Angie > Books: belovedbookshelf‎ (166)

Only two things in the world people count by months. How old a baby is, and how long since something awful happened.

He thinks that the game may have earned those metaphors. It's slow and often seems pointless. It's beautiful, when it isn't a mess. There's a vast ocean of mercy for mistakes: getting hits half the time is nothing short of a miracle, and even the best fielders are expected to have errors. The inevitability of failure is built into the game.

Maybe Mark is wrong. Maybe this swing will slip away from Eddie, or maybe it will settle into something just above marginal, something good enough but never great. He knows better than to count on good things lasting. But when he watches Eddie—when he sees that stern set of his jaw, and when Eddie flashes a grin toward the bleachers—Mark thinks he's seeing something that's for keeps.

"I love you," Eddie says.
"You're a nightmare," Mark returns, in precisely the same tone of voice.

"Are you okay?" He must be really tall. His voice sounded like it came from ten feet above her.
"Sure. Why do you ask?"
"Because you are crying. In my bathroom."
"Oh, I'm not crying. Well, I sort of am, but it's just tears, you know?"
"I do not."
She sighed, slumping against the tiled wall. "It's my contacts. They expired some time ago, and they were never that great to begin with. They messed up my eyes. I've taken them off, but . . . " She shrugged. Hopefully in his direction. "It takes awhile, before they get better."
"You put in expired contacts?" He sounded personally offended.
"Just a little expired."
"What's 'a little'?"
"I don't know. A few years?"
"What?" His consonants were sharp and precise. Crisp. Pleasant.
"Only just a couple, I think."
"Just a couple of years?"
"It's okay. Expiration dates are for the weak."

She was just going to pretend nothing had happened, nod at him politely, and tiptoe her way out of here. Yes, solid plan.
"Did you . . . Did you just kiss me?" He sounded puzzled, and maybe a little out of breath. His lips were full and plump and . . . God. Kissed. There was simply no way Olive could get away with denying what she had just done.
Still, it was worth a try.
"Nope."
Surprisingly, it seemed to work.
"Ah. Okay, then." Carlsen nodded and turned around, looking vaguely disoriented. He took a couple of steps down the hallway, reached the water fountain—maybe where he'd been headed in the first place.
Olive was starting to believe that she might actually be off the hook when he halted and turned back with a skeptical expression.
"Are you sure?

"What did Adam's fortune cookie say?"
"Mmm." Olive made a show to look at the strip. "Not much. Just 'Holden Rodrigues, Ph.D., is a loser.'" Malcolm sped up just as Holden flipped her off, making her burst into laughter.
"What does it really say?" Adam asked when they were finally alone.
Olive handed him the crumpled paper and remained silent as he angled it to read it in the lamplight. She wasn't surprised when she saw a muscle jump in his jaw, or when he slid the fortune into the pocket of his jeans. She knew what it said, after all.
You can fall in love: someone will catch you.

From her window she could see Sir Phillip's greenhouse. She assumed that was where he was, since she hadn't heard him here in the house, stomping about and bellowing at his children. The glass was fogged up and the only thing she could see was a blurry curtain of green—his beloved plants, she supposed. What sort of man was he, that he preferred plants to people? Certainly not anyone who appreciated a fine conversation.
She felt her shoulders sag. Eloise had spent half her life in search of a fine conversation.

"It's not that at all," she said quickly, mostly just to make him stop talking about it. "It was . . . " Her voice trailed off, and she sighed. "It was . . . "
And then she told him everything. All about the marriage proposals she'd received, and the ones Penelope hadn't, and the plans they'd jokingly made to grow old and spinsterish together. And she told him how guilty she'd felt when Penelope and Colin had married, and she couldn't stop thinking about herself and how alone she was.
She told him all that and more. She told him what was in her mind and what was in her heart, and she told him things she'd never told another soul. And it occurred to her that for a woman who opened her mouth every other second, there was an awful lot inside of her that she'd never shared.
And then, when she was done (and, in truth, she didn't even realize she'd finished; she just kind of ran out of energy and dwindled off into silence), he reached out and took her hand.
"It's all right," he said.
And it was, she realized. It actually was.

