing of the little bell from the chapel below, suspended from Petitcru’s collar while she entertained herself with a chew toy in the makeshift bedroom.

There were changes here, as well, although they were more slight, and she drifted towards an alcove in the stone that had - to judge from the traces of foundations - once been sheltered by some small building, and which was now bare wall where debris had been a week before. It was tiled in an ornate fashion - she had always wanted to see it more closely but had not prioritized it - and she drifted towards it unthinkingly, and ran her hands over metal ornamentation. There was a sort of lever, and without thinking - with only the most absent curiosity - she turned it, hearing too late Gouvernail making a little sound of warning cut off by her own shriek of shock.

She stood, drenched by a sudden cascade of cold water, flinching as she anticipated the smell of mold and algae and worse, only to find that the stream continued, after its initial uneven jet, in clarity and - astonishingly - growing warm as she stood in shocked stillness and letting it soak her in her civilian clothes.

“There’s a <******** shower,” she said, turning on him accusingly and finding that he was standing with his hand pressed to his mouth in what was definitely an attempt to keep his countenance that was only partly succeeding. “Eight ******** months of me bitching about how badly I wished there was a shower here and you didn’t say anything.”

“I did not imagine it could still function,” he said mildly.

“I might have fixed it!”

“I was not aware that you had a knowledge of plumbing,” he said, and she thought of Pendour and might have grown truly enraged was she not busy stepping away from the warm water and kicking leaves out of the way, trying to find the drain that must be there. She located it at last, shaking water from the ends of her dripping sleeves.

“Is there anything else you wanna tell me you’ve been sitting on?” she demanded. “You told me there was nothing but storerooms and empty outbuildings and now you’ve hidden a party supply palace, a boat, your own bedroom, and <******** showers from me. Cough it up.”

He watched her marching over to gather up supplies from the gatehouse for cleaning the tiled square beneath the shower and render it fit to be used. “There were some fountains affixed to the walls,” he said at last. “If you are, in fact, prepared to make yourself a plumber.”

“I’m not,” she said, aggressively scrubbing with the end of a push broom. “Is that it?”

“Lady,” he said, in that tone of detached apology that indicated that he was not truly sorry at all and was only conceding to her caprice - a tone she knew intimately by now. “Forgive me. I thought it might infuriate you to know these things and have no means of restoring them. It did not occur to me that they might restore themselves.”

“You lecture me on protecting your feelings,” she pointed out, “you hypocrite.”

He was silent, then, but it was not that wounded silence. She had undoubtedly gotten a point over on him there.

“You did not ask,” he said.

“Well, why the ******** would I?”

“I take your point, Lady,” he said, and if she’d been less annoyed she might have laughed at the sober gravity with which he acknowledged this.

“How does it stay hot?” she demanded. “Is there a ******** - boiler room or something?”

“No. As near as I know, it comes from the ground in that way.”

“And there you went bragging,” she continued, raging at him but feeling too truly smug about the prospect of a shower to get invested in her own anger, “about how you never minded taking a bath in the river when it was cold. Well, of course you didn’t, if there was a hot shower after.”

“There was not always a hot shower after,” he protested.

“No, of course. Because that’d be some kinda luxury and you were busy playing ascetic all the time,” she said, but it didn’t have the vitriol it might have had in it a few weeks ago, their previous conversations having softened her on this point.

“No. It was often in demand. And it did not always function. I suspect,” he added drily, “that it may not always function now.”

“It will if it knows what’s good for it,” she said darkly, and she felt rather than saw him turn away to hide his expression.

She hesitated. There had been some sort of building here, once - some little element of privacy. It was odd to think of, given that the place had been run as a kind of barracks in Gouvernail’s time, but there had been a time before his, when perhaps it had even had other luxuries - some sort of bathtub, perhaps, a thought that nearly made her weak in the knees. There was no way to get a bathtub to the Garde - even a vacuum packed mattress had been a struggle - or she would already be making extravagant plans.

But still, even in a place that had clearly once been a seat of luxury, this particular kind of luxury was a surprise to her. It had a sort of gorgeous superfluity to it, to use a line from Middlemarch: an excess in a place where she had thought all the excesses to be those of ornamentation alone.

There was no little privacy here now. It was more like a barracks shower than it had been even in his time. But after a few more minutes of silence spent in clearing away the square of tile and splashing it down, she pulled off her hoodie, unclipping her hair to let it fall. And she felt, again, Gouvernail turning his back to her, to give her the privacy that the Garde no longer afforded, just as he did when she prepared herself to go into the river.

She was glad he did, now - not from any modesty but from a sudden redness in her face that she could not tell herself in honesty was from the heat of the water. This was contemptible - disgusting. It was wretched on too many levels to even begin furiously enumerating them to herself. But she would vanquish this weakness as she was accustomed to doing, and by the time she had finished luxuriating she made sure that she agreed with herself about that.

“I need to bring up my robe,” she said absently as she turned to and fro beneath the water.

“Allow me, Lady,” he said, without thinking, already turning towards the chapel, and they stood in awkward and painful silence at this impossible offer of service, made without thinking. Perhaps he had stood there forgetting his own insubstantiality while he listened to the water running over the tiles behind his back. Perhaps -

She reached over and turned off the water with a decisive and too-aggressive flick of her hand. The towel, at least, was still rolled up in subspace. But it was her own sudden steely willpower that truly vested her with dignity as she walked on her bare wet feet back across the mossy stone of the bailey floor and towards the chapel, sweeping past him as if she thought nothing of it while he politely averted his eyes. As if she thought nothing of letting him, in his quiet and undemonstrative yielding to her, put the robe on her shoulders, while feeling nothing but the quiet satisfaction of being useful. As if she thought nothing of the unexpectant generosity of that imagined act, somehow more dizzying than any open desire.

Or any desire at all, she reminded herself, and she felt sick, and not for the first time she thought about leaving before she had intended to. But this, too, was a weakness, and could not be countenanced. So she sat on the edge of her blasphemous bed in the chapel below, braiding her wet hair and thinking of the empty bed in the keep above, destined to be empty for the rest of time. But for that bed to be empty was no change, of course, from how it had been before.

She turned her mind towards the opening door in her heart, and with an effort she attempted to slam it decisively shut. But it would not yield. The door was open still, and all she could do was turn away from looking beyond it in the hopeful idea that perhaps he, in some way, would be standing beyond the same open door in his own heart. It would be so much worse, if he was. Unthinkable. Cruel. It would not do to look.

“Goodnight,” she said at last, without turning to where he stood in silent, watchful politeness at the foot of the chapel stairs. “If you remember anything else you’ve conveniently forgot to tell me about - like - oh - a magical wine cellar or enchanted beer on tap - make a mental note and tell me in the morning.”

“Goodnight,” he said, turning to go without any further formality, without even crossing the room to pretend to take her hand and kiss it. She scooped Petitcru up into the bed next to her to avoid watching him leave, and then lay in silence, pretending that she did not listen for music that did not come, and then pretending that she was not disappointed.

Maybe, she thought blankly, he did play, but he played in that abandoned chamber where he had passed his life, and where he had rejected her offer to make it feel like a place that he could live still.

The thought had a strange, distant comfort to it, and she held to it. It was better if this was a single-sided affliction, which was certain to be transient. It was probably the effect of not enough sleep addling her brain - but getting more sleep, at least, was something that she could start doing now.