First: Will Hawthorne, looking like someone’s terribly debonair great aunt, makes his entrance into the king’s banquet hall to a general raising of the collective eyebrow. “How handsome!” they remark. “How stylish!” “Could this be,” they wonder among themselves, “the same degenerate hog’s turd of an Outsider who sullied our court only days ago?”
Second: Will sparkles. Not satisfied with merely looking impressive, he opens his store of golden words and charms his hearers dumb. Rarely have such wit and poise, such timing and ease, been so impeccably combined. This man could break wind loudly and his audience would swear they had never heard anything more wryly apposite all season. Such a man cannot fail to win the hearts and admiration of the entire court.
Third: Will spectacularly fails to win the hearts and minds of the entire court, and is forcibly ejected as if he is some slimy form of pond life which was accidentally tracked in on the sole of someone’s boot.
In retrospect, it started out far too well. With my history, I should have anticipated calamity looming overhead like a thirty-pound hammer, but foresight, hindsight, and any other kind of sight which doesn’t originate in the very second in which I exist is something of a mystery to me. The thirty-pound hammer (augmented by murderous-looking spikes) hovered just long enough for me to start feeling comfortable, and then pounded me through the floor.
But enough of these ominous metaphors. I woke at about five o’clock the following morning. The banquet and its subsequent revelries had been over for about three hours, though I had been absent from them rather longer. I had been curled up in the drafty corner of one of the palace’s anterooms, sleeping fitfully, when the toe of Garnet’s boot prodded me imperiously. As I gazed wretchedly up at him and his iron-faced sister, the whole miserable affair gradually came swimming back to me.
“Get up,” said Garnet, more exhausted than angry. “We’ve been looking for you for ages. Get up and we’ll get you to bed.”
I stirred vaguely, but my legs were not interested. I paused to consider the drool and vomit that had stained the front of my new suit while they looked at each other and sighed. At first, Renthrette refused to help, but eventually Garnet persuaded her to brace me up, and between them they dragged me half-senseless to my room. There they maneuvered me onto my bed, where I lay on my side, wheezing and hacking the thin, foul-smelling remnants of whatever had been in my stomach into a tin basin. Once, I tried to sit up, but the room tossed and spun as if I was bound to the sail-less mast of some storm-wracked ship. I retched something that looked liked orange oatmeal onto the pillow and my gut contracted as if my entire midriff had been clamped into a vice. My eyes watered with pain and my open mouth strained, voiding nothing but air in a long, agonizing gasp. Pleasant, eh? When the nausea subsided I collapsed back onto the bed, my eyes shut against the lamplight and the humiliation. And in this blissful condition, I passed the rest of the night.
Now, this was not the first time I had been a little the worse for wear after an evening’s carousal, but it was, I think, the first time that I had passed into this miserable state without the slightest idea how it had happened. One minute I had been the life and soul of the party, sipping some flavorless fruit drink while bantering to the admiration of all; the next I had been launching the partially digested remains of my dinner over someone in lemon velvet. My lyrical depiction of the pangs of love went into a hideously rapid decline, and before I knew what was happening, I was trying to organize some kind of impromptu orgy using language that would have made the most experienced harlot blanch. But how this all came about, I could not say.
Garnet and Renthrette, naturally, just assumed that I had let the side down by drinking beyond my limit. Now, I know for a fact that I could drink either of those two under several tables and go on to perform every role in several full-length plays without dropping a line. Moreover, everyone had been drinking the same yellowish muck as I had, and I would go before the highest authority on earth and swear that I had had no more than two glasses of the treacherous filth. In fact, I knew that many of those about me, including the stoically sober Renthrette, had had a good deal more than me, so engrossed was I with my courtly patter. I suspected foul play and said so, but Garnet would have none of it.
“Someone doctored your drink?” he exclaimed, his anger now showing through his disbelief. “Why would anyone do that? These are not the kind of degenerates you used to spend your time with.”
“I’m not a degenerate,” I muttered unconvincingly.
“Really?” barked Garnet with nasty hilarity. “So you’re just a normal, civilized person, are you? And normal, civilized people always end the evening by announcing that Lord Gaspar, the chief justice of the land, couldn’t fill his own codpiece.”
“I didn’t do that,” I said, hopefully.
“Yes, you did,” Garnet exploded. “You said that you bet there was nothing in there but old stockings, and that if his wife went home with you instead she’d get to see, and I quote, ‘the one that got away.’ ”
“I did not say that,” I said bleakly, my voice muffled by the rancid pillow.
“Yes, you did,” said Renthrette, leaping into the fray. “In fact, you went on for a full five minutes about your bait and tackle, about eels and fishing poles, about how once she ‘nets this one’ she’ll never mess with minnows again, and every other stupid, degraded fishing image you could come up with, all the while rubbing yourself against her and leering until everyone in the room. .”
“Everyone!” agreed Garnet.
“. . was staring at you in horrified silence,” she concluded. “You only stopped when Lord Gaspar and Viscount Vallacin physically moved you away. And then you started drunkenly swinging at them and calling them a ‘pack of poncey-assed nancy boys who dressed like girls.’ It was only their honor and decency that stopped them from skewering you on the tips of their rapiers like the pig you are.”
“It can’t have been that bad,” I replied, lamely.
“No,” said Garnet, “it was worse. You sneezed all over Baroness Drocine’s dinner plate and then told her that you could bet safely that your snot was more palatable than anything that had been served all night.”
“Well, you know, the food here. .” I inserted, semi-apologetically.
“And then you climbed onto the table and offered to urinate into any glasses that needed filling. Thank God Sorrail was on hand to get you down before you had a chance to lower your breeches.”
“I thought the worthy Sorrail would have been a witness to all this,” I said, the surge of resentment I always felt at his name rising as quick as the bile in my throat.
“Sorrail saved your neck,” Renthrette spat. “You could have been executed on the spot after what you said about the king being a bloated and flatulent old fornicator.”
“I never said that,” I tried again.
“You said he had a private room full of small animals with which he practiced immoral acts,” said Renthrette, her face prissily straight.
“I’ll bet I didn’t put it like that,” I said, managing a smile for the first time since this nightmare had begun.
“No,” she said flatly, “but I wouldn’t sully my lips with one-tenth of the things you said last night. You also called the king’s private secretary a ‘whoreson swamp-sucking varlet’ and the captain of the palace guard an ‘unctuous, civet-reeking, pus-dripping clodpole,’ whatever that is.”