That first marriage was Papa’s unpunished sin, Tessie knew. Seraphina was like a thorn in Mama’s toe, reminding her all the time what kind of man he was. It was awful enough that he’d married a saarantras, a dragon in human form, and then covered his tracks; now that his wife and daughters knew, they were bound to keep his sordid secret, or there could be dire consequences for all of them.
That was the wellspring of Mama’s bitterness; it had driven her toward a pair of crankier, more vindictive Saints, Abaster and Vitt, who offered balm for her suffering, and suffering for the wicked who’d wronged her.
Tessie made soothing, sympathetic noises even as her mind began to wander in other directions. Two more insights had struck, and she had to ponder them. First, contrary to what Mama had told her, Aunt Jenny might have had a baby before marriage. A bastard, she’d called it; Tessie had heard the word but never understood it. Second, Seraphina was not entirely dragon. Papa had been involved in the making of her, which meant that it was very naive indeed to go around pretending you were married in order to fall pregnant. The male of the species (such as Papa, or one of Aunt Jenny’s previous boyfriends, the ne’er-do-wells Mama had refused to have in her house) must be involved somehow.
Tessie knew who would know: Seraphina. She was eleven and always knew everything.
Tessie asked the very next day, but she picked a bad time. She wasn’t so foolish as to interrupt music practice, when Seraphina might have literally bitten her head off, but she asked while Seraphina was reading. Of course, Seraphina was always reading, so it wasn’t like there were a lot of other options. Tessie eased open Seraphina’s door to check that she was there, and then crept up on her in the window seat.
“You could knock, gargoyle-face,” said Seraphina, not looking up. “It’s rude not to.”
Tessie worried the laces of her bodice, almost too nervous to ask. But she’d come this far. She said in a barely audible voice, “Where do babies come from?”
Seraphina, long-suffering, sighed heavily. “Anne-Marie just had one.” Seraphina never called Mama Mama. “It came from inside her, or did you fail to notice?”
Tessie chafed; she wasn’t stupid. That wasn’t the sort of argument to make to Seraphina, however, who could demonstrate in under a minute that yes, you were stupid, check and mate. “Like that quigutl we found in the basement last month, laying eggs,” Tessie offered, trying to sound intelligent.
Seraphina shuddered. “Distressingly like. No silver blood, though, and no eggshells.”
“Yes, but…but how did the baby get inside her in the first place?” asked Tessie, fretting.
“Papa put it there,” said Seraphina, turning a page. “Like planting a seed in a garden.”
This was it. This was the answer, though incomplete. Tessie pressed a little further. “But how? How do you plant a seed inside another person?”
“Saints’ bones, you are six. You don’t need to know all that,” cried Seraphina, her patience abruptly exhausted. Tessie had stepped on the dragon’s tail without knowing how. “This is why you’re such a spank magnet, you know, because you never shut up. You’re the cat curiosity is going to kill.”
“I only wanted—” Tessie began.
“I wanted to read, but am I allowed ten minutes’ peace? Indeed, I am not,” said Seraphina, leaping to her feet, ready to push Tessie out of the room if she had to. There was no need for that kind of thing; Tessie scurried toward the door under her own power. “Knock next time,” Seraphina called. “Or I’ll tell Anne-Marie what kind of questions you’ve been asking.”
“She’ll just spank me,” said Tessie bitterly from the doorway.
“Because you’re a spank magnet!” shouted her sister, and Tessie dared linger no longer.
* * *
So this was Tess’s grand, misguided notion on Jeanne’s first wedding day: she’d bless the happy couple and then lead them upstairs to the big bed Mama and Papa used to share (Mama slept in another room these days, with baby Ned). Once there, they’d play it by ear. She believed there must be kissing involved, because Mama had always been scandalized if Aunt Jenny was seen kissing in public.
Tess led the docile pair upstairs, where she had festooned the bed with roses—well, four roses. Not quite a full festoon, but that was as many as she thought she could take from Mama’s white climber without their being missed. Faffy followed them up, that naughty hound; he leaped onto the bed ahead of everyone, getting grimy footprints on the sheets, and wormed his skinny body between the pillows. Jeanne, who was terrified of Faffy at close range, shrieked while Tessie chased her dog out of the room, crying, “Bad boy! Stop scaring Jeanne!”
With the ruckus resolved and restorative hugs given to her sister, Tessie finally directed Kenneth and Jeanne into the bed. The newlyweds began looking uncomfortable, especially Kenneth, who was nine and may have known more about all this than he was letting on.
He said, “Tess, we don’t have to play this part. I’d rather go on to the pretending-we’re-married part. Jeanne could make me dinner.” Jeanne nodded eagerly at this suggestion.
“We’re playing wedding,” said Tessie authoritatively, “not marriage, and the wedding night is the most important part, after the priest.”
“Then you should take a turn being bride,” said Jeanne, who instinctively let Tessie play all the most important parts.
“No,” said Tessie, exasperation mounting. “I’m the priest, telling you what to do. Now kiss!”
But the two of them seemed suddenly to become a pair of magnets with like poles turned toward each other: they’d get no closer, repulsed by some invisible field. Kenneth protested that it was wrong to kiss Jeanne because he was not her cousin but her uncle. (This was true: he was Anne-Marie’s youngest brother, whom Tessie had declared an honorary cousin.) “Really, you shouldn’t marry your uncle,” he said sensibly.
Jeanne, for her part, whined about Kenneth’s breath. He had a distressing habit of eating onions like apples.
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” Tess cried at last. “You’re both a pair of babies.” And then she dived onto the bed herself, crawled after Kenneth like a crocodile, and planted a big kiss right on his stupid mouth. Jeanne had been right about his breath, which was astonishing, but Tessie grabbed his ears like Dozerius clinging to the mast of his shattered ship and hung on for dear life.
Inevitably, that was when Mama burst in.
* * *
The spanking, even for a girl dubbed “spank magnet,” was one for the ages. Tessie, over years of corporal punishment, had learned to absent herself during these events to make them hurt less; she’d be sailing the wine-blue seas with Dozerius, and the chafing on her buttocks was due to the splintery wooden benches of his ship, or (if it was particularly bad) to the piping-hot Throne of Embers that she’d sat upon to save him from injury.
This one, though, recalled her most unpleasantly back to the here and now, not because it was so severe but because Mama cried the entire time. Indeed, her fury flagged sooner than usual; her arm dropped to her side and her chest heaved with sobs. Tess threw her arms around her mother to comfort her, as if it were Mama who had just received a beating.
“Don’t cry,” said Tessie, patting Mama’s cheek as tender tears welled up in her own eyes. “Whatever has made you so sad, I won’t do it again. I promise.”
“You are never to climb into a boy’s bed or kiss him until you’re married, Tessie,” said Mama when her breathing had stilled enough to let her speak.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” said Tessie weepily, which was a lie.
Mama put her hands on Tessie’s shoulders and looked her in the eye. “You must understand, boys and men are afflicted with bodily lusts. They will try to coax and cajole you into bed, but you must resist. ‘If you won’t renounce temptation, O woman, there is no saving you. The Infernum burns hottest for the unrepentant harlot,’ says St. Vitt, Heaven hold him.”