Page 6 of This Vicious Hunger
“You must be Thora,” she gushes. “Come here, girl. Let me get a good look at you.” She takes my face in her hands, so close now that I can smell her tart, almost bitter perfume. Her skin is clean and dry, no sign of the sweat that gathers on my top lip.
“I… Yes.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Thora. I’m Dr. Petaccia—though you can call me Florencia if you’d prefer. I don’t like to be too formal with friends, and of course I only work with friends.”
“Friends?”
“Of course! Well, we soon shall be, I think.” She shifts her hands to my shoulders and looks me up and down at arm’s length. “You don’t talk much. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing; I can’t stand those gossipy society types—and I have to confess, the LeVand connection did make me think twice—but I thought, well, if you’re your father’s daughter…” She stops and gives a drylaugh, surprisingly deep. “I’m sorry, my dear. I’m getting carried away. Please sit. Would you like a drink? I have, oh…” She glances around. On her desk alone there are several cups and saucers, all coated in some filmy substance that might have been coffee with milk but now looks more like brackish marsh water. “Well, I can send for something. Or there’s water?”
“No,” I say hurriedly, taking a seat, “thank you.”
“Good. That’s good. Well.” Petaccia’s smile grows again, exposing her teeth, which are large and stained. “How are you liking St. Elianto so far? Although I’m very sorry to hear your circumstances, I won’t say I wasn’t pleased to hear from the LeVands. Your father was a good man and I was saddened to hear of his death.”
I’m still trying to get my head around it all—that this eccentric person, a woman, seated before me with a vine once again winding around her gloved wrist, and I could swear it’s moving without her training it, is the doctor who may change my life—so what comes out is a garbled mess.
“Thank you.” I’m breathless and flushed and I feel like a child, desperately trying to impress. “I like the university so far. It’s big, though,” I hear myself say stupidly. “It’s so big and… full of all these… men.” The words come out coated in a layer of disdain—I was thinking of the scholar this morning, the one on the bicycle—and instantly I wish to take it back.
Dr. Petaccia’s expression grows suddenly serious, her dark eyes flashing. My stomach drops. It’s as if the air in the room has grown several degrees warmer and I feel my cheeks burn hot and red.
“I was going to wait to delve into the minutiae, but I suppose we’d better get this over with.” The doctor leans back in her chair and steeples her fingers. “You understand, Thora, don’t you, thatI’m taking something of a risk here with you. St. Elianto is a serious institution, an academy of learning. It is not that women are not allowed to study here, but there is a certain expectation of female frippery around learning.”
“Oh yes. I know it. I very much appreciate the opportunity—”
“St. Elianto isn’t a place for silly girls to meet the silly boys they’re going to marry.”
I stop, a laugh building in me that would be wildly inappropriate to release. “I’m sorry?”
“You mention the men, and I know you can’t be thinking that this is the sort of place to come and while away your days until you find another suitable match for yourself. Not because you won’t find one, Thora. I was led to believe that your father had taught you to read and write well, is that true?”
Now the laughter comes out, coarse and ugly. I slap my hand over my mouth.
“Is this funny to you?” Petaccia’s eyes darken further, the effect like a shock of cold water calming my hysteria. “Phytogeography—botany—is a serious science. It isn’t all fun and parlour games, little walks in the public parks and flowers pressed for pretty displays. I won’t have myself aligned with any of that brainless hedgerow theology they seem to play with in the polite circles. You’re here because I had faith that your father did not raise a silly girl and I need somebody I can trust, somebody without preconceptions about phytology.”
“No,” I blurt. “No, I’m sorry, you misunderstand—it’s absolutely not funny. The funny thing is that you’d think I speak of men in an… achievement-worthy way.” I raise my chin and look the doctor straight in the eyes, willing her to see how serious I am. Men, and the way women are supposed to think of them, haveplagued me my whole life. But something tells me that unlike my father, Dr. Petaccia might understand. “I was married once, Doctor. I did not plan to be a widow at twenty-five—the Lord clearly had other plans for me—but I can assure you that I am not a silly girl, nor do I ever intend to be one.”
Dr. Petaccia lets the silence gather for a moment before saying, “Good. Because I will tell you now, the men in a place like this have an agenda. Theyalwayshave an agenda. Make sure it isn’t you—d’you understand?” I nod briskly. “Good,” she says again. “Now, your father, did he teach you much outside of mourning?”
I think of the stash of books my father kept in his study—the ones even my mother knew nothing about. We never spoke of them, he and I. To this day I’m not even sure if he knew I knew of them, let alone that I would often squirrel them away to read between mournings, but I suspect he did.
When he taught me to read, we used the Scriptures and later the death rites he’d written himself, but my father’s collection of books strayed into more than just the rituals of grief; he always took his role as undertaker seriously and told me more than once that a man who stopped learning no longer had any right to facilitate the passage of life.
He kept titles on medicine and surgical science, on sewing—for those deaths where the rites required a tidy corpse—and on art and painting. He dabbled in poetry, in mathematics, in animal husbandry and, indeed, in phytology. I read every single one of his books, often by candlelight, hiding under the desk in his study, one ear pricked for my mother’s slippered footsteps.
There were other titles I found, too, ones I do not think my father wanted me to see, which even now I try not to think of, a pamphlet hidden between pages of a phenomenally dry veterinarybiography about how to determine manner of death—or the one about how to diagnose, or disguise, an accidental or non-accidental incident according to a family’s wishes…
In public my father gave me titles on flower arranging, and religious pamphlets on the importance of fasting, the science of Silence. It is these, I am sure, Dr. Petaccia is referring to—the very border of respectability. The titles Aurelio’s family would have just about considered appropriate for an undertaker’s daughter—before I became a LeVand by marriage, at which point they became entirelyinappropriate.
“I can read and write as well as my husband could,” I say in answer. Petaccia nods, pleased. “I’m comfortable taking notes in both long- and shorthand and I write smoothly. I have a knowledge of plants from theFunereal Flora—”
“That will do nicely,” the doctor cuts me off. “The rest I can teach you.”
“I assure you, Doctor, I am committed to this life. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn under a famed doctor such as yourself—”
Petaccia waves her hands. The vine is still coiling and I can’t stop staring. It has little blister-like nubs all along its lengths, swelling to pustules the colour of sunspots in places, but its leaves are sharply green and it looks healthy enough. I wonder what kind it is, whether it is something the doctor has somehow created herself. I’ve read about botanists who do that, who aren’t content to merely study and mustcreate, but rather than frighten me this sudden thought sends a thrill right through my core.
“Stop schmoozing,” Petaccia says languidly. “But please, do call me Florencia. My father was Doctor and I can’t stand it.”
“Yes. Sorry.”
