Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West Read online

  It was a charmed circle.

  All the girls steered clear of Madame Morrible while they could. One cold evening, however, Grommetik came hunting for the Thropp sisters. Nanny huffed and wound the strings of a fresh apron around her waist, and prodded Nessarose and Elphaba downstairs toward the parlor of the Head.

  “I hate that Grommetik thing,” said Nessarose. “However does it work, anyway? Is it clockwork or is it magicked, or some combination of the two?”

  “I always imagined a bit of nonsense—that there was a dwarf inside, or an acrobatic family of elves each working a limb,” said Elphaba. “Whenever Grommetik comes around, my hand gets a strange hunger for a hammer.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Nessarose said. “Hand hunger, I mean.”

  “Hush, you two, the thing has ears,” Nanny said.

  Madame Morrible was glancing through the financial papers, making a few marks in the margin before she deigned to acknowledge her students. “This won’t take but a moment,” she said. “I’ve had a letter from your dear father, and a package for you. I thought it kindest to deliver the news myself.”

  “News?” said Nessarose, blanching.

  “He could have written to us as well as to you,” said Elphaba.

  Madame Morrible ignored her. “He writes to ask of Nessarose’s health and progress, and to tell you both that he is going to undertake a fast and penance for the return of Ozma Tippetarius.”

  “Oh, the blessed little girl,” said Nanny, warming to one of her favorite subjects. “When the Wizard took over the Palace all those years ago and he had the Ozma Regent jailed, we all thought that the sainted Ozma child would call down disaster upon the Wizard’s head. But they say she’s been spirited away and frozen in a cave, like Lurlina. Has Frexspar got the mettle to melt her—is now her time to return?”

  “Please,” said Madame Morrible to the sisters, with a sour glance at Nanny, “I haven’t asked you here so that your Nanny could discuss this contemporary apocrypha, nor to slander our glorious Wizard. It was a peaceful transition of power. That the Ozma Regent’s health failed while under house arrest was a mere coincidence, nothing more. As to the power of your father to raise the missing royal child from some unsubstantiated state of somnolence—well, you’ve as much as admitted to me that your father is erratic, if not mad. I can only wish him health in his endeavors. But I feel it my duty to point out to you girls that we do not smile on seditious attitudes at Crage Hall. I hope you have not imported your father’s royalist yearnings into the dormitories here.”

  “We assign ourselves to the Unnamed God, not to the Wizard nor to any possible remnant of the Royal Family,” Nessarose said proudly.

  “I have no feeling on the matter at all,” muttered Elphaba, “except that Father loves lost causes.”

  “Very well,” said the Head. “As it should be. Now I have had a package for you.” She handed it to Elphaba, but added, “It is for Nessarose, I think.”

  “Open it, Elphie, please,” said Nessarose. Nanny leaned forward to look.

  Elphaba undid the cord and opened the wooden box. From a pile of ash shavings she withdrew a shoe, and then another. Were they silver?—or blue?—or now red?—lacquered with a candy shell brilliance of polish? It was hard to tell and it didn’t matter; the effect was dazzling. Even Madame Morrible gasped at their splendor. The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.

  “He writes that he bought them for you from some toothless tinker woman outside Ovvels,” said Madame Morrible, “and that he dressed them up with silver glass beads that he made himself—that someone had taught him to make?—”

  “Turtle Heart,” said Nanny darkly.

  “—and”— Madame Morrible flipped the letter over, squinting—“he says he had hoped to give you something special before you left for university, but in the sudden circumstances of Ama Clutch’s sickness . . . blah blah . . . he was unprepared. So now he sends them to his Nessarose to keep her beautiful feet warm and dry and beautiful, and he sends them with his love.”

  Elphaba drove her fingers through the curlicues of shavings. There was nothing else in the box, nothing for her.

  “Aren’t they gorgeous!” Nessarose exclaimed. “Elphie, fix them on my feet, would you please? Oh, how they sparkle!”

  Elphaba went on her knees before her sister. Nessarose sat as regal as any Ozma, spine erect and face glowing. Elphaba lifted her sister’s feet and slipped off the common house slippers, and replaced them with the dazzling shoes.

