Now Frex. About him. At the best of times it’s hard to know what men are thinking, or even if they do think. Pious Frexspar, as much in love with his own high calling as with his daring claim on Melena Thropp, beloved of her grandfather the Eminence, one Peerless Thropp of Munchkinland.
Claim? It was nearly an abduction. Operettas have been embroidered upon feebler tissue than this. Frexispar Togue, spawn of a dissipated branch of the Togue clan that settled in the slopes of the Pertha Hills. (Cider vinegar people, and it showed.) Frexspar, related to some better-heeled Togue cousins still swanning about in the vicinity of Colwen Grounds. Visiting these wealthier relatives, pious young Frex was hoping to cadge a bursary from them to underwrite a year’s missionary effort in the Wend Hardings. His entreaties fell on deaf ears—the Togues near Colwen Grounds never underwrote nonsense that couldn’t improve their social standing.
Still, Frex was garrisoned with those pinch-pursed relatives on the day an invitation arrived. The annual ball to benefit the local almshouse. Might Frex tag along with his cousins? He might. Such a comedy, he thought, but dusted his own cuffs, a plan in mind.
Because of course the gentry would make an appearance at a charitable fête.
Sure enough, the Eminence, Peerless Thropp, in all his Eminent Throppiness, presided. Colwen Grounds was his estate, after all. He was the token moneybags, the local title—beribboned, bespectacled, bewigged, and bewildered. Lady Partra, his canny daughter and helpmeet, steered him by the elbow through silk-hung salons. Into his ear Lady Partra murmured the names of people the old man had known for decades so he could appear to recognize them when they approached in the reception line, curtseying and paying their homages. Allegiances. Tributes. Hypocrisies. The regular horseshit.
As Frex approached, Lady Partra murmured to her father, “I don’t know this one, he’s a cringing sort, likely to be earnest, watch out for him.” She wrinkled her nose. “Of the trades, no doubt.” Her own husband, Roman, eclipsed by ceremony and happy enough to skedaddle, loitered outside in the forecourt, feeding carrots to the arriving horses.
At Peerless Thropp’s other shoulder, his granddaughter, gorgeous Melena, hitched up her bodice apparatus. She prinked the rose on her shoulder, and like gobbets of blood, three petals fell off onto the floor at her feet. Frex noticed them. He would one day think they represented Melena’s three children. Each one a cause of sorrow. Melena will not think this herself because by the time the third baby happens along, she won’t have the wherewithal to remember petals; she dies in childbirth.
Lady Partra smiled first, encouragingly. She had no name to put forward into her father’s ear. The Eminent Thropp said, “Eh, what is this?” as if a street dog had come into the queue and was waiting permission to advance.
Behind Frex, the senior cousin Togue intervened. “Upon my word, I precede thee, Cousin Frexspar.” The more sanctimonious in that set still using thee and thou, affectedly, to prove a point.
“Ah,” said Lady Partra, and sotto voce to her father, “The sugar beet merchant, Lotronius Togue, and some rural relation of his, no doubt. If my nose tells true.”
“Call me Frexspar,” said the young man, his teeth white with holiness, his hair a little long for the sultry season. He wasted no time. “Your Eminence, if you will, I should like to tender an application for your patronage.”
“What is your cause?” asked the old man, forgetting his obligations to the next thirty people in the queue.
Lady Partra beamed with vacuous generosity though her voice became steely. “Not now, young man.”
“I have no other now,” said Frex, which he felt was a grand and important thing to say. And totally impromptu.
“Please, let me; I shall hear the cause,” said Melena. And, oh fool Lady Partra, oh fool her old father, they allowed Melena to wander away with this unfinished but good-looking man of broad shoulders and spindly arms. With an expression hungry for a donation.
But the senior Thropps, the Eminence and his devoted daughter, Lady Partra, didn’t realize they’d just donated the family heiress to a bounty hunter.
What did Melena Thropp see in Frex? Liberty. What did he see in her—he who relished his spiritual sight over any capacity of earthly observation? Did he even notice Melena’s eyes darting out under her cultivated eyelashes, over her augmented blush? But how could he not notice her? Even a blind man can often see the truth.
Pivoting about the small chamber to which they’ve repaired. The novice minister is intense and looming. His better clothes (he doesn’t have “best” clothes) can’t conceal a sugar beet odor from his skin—there’s no access to pomades in cousin Togue’s strict household. Melena is excited by this and her nostrils flare. Frex responds to flaring nostrils (who doesn’t?). They talk about the needs of the hinterlands. They both talk with enthusiasm, and neither realizes they are referring to different sorts of hinterlands.
Before the weekend is out Melena will have brokered for Frex a financial contribution, because the Eminent Thropp decides he’d best pay the young man to go away, to keep him from buzzing about the forecourt of Colwen Grounds uninvited.
Away goes the young man, under cover of night. With some cash. Away goes Peerless Thropp’s granddaughter with him. Frexspar has just enough authority of his office to be able to marry couples and so he marries himself to Melena Thropp. They light out for dismal, rural, weedy Wend Hardings. A district southwest of Colwen Grounds, where the Cloth Hills share a border with Quadling Country. Frex and Melena honeymoon in Wend Hardings. They endure their spiritual awakenings, such as they are, in Wend Hardings. Stony breakfasts, leaden dusks. As Frex dives ever deeper into persuasions of a more spiritual nature, Melena experiments with being casual in her approach to marital vows.
A this one, a that one. A traveling salesman. A goatherd from the scrubby slopes. A fetching Quadling glassblower who has come north on his way to complain about improprieties being taken against his home-scape back south, but who is mesmerized first by Melena and then, perhaps, by Frex himself. You could call it an affair along modern lines. Well, Frex is good-looking if you can get past the superiority of his calling—and he uses his brooding mien to attract both the penitents and their pittances. Then when this Turtle Heart, a sort of seer from the ruby fields under the waters of Quadling Country, remembers his original mission, he leaves the Wend Hardings cottage in the village of Rush Margins and eventually arrives at Colwen Grounds. Where the poor rube is murdered. Suppose he must not have been much of a seer. You can’t make this stuff up.
Elphie had already been born. Inside a clock, of all things. Capped by a mechanical dragon kitted out with mechanical incisors. But nobody talks of this. Nanny wasn’t there, Turtle Heart hadn’t yet come and gone, Boozy hadn’t been thought up, Melena had been out of her skull from chewing pinlobble leaves for the pain, and Frex was away on the circuit. Nobody but Elphie knew about the swinging pendulum, the way it slices time into ribbons, and Elphie—well, she may have been born with all those shark teeth in her mouth, but if she also had a sharp tongue on her first night on this earth, she kept it to herself.