Did she dream me into existence? I kept my promises, and they made me who I am… and was that what she wanted? If I am only the accidental whim of a smart teenage girl with romantic notions, what would I have been without the whim, the notions, or Sam?
Tell you what, botterogator, and you pass this on to the new generation of Martians: it’s funny how one little promise, to someone or something a bit better than yourself, can turn into something as real as Samantha City, whose lights at night fill the crater that spreads out before me from my balcony all the way to the horizon.
Nowadays I have to walk for an hour, in the other direction out beyond the crater wall, till the false dawn of the city lights is gone, and I can walk till dawn or hunger turns me homeward again.
Botterogator, you can turn off the damn stupid flashing lights. That’s all you’re getting out of me. I’m going for a walk; it’s snowing.
PUG
Theodora Goss
“Pug is flat, like most animals in fiction. He is once represented as straying into a rosebed in a cardboard kind of way, but that is all…”
You don’t know how lonely I was, until I met Pug.
In summer, tourists come to Rosings. The coaches are filled with them. They want to see where Roger de Bourgh murdered Lady Alice, or where Lady Alice’s grand-niece Matilda de Bourgh hid King Charles, in the cellar behind a cask of port, from the Roundheads. There has always been a rumor that her son, from her hasty marriage to Walter d’Arcy, resembled the king more than his father. The de Bourghs have never been known for acting with sober propriety. Miss Jenkinson relishes the details. “And here,” she says, “you will see the bloodstains where Lady Alice fell. This floor has been polished every day for a hundred years, but those stains have never come out!” And indeed there are, just there, discolorations in the wood. Whether they are the bloodstains of Lady Alice, I can’t tell you.
When the tourists come, I go to my room, in the modern wing of the house where even Miss Jenkinson’s ingenuity will find no bloodstains, or out into the garden. If, by chance, they happen upon me, I admire the roses, or the fountain with its spitting triton, and they assume I am one of them. Of course, if Miss Jenkinson sees me, she scolds me. “Miss Anne, what will your mother think! Outside on a day like this, and without a shawl.” With the fog rolling over the garden. We are in a valley, at Rosings. We are almost always in a sea of fog.
I could hear them that day, the tourists. In the fog, their voices seemed to come from far away, and then suddenly from just beside me, so I ducked into the maze. It is not a real maze: for that, the tourists must go to Allingham or Trenton. It is only a series of paths between the courtyard, with its triton perpetually spitting water, while stone fish leap around him in rococo profusion, and the rose garden. But the paths are edged with privet that has grown higher than I, at any rate, can see. I have called that place the maze since I was a child. When I am in the maze, I can pretend, for a moment, that I am somewhere else.
So there I was, among the privets, and there he was, sitting on his haunches, panting with his pink tongue hanging out. Pug.
Of course I did not learn his name until later, when he showed me the door. The door: inconsistent, irritating, never there when you want it. And at the best of times, difficult to summon, like a recalcitrant housemaid.
But there was Pug. I assumed he had come from Huntsford, from the parsonage or one of the tradesmen’s houses. He was so obviously cared for, so confident as he sat there, so complacent, even fat. And he had a quality that made him particularly attractive. When he looked at you with his brown eyes, and panted with his pink tongue hanging out, he looked as though he were smiling.
“Here, doggie,” I said. He came to me and licked my hand. I knew, of course, that Mother would never allow it. Not for me, not in, as she called it, my “condition.” But as I said, I was lonely. “Come on, then.” And he followed me, through the courtyard, into the kitchen garden with its cabbages and turnips, and through the kitchen door.
I had no friends at Rosings, but Cook disliked Miss Jenkinson, and the enemy of my enemy was at least my provisional ally. I knew she would give me a scrap of something for Pug. He gobbled a bowl of bread and milk, and looked up at me again with that smile of his.
“If Lady Catherine finds him in your room, there will be I don’t know what to pay,” Cook said, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Mother never comes into my room,” I said.
“Well, I’ll tell Susan to hold her tongue. Only yesterday I said to her, you’re here to clean the bedrooms, not to talk. Someday that tongue of yours is going to fall off from all the talking you do. And won’t your husband be grateful!”
“All right, Cook,” I said. “I’ll take him up, and could you have Susan bring me a box with wood shavings, just in case, you know.”
“Certainly, Miss.” She patted Pug on the head. “You’re a friendly one, aren’t you? I do like dogs. They’re dirty creatures, but they make a house more friendly.”
And that’s how Pug came to Rosings. I carried him, as quietly as I could, past the gallery. “Every night,” Miss Jenkinson was saying, “Sir Fitzwilliam d’Arcy walks down the length of this hall and stands before the portrait of his brother, Jonathan d’Arcy, who chopped off his head with an axe right there in the courtyard and married his wife, Lady Margaret de Bourgh. Visitors who have seen him say that he carries his severed head in his arms.” I heard gasps, and a “Well, I never!” The de Bourghs and the d’Arcys. We have been marrying and killing each other since the Conquest.
Later, when I had learned something of how the door works, I discussed it with the Miss Martins.
“Mary had a thought,” said Eliza. “She did want to tell you, although I told her, Miss, that you might not like hearing it.”
“Please call me Anne,” I said. “We share a secret, the three of us—and Pug. So we should have no distinctions between us. We know about the door. Surely that should make us friends.”
We were sitting in the Martins’ garden, at Abbey-Mill Farm. I could smell the roses that were blooming in the hedge, and the cows on the other side of the hedge, in the pasture. Eliza had folded her apron on the grass beside her. She was fair and freckled, although she used Gower twice a day. She looked what she was, the perfect English farm girl, with sunlit hair and a placid disposition. Mary was still wearing her apron, as though about to go in and finish her cleaning, but she had woven herself a crown of white clover. She was darker than her sister, with a liveliness, like a gypsy girl from Sir Walter Scott. An inquisitiveness. She had been the scholar, and regretted leaving school.
“Well,” said Mary, “this is what I’ve been thinking, Miss—Anne. Eliza and me, we’re the ones to whom nothing happens. There’s Robert marrying Harriet, and all the high and mighty folks of Highbury marrying among themselves, and even the servants seem to have their doings. But us—we just milk the cows, and clean the house with Mother, and take care of the garden, day after day, no different. And begging your pardon, Anne, but nothing happens to you either. You read and you go out riding in your carriage, that’s all. And what could happen to Pug?” Who was lying contentedly on the grass beside us. At Abbey-Mill Farm, the sun almost always shone. I was glad to escape, for a while, the fogs of Rosings.