Chapter One #2
No matter what she says, I can gloat a bit today. I am the first to marry. Something that Helen wants desperately. I am getting something she wants before she does for the first time in her life. The irony is that it is the last thing I want.
I enter the manor through a short hallway to the manor’s foyer.
Wilted flowers slump over the edges of cracked vases and perfume the air with the sickly-sweet scent of the early stages of rot.
The delicate paintings on the ceiling are soot-stained from years of burning candles with not enough cleanings between.
Before the incident on the roof, not long after the first time my father left on one of his ships, Joyce tried to force me up one of the rickety ladders to clean the ceiling.
Given how young I was, I’m fairly certain she was trying to kill me.
“If you’re still taking from our coffers at this age,” she’d said, “then the least you can do is help with the upkeep. You have the hands of a man but the work ethic of a child.”
As if I didn’t spend every hour of every day repairing and fixing this run-down remnant of bygone days. That is another thing that makes me darkly happy about this whole situation: They are going to lose their most valuable servant.
But as quickly as the wicked thought arrives, it leaves.
There are vague memories in the recesses of my mind of this place in its early days, when it was still lovely.
Of her, my mother, the mysterious woman my father met in his journeys as a young merchant and brought home with him, ignoring everything expected of an up-and-coming young lord.
I can remember sunlight streaming through the now grime-covered windows that overlook the front of the manor.
If I squint, I can almost remember her face hovering over me.
A rainbow of color fanning out behind her.
She’s beaming with joy and love as she sings one of her songs that are imprinted on my heart.
I know laughter and music once filled these halls—filled me.
But in the here and now, it almost seems impossible to believe.
“What are you doing?” A gasp echoes from the mezzanine.
I look up to see the only “mother” I have known, the woman who raised me, sweeping down the stairs in a bloodred velvet gown.
Her pale hair is piled up and harnessed by a tiara, making her look like the princess she’s always wanted to be.
“Men are going to be arriving any moment and you’re standing there looking like you’ve been rolling in the pigsty all morning. ”
My clothes aren’t that bad, but I don’t argue. “I was coming in to change.” I ignore Helen’s lie about the floor. I wonder if it upsets Joyce that I don’t fall for their attempt to trap me into a scolding.
“Good. I have suitors to attend to.” She folds her hands over her stomach; her nails are painted the same shade as her gown. “Clean up as much as you possibly can. Otherwise, a man might realize what he’s marrying and will run away before the papers are signed.”
What, not who. I have always been her little monster. “I’ll do my best.”
“Good.” Joyce wiggles her shoulders and stands a little taller. Whenever she does this, I can’t help but imagine her as a large bird ruffling her feathers. “With any luck, you will be married before sundown.”
“Married? Not engaged?” I knew the discussions were happening, but I thought that I would have a little more time. That maybe I could meet the man before we were wed and ruin this somehow.
“We’ve spoken about this many times.”
“I don’t think we have.” We never have. I know it. And yet my certainty is shattered with her heavy sigh.
“You are clearly misremembering again. Don’t worry, I am here to help you.” Joyce gives me that serpentine smile and settles her hands on my shoulders. I believed this lie of hers once. “So you’re going to be good for me and not resort to one of your dramatic outbursts, yes?”
Oversensitive. Dramatic. She treats me like I am constantly on the verge of flying off the handle. As if I have ever done anything of the sort.
At least, I don’t think I have…
“I’ll be good,” I hear myself saying. It’s a reflexive response. It’s not me. It’s what she’s trained me to be.
“Excellent.”
We go our separate ways. I retreat to my room.
The second floor of the manor contains what are traditionally the family quarters. I lived there once. But when my father began traveling more and more, suddenly Helen needed a whole room for her art studio, and my bedroom had the best light.
Here is where you live now. Joyce’s voice echoes back to me as I stand at the threshold of the dark hall that leads to my room.
