Chapter Text
Crage Hall in the absence of green gaped with guttedness. The ivy on the facade had withered and fallen away, baring the scars of old stone—cracks, pockmarks, places where the masonry had settled under the burden of its own age. Glinda had never noticed these flaws before, consumed as she was by architectural ecstasy. The plane leaves had faded to the hue of over-fermented honey. The water in the Suicide Canal shimmered with a graphitic blackness, and air bubbles caught in the oily film. The light of the early streetlamps refracted through the fog into pale-golden halos. The boxwood spheres stood impoverished.
Elphaba’s bed had been made up with a new coverlet sent from home. Cotton print in a fine green-and-gold check. Glinda turned her head away so sharply that her vertebrae cracked. She lacked the resolve to ask for the bedding to be changed, lacked the courage to demand the removal of the candlestick on the far side, whose silhouette in the dusk took on the shape of a hunched figure.
She lowered herself onto her own pallet by the window—the old one, with its disagreeably sagging mattress—and sat there until evening prayers, when the housekeepers lit the lamps in the chapel. No one came to visit Glinda. Pfannee and Shenshen, having heard of her return, sent a note inviting her to tea, but Glinda fed the parchment to the candle flame, watching it writhe, blacken, curl into a spiral, and at last crumble to ash.
“I have a headache,” she muttered to the maid who dared ask the next day if all was well. Glinda’s head always ached. Likewise her throat. And her hypochondrium, where, she fancied, a clot of spun glass had lodged itself.
Her laughter became too bright and too sustained, breaking into hysterical staccato where cantabile would have been proper. Her friends dubbed her “lively.” Decidedly like a torch-bearer at a carnival who knows that by evening he will be set alight.
Nessarose proved hard as flint.
Glinda volunteered to help her out of an itching, almost compulsive urge—she wanted to be nearer to what remained of Elphaba. To her blood, her scent, her prickly way of brushing off assistance. In Nessarose’s demands one sensed a steel Glinda had never noticed in her sister.
“Comb my hair,” Nessarose would order, and Glinda obediently took the brush, drawing it through the stiff strands that smelled of myrrh soap. “No, further left. Can’t you do anything right?”
“I have never brushed anyone’s hair but my own,” Glinda would reply, and in her voice lived a predatory submission.
Sometimes, fastening the buttons of Nessarose’s dress, Glinda remembered how her own mother had once laced her grandmother’s corset—a ritual of passing female helplessness from hand to hand. But Nessarose was not helpless. She was an anchor. She lived in the adjoining room, while Nanny tottered in to tend her solitary charge. Yet Glinda, to everyone’s surprise including her own, took on most of the care for Elphaba’s sister.
“Tell me,” Glinda would inquire with feigned nonchalance, braiding a strand, “has your sister written anything?”
Nessarose narrowed her eyes with the frosty manner of a cat.
“Elphaba does not write. She does not look back. She considers the past dead weight that must be cast off.”
Glinda yanked the braid harder than she should have, and Nessarose hissed.
“Sorry,” Glinda said, without a trace of regret.
On the windowsill lay a textbook on transfiguration. Its spine was frayed, some pages dog-eared, but Glinda did not remember having read them.
“Elphaba will return only over my corpse. Or her own. She is not one to do anything by halves.”
She did me by halves.
She sat by the bedside, changed compresses, read aloud the lives of the saints (Nessa insisted on those). And gradually, between the lines, she began to glean fragments:
“She never knew how to rest,” Nessarose would yawn. “Elphaba. Always running, running, running. Like a wound-up toy. I remember when we lived in the Quadling backwoods, and she would climb trees all day, then sit and stare into her glass.”
And then—without warning, like a blow to the solar plexus—Glinda was overwhelmed by a vision: a small green girl with solemn eyes, clinging to a branch, hanging over a swamp where vapors spread across the ground like a shroud. Alone. Always alone.
She had been tiny, and no one took her hand because her hands frightened them. And no one kissed her on the crown of her head because her hair smelled of fear. And she climbed trees to be nearer the sky, because the earth rejected her.
Study became morphine. Glinda tore into incantations with the ferocity of a marten savaging a partridge. Miss Greyling, noting her progress, first praised her, then began to grow wary.
“You have a gift, my dear, but you are overworking yourself. Why are you cramming temporal inversion? You understand that it is a theoretical section; in practice no one—”
“I want to comprehend,” Glinda snapped, at which Miss Greyling fell silent and retreated to her desk cluttered with bottles of murky tinctures.
In one lesson, the magister Greyling failed with her usual dismal consistency to transfigure a chicken. This time the feathered victim turned into a sort of stool plastered with feathers and clucked piteously from beneath the seat. The other girls tittered. Glinda did not laugh. She stared at the stump of the chicken’s leg protruding from under the seat and thought about amputation. About how to join what had been rent, how to sew back what had been severed.