  “How thoughtful he is!” said Nessarose.

  “Good thing you can stand on your own two feet, you,” muttered Nanny to Elphaba, and put her old hand patronizingly on Elphaba’s shoulder blades, but Elphaba shrugged it away.

  “They’re just gorgeous,” said Elphaba thickly. “Nessarose, they’re made for you. They fit like a dream.”

  “Oh, Elphie, don’t be cross,” Nessarose said, looking down at her feet. “Don’t ruin my small happiness with resentment, will you? He knows you don’t need this kind of thing . . .”

  “Of course not,” said Elphaba. “Of course I don’t.”

  That evening the friends risked breaking curfew by ordering another bottle of wine. Nanny tutted and fretted, but as she kept downing her portion as neatly as anyone else, she was overruled. Fiyero told the story of how he had been married at the age of seven to a girl from a neighboring tribe. They all gawped at his apparent lack of shame. He had only seen his bride once, by accident, when they were both about nine. “I won’t really take up with her until we are twenty, and I’m now only eighteen,” he added. With the relief of imagining he might still be as virginal as the rest of them, they ordered yet another bottle of wine.

  The candles guttered, a small autumnal rain fell. Though the room was dry, Elphaba drew her cloak about her as if anticipating the walk home. She had gotten over the sting of being overlooked by Frex. She and Nessarose began to tell funny stories about their father, as if to prove to themselves and to everyone else that nothing was amiss. Nessarose, who wasn’t much of a drinker, allowed herself to laugh. “Despite my appearance, or maybe because of it, he always called me his beautiful pet,” she said, alluding to her lack of arms for the first time in public. “He would say, ‘Come here, my pet, and let me give you a piece of apple.’ And I would walk over as best I could, tilting and tottering if Nanny or Elphie or Mother wasn’t around to support me, and fall into his lap, and lean up smiling, and he’d drop small pieces of fruit into my mouth.”

  “What did he call you, Elphie?” asked Glinda.

  “He called her Fabala,” interrupted Nessarose.

  “At home, at home only,” Elphaba said.

  “True, you are your father’s little Fabala,” crooned Nanny, almost to herself, just outside the circle of smiling faces. “Little Fabala, little Elphaba, little Elphie.”

  “He never called me pet,”’ said Elphaba, raising her glass to her sister. “But we all know he told the truth, as Nessarose is the pet in the family. Hence those splendid shoes.”

  Nessarose blushed and accepted a toast. “Ah, but while I had his attention because of my condition, you captured his heart when you sang,” she said.

  “Captured his heart? Hah. You mean I performed a necessary function.”

  But the others said to Elphaba, “Oh, do you sing? Well then! Sing, sing, you must! Another bottle, another glass, push back the chair, and before we leave for the night, you must sing! Go on!”

  “Only if the others will,” said Elphaba, bossily. “Boq? Some Munchkinlander spinniel? Avaric, a Gillikinese ballad? Glinda? Nanny, a lullaby?”

  “We know a dirty round, we’ll go next if you go,” said Crope and Tibbett.

  “And I will sing a Vinkus hunting chant,” said Fiyero. Everyone chortled with pleasure and clapped him on the back. So then Elphaba had to stand, push her chair aside, clear her
throat and sound a note into her cupped hands, and start. As if she were singing for her father, again, after all this time.

  The bar mother slapped her rag at some noisy older men to shush them, and the dart players dropped their hands to their sides. The room quieted down. Elphaba made up a little song on the spot, a song of longing and otherness, of far aways and future days. Strangers closed their eyes to listen.

  Boq did too. Elphaba had an okay voice. He saw the imaginary place she conjured up, a land where injustice and common cruelty and despotic rule and the beggaring fist of drought didn’t work together to hold everyone by the neck. No, he wasn’t giving her credit: Elphaba had a good voice. It was controlled and feeling and not histrionic. He listened through to the end, and the song faded into the hush of a respectful pub. Later, he thought: The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.

  “You next, you promised,” cried Elphaba, pointing at Fiyero, but nobody would sing again, because she had done so well. Nessarose nodded to Nanny to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye.