I've arrived in London without incident.
There are few triumphs in my recent life, but I count this as one. My existence of the last three years has been nothing but incident.

Do you have an obscure fact regarding cartography that would catch the attention of a man whose only other interest is the sweet pea?

I PRESUME THAT WAS A SERIOUS QUESTION?

It was.

THE HEREFORD MAPPA MUNDI IS ORIENTED TO THE EAST. PERHAPS A COMMENT ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS? IF HE IS AN ENTHUSIAST, ANY USE OF THE WORD MAPPA MUNDI SHOULD WORK IN YOUR FAVOUR.

Then he sent another:

FAR BE IT FROM ME TO PRY INTO YOUR PERSONAL BUSINESS, BUT ARE YOU CERTAIN THIS IS A MAN YOU WISH TO IMPRESS?

I laughed.

He is moneyed, with a good deal in the funds, three country estates, and would spend his life consumed by cartography and the sweet pea, thus proclaimed an eligible candidate. Alas, not for me, but my cousin, a reality I fully accept.

USE THE WORD THEORY IF YOU CAN. MEN WHO THINK THEY KNOW A GREAT DEAL FIND SATISFACTION FROM THE WORD.

THE VERY LITTLE I KNOW ABOUT YOUR LIFE EXHAUSTS ME.

I've arrived in London without incident.
There are few triumphs in my recent life, but I count this as one. My existence of the last three years has been nothing but incident.

Do you have an obscure fact regarding cartography that would catch the attention of a man whose only other interest is the sweet pea?

I PRESUME THAT WAS A SERIOUS QUESTION?

It was.

THE HEREFORD MAPPA MUNDI IS ORIENTED TO THE EAST. PERHAPS A COMMENT ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS? IF HE IS AN ENTHUSIAST, ANY USE OF THE WORD MAPPA MUNDI SHOULD WORK IN YOUR FAVOUR.

Then he sent another:

FAR BE IT FROM ME TO PRY INTO YOUR PERSONAL BUSINESS, BUT ARE YOU CERTAIN THIS IS A MAN YOU WISH TO IMPRESS?

I laughed.

He is moneyed, with a good deal in the funds, three country estates, and would spend his life consumed by cartography and the sweet pea, thus proclaimed an eligible candidate. Alas, not for me, but my cousin, a reality I fully accept.

USE THE WORD THEORY IF YOU CAN. MEN WHO THINK THEY KNOW A GREAT DEAL FIND SATISFACTION FROM THE WORD.

THE VERY LITTLE I KNOW ABOUT YOUR LIFE EXHAUSTS ME.

Sometimes Simon kisses me like it's the end of the world, and I worry he might believe that it is.

Simon Snow, it hurts to look at you when you're this happy.
And it hurts to look at you when you're depressed.
There's no safe time for me to see you, nothing about you that doesn't tear my heart from my chest and leave it breakable outside my body.

Go ahead and shoot me. This isn't my favourite shirt.

"The homes are so far apart," Snow says. Now that we're off the motorway, we can hear each other speak again. "It seems a bit greedy, doesn't it? Just to take up as much space as you can?"
"They're not that far apart," I say.
"Not to you; you grew up in a mansion."
"I grew up at the top of a tower," I say. "With you."

A dreamer, a dream, and Declan: that was the brothers Lynch.

Declan Lynch knew he was boring.

He'd worked very hard to be that way, after all. It was a magic trick he didn't expect any prize from but survival, even as he looked at other lives and imagined them his. He didn't fool himself. He knew what he was allowed to do and to want and to put in his life.

He knew Jordan Hennessy didn't belong.

But still, when he came back from the National Gallery of Art to his empty town house, he closed the door behind him and for a moment he just leaned against it, eyes closed, pretending—no, not even pretending. He just didn't think. For one second of one minute of the day, he didn't run the probabilities and worst-case scenarios and possibilities and consequences. For one second of one minute of the day, he just let himself feel.

There it was:

Happiness.

She wanted to stop being afraid, and she wanted to be able to call Declan Lynch and give him something she'd painted with Tyrian purple, and she wanted to have a future that didn't look exactly like her past.