She remembered Elphaba’s hand, which that last night in the inn had traveled up her belly—from the pubis to the sternum, slowly, like a heated rod. Glinda had held her breath then, not knowing where to put her hands, where to hide her face blazing with morning rose. And the next morning, at the station, just before the carriage door slammed shut, Elphaba had kissed her. On the lips. In front of two old women with sacks, a fat Glikkun dwarf picking his teeth with a straw, and horses that did not even lift their heads.
“Hold out, if you can,” Elphaba had said then. As if she were speaking of the strength of walls, not of something melting inside Glinda like sealing wax over a flame.
“Brave girl,” Elphaba had whispered, pressing her forehead against Glinda’s. “Now you know I can offer you nothing.” Glinda remembered the weight of that forehead.
Glinda slammed her fist on the desk. The chicken-stool gave a frightened cluck and turned into a pumpkin. Miss Greyling clapped her hands.
“Bravo, Miss Glinda! You clearly have a talent for spontaneous magic!”
Glinda examined the pumpkin, which in turn began to sprout through the cracks in the floor. She became first in her course. Within two weeks—first in her cohort. Within a month Madame Morrible summoned her to her office and offered private lessons in the evenings. Glinda agreed, because evenings were unbearable.
At night, when the corridors of Crage Hall fell quiet and the oil lamps in the wall brackets began to crackle with fatigue, exuding the smell of rancid oil, Glinda would retrieve from under her mattress an object wrapped in a silk handkerchief. A small button covered in black velvet, which she had torn from Elphaba’s cloak when the other woman turned away at the station to fasten her buckle. Elphaba had not noticed. Or had pretended not to.
Glinda rolled the button between her fingers, feeling a knot swell in her throat—tight as a fist.
“You fiend,” she whispered into the darkness, where the corners of the room fused into a single inky suspension. “Not a letter, not a word. You might as well be dead, so I would know for certain.”
She wept until her tears ran dry—hot, salty tears that burned furrows into her cheeks. Then she rose, powdered her reddened lids, pulled on her most opulent dress of changeant silk shifting from “withered rose to bog mud,” embroidered with beads, and descended to the drawing room, where Pfannee and Shenshen were already rehearsing for a musical evening, plucking the strings of a viola.
“My dears,” she proclaimed from the threshold, smiling so broadly that it seemed her face might split at the seams like over-dried clay. “Would you care for a game of vingt-et-un? I feel in a dreadfully reckless mood today.”
They exchanged glances but nodded. Glinda sat down at the table covered in green baize and deliberately lost—with such elegance and feigned despair that her friends threw back their heads and howled with laughter.
“You are simply a delight,” Pfannee said, shuffling the deck.
“I am a delight,” Glinda repeated to herself, and felt something snap inside. Snap and hang by a thin thread.
On Lurlinemas Eve, when the whole campus drowned in gilded garlands and paper lanterns, and the fireplaces gave off the scent of juniper and clove, Glinda drank herself into oblivion.
She remembered only that she had drunk with Crope and Tibbett at the Peach and Kidney tavern beneath kerosene lamps. Around her, the sweetness of the cheapest pipe tobacco, with its aftertaste of liquorice and burnt cork. Tabletops scored with burned rings from glasses and with the letter X. A pretty waiter darted about, collecting ringing glasses.
Glinda laughed so hard she broke her fan—the ivory slats scattered across the floor. She drank her whiskey neat; the cheap spirit scorched her gullet, and she felt as if a bonfire were kindling inside her, incinerating memory. After the third glass she could no longer distinguish faces: they all blurred into a single smudge, like an old watercolour that someone had wiped with a damp rag. Someone—Tibbett or a strange man smelling of garlic—held another glass to her lips, and she drank because it was easier than arguing.
She lost consciousness at the table, her head falling into a plate of scraps. She came to in the coatroom. Tibbett, staggering, was dragging her by the armpits while she hiccupped and tried to unbutton her collar, which choked her like a noose. There, in the darkness among strangers’ cloaks that smelled of cheap perfume, she burst into sobs, wailing. Some woman in feathers came and embraced her, and Glinda pressed herself to the woman’s breast. The woman stroked her head and murmured soothing things, but the words did not matter. Only the fact that someone held her while her body shuddered with spasms like dry heaves.
Tibbett, who was himself no better—with his kohl-rimmed eyes and trembling hands—also embraced her and muttered, “Let it go, dear, we’ve all been through it.”
Ama Clipp found her at dawn in the corridor of Crage Hall, by the laundry-room door, where Glinda sat slumped against the icy wall with a split lip and a glazed stare. Straw tangled in her hair; the hem of her dress was torn. She could not remember how she had got there. Perhaps someone had carried her. Perhaps she had crawled. Ama Clipp gasped, fluttered her dry little hands, and set to bustling—fetching a wet towel, smelling salts, charcoal tablets. Glinda fought her off, hissing like a cornered cat, demanding to be left alone. Ama Clipp plied her with mint tea from a cracked mug and sighed:
“Young ladies should not behave so. What will your family say?”
“My family,” Glinda forced out, feeling her tongue swollen and too large for her mouth, “will pay you to keep quiet. As always.”