  “Elphaba says she’s not religious but see how feelingly she sings of the afterlife,” said Nessarose, and for once no one was inclined to argue.

  5

  Early one morning, when the world was hoary with rimefrost, Grommetik arrived with a note for Glinda. Ama Clutch, it seemed, was on her way out. Glinda and her roommates hurried to the infirmary.

  The Head met them there, and led them to a windowless alcove. Ama Clutch was thrashing about in the bed and talking to the pillowcase. “Don’t put up with me,” she was saying wildly, “for what will I ever do for you? I will abuse your good nature, duckie, and rest my oily locks upon your fine close weave and I will be picking with my teeth at your lacy appliquéd edge! You are a stupid nuisance to allow it, I say! I don’t care about notions of service! It’s all bunk, I tell you, bunk!”

  “Ama Clutch, Ama Clutch, it’s me,” said Glinda. “Listen, dear, it’s me! It’s your little Galinda.”

  Ama Clutch turned her head from side to side. “Your protest is insulting to your forebears!” she went on, rolling her eyes toward the pillowcase again. “Those cotton plants on the banks of Restwater didn’t allow themselves to be harvested so you could lie down like a mat and let any filthy person slobber all over you with night drool! It don’t make a lick of sense!”

  “Ama!” Glinda wept. “Please! You’re raving!”

  “Aha, I see you have nothing to say to that,” said Ama Clutch with satisfaction.

  “Come back, Ama, come back, one more time before you go!”

  “Oh sweet Lurline, this is dreadful,” Nanny said. “Darlings, if I ever get like this, poison me, will you?”

  “She’s going, I can see it,” Elphaba said. “I saw it enough in Quadling Country, I know the signs. Glinda, say what you need to say, quickly.”

  “Madame Morrible, may I have privacy?” Glinda said.

  “I will stay by your side and support you. It’s my duty to my girls,” said the Head, settling her hamlike hands determinedly on her waist. But Elphaba and Nanny got up and elbowed her out of the alcove, down the hall, and through the door and closed it and locked it. Nanny clucked all the while, saying, “Now, isn’t that nice of you, Madame Head, but no need. No need at all.”

  Glinda gripped Ama Clutch’s hand. Beads of white sweat were forming like potato water on the servant’s forehead. She struggled to pull her hand away but her strength was going. “Ama Clutch, you’re dying,” Glinda said, “and it’s my fault.”

  “Oh stop,” Elphaba said.

  “It is,” Glinda said fiercely, “it is.”

  “I’m not arguing that,” said Elphaba, “I just mean cut yourself out of the conversation; this is her death, not your interview with the Unnamed God. Come on. Do something!”

  Glinda grabbed the hands, both hands, even tighter. “I am going to magick you back,” she said between gritted teeth. “Ama Clutch, you do as I say! I’m still your employer and your better, and you have to obey me! Now listen to this spell and behave yourself!”

  The Ama’s teeth gnashed, the eyes rolled, and the chin twisted knobbily, as if trying to impale some invisible demon in the air above her bed. Glinda’s eyes shut and her jaw worked, and a thread of sound, syllables incoherent even to herself, came spooling out from her blanched lips. “Hope you don’t explode her like a sandwich,” muttered Elphaba.

  Glinda ignored this. She hummed and worked, she rocked and panted. Ama Clutch’s eyelids moved so frantically over the closed eyes that it looked as if her eye sockets were chewing her own eyes. “Magicordium senssus ovinda clenx,” Glinda concluded out loud, “and if that doesn’t do it, I give up; even the smells and bells of a full kit wouldn’t help, I think.”

  On the straw pallet Ama Clutch fell back. A little blood ran from the outer edge of each eye. But the wild turning motion of the focus had shuttered itself down. “Oh my dear,” she murmured, “so you’re all right then, or am I dead now?”

  “Not yet,” said Glinda. “Yes, dear Ama, yes, I’m fine. But sweetheart, I think you’re going.”

  “Of course I am, the Wind is here, can’t you hear it?” Ama Clutch said. “No matter. Oh there’s Elphie, too. Good-bye, my ducks. Stay out of the Wind until the time is right or you’ll be blown in the wrong direction.”