At the end of that session, Fay said, What if it's not what happened with this boy you regret, it's you? It's the you who you left behind. It's who you were at eighteen and the things that happened subsequently, and you look back on it as a watershed. You broke up with yourself.

This hit me as fearsomely true.

I mean, if I was Doctor Who's new companion, and he was agitatedly racing around the Tardis, throwing levers on the control panel, the noise like bellows starting as the time machine mechanism booted up and saying, "Where to, Georgina Horspool?" I'd waste no time in identifying early evening in a crap pub in northern England in the early twenty-first century.

A blond-haired girl in a red dress from Dorothy Perkins and uncomfortable shoes is unsteadily making her way there.

For the time being, she has no experience of managing chronic pain.

Lucas McCarthy. An unknown, who kept to himself, like all future murderers. Not social contagion, but not who I would've chosen.

He was lean, with a pointed chin; it gave him a slightly underfed look. He was Irish, signaled by the scruffy-short tar-black hair and pale skin. Some wags called him Gerry Adams, but not to his face because apparently his older brother was tough as nails.

Lucas was looking up at me, warily, with dark, serious eyes. I was taken aback by how easily I could read his startled apprehension. Would I make any disgust toward him humiliatingly public? Was this going to be harrowing? Did he need to brace?

I'm not carrying it anymore. I spoke the words aloud, used my words, and broke the curse.

Ben West spent summer vacation growing a handlebar mustache.

Seriously.

Hovering over his upper lip―possibly glued there―was a bushy monstrosity that shouted, "Look out, senior class, I'm gonna tie some chicks to the train tracks and then go on safari with my good friend Teddy Roosevelt. Bully!"

I grabbed two ends of my hair and yanked until I felt the ponytail secure itself to the base of my skull. It was shameful to be dissecting my own appearance. I blamed Cornell Aaron and the way he stared at Harper, as though he'd plucked her out of a claw machine and couldn't believe his luck. I wasn't jealous, exactly. I certainly had no designs on Cornell for myself. He was a nice guy and good-looking, but nothing like the vague idea I had in mind for a male companion.

But that was the problem. Harper only wanted Cornell. Meg only wanted to see what the hype was about without letting her limbic system get the best of her. And I didn't really want anything. Not anything concrete. I didn't want to waste my time. I didn't want someone who wouldn't understand when I reference Tony Stark, Mal Reynolds, and Alexander Hamilton in the same breath―all handsome rogues, obviously. I wanted someone who didn't need me to backtrack and explain everything. Someone who would escort me to midnight showings but never ask me to dress up to attend. Someone who knew that I always, always, always wanted a Slurpee, but especially when it was snowing.

A boyfriend, I concluded, should be like a new best friend. Which didn't help me at all considering I hadn't made a new best friend since I was eight and Meg transferred to Aragon. Even in a world full of people as smart as I was, there weren't that many people I wanted on my team.

"So, if you had your license, would this week have gone differently? I've seen the Yahtzee episode of Community. I know alternate time lines are tricky and all."

He laughed. "I would have offered to be your ride. If, in this time line, I was a decent driver who wouldn't possibly maim you. At least I would have gotten to spend more than five seconds with you." A blush crept out of his collar and continued up to his cheeks. "You left so fast, I didn't even get to tell you that you look beautiful. In the alternate time line, I would have monologued about that."

I averted my eyes, my face warming in tandem with his. "I'm wearing makeup. It's performance enhancer for my face."

"I see you every day. It's not the makeup." He reached over tentatively and lifted my chin. His fingers shook, just a little. "Your eyes really are gray, aren't they? I thought they were blue, but they're almost silver."

"Very low melanin levels," I said, faltering.

"You gorgeous mutant."

Angelique gave a little snort. But her posture suggested that some sort of internal knot had finally loosened.

"Can you picture it?" Delilah demanded on nearly a whisper.

"I can picture it," Angelique conceded. "And it's not only not mad, we might never have to be at the mercy of another man again."

"Precisely my thought."

Delilah took a breath. "Shall we shake hands on it?" Her voice was shaking.

Angelique drew in a long, long breath.

