The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [92]
“I had thought, perhaps, it was a memory.” Pythias is calmer now. “When you told me of the heavens, of all the—the spheres, and the outermost sphere that was black but all full of pin-holes, so that the great fire behind shone through as stars. It frightened me at the time, when you explained it to me, and I thought perhaps I was remembering this in my dreams.”
“Now, you see.” I feel a simultaneous rush of gratitude and affection and amazement and pain at the inevitable, impending loss of her. “You have already thought it through, without me. I am proud of you.”
She lies back, then, and closes her eyes in a show of bravery.
“She is comfortable,” the maid says later, when I ask. “She slept this afternoon, a little, while you were out.” This maid, Herpyllis, is a warm creature, not especially young, with a tidy bent and a sympathetic face. The dark one with the green eyes, the one Pythias likes. Now that Pythias is utterly bedridden, Herpyllis has taken over the running of the household. I’ve seen her coddle Little Pythias with hugs and cooing, affection the little girl accepts with total, unsmiling attention. I suspect her of trying to comfort me. I don’t resent the effort, but am curious about the audacity it implies. She’s a servant, not a slave; still.
“You take it very calmly,” I say to her as she closes the door to the sickroom. Her arms are full of the bed linens she has just changed, her face flushed with the effort of stripping them without disturbing Pythias. I’d been meaning to spell her by the sickbed, as I do every evening now, but Pythias waved me away, saying I would only try to make her think.
“You can talk to Herpyllis instead,” my wife said. “She will listen.”
“I’ve seen it before,” the maid says now, in the hall. “When I was a girl. Sometimes in the stomach, sometimes the breasts. My mother used to sit with the sick. She would take me with her.”
I stand aside to let her precede me, and follow her to the kitchen, where she drops the laundry in a corner. “And can you guess,” I say, but courage crumples inside me and I stand unhappily without finishing the sentence.
“How long?”
I nod. She, in turn, shakes her head, which I take at first to mean she doesn’t want to venture a guess, but then she says, “She won’t suffer much more.”
I watch her move around the kitchen, tidying, and beginning to prepare my meal. She plucks a hair from her head, a coarse white strand from the dark, and with it sets to slicing a hard-boiled egg for Little Pythias’s supper. Not so young, but not so old. Her hands, the nails especially, are clean for a servant’s. The pans are burnished, the floor scrubbed. My own bed linen, I’m only now realizing, is always changed before I have a chance to smell myself on it. My meals are prompt and hot; my favourites appear without me asking for them. Even the courtyard garden appears more kempt, weeded and watered and clipped and staked. I’m noticing everything, now.
When I clear my throat, she turns away from her chopping board, wipes her hands, and pulls up her skirts—from some wetness on the floor, I think at first. When she smiles, laughter in her eyes, I start back, as though from a cinder. The rest