  Glinda said, “Ama Clutch, I have something to say to you—I have to make my apology—”

  But Elphaba leaned forward, cutting Glinda off from Ama Clutch’s line of sight, and said, “Ama Clutch, before you go, tell us who killed Doctor Dillamond.”

  “Surely you know that,” Ama Clutch said.

  “Make us sure,” Elphaba said.

  “Well, I saw it, I mean nearly. It had just happened and the knife was still there”—Ama Clutch worked for breath—“smeared with blood that hadn’t had a chance to dry.”

  “What did you see? This is important.”

  “I saw the knife in the air, I saw the Wind come to take Doctor Dillamond away, I saw the clockwork turn and the Goat’s time stop.”

  “It was Grommetik, wasn’t it,” Elphaba murmured, trying to get the old woman to speak the words.

  “Well, that’s what I’m saying, duckie,” said Ama Clutch.

  “And did it see you, did it turn on you?” cried Glinda. “Did that make you ill, Ama Clutch?”

  “It was my time to be ill,” said Ama Clutch gently, “so I couldn’t complain. And it is my time to die, so leave me be. Just hold my hand, dear.”

  “But the fault is mine—” began Glinda.

  “You would do me more good if you hushed, sweet Galinda, my duck,” said Ama Clutch gently, and patted Glinda’s hand. Then she closed her eyes and breathed in and out a couple of times. They sat there in a silence that seemed peculiarly servant-class-Gillikinese, though it was hard, later on, to explain why. Outside, Madame Morrible moved up and down the floorboards, pacing. Then they imagined they heard a Wind, or an echo of a Wind, and Ama Clutch was gone, and the overly subordinate pillowcase took a small spill of human juice from the edge of her slackened mouth.

  6

  The funeral was modest, a love-her-and-shove-her affair. Glinda’s close friends attended, filling two pews, and in the second tier of the chapel a flock of Amas made a professional coterie. The rest of the chapel was empty.

  After the corpse in its winding sheet slid along the oiled chute to the furnace, the mourners and colleagues retired to Madame Morrible’s private parlor, where she proved to have sanctioned no expense in the refreshments. The tea was ancient stock, stale as sawdust, the biscuits were hard, and there was no saffron cream or tamorna marmalade. Glinda said reprovingly to the Head, “Not even a small bowl of cream?” and Madame Morrible answered, “My girl, I try to protect my charges from the worst of the food shortages by judicious shopping and by going without myself, but I am not wholly responsible for your ignorance. If only people would obey the Wiza
rd absolutely, there would be abundance. Don’t you realize that conditions verge on famine and cows are dying of starvation two hundred miles from here? This makes saffron cream very dear in the market.” Glinda began to move away, but Madame Morrible reached out a raft of cushiony, bulbous, bejeweled fingers. The touch made Glinda’s blood run cold. “I should like to see you, and Miss Nessarose, and Miss Elphaba,” said the Head. “After the guests leave. Please wait behind.”

  “We’re nabbed for a lecture,” whispered Glinda to the Thropp sisters. “We have to be yelled at.”

  “Not a word about what Ama Clutch said—or that she came back,” said Elphaba urgently. “Got that, Nessa? Nanny?”

  They all nodded. Boq and Avaric, making their good-byes, said that the group was reconvening at the pub in the Regent’s Parade. The girls agreed to meet them there after their interview with the Head. They would manage a more honest memorial service for Ama Clutch at the Peach and Kidneys.

  When the small crowd had dispersed, only Grommetik clearing away the cups and crumbs, Madame Morrible herself banked up the fire—a gesture of chumminess lost on no one—and sent Grommetik away. “Later, thingy,” she said, “later. Go lubricate yourself in some closet somewhere.” Grommetik wheeled away with, if it was possible, an offended air. Elphaba had to repress an urge to kick it with the tip of her stout black walking boot.

  “You too, Nanny,” Madame Morrible said. “A little break from your labors.”

  “Oh no,” Nanny said. “Nanny doesn’t leave her Nessa.”

  “Yes Nanny does. Her sister is perfectly capable of caring for her,” said the Head. “Aren’t you, Miss Elphaba? The very soul of charity.”