Unmoved

The White Lady

There is a single word which describes her, and yet doesn't describe her at all. He doesn't use it. At this moment he is standing on a parapet half a city away.

She is outside also, wandering quietly through the garden, sometimes looking through foliage at the stars. Long-fingered hands pluck at the leaves of long-stemmed flowers, twist and rip petals in absentminded indifference.

She comes to a small clearing, an even smaller oval pond set in its centre. Her gown is long and white and made of heavy, rustling silk. She gathers it up and kneels softly on the pebbled ground. When the moon reappears the water, two inches from the tucked fabric at her knees, throws an image back at her.

The stranger in the pond has huge dark eyes, with long black lashes. Long white hair, milk-white, bone-white, tumbles over her fine pale skin, bleached white in the moonlight. She slits her eyes. She sees high cheekbones and a narrow chin. There is something otherworldly about this reflected stranger tonight. Perhaps it is the moonlight. Flowers are tossed bleeding to one side; white hands clasp one another in her lap. She closes her eyes and dreams.

He looks up and smiles. He has no idea whom he is smiling at, merely wishes to be pleasant at the end of what for him has been a long and tiring day.

Within the small, pale chest something flutters. A flush of colour, so pale it might well have been imagined, blossoms and fades. She clears her throat, gently, musically, and finds she has nothing to say.

The laugh lines in the corners of his eyes deepen.

"That will be two crowns, please," he says, smiling pleasantly.

She sees him again, often, after that. He is not meant to be a common shopkeeper. Given proper education, she feels, given the clothes and the manner, he could easily pass for one of her own caste. He is a young man, tanned and strong, his teeth, straight and white, flash at her when she laughs.

From the dreams and impossible longings, a plan slowly forms.

"You require me, my lady?"

He is courteous as always, if somewhat mystified. He has been involved in some kind of heavy labour this morning; his tunic, hastily donned, is unlaced and a trickle of sweat runs down his temple. It has taken her months to gather up the courage to summon him. She opens her mouth. Stay with me, she wants to say. I love you.

He shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot.

"I," her voice falters, dies.

He looks at her, attentive and heartbreakingly unaware of his own beauty. She cannot say it.

"I need a dozen crystal goblets this Winterfest," she said. "Can you supply me?"

He replies politely, masking an odd expression. She watches him leave with a sick feeling in her heart.

She is afraid to confront him directly after that, yet she cannot stay away from him entirely. She orders that all things bought from his shop be brought to her directly and spends hours looking at them, touching and imagining his hands touching them as well. His hands touching hers-

Again the heart flutters, the flush of pale rose rises and subsides.

She sits at her desk and writes up another order, unable to think of anything else she could do.

Until, one morning, she wakes up with another plan fully blossomed in her mind like a poisoned rose.

She doesn't want him to know until the end. She counts the gold pieces as she puts them in the velvet bag, touching each one and imagining him doing the same. She closes the bag, kisses the velvet, imagining his lips-

The heart flutters, painfully.

She puts the bag down again, ties it with a length of cord. The message she has written in her own hand; she hopes he does not discover it is her handwriting. She knows he can read- as she has always known, from the moment she saw him, that he is no ordinary shopkeeper. The fiction she has written on the scroll might very well be true.

She imagines his elation at the 'news' and smiles.

The town is abuzz. An ordinary shopkeeper, suddenly discovered to be a duke's lost child! Suddenly wealthy, and titled!

She has to repress the urge to giggle when her steward tells her this news. She orders a horse readied; she can't wait to see him again. She will generously offer to take him in hand, teach him the intricacies of aristocratic life, offer him hospitality, gifts, her hand in marriage-

Awash in delirious fantasies, almost giddy with happiness and fighting not to show it, she canters on to the street. Ribbons and flowers seem to be everywhere; smilingly, she reflects that this indeed is appropriate-

She sees the posted wedding banns, reins in her horse and reads them once, twice, again-

Oh, fool. Oh, you fool.

Closing her eyes, she swallows, but the vertigo does not go away.

He was promised, you fool-

The air is suddenly too hot, too thick; the colours too bright and the clattering babble of the street overwhelming. She slumps in her saddle and gently falls forward, into the arms of a startled bodyguard.

She is not well enough in time to attend the wedding. She does not think she will ever be well enough again; the secret of the duke's son she keeps to herself, even though she could use it to unmake him if she chose. She has no wish to buy his love through blackmail. She has seen them together, he and the woman he has married. She has seen his face, gazing at his bride, and knew then with a sick kind of certainty that he could never- would never- look at her that way, that he was incapable of feeling anything when he looked at her, save mystification.

She is accumulating a reputation for eccentricity. People whisper when she passes, some of the ruder common people point. She ignores all of it. Slowly, imperceptibly, she grows thinner, paler. Someday, she knows, she will become a ghost.

Her dark eyes open, gaze upward at the night sky. A single tear rolls down her cheek. Otherwise she seems carved from alabaster, pale and cold, unmoving.

She remains in that position for a long, long time.

Far away, across the city, he stands on the parapet and looks out across the tiled expanse of roofs splashed blue in the moonlight. The great house at the other end of the city, murky in the shadows, beckons him. His palms itch; he wants to take out his brass telescope, as he has done many nights before. It shames him to admit he wishes to spy yet again on the pale, eccentric lady who spends so much of her time walking in her garden. His curiosity is stronger than his good manners, though; it is not long before he stands once again on the parapet, telescope in hand.

He searches the city, magnified a hundred times, for the garden in which she sits. The trees and high wall around her estate blocks off much of his view, but tonight he is lucky. She is sitting in full view by the pond, almost luminous in the moonlight. Her eyes are raised to the heavens; her throat shining in the white light like a swan's.

Within him, his heart breaks.

She is so lovely, he thought. So melancholy. Dangerous thoughts flit through his head; suppose, he tells himself, just suppose-

He lowers the scope and sighs. Impossible, of course.

A woman like that would never look twice at a man like him.

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