Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“Is that all, Thomas?”

“See that she’s at the ILO at five minutes till eight, Rachel — and see that she’s in top form. And that is all.”

He reached out and cut off any remarks his wife might have had in mind. Later, he’d have to try to work his way through the gruel in her head long enough to make her remember a few things about decent courtesy, and about her function as role model for younger females under his roof. It would be a nuisance, but it could be done — given sufficient patience, and sufficient skill. But not now. Right now he had contracts to see to.

At Barren House, Aquina was facing the music, and it wasn’t pleasant. They had her pinned at a table in a back room, and it was Susannah and Nile and Caroline — no goodies from Belle-Anne or oil in the waters from Grace this time — who were lambasting her. And they were good at it.

“You fool, Aquina!” Susannah had said for starters. “You contemptible, wicked fool of a woman!”

“And bungling… don’t forget bungling,” Caroline added. It was Caroline who had caught her. Caroline who’d been alerted by Faye, their most medically skilled woman, that Aquina had been at the herbs in the basement cupboards. And Caroline who’d caught her coming out of the kitchens at the main house and had forced her to hand over the empty bottle in her pocket and give it to Faye for analysis… not that anything sophisticated had been required. Faye knew what Aquina had taken because she knew the inventory down to the last leaf and fleck; and she’d only had to uncap the bottle and smell it to know what it had contained.

How could she have been so bungling? Aquina thought that was a very good question… except that she never, never had imagined that the other women could spy on her and follow her around. Or that Caroline could twist her arm so cruelly that she was helpless to keep her from searching her pockets… Who would have thought they’d be so suspicious, them with their damned ethics always on such prominent display?

“I’d do it again,” she’d said, defying them. And Caroline had turned on her like a snare set free on a rabbit, and in spite of herself Aquina had gasped between her teeth, sucking air, and jerked away from the other woman. Caroline was much smaller, much thinner, much less powerful of frame than Aquina; she was also stronger than Aquina could ever hope to be, with a grip like a man’s.

“You try that again, you silly bitch,” Caroline hissed at her, “and so help me God I’ll put you in permanent traction where you can’t do anybody any more harm with your stupidity and your viciousness!”

Susannah clucked her tongue, and objected mildly. “She’s not vicious, Caroline. Stupid, yes. But not vicious.”

“She did her damnedest to poison a fourteen-year-old girl, and she’s not vicious? What is that, tenderness and love?”

“Caroline… you know very well that Aquina had no intention of harming Nazareth Chornyak. She bellows a right good line, but she wouldn’t really hurt a living creature. Come off it.”

Caroline was so angry that she turned around and smacked the wall with her fist; Aquina was glad that it was the wall and not her.

“Aquina,” Nile said, “whatever did you think you were doing?”

“I’ve told you.”

“You tell us again.”

She told them. The thought of having to wait forty years before Nazareth could work on the women’s language at Barren House, really work on it — especially since Aquina had found her notebook, and it had turned out to be a treasure horde of Encodings, even more valuable than she had hoped — that thought had been intolerable to her. And there was only one way to shorten that forty years… Nazareth had to be made barren. If Aquina could have managed that, the girl would have been kept at Chornyak Household a few more years, to finish her education and her training; but then she would have come to Barren House.

“But Aquina, you know nothing about medicine!”

“I can read. I know where Faye’s herbals are. I’m literate.”

“You could have killed her.”

“No, she couldn’t,” chided Susannah. “Good lord. First she followed the formula with substitutions for anything that alarmed her, and then she cut its strength by half. And then she only gave Nazareth half a dose of that . I’m sure the child has been miserable, but she’s not in any real danger, nor was she ever.”

“Aquina had no way of being sure of that,” Caroline insisted, and Nile nodded solemn agreement. “It’s luck — just pure blind luck, not skill, not knowledge — that all she did with her nasty potion was make Nazareth sick!” And she leaned over the table and fairly hissed at Aquina. “Do you realize, you idiot, that you could have cost us not just the forty years you’re whining about, but lost us Nazareth forever ? You had no idea what you were doing!”

Aquina knew that they were right. She could see it now, see it clearly. She must have been half out of her mind, with frustration and with the constant worrying at the problem in her head. And she was sorry, sorry to the depths of her. But she’d be damned and fried in oil and pickled before she’d admit it.

“It was worth a try,” she said defiantly. And she stared at them, breathing hard and fast and deep, until they threw up their hands and walked out on her.

Thomas was nobody’s fool. He listened to what the doctors had to tell him, and he looked at the computer printouts, and he gave it about fifteen minutes of his time. You looked at sets of data, each one representing a possible hypothesis, until you had only one left. The one he had was the one he would have considered least plausible; but it was the only one the computers had not eliminated — therefore, it must be taken seriously. And he sent for a chief of detectives to come to his office at Chornyak Household.

The man was called Morse, Bard Morse; he was tall and bulky and ordinary-looking, but he proved to have a quick mind that belied the ponderousness of his movements. He listened while Thomas explained that someone had tried to poison a daughter of the house, and he ran his eyes over the computer printouts swiftly, and he came to an immediate conclusion.

“Oh, you’re quite right, Chornyak,” he said. “No question about it. Did you think there was?”

“Only because it was so unlikely,” said Thomas. “There’s no reason on or off this green globe for anyone to single out this one child — she’s only fourteen years old. And if the motive had only been to score some points off the linguists, it wouldn’t have been just Nazareth who was affected by the stuff. It makes no sense to me, frankly.”