And then with a certain ironic flair, extended the hand Delilah had lately stopped from taking that last sip of sherry.

They shook briskly.

"To The Grand Palace on the Thames!"

"To The Grand Palace on the Thames!" Dot and Angelique echoed.

And they all raised their lanterns and toasted each other with light.

"Would you mind telling me a bit more about the rules?"

She looked relieved. "They're very simple, really. We expect our male guests to behave like gentlemen in the presence of ladies. Rough language, drinking, spitting, or smoking will not be tolerated in the drawing room when ladies are present, and will be fined one pence per word. We've a jar, you see."

"A jar." He said this with every evidence of fascination.

"But we also have a withdrawing room for gentlemen, in which they can unleash their baser impulses in case the effort of restraint becomes too much to bear."

Lady Derring was very dry.

"What a relief to hear. Tethering instincts wears a devil out."

He was rewarded with a smile, one of delightful, slow, crooked affairs, as if she just couldn't help herself, and he, for a moment, could not have formed words for admiring it.

They regarded each other somberly, making internal adjustments to accommodate the mere glorious fact of each other.

Raymond sent me an electronic mail message at work the next week―it was very odd, seeing his name in my in-box. As I'd expected, he was semiliterate.

Hi E, hope all good with u. Got a wee favor to ask. Sammy's son Keith has invited me to his 40th this Saturday (ended up staying late at that party BTW, it was a rite laugh). Fancy being my plus one? It’s at a golf club, there's a buffet? No worries if not―let me no. R

A buffet. In a golf club. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

I watched him amble toward me. His peculiar loping walk was almost endearing now―I wouldn't recognize him if he started to walk as normal men did. He had his hands in the pockets of his low-slung denim trousers, and was wearing a strange, oversized woolen hat that I hadn't seen before. It looked like the kind of hat that a German goblin might wear in an illustration from a nineteenth-century fairy tale, possibly one about a baker who was unkind to children and got his comeuppance via an elfin horde. I rather liked it.

I took a breath. Back in that house, on a good day. Stripes of sunshine on the carpet, a board game set out on the floor, a pair of dice, two brightly colored counters. A day with more ladders than snakes.

"Charlotte Holmes. I thought I might see you here."

The voice belonged to Lord Ingram, but slightly raspy, as if he were under the weather―or recovering from a night of hard drinking.

She turned around slowly. "Hullo, Ash."

A complicated pleasure, this man.

Lady Ingram hadn't been angry because she'd wished to marry a different man, as Mrs. Watson had thought at the time, but because her life hadn't been her own.

Charlotte did not pity Lady Ingram―the woman played no small role in her own fate. But she sometimes thought of the former Miss Alexandra Greville, brought to London and told to smile, told to be happy that an eligible man loved her, told that upon marriage she would have everything a woman could desire.

When it should have been obvious to all who knew her that such a life would unravel her. Yet they'd pushed it on her with all their might―and made it plain that for her to do anything else would be a gross betrayal of her family.

Perhaps she had always been a monster, but even the lady monsters of the world couldn't escape the expectations that came of being women.

"Is it true, what I once heard your sister say, that you don't like to be embraced?"

She took some time to think. "Sometimes Livia needs to hold someone, and I'm the only suitable person nearby. When I was little, I used to wriggle out of her arms and escape to a corner of our room. But it wasn't so much that I couldn't stand being held as that I didn't want to be held indefinitely. Later I taught myself to count to three hundred to mark five minutes―which helped me to realize that she needed only about half that time. I can take two to three minutes of being held. But Livia remains hesitant to this day―she's still scarred by my bolting away from her embrace."

He would be, too.

In fact, sometimes he felt scarred by her, even though she had never done anything except be an excellent friend.

She wasn't sure that she wanted to understand the full spectrum of human emotions―everything that remained seemed dire to one degree or another. But this warm, silly mutual delight, this she wouldn't mind experiencing until she comprehended its place in the world.

Alex couldn't hold it in any longer. She buried her face in her hands and moaned into them.

He leaned toward her at once. "Are you ill? I do hope it's not typhus."

"It's disappointment. I expected something different. I should have known better."

He lifted an eyebrow. "What precisely were you expecting?"

