If We Were Villains: A Novel

The schedule for our midterm speeches was posted on the call-board in the crossover on Monday. I was slated to go first, during what ordinarily would have been rehearsal time on Wednesday afternoon, and Wren would follow me. James and Filippa were scheduled to read at the same times on Thursday, Alexander and Meredith at the same times on Friday.

Snow had fallen thick and fast from Sunday night through Tuesday morning, doing its best to fulfill the reckless wish I’d made on the way out of the bar. Our feet and fingers were perpetually numb, our cheeks and noses rosy pink, ChapStick suddenly a valuable commodity. On Wednesday Frederick and Gwendolyn ushered us into the drafty rehearsal hall, where we shed scarves, coats, and gloves and were subjected to a rigorous warm-up exercise of Gwendolyn’s selection.

I rushed headlong into my speech while Wren waited in the hallway. “I’d play incessantly upon these jades / Even till unfencèd desolation / Leave them as naked as the vulgar air” forced me to slow down, and the strength of the imagery carried me more steadily through “How like you this wild counsel, mighty states?” when I felt obliged to gather speed again. At the end, I was winded but weirdly elated, relieved to be someone other than myself for a while—more willing to go to war than face my own ugly, meager demons.

Frederick and Gwendolyn were both smiling at me—Gwendolyn’s mouth a bold slash of her dark winter lipstick, Frederick’s a small, creased bow.

“Very good, Oliver,” Gwendolyn said. “A little hurried at the top, but you fell into it very nicely.”

“I found it entirely persuasive,” Frederick told me. “Which argues great success on your part.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’ll get the rest of our comments in your mailbox tomorrow,” Gwendolyn said. “But I wouldn’t worry. Have a seat.”

I thanked them again and went to sit beside their table, gulping down water from the bottle under my chair while we waited for Wren. Gwendolyn summoned her from the crossover, and when she appeared, I was alarmed by how small and frail she looked.

“Good morning,” she said, her voice only an echo in the cavernous room.

“Good morning,” Frederick said. “How are you?”

“All right,” she said, but I didn’t believe it. Her face and hands were pale, dark circles showing beneath both her eyes. “A little under the weather.”

“With this sort of weather, everyone’s under it,” Gwendolyn said, and gave her a wink.

Wren tried to laugh but lurched into a deep cough instead. I glanced uneasily at Frederick, but I couldn’t see past the glare on his glasses.

“What do you have for us today?” he asked. “Lady Anne, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“Lovely,” Gwendolyn said. “When you’re ready.”

Wren nodded, then squared her feet on the floor, ten paces back from the table. I frowned across the room at her, unsure if it was my imagination or if she was trembling.

Wren: “I would to God that the inclusive verge

Of golden metal that must round my brow

Were red-hot steel, to sear me to the brain!

Anointed let me be with deadly venom,

And die, ere men can say, ‘God save the Queen!’”

Her words rang high and clear under the vaulted ceiling, but they wavered, too. She continued bravely, her small body contracting even smaller under the crushing weight of Anne’s pain—I didn’t doubt that she felt it as intensely as if it were her own.

Wren: “This was my wish: ‘Be thou,’ quoth I, ‘accursed,

For making me, so young, so old a widow!

And, when thou wed’st, let sorrow haunt thy bed;

And be thy wife—if any be so mad—

As miserable by the life of thee

As thou hast made me by my dear lord’s death!’”

Her voice cracked, the sound too harsh to be an actor’s affectation. She struck her chest hard with one fist, but whether it was a wordless expression of her grief or a desperate attempt to dislodge whatever was choking her, I couldn’t tell. Gwendolyn leaned forward on the table, brow creased with concern. But before she could speak, Wren’s voice came stammering out again, broken and disjointed. She was bent almost in half, one hand still on her chest, the other digging violently into her stomach. I froze in my seat, gripping the sides of my chair so hard my fingertips went numb.

Wren: “Lo, ere I can repeat this curse again,

Even in so short a space, my woman’s heart

Grossly grew captive to his honey words

And proved the subject of my own soul’s curse,

Which ever since hath kept my eyes from sleep,

For never yet one hour in his bed…”

She stopped, faded out, and swayed on the spot. She blinked ponderously and murmured, “… sleep.” I knew she was going to fall, but I was too slow leaping out of my chair to catch her before she crumpled to the floor.