Project Purple

21 - The Sayer

Renee Duquette looked up from her planting, out at the spruce, and the big firs and pines that rang their little valley.

"This is just like Canada."

She was the Governor's fair and youthful protégée, at least twenty years younger than he. Renee had theatrically large eyes, a red outburst of silky hair, and a throaty laugh that gave her a lusty air, even if she had no such intentions.

"I have always been weak for intelligent men," she said more than once, batting her blue eyes with a vague measure of earnestness. Yet anyone would have a devil of a time removing that innate flirt that dwelled within her. It was sexy as hell, and she knew it.

This appeared to do nothing to ingratiate her with the other women in the colony. She looked appealing every day, even without the forbidden modern make-up. And she knew the women were nearly falling over themselves in their efforts to measure the Sayer, to gain some understanding of her as she preened in elegant radiance.

At night she shared the bed of the Govenor, and to the women, she seemed, in those early months, some palpable contradiction-a hustler amongst the toiling gentry.

"I'm the queen of England," she had gushed with audacious eyes.

Indeed she was: every weekend at the Renaissance Faire in a Las Vegas Casino. Renee had been performing the part for nearly three years, dressing up in the pseudo-Elizabethan wear from the casino's costume department and parading around, bestowing the commoners that adorned the gambling establishment with her small, regal waves, soliciting their prolonged presence with occasional recitals of limericks, or quotations, from the great writers of the time.

Preparing to be the Queen of England was a lot of work for Renee-She knew little about world history, and just survived her high school years in Montreal, learning a bit of French history, but nothing of the British.

Nevertheless, she landed the part of the Queen of England.

"None other than Elizabeth the First," she went on that May eveining at the quad table, "the fifth, and final, monarch of the Tudor dynasty."

She didn't try to conceal her French-Canadian rearing with the lofty royal English speech of the late 1500's, and she scanned the table in her doe-eyed conviction that evening for signs of dissension among her rivals-most likely the Goatwench, who returned a smile, though their eyes covertly menaced one another.

"The reign of our Good Queen Bess is referred to as the Golden age in English culture," the Governor chortled," The Golden Age, no less!"

He looked at Renee with reverence, like she, herself, had been responsible for England's Golden Age, and not just a lucky dancer plucked from the enormous ranks of the Las Vegas entertainment pool.

"There's no role-playing here," she heard the Governor repeat more than once of their positions in the colonial hierarchy, "we don't have to be these people, we don't have to act our assigned parts. Really, there's no way we can NOT be ourselves."

Whether his pipe needed lighting or not, he lit it again, and everyone sat in silence as he went through the familiar puffing process. "Good God, we've got too much to think about each day, let alone pretending to be someone we aren't. We just have to try and do what they do, if you follow my drift."

Renee sighed softly: She knew she'd be in his bed within the week.

"One good thing about Alaska," she said, "is that one need not take down the Christmas lights."