The Rose Bargain

I have a vague recollection of Marion reading at my bedside by candlelight. Then, of Greer rebandaging my hands. “This is what you get for jumping into the Thames with open wounds,”

she lectures, but her voice is gentle, her face etched with concern.

Will the Crown pay my family if I die like this, or will I become just another Benton girl sacrificed to the gossip mill? It is a little funny, I suppose, to attempt a coup against the queen and die of an infection instead.

The dreams set in, places where the colors bend all wrong. I’m at a coronation, a crown on my head. I’m at a tea party, and the walls are melting like chocolate left out in the sun. I’m cantering on the back of a horse through a land that looks nothing like this one.