The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 91
“They poison her, those witches,” Jane told me soon after. “The poor dear, she don’t know what happened to her. They tease her about a bairn. She’s no pregnant, I can tell ye, Abbie and me made sure. They won’t let me or Abbie close, threw mud at Abbie when she called. They make that child feel like she’d done wrong. Those witches. You must do something.”
I balked, asking, what could I do about old women and gossip?
“Take hold,” said Jane, her sense of republicanism melting like the ice, “ye, Mr. President, take hold and make right.”
I told her Elephant Frazer had made more concessions to the Hospidar, among them sending the Frazer’s adopted beasties to live with the Zulemas in the beastie camp.
“And we’ll see Saint Peter himself on the High Street afore those two sort out their minds. Ye, and Germanicus, take hold now.”
Elephant Frazer did confer increasingly with me and Germanicus, and even Lazarus, since he was pushed away by the elders of Gaunttown, who were bitter about Robby. These meetings, between father and son and adopted son, made Germanicus uneasy. He felt it was coming to look like Frazer rule. For all his instinctive sympathy for absolutism—rule by strong men—Germanicus was not insensitive to the peril of what Lazarus called “crypto-royalty.” And more worrisome to Germanicus than this hint of Frazer dictatorship was that Lazarus’s solution to the Robby dilemma was to begin advocating the formation of a “revolutionary court” to settle disputes while we waited for the constitution to be accepted and to set in place a judiciary. It was not a bad idea. It was too much for the Frazers, especially since the Hospidar seized on the rumor of Lazarus’s notion to agitate for his obvious goal: a Volunteer state, military rule.
We did find what we hoped was a wise course, during one of our late night talks at the KELPER. Germanicus, just back in King James from exploring the breakup of the ice and from taking several whales, admitted to us that he had delayed his marriage too long, for good reasons: war, weather, catastrophe. He offered not to wait for summer, rather to marry Jane in the spring. Lazarus toasted the idea, and we took it upstairs to Elephant Frazer, working that night with the whaling factory foreman on rationing. He was delighted. None of us thought it was polite to mention aloud that the major reason it was such a good idea was that it would go a long way to repairing the rift between the Frazers and the Gaunts, and with that, all the major families might come to peace at the ceremony. Jane was informed belatedly. She stopped by the Assembly Hall a few days later to confront me and Lazarus. She said she would agree to the ploy; she also said she thought it contrived.
“There’s not flour for a proper cake,” she said. “That’s yerr real threat, not Roses and that Simon Brackenbury neither. Ye men get us flour and let us heal ourselves. No finery will have done like cargoes of fruit and wheat.”
The day of the wedding was wet and anxious. There were sooty icebergs on the northwestern horizon. The people of Gaunttown turned out in their gray best. The bride, at twenty, wore white, Abigail’s gown, which had been her great-grandmother’s, with a veil provided by Frances Gaunt, Luff Gaunt Senior’s voluble widow who had recently been caught up by spring love and had declared her intention to marry Simon Brackenbury come summer. I was the best man. Abigail was the matron of honor. There were Gaunt and Frazer flower girls, though we had no flowers, used heath grass and candles instead. Trip Gaunt, Jane’s uncle, stood up for her. The Hospidar, Christian Rose, Simon Brackenbury, and Kevin Gaunt stood at the last pew for the Volunteers and Falkland Irregulars. Roses, McHughs, Lindfirs, Harrahs, Moogs, Oateses, Macklemurrays, and more filled the chapel, family by family, the young intermingling as they would, for the years since the war had seen a new generation of taciturn patriots push into the ranks. The Zulemas sat on the Frazer side of the chapel with the adopted beasties; Lazarus and Violante sat on either side of the young beastie prodigy who had originally been knifed. Longfaeroe preached a long, sentimental sermon beforehand, impromptu, on the spring of hope, and he closed it with a psalm that made Abigail cry. I was nervous, but collected enough to be bursting proud of my fellow South Georgians, who were strong to admit that their weaknesses needed heavenly intercession, and a little fun. By the time of the exchange of rings, I had relaxed, took note of the little Gaunt and Frazer girls, and that there seemed a missing place in the flower children, six on the right, and five on the left. The groom kissed the bride, and she him back, warm and lingering, and we paraded over to the Assembly Hall, decorated for dancing and feasting. There I got my first opportunity to talk with Orlando the Black, who had come down from Shagrock with his men for supplies and had stayed on for the ceremony.
My memory is that Orlando the Black and Lazarus and I were reminiscing about Angel of Death, awkwardly, painfully—it was one week shy of six years since we had set sail from Stockholm—when someone dropped a platter of haggis. It was not an extraordinary ruckus, barely discernible over the piper standing outside the door, bleating good cheer through Gaunttown. I did look up, to find Abigail’s face across the room. She tightened, darkened, walked directly to me, drew me aside, saying, “It’s Lena, Grim, oh, Grim, go and see. Dear sweet Jesus, why, why?” She wrapped her arms around me, would not sob. “I’m up