Sherbet and Sherry
Xavier walked the length of the long table and came back carrying two glasses.
One held sherry — and the other was piled high with lemon sherbet.
Dolores was struck speechless for a moment, then let out a short laugh.
I told myself I wouldn't laugh at him today.
"So you get sherry, and I get sherbet?"
"You like it. It's not orange, though."
She could only conclude that he'd gotten one over on her.
Without a word, she picked up her spoon and took a bite. It was cold, with a vivid tartness that lingered on the tip of her tongue. Her mouth felt clean again.
An old memory came rushing back, sharp and clear.
It was sometime after she'd learned the pleasure of drinking herself tipsy with her friends from the dance academy.
No — the day after. Dolores was in the grip of that bitter regret most drinkers experience at least once in their lives after overdoing it.
Clutching a bucket, eyes bleary, she was wandering the maze of thoughts that began and ended with why did I drink that much. I'm going to die.
She felt so wretched, so helpless, that she'd simply collapsed where she was — and that was when Xavier showed up.
Eat.
What he held out to her, looking down at her with unmistakable contempt, was orange sherbet packed over ice.
"I can't dr— no, I can't eat. If it were you, could you even think about eating right now..."
"Think? There's no thinking about it."
"Hey."
"If you had the presence of mind for that, you wouldn't be in this state. Funny how different this is from all your lectures about proper ladylike conduct."
"I'll hear your pitiful philosophy of ladyhood later. Really, not now. Please. I'm going to be sick."
"So eat."
She was at the point where anything that touched her lips came right back up, water included — but Dolores felt she could do anything at all, so long as it meant waking from this hangover that seemed like it would last forever.
"And if it doesn't work?"
"Then throw up."
It was delivered in that dry tone of his, and yet somehow she couldn't refuse. So she'd forced it down, fighting back nausea — that sherbet. It had been so wonderfully cold and bright. A taste that somehow settled her stomach.
Dolores blinked slowly.
The flavor spreading through her mouth wasn't the same as back then, and yet, for some reason, it made her feel exactly as she had that day.
She lifted her head and looked at Xavier. He was taking an unhurried sip of his sherry, as if nothing at all had happened.
She couldn't figure him out.
Up until her accident, Dolores had been rather more sociable. There was a time she could attend parties like this two or three times a week.
But was it because she knew, herself, that those days were behind her? Or was it simply that it had been so long the whole thing felt foreign? She had the odd sensation of dancing to music with no melody she could follow.
Xavier, by contrast, was mingling with his friends as though he hadn't just returned to Lange days ago.
He joked about his years abroad, showed a cynically detached curiosity — or was it interest? — in this or that person's news, and steered the conversation along with questions pitched precisely where they belonged.
Every so often a certain aura would surface, the kind peculiar to geniuses, so excessive in its confidence it might be called arrogance, and he would talk down to someone or needle them without missing a beat. But that register was, in truth, a kind of culture among Lange's hot-blooded young men.
"Well, if it isn't the cripple. What brings you out?"
And so, naturally, this sort of thing happened too.
The jab came from one of two young men seated on a sofa a little ways off.
Marc and Nathan. Both old acquaintances — and both, since long ago, exactly the type of boy Dolores had never liked.
"Long time no see."
"The rarest of ladies graces us with her presence. Aren't you the count's daughter?"
Nathan spoke in a slurred drawl, chin propped in his palm. His hair was soaked through, as if he'd been playing in the pool, a towel slung around his neck, and his eyes were half-unfocused.
Marc shot her an awkward nod and tapped Nathan's arm. Drop it. You're saying too much.
But Nathan swatted his hand away like he was shooing a fly and looked her over with the expression of a man touring a zoo.
"I heard you'd never walk again. So you can walk after all? That cane of yours is a real hoot, though — the kind my grandmother would use."
Dolores remembered why she'd never liked Nathan.
It was his shallow, blunt manner — he simply struck her as uncultured. Nathan himself insisted it was the free will of an artist with an honest soul.
"Still chasing rumors around, I see. Why not try minding your own business for once?"
