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Two things you know. One: you are the last sane woman in Illyria. Two: you have never hoped so badly you are wrong.
You would say that you know it is dark in the cell, but you do not. When the priest came, he claimed it was bright as heaven, bright as wisdom, bright as truth. You are barred from heaven, and you lay no claim to wisdom, but you have always clung to truth like a shipwrecked sailor to a mast, so fiercely it leaves grit beneath your fingernails. Here is the truth: one week past, you would have blazoned him a liar. You do not know anymore. If you are wrong, then you are ruined; if you are wrong, then your lady is safe. If you are right, she is beyond the walls of your cell, unprotected, alone. When the priest came, you were standing, reaching through those bars, grasping in the maybe-dark as if he might hand you the keys.
“Do not think I am mad,” you ordered. “Do not think I am mad,” you begged. It took many empty echoing breaths in the dark to realize he had left.
You have gone to your knees now, a mockery of prayer. Some span of time ago, before the cell, you felt braver in trousers; now you feel bare without petticoats falling over your thighs. The ground beneath you is hard-packed dirt. When you lay your hands down flat, you shiver at the grit. Your fingers ache from clawing at the bars, a steady throb like the pulse of your legs too tightly bound.
You are not mad. You must not be. You cannot afford it. You are sane. You must be sane. You will be sane; she needs you to be sane. Two things you know. You hold one in each hand. You must not drown.
One: you are the last sane woman in Illyria. Two: you have never hoped so badly you are wrong. An objection to the first: there is the Lady Olivia. An overruling: the Lady Olivia is not sane. This is not your fault, but it is your responsibility. An addendum to the second: you have, in fact, never hoped to be wrong at all. If you are nothing else, you are correct; it is your sole source of pride in this household, where you are little more than a laughingstock, and would be more so if your private inclinations were laid bare.
Lady Olivia has never laughed at you. Lord Octavio did not, either, while he persevered. When he died your lady fell to the floor, not a graceful swoon like a stage heroine but a crumpling like a flower crushed beneath a bootheel. She could not stand for sobbing. She rocked red-faced on the floor with her dress in tulle tatters and gasped, and you knelt in your awkward underskirt and held her. When she pressed her face into your shoulder, her maid-loose hair tickled your neck, soft as a caress. When her ladies-in-waiting took her to bed, you rose to tell the servants to draw the curtains and mend the black clothing torn in grief when her father died. You sent the kitchenmaids back to their work; you called for a review of the lady’s finances; you drew up plans for the funeral while his body still cooled. Someone had to. Sir Toby called you heartless for it. Lord Octavio had always smiled at you. You could do nothing else for him now.
The Lady Olivia has a freckle on her left collarbone. You do not know if she knows it is there. You know it is there. You are no longer her lady-in-waiting but her steward, now that she has closed her doors to men beyond her blood; this is a blessing, for it means you may leave the room when Maria dresses her. Unless she needs to speak to you about the household, and then you paste your eyes to the ceiling, fixing your gaze as if in birdlime, so you do not look at it. A dark freckle, a round one, like the inked ring of an O. O for Olivia and for Octavio; O for the howls that rent her body when she mourned. O like a round painted mouth, O like a lover’s sound you dare not imagine without sinking nails into your flesh. Sometimes you pace the halls at night, when the shadows turn a home into a labyrinth, when the weary walls seem to hold only sea-wind and salt tears. You walk, for your bed is cold and you cannot sleep, and you wonder if you can pace the sick thing out of you, if it may be purged from you through your breath and your sweat, if the hunger pangs may abate and you may feel less like a wolf locked inside the sheepfold. Some nights you dream of skin on skin and soft painted lips brushing yours. Those nights you walk until the sun yellows the sky, and the portraits hanging in the hallway watch you in silence, and all of the faces that stare down are unfamiliar and strange.
