(Title/summary taken courtesy of Shakespeare, obviously). Climbing Kanchenjunga is on indefinite hiatus. Sorry. I will get back to it eventually, but I regret a lot of the decisions I made in the early chapters and I am trying to figure out how to resolve them. In the meantime, my fascination with Dot continues.
1. Portia, Redux
For, as thou urgest justice, be assured/Thou shalt have justice, more than thou desirest.
-The Merchant of Venice
When Dorothea Callum meets George Owden at a party in London, she is baffled. She doesn't know anyone who would have brought him—everybody here is a student at the university, member of the faculty, or related to one or the other—she doesn't know who would want him here, or who in the world would let him study dead people when he has such disregard for living ones. She frowns and sips her drink and walks off briskly, wishing she had stayed at home with Dick.
Owden, who doesn't recognise her, comes up and tries to introduce himself. That wouldn't be so bad, perhaps, except that he has been drinking and his breath is close to her neck and he looks suspiciously like he might put his hand on her waist when he doesn't even know her name. Her bewilderment morphs swiftly into something less forgiving. She shrinks back against the table and says no, but that seems to encourage him, and her icy glare doesn't even register.
'Come and dance, sweetheart,' he slurs, and grabs her wrist when she tries to turn away. Dot can only see the Death and Glories in the docks with no representation but a little girl, strung up for a crime they didn't commit, black cap for murder. The tiger and the bleating of the kid.
She doesn't entirely know how it happens (whether it is the tiger and the kid, or the fingers tight around her wrist, or the knowledge that Tom and Dick and the Death and Glories would never ignore a girl's no), but somehow she is throwing her drink at him, gin and orange on his white shirt, and violently wrenching her hand free, and telling him exactly what she thinks of anyone who treats others the way he does.
She finishes (and she is aware that her voice has risen to a crescendo and the room is staring at her and she doesn't care) with a cry of 'Coots forever! And ever!' (The room begins to whisper and giggle, and her mother blushes, and she couldn't feel less self-conscious).
A surge of recognition in his eyes, finally, and he visibly shrinks in front of her (or perhaps she grows a foot or two): she watches as he remembers Portia, as he remembers how he was put bang to rights at the hands of the Coots once before. He slinks out of the room, which erupts with applause, but really she can hear Mrs Dudgeon and Tom and the Admiral and the Death and Glories giving three cheers, and she flushes just as pink as she did then.
It is months, a year, before she actually tells Tom the story (a censored version, maybe, where hands are not on wrists and waists without permission). He is sitting on his parents' lawn mending a sail, and she's brought her deadline outside to be sociable with him. They somehow meander onto the topic of dancing, and he can't help but snort at the thought of George Owden covered in gin and orange, tripping over himself to get away from the mad girl who has drawn every eye in the room with her outburst. Dot pretends to mourn the loss of her second-best dress, which has never been the same since, but her eyes are bright with mischief.
'Hard to believe at the moment, but I don't look bad when I'm in all my finery.' She is laughing, not fishing, as she waves at a splash of blue ink on her face and the neat mend in her collar.
Tom glances at Dorothea for a moment. In addition to her ink-smudged cheeks, her nose is burnt from unexpected September sun and there are indiscriminate freckles all over her arms; there is a splatter of mud on the back of one of her calves from an early morning walk with William, and her plait is looking wild and bedraggled (she never can cure herself of pulling her fingers through the loops when she reaches an exciting point in a story, whether hers or someone else's). He cannot picture her in a formal dress, even a second-best one. Then again, he can't really imagine her looking any prettier than she does at the moment. He decides not to voice either opinion.
'Too good for a chap like Owden, at any rate,' he offers instead, eyes back on the sail in his hands, squinting at the light on the white fabric, extremely casual.
Dot makes a small, amused noise in the back of her throat, and he thinks that she agrees with him. She leans forward again, propping herself on a grass-smeared elbow and going back to her story, and Tom is glad that she does not like London very much these days.