Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,124

going out on that horse?” Aunt Cord had said, putting her bowl down and sitting in a shaft of early sun. It was a bad location, one she never would have allowed herself to be caught in had Mr. Jonas been in attendance. The strong light made her face look like a carved mask. There was a cold-sore growing at one corner of her mouth; she always got them when she was not sleeping well.

“Aye,” Susan said.

“Ye should eat more’n that, then. ’Twon’t keep ye til nine o’ the clock, girl.”

“It’ll keep me fine,” Susan had replied, eating the sections of orange faster. She could see where this was tending, could see the look of dislike and disapproval in her aunt’s eyes, and wanted to get away from the table before trouble could begin.

“Why not let me get ye a dish of this?” Aunt Cord asked, and plopped her spoon into her oatmeal. To Susan it sounded like a horse’s hoof stamping down in mud—or shit—and her stomach clenched. “It’ll hold ye to lunch, if ye plan to ride so long. I suppose a fine young lady such as yerself can’t be bothered with chores—”

“They’re done.” And you know they’re done, she did not add. I did em while you were sitting before your glass, poking at that sore on your mouth.

Aunt Cord dropped a chunk of creamery butter into her muck—Susan had no idea how the woman stayed so thin, really she didn’t—and watched it begin to melt. For a moment it seemed that breakfast might end on a reasonably civilized note, after all.

Then the shirt business had begun.

“Before ye go out, Susan, I want ye to take off that rag you’re wearing and put on one of the new riding blouses Thorin sent ye week before last. It’s the least ye can do to show yer—”

Anything her aunt might have said past that point would have been lost in anger even if Susan hadn’t interrupted. She passed a hand down the sleeve of her shirt, loving its texture—it was almost velvety from so many washings. “This rag belonged to my father!”

“Aye, Pat’s.” Aunt Cord sniffed. “It’s too big for ye, and worn out, and not proper, in any case. When you were young it was mayhap all right to wear a man’s button-shirt, but now that ye have a woman’s bustline . . .”

The riding blouses were on hangers in the corner; they had come four days ago and Susan hadn’t even deigned to take them up to her room. There were three of them, one red, one green, one blue, all silk, all undoubtedly worth a small fortune. She loathed their pretension, and the overblown, blushy-frilly look of them: full sleeves to flutter artistically in the wind, great floppy foolish collars . . . and, of course, the low-scooped fronts which were probably all Thorin would see if she appeared before him dressed in one. As she wouldn’t, if she could possibly help it.

“My ‘woman’s bust-line,’ as you call it, is of no interest to me and can’t possibly be of any interest to anyone else when I’m out riding,” Susan said.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. If one of the Barony’s drovers should see you—even Rennie, he’s out that way all the time, as ye well know—it wouldn’t hurt for him to mention to Hart that he saw ye wearing one of the camisas that he so kindly gave to ye. Now would it? Why do ye have to be such a stiff-kins, girl? Why always so unwilling, so unfair?”

“What does it matter to ye, one way or t’other?” Susan had asked. “Ye have the money, don’t ye? And ye’ll have more yet. After he fucks me.”

Aunt Cord, her face white and shocked and furious, had leaned across the table and slapped her. “How dare thee use that word in my house, ye malhablada? How dare ye?”

That was when her tears began to flow—at hearing her call it her house. “It was my father’s house! His and mine! Ye were all on yer own with no real place to go, except perhaps to the Quarters, and he took ye in! He took ye in, Aunt!”

The last two orange sections were still in her hand. She threw them into her aunt’s face, then pushed herself back from the table so violently that her chair tottered, tipped, and spilled her to the floor. Her aunt’s shadow fell over her. Susan crawled frantically out of it, her hair hanging, her slapped cheek