You know the rules of nature and the household. You know it is a terrible thing to love another woman. More terrible when she looms so high above your station, when the fulfillment of your desire is like to invert the world. An objection: it has been done. There was Strachy. An overruling: your lady lost her father, then her brother. She still wakes wailing at night. You are not for her to love; you are for her to cling to, a safe place for her to live inside. You want her to hold you close and crawl inside your perfectly ordered ribs and build a home like a willow cabin in your chest. You want her to be safe. You are safe. You must be safe.
You must be safe, and you must be sane, for she is neither. Somewhere outside of your cell, she is alone with a man she does not know she does not know—a creature she calls a husband, with intentions you can only guess at. She did not believe you and you left her alone. You cling to the cell bars and slam your head, once, into the iron, so the metal and your skull both ring.
You should have known when the fool came back wrong. You did know—you knew, but no one believed you. “Who are you?” you asked the stranger in your lady’s house, and that stranger tilted her head at you, a lock of hair falling over her face, and answered in musical tones: “Ah, very clever, but leave the fooling to the fools, my Lady Loftiness. It has not been so long that you might forget my face.”
Such was the problem. It had not been. Feste had been gone no more than a fortnight, and you remembered her thin pointed chin, her dark tangled hair, the mismatch of her eyes—one blue as the cloud-torn sky, one green as the salt sea. This patchcoat wore the same coxcomb, but it teetered on a figure a head taller, light-haired and round-faced. She kissed your lady’s hand and the countess welcomed her in.
“Does she not mend?” Lady Olivia said, but you could not answer, could not understand why she spoke to a stranger with the rare lightness she never offered you.
“I marvel,” you managed at last, “your ladyship takes delight in…”
You trailed. She looked at the stranger, then at you. “In Feste?” she said, eyes wide.
“This is no Feste,” you said. Someone had to.
The Lady Olivia gave you a weary look. You wanted to soak in her gaze like the light; you could not, for she said, “You would do well to be less stubborn. You ought to welcome her back like the prodigal, not turn her out of the fold for straying.” The false Feste smiled from behind her, teeth flashing, both eyes the color of dark polished wood.
Sick of self-love, your lady called you then, and so you paced anight, picking at your peeling nails and at your fraying thoughts. Sick of self-love—is that much true? Could you have been so distempered, so prepossessed, to mistake the fool entirely? Surely not. But you assembled your memories in neat ranks anyhow, recalling the sun falling across Feste’s dark hair, the slight frame that allowed Lord Octavio to lift her off her feet, the delight your lady used to take in her uncommon eyes. You retraced those memories until your head ached. You retrace them again now. You are sure. Are you not sure?
A worse woman would have feared her mind going. But you are as well in your wits as any man. Perhaps you are sick of self-love. Perhaps you are the imposter in this household, swelling and festering with hidden desires. (You dreamed of her again that night.) Maybe you are barred from heaven. But by God, you must be right. You have always at least been right.
Even so. You would have let the matter lie, for someone bearing the fool’s name had returned, and your lady was happy. Happy if only for a moment.
Then Toby.
It was different with Toby, for he did not disappear for days on end, only stumbled out to drink one night as was his wont and never stumbled back. The man you found drunk and reeling in the early hours of the morning was not your lady’s uncle; no respect of place or persons, indeed. He had exchanged dark curls for hair the color of seashore sand, a new smattering of freckles covering his face, a new thread of bass in his voice. When he grabbed roughly at your wrist, you felt your first strike of fear. Not that he had touched you; a more instinctive fear, a flinch from something deeply and indelibly wrong. You did not understand what until you caught better sight of the hand that groped up your arm. “Art any more than a steward?” he demanded, as five fingers curled around your shoulder.
“My lady,” you said, curtsying to the countess, “there is something amiss with the man who calls himself Sir Toby.”
