She sighed as they entered, "Alas, my love, you do me wrong…"
"I beg your pardon," said Peter the Poet.
"Had I known when I was young what I know now," she said, "I would have found a time and place for love. It is the one thing which is both constant and most fleeting. We clutch it like gold, but it trickles away like water. A poet told me that once. I never met him, but he wrote many things, in notes and poems he slipped under my door. I guess he was too shy. I never found out who he was. I could have loved him."
"Oh, alas!" said Peter, sinking to his knees at her bedside.
"Yes, alas," said the old woman. She fumbled in a drawer by her bedside. She unfolded a piece of paper, and, though it was too dark to read in that room, she recited what was written thereon, for she had memorized it long, long before.
Her hand went limp. She let the paper fall onto the bedclothes.
"Not very good," she said, "but written with real feeling. That's what matters."
There on the paper was something that shone like a brilliant jewel, like a star fallen to earth and captured in the hand, a thing as delicate as a snowflake, but all of fire. It was his soul, his heart, the very source of his inspiration, which he had given away in hopeless love so long ago.
First he reached under his clothing, removing a bit of cheese from where his heart used to be, putting the cheese into a pocket. Then gently, reverently, he took up the glowing thing and replaced it within himself, where it belonged.
Now his fancies were under control.
He looked at the lady sadly, but hardly weeping, and began thinking of the words to a sonnet he would write about this night, something elegant in form, like a deftly carven jewel.
"Now I've got you!!" hissed the Hooded One, stepping out of the shadows, bones rattling, swinging his scythe wide. "I've figured it out! All I had to do was wait! Ha!"
"And you shall have to wait a little longer," said Tom O'Bedlam, "as anyone who is completely insane can understand readily enough."
He tapped the hourglass and sent it spinning, end over end. But as the lid had not been secured properly after Tom had opened it during their previous encounter, the Sands of Time spilled out all over the room, and there was much confusion.
"That's not fair!"
Tumbling, then, back through the days of their lives and the days they had never lived, Tom, Nick, Peter the Poet, and Rosalind found themselves once more in a London street, under the bright sky of summer (which is somewhat less obstreperous than many spring skies you could meet). It was an ordinary day. People went about their business. There was talk that the King was going to chop off another queen's head, or maybe had invented a new kind of meat pie. No one seemed entirely sure. Rumor, painted in tongues, wagged idly.
The poet got out pen and paper, sat on a wall. Beyond the wall lay a lunatic who had shaped a lady out of rubbish; but she had come to life and the two made passionate love, each of them perfect in the other's eyes.
The poet started to write a sonnet.
Tom, with the insight that comes only to the mad, stayed his hand, and said, "Have you considered becoming an accountant? Lots of lovely numbers in neat rows. Steady wages. No heartbreak or raging metaphors."
(The lunatic behind the wall and his lady love began to sing, something with Hey nonny-nonny in it every other line. It was time for Tom and the others to move on.)
The ending was this: Peter married Rosalind, after a proposal that added up their accounts neatly and showed how one side balanced the other. They lived quietly and happily together for a long time. If theirs was not a fiery, all-consuming passion, it was just as well, for such love is only for madmen, as Tom O'Bedlam knew so well. It deprives one of reason by its very nature, but even so, you have to have a knack for it, as you do for really inspired madness.
He explained as much to the Man in the Moon (there was only one) at night when he climbed to the top of the spire of old St. Paul's and helped free the Moon, which had gotten stuck up there, like an apple on the end of a knife.
One for the Record
Esther M. Friesner
I believe that I am safe in saying that no one was more gratified than myself when the Club arose so promptly, phoenixlike, from the figurative ashes of our last unpleasant incident. One might argue that the worst was averted, and depending upon one's priorities and point of view, one might be right. The harm that Dr. Sonoma's incursion did to our reputation was minimal, yet the havoc his visit wreaked upon us purely in terms of demographics was incalculable.
So many murders, so little income. Though Dr. Sonoma was long gone from our midst, his residual influence had provoked several of our membership to the injudicious slaughter of several more. Although the celebrity dead often may be espied as alive and well by all the best tabloids and the plebeian dead may vote in Chicago, the better class of corpses seldom keep up their membership dues at the Club.
Dawkins was bemoaning this very fact to me as the two of us scanned the small, utterly discreet slips of paper which were being handed out to all members that bright April day. Stafford «Pinch» Dawkins was one of our relatively newer members, having joined our ranks after the Sonoma incident. He was, by all accounts, a gentleman of excellent bloodlines and impeccable breeding, but one whose family fortunes had suffered a plummet in the lattermost tenth of the nineteenth century due to injudicious investments. La famille Dawkins had spent nigh unto a hundred years crawling back out of the mire of middle income, finally reclaiming their rightful place in society in the person of young Stafford, who was a veritable wizard among the pork bellies, a Delphic oracle par excellence to whom the futures (nota bene my intentional usage of the plural) were an open book. Had he turned haruspex (that variety of augur who peeks at our tomorrows by studying the flight of swallows or the prancing of barnyard fowl) he would read the omens solely in the conduct of the goose that laid the golden egg.
Alas, while the spectre of Poverty may be exorcised within a single generation by the laying-on of Neiman-Marcus credit cards, the ghost of Bourgeois Lifestyle Past tends to linger like the aroma of a senile Gorgonzola. The rich who have been rendered simply «comfortable» do not forget. No matter that the disaster befell their many-times-great-grandsire, they live with the fear that what happened once before may well happen again. They have lost their precious sense of invulnerable entitlement and that, in turn, makes them… careful. Not cautious, certainly not prudent or even particularly wise, just… careful. There is a difference.
We called him «Pinch» for a reason: It was what he did. Not to women-that would be merely coarse-but to pennies, which was unspeakable. Of course we told him the nickname came from how certain we were that we could count on his help "in a pinch." It was an explanation as credible as a courtesan's smile, but Pinch was so eager to be accepted back into the societal bosom that he gulped it down whole.
The printed notice which we had just received, however, stuck firmly in his craw.
"A raise?" Pinch's eyebrows elevated themselves to such a height that they looked ready to crawl under the brim of his golf cap for sanctuary. The two of us had been on our way to a jolly round of the sport when we were waylaid by the news. "But our dues are astronomical now. How have they conjured up these obscene numbers? There haven't been any new property tax assessments, there are no legal matters outstanding, and no improvements to the plant are currently scheduled." Pinch knew whereof he spoke. He did Spartan service on almost every Club committee; not so much from altruism as from the hag-ridden drive to keep a close and personal eye upon any developments potentially perilous to his capital.