[Closed] Walls I Cannot Climb

[Desiderio Morandi]

outside the good pan

morning on the 29th of roalis, 2720

Y

ou flatter me, he wanted to snap, embarrassed and offended and perturbed and touched all at once. It was an impulse not unlike when they were children. He was more than a little better at argument now, and at brooking none in return – but she seemed stubborn enough herself to account for the change.

If he cared any longer about being in a young lady’s room, the concern was quite buried underneath – all this. The two of them holding the book together, his arm nearly – but not quite – brushing her back, the lingering smell of violets and wet dog and now well-preserved old book.

And the chapel! That was the least of all the things he felt, and still it was very great. To think of it was one thing, but to see it was another.

He had promised her they would go there someday, had he not? Such a long time ago. Well, he had taken her other places, he thought bitterly. A cell in Graywatch, for one. Nearly back to Brunnhold, if it had not been for mere chance.

He could not see her face for a tangle of red hair when she nodded. He had the urge to lean around and look at it, as if they really were children. As if it took nothing but a cheerful word or a drawing of a hingle to lift the spirits.

She went on at last; he looked back down at the book, shifting slightly. It was very inappropriate, how close they were, but he could not seem to let go. The texture of the cover was so familiar underneath his fingers. And yet it was so much smaller, and despite her care, so much more worn.

It was hard to imagine – and the imagining made him feel very strangely. Her book, their book, read aloud to strange children in a strange place. Strange children in servant’s blue, touching the gilt letters with callused little fingers. He was uncomfortable, and then uncomfortable for a wholly different reason. That feeling was not born of reason. He looked down at her hand on the page, with its short blunt nails and agile, toughened joints. Absolutely nothing made sense.

Except for one thing, which was the thought of Aurelie reading aloud to the children.

I like to remember, I suppose.

The phrase seemed to speak for other things. Of which he had none to offer – he had, after all, made a point of holding into nothing.

He had thought so, at least.

Both things, she had said firmly. Morandi swallowed; it sounded to him deafening. As did his voice when he spoke. “I recall the one you told me first,” he went on, a little embarrassed himself. “Of the tin soldier and the paper ballerina. I knew it when you began reciting it two days ago. I could almost have finished it myself.” His cheeks were very hot, but he was as adamant to speak as he had been to show her his drawings the night before. “And, er – Blockhead-Hans, is it? And the poor fir tree.” The Little Match Girl he remembered too quite suddenly, disturbed.

“May I?” His fingertip found the top edge of the page questioningly; he glanced over. “Did it – give them comfort?” The words were as ill-made as the drawing, much less practiced than others which came easier to his tongue. Comfort from – what?

[Aurelie Steerpike]

Roalis 29, 2720 - Afternoon
The Good Pan Bakery

There was another overpowering silence after she spoke. It seemed to Aurelie to stretch on for an eternity between them. Aurelie kept her eyes fixed firmly on the chapel, the ivy and the crumbling walls and the mountain beyond. They had promised to see it together; the sort of promise children made, of course—Aurelie wasn't really sure they would have even if things had been different.

Now it was impossible—even if they still had the estate, which he had already told her they did not anymore. Had been impossible now for many years, and yet Aurelie felt a new wave of sadness thinking on it. She had truly wanted to see it, that mountain estate that had meant so much to him. (Climate aside; she would mind less now. She had grown used to many things she hadn't as a little girl.)

She heard him swallow before he spoke, and saw it, too. The collar of Cass' shirt hid nothing, and he was sitting so very close. Despite her efforts to keep her eyes fixed only on the book spread out in front of them, Aurelie looked up at the mention of The Steadfast Tin Soldier, a smile on her face. He looked very warm—out of some long-buried habit, Aurelie found herself worrying for his health. He seemed to be much better now, anyway, but she couldn't quite help it.

"Blockhead Hans was a favorite for a while," Aurelie offered with a warm grin. It was one of the sillier stories; she hadn't liked it much herself as a little girl, but her favorites were not as well-loved by the little girls who came to Brunnhold. "And Tommelise, too." The ones with brighter endings, she didn't say, for children who had enough of sorrow.

Just how many children had she told these stories to? Aurelie couldn't quite remember. Not many, she thought—they soon outgrew her, and there were never many each year. The affliction was rare, after all. Rare enough to seem impossible in the hearts of parents. Passivity was a thing that happened to other families' children, never their own. Until it did.