He had always had dusty-sand hair, she said. He had always had freckles and bass in his voice. And so you splayed your own hand before her, and you told her, “This man has five fingers on each of his hands.” For Sir Toby’s left hand was his sole claim to knighthood: the littlest finger a shrunken nub lopped off in a long-ago duel. A dozen times you watched him waggle his fingers at Maria; a dozen times you heard him tell the story to his captive lapdog knight. You were sure. Are sure.
The countess blinked huge dark eyes at you. Dark as the nighttime sea. Dark enough to drown in.
“Nonsense,” she said. “He always has.”
Here, now, in the cell, you dig your fingers into the earth. Here, now, on your knees, you close your eyes and cast back and back through your memories again, even though you know what you will find. You have seen him flaunt the injury more times than you could count. You know every in and out of this household, every face and every name, and this you know.
When you left the countess’s room that day, you went to the hall to find the old portrait of her father. The artist had painted him standing before the open window, gazing out over a foam-flecked sea. Beside him stood his brother: sandy-haired and freckle-faced, left hand on his sword, five fingers curled around the pommel.
You were no fool. Are no fool. When the letter fell into your hands, yellowed parchment creased into fourths, the Lady Olivia’s scrawl listing to the left as always, you knew better. Too perfect to believe. Too convenient. Thou canst not choose but know who I am, it drawled, teasing, mocking, and you did know. If your lady loved you, fortunate unhappy that you are, she would have told you long ago. This was a springe and you the dull woodcock: the hand behind this pen wanted you odd and alone, stranded in the trick of singularity, so that whatever swallowed Toby and the fool might have you next.
Even so, the terror. Even so, the hope. For you had told no one; you had said nothing; you keep your desire inside where it festers and rots you day by day day. And yet someone, or something, had apprehended your point, seen through your skin into your ribcage to read the sick thing in your heart and put it down on paper. You were almost sick. You were not sure if it was fear or want. For if it were true—if it were real—if against all odds your lady would alter services with you just to hold you against her beating heart, to let you press your lips to the freckle hidden just beneath her collar—
Even now you long for it. This is a sin. Peel your fingernail back—broken from clawing at the bars—until the pain makes you hiss. Swallow the hiss. Put your finger in your mouth and swallow the blood. You have learned to do this so you do not blotch the floors with your illness.
You were no fool. You knew better. The garters, if nothing else, were proof of that, for even if your lady could love you, she could not love you cross-gartered. Your yellow stockings were a misrule party guise from years past, before Lord Octavio’s absence, when the halls still rang with laughter rather than the empty shushing of the salt sea. The ladies-in-waiting gathered together to dress in men’s clothes, ill-fitting and ill-worn, doublets and breeches and cross-garters for each of you. The others laughed. You itched, somewhere deep down in a place you did not recognize yet. You had not yet come to understand your illness. All you knew was that you felt bare—your heavy skirts shed, your heavy hair tied up beneath a cap. Your doublet was a second skin; it felt like standing naked in the street. Lady Olivia laughed like bells. “I near mistook you for a man,” she said, with a slivered smile and a teasing curtsey. That was the first night you dreamed of her and woke with heat between your legs. You could not whip yourself for that, for there was household work to do; you bit your arm into seething bruises you could hide beneath the women’s sleeves that seemed, that morning, twice as heavy. The lesson did not stick. The lesson never sticks. Still you bruise and bleed and stalk the halls. Still you kneel aching in your cell.
She could not love you that way: in men’s clothes, in gold stockings. So you saw the letter for what it was: a trap. Nothing more, nothing less, no matter how much your hope hurt.
Even so. You had no choice. After Toby, it was the boy.
Him you did not know. “What kind of man is he?” your lady asked when he came to her door, but you were caught up in the Fool’s wrongness. You answered absently, that he was of mankind, because you did not know otherwise. The first time you saw him up close was when you tossed down the ring, like metal from Lady Olivia’s hand might scald your fingers, a cross burning unholy flesh. You caught a glimpse of his face, wide eyes and youth-soft lips, the freckles scattered across his nose like salt across the surface of the sea. A stranger. But a stranger you remembered well enough to know that the man who came back to your lady’s door was wrong.