"You don't want to know." And I don't want to tell you.

"Oh, but I do."

"No, you don't. You really, truly don't."

"Come now. That kind of protestation only makes a man more intrigued. Just have out with it."

"A gentleman," she blurted out. "I expected you'd be a gentleman."

"You weren't wrong. I am a gentleman. Eventually, I'm going to be a peer."

"I didn't mean it that way. I thought you'd be the respectable, considerate, honorable kind of gentleman."

"Ah," he said. "Yes, that was a mistaken assumption on your part."

"Obviously. Just look at you."

"You don't need to pity me. I'm here. And I'm alive. So there's your answer, Chase. When am I giving up? I'm not. I did not give up on myself then. I am not giving up on you now." She smoothed her apron. "Now I'm going to tidy myself up, take the girls for ices, eat two of them myself, and not bring you any. When we return, I'll send Rosamund and Daisy in to visit you, and you will behave. Treat me as you like. But you will not belittle those girls for loving you. I won't allow it. And do not ever waste your breath again with more of that 'lost cause' nonsense. Consider yourself found."

"I think the world is spinning."

"The world is always spinning."

He exhaled in a soft groan.

"Well, that's the truth. It's spinning all the time."

"How about this? What if I say that you're my world. You're not spinning."

"But I am. We all are. We're on the earth, and it's spinning, so we're spinning, too."

"You are ruining all my sweet nothings."

"That's just it." She put her hand atop his chest, covering his fiercely beating heart. "To me, the truth doesn't ruin anything. Why should understanding the universe diminish our sense of wonder at it? We are spinning around and around, at hundreds of miles an hour, on a rock in the midst of a fathomless universe. Isn't that awe-inspiring enough?"

"If we're spinning at hundreds of miles an hour, it seems a miracle that we stay on this rock at all."

"That's not a miracle. That's gravity."

He kissed the top of her head. "I love you. There. Have you some astronomical way to ruin that?"

"No." She was grateful he couldn't see her face contorting with elation. "That's a miracle."

She had handed him her heart in her hands without truly knowing whether this quiet, enclosed man could be trusted with it. But it had gone; it had flown from her as if it had always been his, regardless of what he wanted to do with it.

She didn't look like anyone else Marsha had ever seen, and she lived in New York where eventually you saw everyone, more or less. Her pale hair; her skin was practically albino; those strange silvery blue-green eyes . . . You didn't quite notice her at first glance; she was average . . . then you took a closer look and she was extremely striking. Her voice when she spoke wasn't always easy to understand, but it sounded to Marsha like music. Please, she thought to herself. Let her be kind. But not too kind.

I had never felt sorry for the miller's daughter before, in the story the villagers told; I'd been sorry for my father, and myself, and angry. But who would really like it, after all, to be married to a king who'd as cheerfully have cut off your head if you didn't spin his straw into gold? I didn't want to be the Staryk's queen any more than I wanted to be his slave, or frozen into ice.

"You were challenged beyond the bounds of what could be done, and found a path to make it true."

"You can't want to marry me. What will anyone think?"

His mouth grew even more displeased and his eyes knived. "What I have promised, I will do," he hissed at me, "though all the world will end for it. Have you my silver changed for gold?"

He didn't even sound malicious this time, as though he'd give up hope of my failing. I bent down and seized the lid of the casket and threw it open where it stood amid the coats and woolen wraps; I could not even have pushed it to his feet by myself. "There!" I said. "Take it, and leave me alone; it's only nonsense, to marry me when you don't want to, and I don't want to. Why didn't you just promise me a trifle?"

"Only a mortal could speak so of offering false coin, and returning little for much," he said, contempt dripping, and I glared at him, glad to be angry instead of afraid.

"My account books are clean," I said, "and I don't call it a reward to be dragged from my home and my family."

"Reward?" the Staryk said. "Who are you to me, that I should reward you? You are the one who demanded fair return for a proven gift of high magic; did you think I would degrade myself by pretending to be one of the low, unable to match it? I am the lord of the glass mountain, not some nameless wight, and I leave no debts unpaid. You are thrice proven, thrice true―no matter by what unnatural chance," he added, sounding unreasonably bitter about it, "―and I shall not prove false myself, whatever the cost.

