Stardust

“But the wall —” he said, eyeing the innkeeper and the vicar a little nervously.

“Oh, as to that, when Wystan and Mister Brown finished their shift last night they repaired to the saloon bar at the Seventh Pie, where Wystan happened to mention their meeting with a ragamuffin who claimed to be you, and how they blocked his way. Your way. When news of this reached Father’s ears, he marched right up to the Pie and gave the both of them such a tongue-lashing and a telling-of-what-for that I could scarcely believe it was him.”

“Some of us were for letting you come back this morning,” said the vicar, “and some were for keeping you there until midday.”

“But none of the ones who were for making you wait are on Wall duty this morning,” said Mr. Bromios. “Which took a certain amount of jiggery-pokery to organize — and on a day when I should have been seeing to the refreshment stand, I could point out. Still, it’s good to see you back. Come on through.” And with that he stuck out his hand, and Tristran shook it with enthusiasm. Then Tristran shook the vicar’s hand.

“Tristran,” said the vicar, “I suppose that you must have seen many strange sights upon your travels.”Tristran reflected for a moment. “I suppose I must have,” he said.

“You must come to the Vicarage, then, next week,” said the vicar. “We shall have tea, and you must tell me all about it. Once you’re settled back in. Eh?” And Tristran, who had always held the vicar in some awe, could do nothing but nod.

Louisa sighed, a little theatrically, and began to walk, briskly, in the direction of the Seventh Magpie. Tristran ran along the cobbles to catch her up, and then he was walking beside her.

“It does my heart good to see you again, my sister,” he said.

“As if we were not all worried sick about you,” she said, crossly, “what with all your gallivantings. And you did not even wake me to say good-bye. Father has been quite distracted with concern for you, and at Christmas, when you were not there, after we had eaten the goose and the pudding, Father took out the port and he toasted absent friends, and Mother sobbed like a babe, so of course I cried too, and then Father began to blow his nose into his best handkerchief and Grandmother and Grandfather Hempstock insisted upon pulling the Christmas crackers and reading the jolly mottoes and somehow that only made matters worse, and, to put it bluntly,Tristran, you quite spoiled our Christmas.”

“Sorry,” said Tristran. “What are we doing now? Where are we going?”

“We are going into the Seventh Pie,” said Louisa. “I should have thought that was obvious. Mister Bromios said that you could use his sitting room. There’s somebody there who needs to talk to you.” And she said nothing more as they went into the pub.

There were a number of faces Tristran recognized, and the people nodded at him, or smiled, or did not smile, as he walked through the crowds and made his way up the narrow stairs behind the bar to the landing with Louisa by his side.

The wooden boards creaked beneath their feet.

Louisa glared at Tristran. And then her lip trembled, and, to Tristran’s surprise, she threw her arms about him and hugged him so tightly that he could not breathe. Then, with not another word, she fled back down the wooden stairs.

He knocked at the door to the sitting room and went in. The room was decorated with a number of unusual objects, of small items of antique statuary and clay pots. Upon the wall hung a stick, wound about with ivy leaves, or rather, with a dark metal cunningly beaten to resemble ivy. Apart from the decorations the room could have been the sitting room of any busy bachelor with little time for sitting. It was furnished with a small chaise longue, a low table upon which was a well-thumbed leather-bound copy of the sermons of Laurence Sterne, a pianoforte, and several leather armchairs, and it was in one of these armchairs that Victoria Forester was sitting.

Tristran walked over to her slowly and steadily, and then he went down upon one knee in front of her, as once he had gone down on his knees before her in the mud of a country lane.

“Oh, please don’t,” said Victoria Forester, uncomfortably. “Please get up. Why don’t you sit down over there. In that chair? Yes. That’s better.” The morning light shone through the high lace curtains and caught her chestnut hair from behind, framing her face in gold. “Look at you,” she said. “You became a man. And your hand.

What happened to your hand?”

“I burnt it,” he said. “In a fire.”She said nothing in response, at first. She just looked at him. Then she sat back in the armchair and looked ahead of her, at the stick on the wall, or one of Mr. Bromios’s quaint old statues perhaps, and she said, “There are a number of things I must tell you, Tristran, and none of them will be easy. I would appreciate it if you said nothing until I have had a chance to say my piece. So: firstly, and perhaps most importantly, I must apologize to you. It was my foolishness, my idiocy, that sent you off on your journeyings. I thought you were joking . . . no, not joking. I thought that you were too much the coward, too much of a boy, ever to follow up on any of your fine, silly words. It was only when you had gone, and the days passed, and you did not return, that I realized that you had been in earnest, and by then it was much too late.

“I have had to live . . . each day . . . with the possibility that I had sent you to your death.”She stared ahead of herself as she spoke, and Tristran had the feeling, which became a certainty, that she had conducted this conversation in her head a hundred times in his absence. It was why he could not be permitted to say anything; this was hard enough on Victoria Forester, and she would not be able to manage it if he caused her to depart from her script.

“And I did not play you fair, my poor shop-boy . . . but you are no longer a shop-boy, are you? . . . since I thought that your quest was just foolishness, in every way . . .” She paused, and her hands gripped the wooden arms of the chair, grasping them so tightly her knuckles first reddened, then went white. “Ask me why I would not kiss you that night, Tristran Thorn.”

“It was your right not to kiss me,” said Tristran. “I did not come here to make you sad, Vicky. I did not find you your star to make you miserable.”Her head tipped to one side. “So you did find the star we saw that night?”

“Oh yes,” said Tristran. “The star is back in the meadow, though, right now. But I did what you asked me to do.”

“Then do something else for me now. Ask me why I would not kiss you that night. I had kissed you before, when we were younger, after all.”