The fool, the uncle, the suitor. The letter to you. Suddenly the pattern was clear as the sky after storm. Every stranger beneath your roof drew an orbit closer to the center of the household. An orbit closer to your lady.
And so you played the game; you sprang the trap; you set yourself to stopping it. Someone had to. You recovered your men’s clothes; you donned your yellow stockings.
A great deal of good it has done for her, you think, resting your face against the cool iron bars.
As if anyone truly cares for a steward. As if you have done anything, by taking yourself from her side, except leave her alone with something that looks like the boy called Cesario. As if it is not your responsibility to keep her safe. You kneel in the cell on legs that tremble with pain, heart pounding against your stolen doublet, hair falling in knotted tangles down the back of your neck where the false Toby ripped off the cap keeping it restrained. You are right. You know you are right. You are right, and you are a monstrosity, and you are a failure.
You did not recognize the priest’s voice. You cried out to him anyway. When the fool came it should have scared you, and it did, because it was not her voice but the false Feste, and you thought—now, perhaps. Now they would take you; now something else would wear your name. Even so, you wanted so badly to be free, more than you wanted to be safe. You pressed your hands against the bars so hard your wrists still smell of metal now. You tore at the lock like an animal. Your nails broke before your voice.
“Go to my lady,” you begged her. “Do not say that I am mad.” And again, a hoarse cracking scream: “I am not mad!”
Perhaps it is a lie. You would not know; you do not know if the cell is dark, though you cannot see your own bleeding hands, because the priest and the fool swore they could see as if wreathed in the light of God. If you are mad it is not your fault. If you are mad you are something to be cared for, something to be wrapped in woolen blankets with someone else stroking your hair, something that no longer has to fight and claw and cry out against the rest of the world. If you are mad it is not your fault. If you are mad she may feel sorry for you. How easy it would be. How simple. The price, of course, is being wrong. You play with the cuff of your sleeve, twisting it back and forth though it chafes against your wrist. You are not sure if you fear being wrong less than you fear knowing this. Than knowing she is in danger. Than knowing she is alone.
You are alone. Your shoulders have stopped shaking with sobs; your voice has given way. You are as sane as any man in Illyria, unless you are mad, unless you are wrong, and in truth you are not sure you know the difference anymore.
It is Fabia who comes for you, finally. Not your lady. You would recognize Lady Olivia’s footsteps from a long way off. Your legs have gone numb; you stumble trying to stand, slipping back down to one knee. Fabia does not help you up. She does not dare brush your arm, clad in the wrong sleeves, or the patch of bare neck where your hair is still half-pinned up. She keeps a step’s length from you, light and wary on her feet as a rabbit, watching with the glassy eyes of a frightened sheep. As if she may catch what you have. As if you may catch her in your wolf’s jaws and rip her dress beneath your clumsy paws.
The sun stings your eyes. Their gazes sting your skin: the circle gathered, the count and the suitor and the priest and the fool, a semicircle surrounding you, a makeshift stage pinning you in. You stand before them, arms hanging limply down, a creature in yellow stockings and a torn doublet with her hair half-freed. Part woman, part man, part monster. None of their eyes are right. False suitor, false priest, false fool, no face you recognize.
No face you recognize until the boy Cesario steps aside. And there she is, your Olivia, pushing through the crowd to find you, mouth slack with shock and horror. Your Olivia, her mourning clothes shed like old skin, dressed in wife’s wear with her hair pinned up.
Your heart leaps. You reach for her. You freeze.
“Malvolio,” Olivia says. A prayer. A sob. “Malvolio.” She opens her arms, hurting for you, asking for you, begging you to go to her, and the sun shines off the creamy skin of her unmarked collarbones, and glints off the tears in huge eyes blue as the sunlit sea.