Melena considers letting her lapels fall open a little. She stops herself though. Words come out of her mouth that she hasn’t anticipated.
“Severin,” she gabbles, “tell them not the children. Tell them to take me.”
“You just want a night off from babysitting, and you hardly lift a finger as it is,” says Nanny. She is deranged with fear. No one replies to her.
Though Melena has always liked being on display, here she is as few have seen her before. In this rare moment she’s found her footing—briefly. Pity it won’t be noticed except by these who will never mention it. Melena’s words mean little to Severin and to Snapper, because in their world, what mother wouldn’t say the same? While Nanny could never give witness because the question would then arise, Why didn’t you offer in Melena’s place?
When Elphaba was born, Melena had sent back word to her family at Colwen Grounds from the hardscrabble hamlet in Wend Hardings. She’d written: “Don’t come to find me. I left willingly, I left as a free agent. But send Nanny—I need some help.” Grudgingly, Melena’s grandfather had granted her request. Melena was his only grandchild, after all. So Nanny had readied herself for the severities of the gorse-bushed, scree-sloped wastebasket called Rush Margins. Arrived tutting, fussing, scheming. Any diplomatic contact between the generations of the Thropp line was conducted by Nanny, or Cattery Spunge as she was known when out of nanny drag and back in mufti.
But Nanny is a domestic, and she hasn’t ever forgotten it. Elphie and Nessa are her charges but not her children. It’s not her place to offer to be their stand-in. Putting on airs even to suggest such a transaction. Above her station. The very idea. She keeps her mouth shut.
As for Melena, this is her fine moment. For the briefest of instants she means what she says. Let them live, those appalling little mites, she thinks; even mites have a right to their squished lives.
“Take me,” she says again, as if she’s suddenly put together how her own actions helped bring to pass this moment on this riverbank on this warm winter morning in Quadling Country, southwest of Qhoyre. Though this is speculation; Melena has rarely bothered with cause and effect.
When Turtle Heart finally left the stone cottage in Rush Margins, Munchkinland, on the shores of Illswater, abandoning Melena and Frex, who had both been somewhat smitten with him, the simple Quadling prophet had taken up his quest again. True, after leaving Rush Margins, it had been some months before Turtle Heart ended up at Colwen Grounds. But he’d experienced his pilgrimage as part of the lesson. He had meandered and dragon-snaked with others as he had with Melena. Dust on the soup. While Melena’s belly swelled and the days of her confinement neared an end.
The Quadling glassblower had continued north in Munchkinland, stumbling upon that despised highway of yellow brick. He’d been told Center Munch was the provincial capital but that the most senior of the province’s Eminences, the Eminent Thropp, lived in a place more remote (the isolation of the privileged). A redoubt called Colwen Grounds. Which as it happens is right over that way. Cross three fields and a deer park and breast the ha-ha and there it is: That stodgy manor of stone facades and forecourts, arcades and symmetrical outbuildings. At last.
It must have been hard for the Quadling glassblower and self-appointed emissary to fathom, that his erstwhile lover Melena had been cultivated here—like a prize cabbage.
The hapless pilgrim hoped to get advice from a bigwig about how the Quadlings could best register a complaint against the Emerald City. He would knock on the wrong door, however. The Eminent Thropp had no influence upon the arriviste Wizard of Oz, that bounder who had deposed Pastorius, the Ozma Regent. The Eminent Thropp had no stake in what happened to mucky Quadlings. Despite Munchkinland and Quadling Country sharing a border. Not his bailiwick.
Turtle Heart, in the wrong place at the wrong time. An unlucky envoy of his people, anticipating an invasion yet foolishly trusting in diplomacy.
He had sallied in, bringing salutations from Melena and her minister husband. She says to tell you they intend to move from Rush Margins. I have complained of our plight and so they are intent on settling there, a presence for good among my people. They are taking up a position as missionaries to the Quadlings. You should be so proud of them.
The Eminent Thropp believed the Quadling’s assertions. His second daughter Sophelia having died of the flu, leaving no issue, the continuation of the line of Eminences depended on Lady Partra’s only child, Melena. That heiress granddaughter had already slipped her harness once; and out there in Wend Hardings tottered a small girl named Elphaba Thropp, in line to become Eminence. Growing up shoeless and untutored, probably. If Melena and her family chose to disappear even deeper into Muckland, the Peerless Thropp’s ancestral title and lands could be lost, his legacy squandered. And for what? For this blinking, peaceable foreigner delivering unwelcome news? And for all his ill-luck kin and kind?
In rage the Eminent Thropp had had the innocent removed. When questioned by the local constabulary later about the unfortunate event that followed—pro forma enquiries at best—Peerless Thropp murmured that the Quadling tinker had offered himself to avenge the spirits of drought that had plagued the land. A sort of impromptu mob showed up to do the dirty, not so unusual. “Human sacrifice” was noted, in those ironic quotes, for the record, but that the drought actually lifted shortly thereafter gave the murder some aftershock of legitimacy. Unfortunate but there you go. And news of it spread, little by little. Including back to the prophet’s home in the marshlands.
What the murdered man never learned was that the Eminent Thropp’s granddaughter was actually in residence at Colwen Grounds at the very moment he presented himself—for the last time in her life.
As Melena approached the hour of her second delivery, her uncertain memories surrounding Elphie’s birth had raised a sense of foreboding. She’d wanted the safety of medical expertise, not the gap-toothed leer of a Wend Hardings midwife. She’d persuaded Nanny to bring her back to her parents and her grandfather for the first time since her elopement. Naturally, she left Elphie with Frex—Melena wasn’t ready to put her green child on display in the parlors of the Eminence. She still harbored hopes that the creature might grow into a more savory skin tone. (When back in Colwen Grounds, Nanny had remained mum on the subject, as required.)
To complete her lying-in at her childhood home, Melena had been sequestered in a back room overlooking the stables. With a physician and a pair of nurses in attendance, she gave birth to Turtle Heart’s daughter just as he was being slaughtered in the forecourt. She didn’t know about it at the time. Being in labor does concentrate the mind. The roaring in her ears and from her throat drowned out sounds of the mob on the other side of the mansion.
So it is to avenge Turtle Heart’s murder that the warring band has finally arrived in the morning mist, this very day a year or so later, and is now looking for either of the young daughters of the Munchkinlander missionaries, as hostage, or perhaps as victims of vengeance.
Still. Melena. Why is it hard to look at her? Is it that she is beautiful, and beauty is hard to concentrate on? Is it that she has only ever had a bum rap, being a cold and unnatural mother like the rest of us, and that this one moment of dignity and even courage doesn’t conform with what else we know of her?
She will never be as brave again. As she is waiting for the chief to respond to Severin’s stuttered proposal on her behalf, she’s already sorry she spoke up. But her arms are still, her chin is high. She has more of her angry grandfather in her than she knows.
Elphaba will inherit some of this. But the green girl will not know it; she will believe she invented her own character for herself out of a lack of suitable guidance. But who cares whether she gets it right or not. Maybe it doesn’t matter how we’re made, in the end; it matters only who we are.