"Of course you may," she allowed when Desiderio asked. She watched his fingertip trace the top of the page, and then forced herself to look away. Funny thing—she didn't think she'd ever let anyone else handle the book before. There were practical concerns, like getting it torn or dirty. Mostly, she just felt it was too private a thing to let other people touch, like the locket around her neck. She had hardly a second thought for letting Desiderio take it.

His question surprised her. Aurelie studied his profile, trying to decide how to answer. How the question had been asked. "As much comfort as a story can give, I think, to children who are frightened and far from home." There was only so much she could offer, after all. Just a story and a smile, if they should want it. Help finding a place in the kitchen, if that's where they ended up. Nothing like what they really wanted. Nothing like home, or the life they knew.

Aurelie shrugged, uncomfortable. That probably sounded—dramatic, or self-important. "It's only a little thing, anyway. Not enough to..." Aurelie's eyes, which had been fixed on Desiderio's face, dropped back down. She shrugged again, frowning a little. They're lonely, she didn't say; and I am, too. "It was probably more comfort to me than them."

[Desiderio Morandi]

outside the good pan

morning on the 29th of roalis, 2720

M

orandi recalled that he had always been terribly embarrassed by stories like Blockhead Hans, as a boy. He had called them ridiculous; he had been so worried about seeming childish, especially in front of girls.

He supposed he had even less tolerance for goofing around now. He had only just a few days ago been threatening those two layabouts at Graywatch for putting an eel in his bed – had it only been a few days? Hurte – and he had never particularly encouraged such behaviors, which seemed to bring them on thricefold. It made him feel bitter sometimes. As if there were some people who could be utterly humiliated and spring back from it like saplings, all laugh and charm, and everyone around them love them all the more for it. Even as a boy, he had handled humiliation very poorly, which only seemed to worsen the effect. Sometimes now all things bright and cheerful seemed to him some sort of humiliation.

Aurelie was grinning; they were very close, he realized, and he felt it almost like the runoff of a spell. Like a warmth upon his face. (Or perhaps his face was just very warm now.)

He could not remember that she had ever liked such stories, either (though not with his vehemence). But he could imagine her reading them out to giggling little girls. As she was now, with her soft, warm voice and her firm manner, which surprised him.

It was hard to place her again in that misshapen blue dress – though, he supposed, moving through the imagining as if he were trying to see the scene of a crime, it would have been tailored to her at Brunnhold. Everything would have fit, perfectly and intentionally, with nothing out of place as it had seemed at Graywatch. Not for her, and not for the – children.

Not then.

He took the book silently. Of course, she had said, and he felt a tug of sadness. The book had never really been his, though it had felt so when he was a boy; but it had never really been his, as he had learned.

He flipped through carefully, smoothing the pages and trying not to batter the print with his thumbs. He had never taken care of books so well as he had his boots or his uniforms or even his sabre, ceremonial as it was; he had not seen them as something to hold onto, to care for. Not since he was a boy. But she did, and there was something terrifying about holding this particular book again after so long. He felt a sort of reverence he might have scoffed at another time, the sort of reverence one left to religious fools.

He listened, too. Could not quite process. The words seemed at odds with the printed picture of Tommelise sleeping in her walnut shell, which he stared at for a few moments before he turned the page. Aurelie fell silent, awkward, and her shoulder brushed his slightly when she shrugged.

“It was a comfort to me as a boy,” he replied, even and cool despite the tightness in his chest. “I was not so far from home as that.” He frowned, jaw set, and took a deep breath.

It was not successful in loosening him. “Were there no –” He broke off, fingers curling around the edge. “The children at Brunnhold, the youngest ones, for them – there were no – nurses? No – governesses, but.” He broke off again, abrupt and stumbling.

[Aurelie Steerpike]

Roalis 29, 2720 - Afternoon
The Good Pan Bakery

Either she had leaned in closer or (less likely) Desiderio had. The motion of her shrugging brushed her shoulder ever-so-slightly against his, and she felt it like she had leaned fully into him. Gracious Lady. Aurelie knew she ought to straighten up, especially now that she had passed the book into Desiderio's care; she couldn't bring herself to do it. A selfish indulgence, but only a small one—what harm was there in pretending a little?

