After a while, she started to become familiar with individual characters, regulars like herself. She followed their lives as if they were plotlines in the serialized novels she used to enjoy in magazines. Sometimes, while she was shucking oysters, she’d daydream about what might happen to them next. Would Josie’s young man finally propose? Would Old Mr. Gattersby finally be caught out as the source of all those badpennies? Certain storylines presented themselves as more interesting than others. Then, very slowly and gradually, it occurred to Carrots that with all she’d learned about these people—and about people in general—it might be trivially easy for her to influence the courses of their lives in reality instead of just in her imagination.
She started off with what she thought would be a pair of particularly easy targets: a spinster named—unfortunately—Ermengarde Snip, and a poet several years her junior named Robert Crewe. Carrots had spent many long hours observing them both.
Miss Snip, an attractive-enough blond woman of forty or so, sometimes managed to claim Carrots’s preferred corner when Carrots hadn’t gotten there first. She liked to bring a book with her when she came, and often lingered for hours over a single glass of wine. At first glance, she might have been mistaken for a schoolteacher coming to the bar to pass a few inexpensive hours reading, but Carrots never stopped at the first glance. The wine Miss Snip sipped was the most expensive that the bar offered, her clothes were plain but made of fine material, and half the time, when she pretended to be reading her book, she was actually watching Mr. Crewe.
Mr. Crewe was about thirty, and had spent his entire youth writing poems that no one wanted to read. When he came to the bar, it was to scribble away furiously at his latest poem, to chat with the other young romantics who cluttered up the place, and to drink whatever someone else bought for him. What he lacked in talent, he made up for in having thedark hair and dreamy eyes that one expected from a poet, as well as a mind that thought high-minded concepts arranged into pleasant-sounding words were realer and truer than anything that had ever actually happened to him.
It didn’t take much. Carrots started with Mr. Crewe, the easier target of the two. She began by expressing admiration for the (terrible) poem she’d just heard him recite to a long-suffering friend, then engaged him in more conversation about hiscraft—he was almost pathetically pleased to have his poems apparently taken seriously by a discerning reader—before segueing smoothly into the next phase of attack: telling him, more or less, the truth.
“I always think it’s so interesting how when you live in the city, you might walk past a thousand people every day who have their own wonderful stories to tell that you’ll likely never know about. So many people you see seem like such fascinating characters.”
“Oh, you think so too?” Mr. Crewe asked, smiling at her. “I’ve always thought thatyouare a very interesting character. I’ve been noticing you hiding in that little corner, watching everyone and looking like the light of sunrise reflecting in the morning dew. I’ve always thought that you could be either a young forest witch or a milkmaid: just the pure fresh spirit of the countryside, in either case.”
This was a moment when the whole trajectory of Carrots’s life easily might have been set off in a different direction. It might have been such a moment for the even younger Carrots of just a few short years earlier.ThatCarrots might have stillbeen willing to see herself as the protagonist, to see the sort of romance she’d once dreamed of spreading out in front of her.ThisCarrots, though, was different. She’d recast herself from leading lady to playwright, and didn’t even notice the opportunity to take a starring role. Instead, she said, “Oh, notme. I’m extremely dull. I was thinking about Miss Snip.”
“Miss Snip?” Mr. Crewe asked in the polite but detached tone of someone prepared to listen to a story about a person whom they neither knew nor cared about.
“Yes,” Carrots said. “The slender lady with the sad blue eyes who always sits in that corner reading poetry. No, don’t look!” she added at the end, which was, of course, exactly the thing to say to prompt Mr. Crewe to take a quick look. She saw him frown.
“Oh,” he said. “I’ve seen her sitting there before, but I never took a closer look. I thought she was…well, she just looked like any old spinster in that old-fashioned dress with the high neck.”
Something inside Carrots gave a little snarl at that. It didn’t show on her face. Instead, she said, earnestly, “But she’s not at all! I’ve been paying attention to her. I’m quite sure she was a real society beauty just a few years ago, but she must have had her heart broken by some scoundrel and never married. You can see her breeding in the quality of her dresses and hear it in her voice when she speaks, and you can tell by the books she reads, and by how attentively she listens whenever you recite your poetry, that she’s a woman of realsensibility.”
