Tess made a beeline toward her father, ready to place herself in his gentle and capable hands, but herds of milling shoppers stood in her way. “Papa!” she shouted, waving, but he neither heard nor saw. He turned his horse up a side street. She was losing him; even a liberal application of elbows couldn’t clear a path through the crowd quickly enough. She noted where his hat plume disappeared, and the spot became her pole star, guiding her.
He was long gone by the time Tess broke free of the square. Praying he’d kept to this road and hadn’t turned up any side streets, she ran past mercers, tailors, leatherworkers, her boots thunking on the hard-packed dirt of the road, her head thumping painfully. About a mile along, it curved south, dead-ending at a wide wooden building with a statue at the apex of the roof. Papa was nowhere in sight, but the horse he’d been riding was tied up out front alongside a tiny donkey.
Tess’s feet slowed at the sight of the Saint on the roof, recognizing her big green apple even before reading the plaque: ST. LOOLA’S HOSPICE FOR THE INDIGENT AND INCAPACITATED.
Papa wasn’t looking for Tess; he did not yet realize she’d run away. He’d come for Mother Philomela of St. Loola’s. Of course the nuns had to be fetched from town. They wouldn’t have been wandering the fields near Cragmarog, grazing and mooing.
Tess wasn’t sure what to do. He wouldn’t be relieved to see her, as she’d…Her lungs tightened again. She should have known better than to hope. He might not even take her back home, not when this was where he ultimately wanted to leave her.
The door opened, and Tess darted behind the horse. She pulled her blanket out of her satchel and wrapped it over her head like a widow’s shawl.
A widow’s shawl with a light plaid weave. This would fool no one.
Papa approached the steed to untie it, but he was on the other side, engrossed in conversation with an elderly nun, Mother Philomela of St. Loola’s, as per yesterday’s letter. “We’re at our wits’ end,” Tess heard Papa saying, his voice strained. “My wife insists this daughter was simply born bad—”
“No one is born bad,” snapped the nun. Tess peeked at her over the horse’s back; she was at least sixty and built like a grain stack, an impression enhanced by her yellow habit. She was looking at Papa shrewdly. “Anyway, you don’t agree with your wife. What’s your theory?”
Papa hesitated; contradicting Anne-Marie always made him anxious. “I suppose…I assumed our Tess misbehaves for the pure, anarchic joy of disobedience.”
He thought she was bad on purpose? He might as well have reached across the horse and slapped Tess. She’d never heard what he really thought of her before.
“So you have no idea, either,” said Mother Philomela flatly. “Tell me more about her. I suppose she’s out drinking till all hours, entertaining young men, dressing like a slattern?”
“Erm,” said Papa, removing his hat and scratching his balding head.
He didn’t know, Tess realized, her ears growing hot. He had no idea how she dressed or what she did all day, or why. Mama was bitter and mean, but at least she paid attention.
“She punched a priest,” Papa finally said weakly.
“Feh. Who hasn’t?” Mother Philomela had untied her donkey and was stroking its nose. “Well, never mind. The parents never know. I’ll get to the bottom of it. Our order is salubrious for wild and selfish young ladies. Nothing like a hospice full of graypox victims to give you some perspective. Life is short, by Heaven’s mercy, and we are distressingly fragile.”
The nun leaped onto her donkey like a woman half her age and began to sing in an unexpectedly clear soprano:
The flesh is but
A sack of goo,
A feast for worms
To delve into.
Remember, mortal,
As you strive,
That you, ambitious goo,
Must also die.
Papa mounted his horse, his lips pinched as if the song disturbed him. Tess had been standing frozen, listening to them talk, and had forgotten to pull the shawl across her face. Papa looked right at her as he turned his steed.
He looked her in the eye.
Maybe he thought she looked familiar; his frown deepened, and his gaze lingered. Maybe he thought, That woman could be Tessie’s twin, almost, or the question arose in his mind halfway to Ranleigh Cottage, Wait, did I see…? No, it couldn’t have been.
He didn’t recognize his own daughter out of context. He rode on, unseeing, unknowing. Tess gaped after him, her voice caught in her throat, insubstantial as a ghost.