"My business is you, right now. I mean, I heard about your accident on the ice, but is that really how it ended? You can walk, sure — but can you run? Now that I think of it, aren't you going to dance?"
Having had his sneer, Nathan abruptly started laughing to himself. Marc apologized on his behalf, grudgingly.
"Sorry, Artois. He's had far too much to drink."
"Why, why? You're curious too, aren't you?"
To young men, a joke lobbed from just across the line of malice was entertainment. She confessed it to herself now: there had been a time when Dolores had laughed along with exactly those jokes of theirs.
Shame rose in her all at once. She gripped the skirt over her knees hard, then let go — she had no wish to engage with them any further — and tightened her hold on her cane. And in the very moment the tip of it clicked against the floor again—
A broad man's back filled her field of vision.
It was Xavier.
One hand jammed crookedly in his pocket, he planted himself between Dolores and Nathan like a wall.
When Nathan noticed him, he twisted his face into gratuitous discomfort and sneered.
"Xavier Bransen, Lange's celebrated man of the hour. What exactly do you think changes when a knight deigns to show up?"
Xavier shook his head and laughed low.
"Nathan, what are you even... Are you drunk?"
"You can see for yourself, can't you?"
"Your grandmother had something to say about you. Something about spending less time commenting on other people's music and actually learning to read the score for your own part. Which is how you ended up like this — cut from the performance before it even opened, wasn't it?"
The screech of the sofa table being shoved back raked at every ear in the room, and all eyes converged on them. Marc, too, looked up in alarm at Nathan, who had surged to his feet.
Nathan was an aspiring actor himself, and until recently he had been performing at one of Lange's small playhouses.
But thanks to an excess of private scandal and a total inability to carry his aria, he had been dismissed before the curtain ever rose.
"Haven't you all heard? About Debeilla?"
Xavier tilted his head with perfect composure.
"Word going around is you couldn't even hold on to a bit part. Got yourself cut."
"......"
"Some people rise all the way to the prince, to leading roles. Hard luck for you. Couldn't even manage knight."
As Nathan, flushed and unsteady, began stalking toward Xavier, Marc grabbed his wrist quick as lightning.
"Don't."
"Let go. I'm going to kill that bastard."
"What is this, a line from the role you got cut from?"
Someone's burst of laughter was the trigger. Nathan kicked off from the sofa and surged up. Marc threw himself in, blocking him with his whole body.
"Xavier, enough! He's been torn up about it, you know he has!"
If Nathan was a simple, direct sort of man, Xavier had always been the type to leap onto the stage without ever having read the script. He never followed a flow anyone had planned in advance.
Men like Marc knew that as if by instinct.
"What's wrong with friends asking after each other? Marc, you've been well? I hear you've managed to keep yourself looked after, in your own modest way. Unlike whoever's standing next to you."
"That's right, what of it."
"You—!"
In the end, Nathan's temper won out and he flipped the table over. The young men who'd been watching uneasily moved to block him as he reached for a bottle, and Marc needed no saying.
Amid a chaos of muttering, laughter, jeers, and whistles, Xavier turned away with perfect calm.
Dolores stood quietly and met him as he came back to her.
"Why on earth would you bother with something that far gone."
His voice was so loose and unhurried it was almost tender. A face utterly without conscience — at times like this, she rather liked it.
It took four men to hold down the hulking Nathan, and even then it wasn't enough. At last Marc, arms locked around his waist, practically hanging off him, shouted:
"Hey, Xavier! Just say it once! Say you're sorry!"
But Xavier was not a man who knew how to apologize. Dolores knew he wouldn't — and he didn't.
In the end, it was Antoine who restored order, arriving with the news from the sponsor's side. Antoine was the cousin of Pierre, the host of tonight's party.
He looked the room over once, and said, shortly:
"What is all this."
He'd enlisted in his late teens, and while his body was solid, it was his bearing that set him apart. Without raising his voice at all, the young men were already subdued.
"Nathan, he—"
No explanation was needed. Nathan was already bellowing.