I light a nub of candle—one I took when replacing those in my sisters’ rooms. It illuminates the cracking plaster of the halls, the crumbling stone that tells the truth of this manor.
It’s too much. There’s not enough money to keep it in good repair, not really.
I do my best for the memory of my mother…
and so that if Father did somehow survive the ship going down, he has a home to come back to.
But all Joyce cares about are the common areas and her rooms. There’s money enough for those.
For the facade. Everything else, I think she would let burn.
My bed takes up the entire back of the room at the end of the hall, filling the space with wall-to-wall blankets and pillows.
My old bookshelf, also far too large for this room, is mostly empty, and the few objects on the shelves are practical ones only.
My prized possession is the lute leaning against it.
I go to pick it up and immediately think better of it.
Someone is certain to hear me if I play now.
I think Helen has trained herself to hear even my quietest strumming.
She protests whenever she is “forced to endure” a single note.
Once in a while, though, Laura listens. I will miss the nights she finds the courage to sneak down here and hum along to my playing. She’s the only one who has heard my music in years.
Sighing, I turn to the wardrobe, and I’m surprised to find a new dress within.
Well, it’s not technically a “new” dress.
I recognize it as Helen’s from the springtime ball two years ago.
It was worn only once, so the satin is still in pristine condition.
I run my hands over the buttery smoothness, so different from the regular clothes I wear.
The high collar hides the scars on my back. No doubt intentional.
I dare to use the upstairs bathroom. It’s a small form of protest that feels even better than the hot water stinging my skin.
Most days I am the one heating and carrying the water for everyone else’s bath.
At the end of it all I don’t have the energy to haul up my own.
When I’m finished washing now, I even dare to look through Helen’s cosmetics.
I select a soft rouge for my cheeks that accents the stormy gray of my eyes and a deep red for my lips that brings out the darker rusty notes of my brown hair.
I emerge a new woman. My hair has been brushed and carefully pinned in a cascade of curls that even Joyce would be proud of. I wonder if I would have looked like this every day if my father had never married that woman.
Joyce was a widow before she married my father.
It was a smart match on the outside: They both had young daughters, Helen and I, and were of a similar economic background—she had inherited a good deal of wealth from her previous husband in the form of rare silver mines to the north.
The same mines that only my father’s ships could reach with their most skilled captain.
I caught on to her game early. But my father never saw it.
Not even at the very end, when he left on his last journey.
He loved her. She had been the one to “save” him from the depths of despair following my mother’s death.
Then Laura came along, the light of both their worlds and the “glue,” as they would say, of our dysfunctional little family.
Treading lightly across the squeakier portions of the floor, I sneak into my old room.
It overlooks the front of the manor and has a view of the drive that connects the house to the main road we take to town.
Sure enough, there are three carriages parked along the front.
I see a man in a top hat emerge from the manor.
He exchanges a few words with his driver and they speed off.
I wonder how he feels about marrying a woman he’s never met. Clearly he’s fine enough with it to come here and make an offer.
Then again, maybe we have met. Maybe the man I will marry is someone I’ve crossed paths with in town or at a ball.
I shudder as I think of the lecherous Earl Gravestone and how he looked at me and my sisters in our dresses during our first seasons out in society.
I pray that he does not come calling for me, or for them when their time comes.
There are some evils I can’t even wish on Helen.
I creep out of my sister’s art room before I can be found.
Instead of taking the main stairs, I go down the side stairs wedged between the primary bedroom and the wall.
It’s the servants’ staircase and it puts me back in the kitchens.
From there, I sneak through the house using other such hidden halls.
One thing that my mother and sister never realized was that by making me their servant and demanding I act the part, they allowed me to learn all the passages built long ago into this now-decaying home.
The wall of the sitting room adjacent to my father’s study glides open on hidden, silent hinges.
I creep across the room, footsteps muffled by the carpet.
At the far end, I press my ear against the wall and hold my breath.
The wall is thin enough that I can hear the conversations happening on the other side with perfect clarity.