The Fool's Girl Read Online Free PDF

with the girl with the nut-brown eyes who delighted in mischief and playing tricks on her betters. The eyes were the same, but the spark in them had long since died. The lines on her face showed that life with Sir Toby had not been easy. Time had thickened her at the waist and hips and the hair escaping her cap had more grey in it than black. Maria no longer played tricks on anybody.
    ‘Who’s this with you?’ She’d looked past him, squinting as if short-sighted. ‘My lady? But that cannot be . . .’
    Her frown returned and her fingers hastily sketched the shape of a cross.
    ‘It is me, Maria.’ Violetta had stepped forward. ‘Violetta.’
    ‘Violetta?’ Maria’s look, almost of fear, had disappeared. She took the girl by the arms, the better to see her. ‘For a moment I thought you were your mother. How old are you now? Fifteen? Sixteen?’
    Violetta nodded.
    ‘When she came to us, she was not much older. You are the very spit of her. Where does the time go? When I left, you were a child. You are a woman now.’
    Violetta had always been told that Sir Toby was a great man in this land, that he lived in a castle, and she’d come in hope that he might be able to use his influence to help her. Any hope of that had fled as soon as she saw the Hollander, but they had stayed, having nowhere else to go. Besides, Maria had been kind to her when she was young and Toby was still the nearest thing she had left to a kinsman, if only by marriage.
    ‘How has he been?’ Violetta asked.
    ‘Bad today,’ Maria said with a shake of her head.
    The door to the room where Sir Toby lay was ajar, and a sweetish smell seeped out, the cloying stench of medicines and illness. Sir Toby was on his back in a lopsided bed that was near to collapse. A small truckle lay underneath, where Maria slept. He had always been an ample man, but the great spreading mound of his belly was distended by sickness, not good living. The rest of him was wasting away. His arms lay like sticks by his sides and his legs scarcely disturbed the coverlet.
    ‘He’s not how he was,’ Maria kept saying. ‘His mind is apt to wander. Don’t expect too much.’
    Since they had arrived, his decline had been sharp. Dr Forman came to see him and dosed him with poppy. That was all that could be done for him now.
    ‘Go into him, Feste,’ Maria said. ‘Your presence cheers him, brings him a little way out of his melancholy.’
    Feste bowed his head. He took his flute from his pack and his little drum and went in to see the old man, even though he was bone-tired. He did this every night, but such was the slippage of the Sir Toby’s mind that each time it was as if he had just arrived.
    ‘Peace be in this house,’ he began. ‘ Domine. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, parce nobis, Domine. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, exaudi nos, Domine. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. ’
    He stepped into the room, treading softly, intoning the words, his back slightly hunched, his eyes cast down and his hands folded at his chest as if he carried a Bible or prayer book. He did not need props or costume. The character was contained in the tone of his voice, the droop of his shoulders, the angle of his head.
    Sir Toby blinked awake. His blue eyes were faded and cloudy, the whites yellow, clotted and bloodshot. His face was wasted and ravaged. His formerly florid complexion had a greyish cast, the flesh of his cheeks hanging in sagging swags. His nose was bluish purple, pitted like a strawberry, swelled out of shape.
    ‘Who is that? Who is there?’ he whispered, and reached out to push back the bed’s canopy. His thin hand was a span of bone webbed with yellow skin, criss-crossed with a snaking tangle of thick, twisting veins.
    ‘It is I, Sir Topas,’ Feste murmured in the same sing-song voice. ‘Don’t you remember me? I’m come to visit you, my son.’
    ‘Sir Topas! Good Sir Topas!’ The sick man’s face cleared for a moment; his