(What she was pretending, she couldn't have said. That they were children again? That they were friends, and had never stopped being such? Or something else? Some possibilities were more forgivable than others.)

He took the book as if she had handed him something much more fragile and sacred than an old book of children's tales. Which, in her heart, she had. She had the impulse to ask him—oh, chimes, she didn't know. If any of this was important to him, too, or if it was just her alone. All potential answers were frightening, and she didn't ask.

She watched him turn the pages carefully and slowly, stopping here and there to look at an illustration or the words on the page. The pictures had always been her favorite part; eclipsed, she thought, only by the ones Desiderio drew himself. For a moment, hearing the soft shuffling of paper, the afternoon light slanting in from the window, she felt as if they were children again. Aurelie attempting to make friends the only way she really knew how—awkwardly, aided by her book of stories.

The coolness in his voice when he spoke pulled her out of that idle daydream—a little. Time and remembered fondness clouded her recall of their first real meeting a bit, but she didn't remember Desiderio as being the warmest of children, either. Not cruel, just—serious. Her smile was equal parts fond and sad. No, not so far as that—only a country away. Brunnhold had always felt to her much farther from Briarwood than her imagining of Caroult.

The next thing he said, stiffly and clutching on to the edge of the book, did make Aurelie sit up a bit more. Sit up and look at him properly, confusion creasing her eyebrows and tugging a frown onto her face. For a moment she thought he was joking. But Desiderio Morandi was not the type of man to joke in this way, as far as she had gathered. So the question was sincere. Aurelie couldn't tell if she was more heartbroken or angry; it was a kinder vision that he had been given, and she almost hated to take it from him.

"No. There are no—no nurses, nor..." She broke off, trying to untangle how she wanted to continue. It was an ugly thing, in the middle of a moment she had liked. But it was true, and that mattered more.

"...We aren't—I wasn't... Nurses," she said with a sudden and surprising venom, "are for children. Not tools. Tools are put to use, as soon as they are acquired." Aurelie looked up and tried to hold Desiderio's eyes. Willing him to understand, she supposed, or looking for proof that he had heard her properly. It was difficult; she wanted to look away, or apologize for the hardness in her voice. She held her chin firm and did not. He had asked, and he had said he wanted to know.

[Desiderio Morandi]

outside the good pan

morning on the 29th of roalis, 2720

A

urelie sat up a little. He felt it keenly, as he felt most of her motions; he did not care to think long on why he was so precisely aware of her, but he was. She was looking at him, and he was still staring fixedly at Tommelise in her walnut shell. Trying to reconcile it all in his mind.

Slowly he lifted his eyes.

She looked – confused, if he had to put a word to it. There was a little crease between her brows, and a frown on her lips. Confused and angry, perhaps.

Subject, the Inspector might have jotted down on his pad, has not broken eye-contact.

No, she said first; he blinked, his frown otherwise deep and motionless as if it had been carved into the stone of his face. He himself sat very straightly, as he had the whole time, and only now was he aware of the awkwardness of the angle, sitting so close. He was looking down, and she was looking up. For the moment, he could not seem to care.

Not as she trailed off, and he felt the horrible, impatient sensation of something slipping through his fingers. No nurses. Go on, he wanted to demand harshly.

We aren’t, she began, stumbling; then, I wasn’t – then, clearly-enunciated and firm, her chin up and her jaw set, she went on. Unyielding. His eyes widened slightly, and his frown deepened. He must have registered his offense.

They watched each other in the silence after she spoke. He sat as still as the statue of a hound, every angle of him trained on her.

“This flies in the face of everything I have been taught,” he said, even and clipped out of habit, as if he had before him his pen and pad and not a book of stories. Even sitting ridiculously in his socks and a human woman’s shirt. “There is no one to mind them except for their peers, no one to ensure that there is no foul play?”

No one had mentioned foul play. Not aloud. He traced the lines of her face with his eyes, studying it intently. The face of a missing girl, gone for so long he barely recognized it. Missing persons, some dull part of him said, were seldom found after the first forty-eight hours. Cold cases were seldom solved after ten years. This one he had never wanted to re-open. It was too late now for wanting or not wanting.

“This is not how our children –” A dreadful slip of the tongue. Perhaps it was the book in his hand, dreadfully familiar after a decade. Worn slightly on the same edge of the spine, even. “This is not how our people’s children are treated,” he said adamantly.