"Did the tsar refuse to marry you?" I asked. I thought the duke might have been angry with her if he had: he hadn't seemed like a man to be satisfied if his plans went awry.

"No," she said. "I am tsarina. For as long as I live." She said it dryly, as if she didn't expect that to last long. "The tsar is a black sorcerer. He is possessed by a demon of flame that wants to devour me."

I laughed; I couldn't help it. It wasn't mirth, it was bitterness. "So the fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice. We should put them in a room together and let them make us both widows."

I reached out my hands to them, suddenly: I put out my hand to Sergey on one side, and to Stepon on the other, and they put out their hands to me, and to each other, and we held tight, tight; we made a circle together, my brothers and me, around the food that we had been given, and there was no wolf in the room.

hiraeth (n): a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost places in your past

As they stood together gazing out to sea, Lorna leaned over toward her.
"It's going to be okay," she said quietly, because she was the very best type of friend to have.

Joel was taken aback, suddenly, by the startling nature of seeing them there. It was the oddest thing. He'd never known anything quite like this; he had never thought about families, not in this way. But if he had . . . It was so strange. The laughing girl with the pale hair; the tiny child who looked like a miniature witch, who even now was running up to him, that strange white hair cascading out behind her, shouting, "YOEL!" with a huge grin on her face; the music; the turning, laughing women; the soft scent in the air; the warmth of the lights.

It was like walking into something he was already nostalgic for, without it ever being his, without it even having passed him by. It was a very strange feeling. From when he was very young, Joel had learned that if ever he wanted something, he should just take it, because so few people seemed to care what he did or how he did it. But this; this didn't belong to him. He couldn't even see how it ever could. You couldn't buy what they had.

"I don't want just a night or a week or a month with you. I want you all the time. I like you better than calculus, and math is the only thing that unites the universe."

Michael was mint chocolate chip for her. She could try other flavors, but he'd always be her favorite.

I know that Muslims believe in the same god as Christians, although they call that god by a different name. When the American Thomas Jefferson insisted on that, many people made a fuss about it, but I think it makes perfect sense. And I know that idols are prohibited you. Admittedly I don't know anything about harems . . . and such. But I don't understand how anybody schooled in Scripture could think a child would be a useful religious sacrifice, for of course Abraham, who was the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, made that mistake with his own son so that the rest of us needn't ever after. In general I am not taken to fanciful notions, for I read a lot—a lot more, that is, than the caricatures of Byron or Morier. And I don't depend on the ridiculous portraits of foreigners one sees at the opera to inform me. I regret that is not the case with every Englishman or Scot you have encountered. If I could slap them all, I would."

For a long moment he did not speak.

"You would slap them," he finally said.

"Yes. For I don't have a collection of daggers. Although I do have surgical instruments, it's true. So I suppose I could inflict some fairly grievous wounds if necessary. I haven't yet taken an oath as medical men do, so it would not be strictly unethical, although certainly immoral. But I would do it for your sake. Please let me know if you ever wish me to."

His beautiful eyes changed—as though he not only believed her words but understood her.

Heart tight, she turned to the stairs and went up as swiftly as her bandy legs would carry her. When she paused on the landing and looked down, he stood there still, watching her.

"My father and I have always lived wherever his patients wished. I have rarely stayed in one house for long. I have never had a home that could be mine forever."

"Now you have."

"Until my father's return."

He nodded, and it was so regal that she wondered she had ever thought him anything but a prince.

"I won't bother you," she said.

"I have very little confidence in the predictive value of that statement."

Air shot out from between her lips.

"Was that noise an agreement?" he said, a beautiful smile shaping his mouth.

She laughed again, and pain shot through her lungs.

"I missed that sound," he said. "Your laughter."

She clutched the linen over her chest. "It hurts."

"Yes," he said. She didn't mean the laughter hurt, but she thought perhaps he understood that.

"I will try not to disturb you," she said.

"Don't," he said. "Disturb me. Every day. Every hour. Every minute if you wish."

When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.

The anger stood out plain and clean on his face. There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story's end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. He would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open.