The next morning she told Ama:
“Bring me coffee. Black. And have the carriage summoned by evening. I am leaving for Frottica. Home.”
“In such a state?”
“In such a state,” Glinda cut her off. “At home they will wash me clean. At home they will glue me back together.”
But at home, pretence came no more easily. Her parents, noticing her hollowed face and perpetual exhaustion, blamed it all on academic overwork. Her mother whispered with a doctor who prescribed “complete rest and fresh air.” Glinda agreed, nodded, smiled her cracked smile—and at night she rummaged through the sideboard for the brandy her father used for his migraines. When the brandy ran out, she turned to the tincture of opium poppy kept in the medicine cabinet for nervous spasms.
Sir Chuffrey, her betrothed, sent hampers of truffles, candied fruits, goose-liver pâté, and among these delicacies there would invariably be a bottle of plum brandy from his estate—dark, with a wax seal. Glinda sipped from the crystal tumbler she kept under her pillow and stared at the wall. Sometimes she drank in the morning, before rising—one swallow, to shut herself up.
Once, after a particularly disastrous evening in Frottica—she had got drunk at a neighbour’s dinner party, smashed a vase, and insulted the hostess—her parents sent her back to Shiz, hoping that study and a strict regimen would knock some sense into her. But on the train she took out the flask she had prudently filled before leaving, and arrived at Crage Hall half-drunk already.
A few days later she woke on a bench by the Suicide Canal—by some miracle she had wandered back to Shiz. Her head was splitting as if someone were driving nails into her skull. Her mouth tasted bitter, as after vomiting. Her dress was stained with something dark that looked like wine or blood. Beside her sat an old man with a goaty beard, in a greasy frock coat, lecturing her on the sins of the flesh and shaking a knotted staff.
“…for debauchery softens the soul,” he declaimed, spraying spittle.
“At least it doesn’t break the bones,” Glinda muttered, rising on unsteady legs. “Take your debauchery elsewhere, sir.”
She swayed but kept her balance—out of sheer stubbornness and hatred for this preacher, who so reminded her of Elphaba’s father.
She stumbled back to the dormitory, each step a cannon shot to her temples. In her room she collapsed onto the bed and slept for fourteen hours. And when she woke, the first thing she did was reach for the half-empty bottle of port in her nightstand. Her hands shook so badly that she spilled wine on the sheets. She drank straight from the neck, not bothering to look, with a groan.
In the library she picked up a textbook, opened it to the marked page, and began to recite an incantation meant to transform a candle stub into a swallow. The stub smoked and melted, but no swallow appeared. Instead, a grotesque lump of wax with sprouting feathers dropped shamefacedly to the floor and lay still.
“Damn it,” Glinda whispered and crushed it under her heel.
She wanted to smash everything around her—mirrors, cups, her own reflection in the window glass. She held back, but sometimes magic broke free on its own, without her will: a mirror would web with cracks if she held her gaze too long; water in the pitcher would boil as she passed; candles would snuff themselves as if strangled. Once, during a particularly severe fit of despair—after she had smashed a vial of sedative and drunk its contents, hoping simply to fall asleep and not wake—all the furniture in her room shifted an inch toward the wall, as though trying to flee from her.
Miss Greyling began to watch her thoughtfully and remarked:
“Strong emotions are poor helpers in witchcraft, my dear. They distort intention.”
Glinda lost faith in magic. And that same evening, weeping into her pillow until the sheet was soaked and tears had trickled into her ears, she conjured a tiny flame on the tip of her finger. An undeniable miracle, requiring no formulas, no passes, no practiced gestures. The flame burned for three minutes—the eye of a tiny beast—and then died, leaving a barely visible burn on her skin.
Glinda stared at the burn and thought: She marked me. Even from there.
Now she sought solitude with the hunger of a starving creature. In the evenings she locked herself in the library tower and read ancient treatises on resurrection, on sealing a wound without touching it, on bringing back a drowned man if his lungs had not yet cooled. She simply wanted to know how it was done—in case Elphaba ever returned in pieces that could be glued together.
She turned pages that offered recipes: menstrual blood, ash of a burnt lily, a whisper at dawn spoken in a graveyard. Nonsense. Charlatanry. But she memorised them. Just in case.
She yearned for Elphaba to see her now: so focused, so strong, so wicked.
During tea with Milla and the other girls in the drawing room, among the porcelain knick-knacks, Glinda fixed her gaze on the windowsill. There, along the edge, a ladybug crept—its tiny red carapace with black spots, its antennae feeling the air. Glinda watched it without blinking and felt a formless rage rising inside her.
“What’s wrong?” Milla asked, setting down her cup with a clatter.
“Nothing,” Glinda said, and crushed the insect with her finger. The ladybug crunched, leaving an oily smear mingled with something red on her skin.
Milla gasped and recoiled.
“Why did you do that? They’re harmless.”
“I cannot abide insects,” Glinda said, wiping her finger on a napkin and leaving a dirty stain.
She had never noticed them before. She had never noticed how easily cruelty took root in her when there was no one to restrain her.