[Aurelie Steerpike]

Roalis 29, 2720 - Afternoon
The Good Pan Bakery

What sort of life had he pictured her having? Aurelie wondered over and over; each thing she told him seemed to shock him. He had been to Brunnhold too, hadn't he? And Anastou after, which she knew was no kinder than that great red fortress she had lived in for so long. Aurelie knew better than to expect him to really have seen anything—why would he have? Some part of her was disappointed each time anyway.

In the quiet that followed her clipped, hardened declaration, Desiderio barely moved. Not away from her, which was something of a relief. Neither, though, did the lines of his face alter much at all. A widening of his eyes, looking down at hers, a deepening of his perpetual frown. That was all. Aurelie held still too, waiting.

Now it was her turn to frown. This wasn't the soft, confused frown of moments ago, or concerned, or thoughtful. Aurelie was annoyed. It was easier to be irritated with Desiderio than with Ana, somehow. Or with Aremu, or Cass, or even with Fionn. Or rather, it was easier to acknowledge how she felt and let it show on her face. Which it certainly did now.

"Everything he'd been taught"? He said it so briskly, without the least stumble. You are wrong, it felt like he was telling her, about even the details of your own life. Like he'd slapped her in the face, after insisting—insisting!—that he wanted to hear the answers to his own questions. Well, she thought with some trace of bitterness, he hadn't said he would believe her.

The mention of "foul play" made her frown thin to a narrow line. She shook her head, anger stoppering up her tongue. Who would care? What did it matter? As long as it wasn't carried too far—as long as they could keep going, and no one could see what happened...? The skin between her shoulder blades itched.

Our children, he said, and then corrected himself. It was too much. He was looking right at her, and he could still say that? Could hear the words from her mouth, and still...? It hurt so much more than Ana's gentle arrogance. Ana was her sister, an unreachable star—Desiderio was her friend. One of the very few she had. Her eyes burned, and she looked away at last.

"No, it isn't." She squeezed her eyes shut, willing them to stop their prickling. When she opened them again, she felt no better. Her face was dry still, at least. That was something. "But we aren't treated like children. Except when it suits," she added, her anger welling up again. One tear escaped; she scrubbed it away before it could make it far down a freckled cheek.

"I don't know what you've been told, or how you think it should be. I don't—" Care, she almost said. Except she did. She cared very much—she cared to an absurd degree. Cared about what he thought, what he felt. If he listened to her or not. Aurelie looked back up at him. "But I am telling you what is. Unless you don't believe me, in which case I... I... T-Then why are you here? And why do you think I am?"

[Desiderio Morandi]

outside the good pan

morning on the 29th of roalis, 2720

S

he shook her head as firmly as she had spoken, the line of her mouth quite thin and sharp. If this were an investigation, he knew what he would have written in his pad. Every bell, one by one, was being rung. Aurelie had not looked away once, not to the book nor anywhere but his face. Had he ever believed her a liar – and he felt helplessly that he did not, could not, no matter what else he wanted to believe, and not only on account of ten years ago – he could not make even the thinnest shred of an argument for it now. Not to anyone, least of all himself.

But the image that was taking shape in his mind was unsettling at best, horrifying at worst.

He blinked, watching her shut her eyes. There was a redness about them; he knew what it meant. When she palmed away her tear, he had the startling remembrance of his thumb on her cheek.

He breathed in deeply, measuredly, when she looked at him. His eyes widened once more; his lips twisted, but still he said nothing when she broke off. His grit jaw unclenched as he went on. He had not realized just how tightly he was holding himself.

“I do believe you,” he shot back stubbornly. Immediately – he had not hesitated. “This is why I am –”

He frowned down at her, unable to find the words.

His jaw worked for a moment, then, “This is why I am sitting here. Because I do believe you.” He shifted, and his thumb on the page in his lap sounded utterly deafening to him in the small room. He checked his field again – indectal, but only barely. “I prefer the truth to a lie, Aurelie, even a lie of many years,” the words came out stilted and sharp with feeling, “even a truth I do not wish to accept.”

The pursuit of justice has made a fool of me for ten years, he wanted to say. What he could have done in ten years to find her – he could have put himself on the case with intent, rather than making of himself the man who pulled the solid ground from under her feet, when someone else – someones else, utterly faceless – had been the one to aid her.