“I see,” Mr. Crewe said, and turned his gaze toward Miss Snip. “Yes, I see. She does have a noble look about her, doesn’t she? And even from this far away, you can still see the bright blue of her eyes.”
In the sort of novel that Carrots read in those days, as a sophisticated young woman, Mr. Crewe’s own eyes would harden and grow cold and calculating as he weighed this woman’s worth. Instead, there at the bar, his gaze went soft and abstracted. He wasn’t the kind of man who was capable of setting out to seduce a woman for her money. When he prepared himself to seduce this shy, lonely older lady, he did so thinking that he was acting with the heart of a poet recognizing a fellow traveler. And if there were other reasons lurking just beneath the level of conscious thought, did they matter in the moments when their eyes first met, when their hands first touched, when years later they sat together in the sitting room of their cozy, well-appointed country house and he read her poems he’d written for her that were filled with more sincere feeling than anything else he’d ever put to paper?
These weren’t questions that entered Carrots’s mind: neither during that conversation, when she prompted Mr. Crewe to look at his future wife for the first time, nor during any of the moments that followed, when she shepherded the two of them toward a union that caused a minor scandal in the more genteel neighborhoods of the capital. What she cared about was power—and the sheer, intoxicating, syrup-sweet joy of wielding it.
She slunk around the edges of the ballroom at their wedding, eavesdropping on other people’s secrets and feeling a smug sense of self-satisfaction that was better, she thought, than anything she’d ever felt.
It was the first major manipulation of a long and fruitful career.
Chapter 7
Back to the Feast Celebrating Gretsella’s Arrival in the Capital
Most people at Gretsella’s welcome feast were focusing on eating or flirting, oblivious to the fact that they were being invisibly monitored by the guest of honor. Janet was strumming her lute and not jesting even slightly. No one was overtly plotting to overthrow the king. One man was calling him a birdbrained fop, which Gretsella couldn’t entirely disagree with. She dropped a spider into the man’s soup anyway and then noticed whom he was speaking with: all hateful six or so feet of Sir Harold, wantonly flaunting his jawline with a buxom young woman on his knee. Gretsella dropped a lit candle down his tunic and, for a few moments, observed with great relish his hopping around and shrieking before she continued on toward the back of the hall.
She didn’t find anything interesting until she got all the way to the back near the door, where a sad-looking man wasskulking in the shadows like a witch at a wedding. He was holding a shield and wore a sword at his hip, and he looked as if he’d just come in out of the rain, but no one seemed to be taking the slightest notice of him. Gretsella re-visibilized herself. The knight—she assumed he must be a knight—barely jumped, which Gretsella found very annoying but also thought was to the fellow’s credit.
“Hello, Grandmother,” he said after a moment. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t see you there.”
“That’s because I waslurking invisibly,” Gretsella said. She thought that she liked this knight. He had a smooth, dark complexion; his nails were neat and his braids tidy; and his voice was pleasant and low. Also, he was polite. If Gretsella wasforcedto speak to men, she preferred to speak to polite ones. “So that I could eavesdrop and drop a lit candle down Sir Harold’s tunic.”
“Oh,” the knight said, and smiled, then quickly tried to pretend he wasn’t smiling. “Why were you doing that, Grandmother?”
“He’s been very inconsiderate to Bradley,” Gretsella said. “And his jawline annoys me.”
The knight, at the mention of Bradley’s name, had gone a bit goggle-eyed. “You know King Bradley?”
“Yes,” she said. “He’s my son.”
“Oh,” he said. “You must be so proud, Grandmother. He’s such a lovely, kind”—he stopped and cleared his throat—“I mean, you must be very proud to be the mother of a king.”
“Not particularly,” she said. “There’s nothing so veryimpressive about being a king. All you have to do is wait for your father to die, which happens to everyone, eventually. I wasmuchprouder of Bradley when he was working as a hairdresser. Not everyone can cut hair like Bradley. It’s anart form, you know.” She felt, for a moment, as if she might sound a little ridiculous, but she swiftly drowned that thought in the deep bucket of her own self-confidence.
“I’m sure you’re right, Grandmother,” the knight said. “I certainly wouldn’t trust myself to cut anyone’s hair. They’d be lucky to come away with both ears still attached.”