And what of her holding fast to his drawing? To that memory, which he had been in Bastia trying to scrub from his skull?

He stared at her a moment more, then looked back down at Tommelise slumbering in her nutshell, before she was swept away by the toad. The illustration was more faded than he remembered. “No, I do not think that you would do anything without good reason,” he said. “Least of all leave that place after ten years. Your reason has never been in question to me. And never shall be.”

[Aurelie Steerpike]

Roalis 29, 2720 - Afternoon
The Good Pan Bakery

Desiderio's mouth twisted when she broke off. Aurelie did her best to prepare to—to what? To argue, to insist? It seemed to her as if she might, which surprised her. The strength of her desire to be believed, for him to believe her, surprised her. No one else in the world needed to, it felt like, if only...

Aurelie heard his tone first, jaw setting stubborn. It was only after he paused, frowning down at her, that her mind caught up to the words as well. The sharp look on her own face gave way to surprise. Her eyes widened. She didn't smile, not yet, and she didn't relax the tense set of her jaw and her posture. It felt unreal—after all, Ana had hardly listened, so why would he?

Desiderio, of course, wasn't her sister. And Aurelie knew that Ana had no love for Brunnhold, or for her being there. Why else would she have made that absurd demand to take her back to Briarwood? Against all sense and caution? Against, Aurelie reminded herself with a bitter twist in her stomach, Aurelie's own wishes and desires. But her beautiful sister had never asked for any details, hadn't seemed to want to know beyond confirming her own planned actions.

He repeated himself. Insistently, and after a pause to consider what he was saying. Aurelie studied his face, looking for a hint or a sign of... of something else, of insincerity. There wasn't any that she could find.

Best of all, he said her name again. Aurelie wondered, abstractly, if there would ever come a time when that didn't thrill her in some ridiculous way.

"Thank you," Aurelie breathed. There was a slight tremble in her voice and in her posture. She had been so prepared for him to say something else. She hardly knew what to with herself now. How ridiculous. She hardly knew what to do with her expression. Smile or sob? Had she always been so... so wishy-washy? Bells and chimes.

He believed her. Desiderio believed her, and moreover he believed that she had reason to have left. Aurelie turned this over in her mind, trying to decide how to feel about it. Not purely relieved, although she was. The relief was made heavier, laced as it was with fear. The more she was believed, the more it all seemed... real. Real and terrible in a way she was often very good at talking herself out of believing.

"I'm sorry if I... I simply..." She broke off, looking down at Tommelise in her little walnut shell bed. (She had tried to make one, Aurelie remembered suddenly, when she was a little girl. She had carefully prepared the shell, gathered together rose petals—in the absurd childish hope that the story was real in some way. As if by making space for one, a friend of her own would simply appear. The petals always wilted before the next day, and Nurse usually threw the walnut shell beds away after that.)

"Ana," she said in a rush, "didn't. Quite. Or not... She never truly asked. About... how things... About B-Brunnhold and..." Aurelie held, not wanting to look up. She hadn't wanted to mention her sister, the memory still too... But he should know, at least, that Ana had been to see her. Shouldn't he? Wasn't that fair? Saying her name out loud twisted her stomach; that twisting hurt, and twisted it even more.

[Desiderio Morandi]

outside the good pan

morning on the 29th of roalis, 2720

H

e lifted his chin slightly, feeling uncertain at her thanks. She was studying him; he knew not for what. When she spoke again, she apologized and trailed off, and then both of them were looking at the printed illustration of Tommelise. No, he wanted to bark, but he could not quite summon it up just now. Even if he did not think her apology appropriate – and he was uncertain about her thanks – he thought that he had done enough cutting across her for a year just in the last three days.

There was a tremble in her shoulders as if they had borne a great weight. It was slight; her posture was still straight. But she looked as if the air had been let out of her, or as if the frame of her was not so tightly tethered to the ground.

Morandi wondered if he should have changed the subject. The illustrations in this book had done a great deal to inspire him, he recalled, looking down at Tommelise; he had copied quite a few of them, and usually for a rapt Aurelie. He thought sometimes in retrospect just how strange it must have seemed – a boy whose only friend had been a girl five years his junior, when such things were terribly important. Certainly talk of Briarwood and marrying into the Steerpikes had not helped the teasing.

And how little all of that seemed to matter now. Hurte’s teeth, but he wished those things – which had marred his pride so much as a boy – were his concerns now.

His head jerked up when she spoke again. Wholly unexpected. He stared sidelong at her, though she did not look at him; all hound again, he scarcely blinked.

“Ana?” he blurted out. Then: “Lilliana,” the name feeling new after ten years. (No, not quite – Amelie had mentioned the elder Steerpike when they had had news of Julietta and Edmund. But it had felt strange even then.)

All he could see was her profile beyond a tangled lock of red hair, and her expression perturbed him.

“You have spoken to Lilliana?” he asked. Lilliana has spoken to you? In with his confusion was a prickle of hurt. He remembered with a horrible vibrancy hurling himself up against that proverbial red-brick wall as a boy, as if he could make them let him see her – and he had never managed it, and they had taken him away in the end, and kept him away until he no longer wanted to.

And Lilliana had managed–?

Was she involved with all this? Nothing made sense. Especially not with the set of Aurelie’s hands in her lap, nestled in all the lovely embroidery of her skirt.

He had heard a little of Lilliana Steerpike since then. He had tried not to; the Steerpike name had had nothing to do with him, not for a decade and more, and he had closed himself to anything of them which might touch him. He had seen her at Anastou, a fellow perceptivist of no small strength, but ever from a distance. He remembered her arresting height, her gold eyes so unlike her sister’s, that strangely familiar set of her chin – he remembered her glowing reputation, but little more. He remembered nothing of substance, except that she did not seem to him the sort of galdor who would encourage her sister to be employed by a human baker.

Shadow shifted, stretching out behind them, letting out a messy canine sigh and a whine.

“After–?” He frowned, unable to look away.

[Aurelie Steerpike]

Roalis 29, 2720 - Afternoon
The Good Pan Bakery

To say that she had "spoken with" her sister was put it mildly, Aurelie felt. Desiderio said her name almost like a stranger's; for some reason that surprised her. She supposed there was no reason to keep in contact, after... They were not, themselves, friends or even friendly. And yet when she registered her surprise, she realized that she had pictured... a sort of contact, at least. They had both been at Anastou, hadn't they? In Bastia, generally...?

It was only that her world was too small, she supposed. She couldn't help but feel like she would have kept in touch. Then again, perhaps not. Why be reminded of something as humiliating as...? As her. Aurelie felt strangely guilty, like she'd broken something. Which, she supposed, she had.

That her sister had been to visit her not just that first time last year, but indeed many since, felt strange to say out loud. It was a fact, and not a secret. Yet it felt as if it should have been—regardless of Aurelie's joy, or of what came after, Ana shouldn't have done it. Shameful, she thought, and her fault. She ought to have stopped her somehow—how, Aurelie had no idea. Brunnhold's administration certainly hadn't been able to. Aurelie doubted if anyone could have. Lilliana was not a woman who heard "no".

Her skin prickled all over, thinking on that. Aurelie swallowed, the tangle of her fingers tightening. She looked at Tommelise in her little nut-shell bed, and tried not to think to terribly hard about anything else. He needed to know that Ana might realize that she was gone, that was all. Nothing else. The rest wasn't important.

Shadow shifted and stretched; his sleepy puppy sigh and the press of his spine against her proved grounding. Aurelie chewed nervously on her bottom lip, then nodded again. She glanced up, catching his frown.

"A few times, recently," Aurelie admitted, as if to some sort of wrongdoing. "She came to tell me about... Our, ah. About Mother and Father. They..." Aurelie hesitated; did he already know? Possibly. It was different, coming from her. "They passed away, last spring. She thought I... That I should know."

Aurelie's hand drifted up, out of habit, to touch the little silver locked under her blouse. She had never quite gotten over keeping it tucked under her shirt, metal warm from resting against her skin. There was no reason to keep it hidden now, she supposed—it wasn't as if anyone would mind. Ten years' habit was hard to break, that was all. She lifted the chain up and over her collar now, running her hands along the seam where the two halves came together.

"I last saw her on my birthday," she went on quietly. "I don't know if she realizes I... That... That I'm not there anymore." Or what, if anything, would happen after she found out. If she even cared at all anymore. Aurelie might finally have proven herself more trouble than she was really worth.