“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” Tess cried at last. “You’re both a pair of babies.” And then she dived onto the bed herself, crawled after Kenneth like a crocodile, and planted a big kiss right on his stupid mouth. Jeanne had been right about his breath, which was astonishing, but Tessie grabbed his ears like Dozerius clinging to the mast of his shattered ship and hung on for dear life.
Inevitably, that was when Mama burst in.
* * *
The spanking, even for a girl dubbed “spank magnet,” was one for the ages. Tessie, over years of corporal punishment, had learned to absent herself during these events to make them hurt less; she’d be sailing the wine-blue seas with Dozerius, and the chafing on her buttocks was due to the splintery wooden benches of his ship, or (if it was particularly bad) to the piping-hot Throne of Embers that she’d sat upon to save him from injury.
This one, though, recalled her most unpleasantly back to the here and now, not because it was so severe but because Mama cried the entire time. Indeed, her fury flagged sooner than usual; her arm dropped to her side and her chest heaved with sobs. Tess threw her arms around her mother to comfort her, as if it were Mama who had just received a beating.
“Don’t cry,” said Tessie, patting Mama’s cheek as tender tears welled up in her own eyes. “Whatever has made you so sad, I won’t do it again. I promise.”
“You are never to climb into a boy’s bed or kiss him until you’re married, Tessie,” said Mama when her breathing had stilled enough to let her speak.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” said Tessie weepily, which was a lie.
Mama put her hands on Tessie’s shoulders and looked her in the eye. “You must understand, boys and men are afflicted with bodily lusts. They will try to coax and cajole you into bed, but you must resist. ‘If you won’t renounce temptation, O woman, there is no saving you. The Infernum burns hottest for the unrepentant harlot,’ says St. Vitt, Heaven hold him.”
Tess, who’d failed to understand most of that admonishment, nodded gravely. She would learn those words; she would understand what Mama wanted and live up to it, if only Mama would stop being sad. “I won’t go near any boys,” she said. “Only Kenneth is my uncle, so…”
Mama rolled her eyes. “I’ll talk to Kenneth. Of course you may still play together—you’re family!—but there is to be no kissing. No…explorations.”
No explorations seemed a bit harsh. What was Dozerius if not an explorer? Still, Tessie agreed to it—she’d have agreed to almost anything to see Mama smile—although a mote of bitterness niggled at her, the knowledge that Kenneth would not be spanked for his part in this.
Then again, he hadn’t wanted to play along. She’d done all the kissing.
Mama had not laid it out explicitly, but she didn’t have to, not when years of spankings had done the work for her: there was something particularly bad about Tess. She was singularly and spectacularly flawed, subject to sins a normal girl should never have been prone to. It was going to take far more work for her to get into Heaven than someone like Jeanne, whose goodness seemed to flow effortlessly from some deep inner well of virtue.
Tess was determined to make it, though. Jeanne wouldn’t want to go without her.
* * *
The twins were in the habit of creeping into each other’s beds for what they called their “midnight conference.” The night after the faux wedding and epic spanking, Tessie wept in her sister’s arms.
“W-why is she never happy, Nee?” Tess sobbed. “W-why do I always make it worse?”
“We’ll find the way to help her,” said Jeanne, stroking Tessie’s dark hair. “I think she’s unfair to you sometimes. She’s mad at Papa, but it’s easier to take it out on you.”
This only made Tessie cry the harder. Jeanne held her sister’s face in her hands and said, “You’ve got me, Sisi. We’ve got each other. It’s us against the world.”
“Us against the world,” Tess repeated in a sopping sob voice. But there was strength in those words and in Jeanne’s hands. She felt it. Little by little she calmed, until she found the road toward sleep, whereupon she dreamed of pirates and woke refreshed and ready to get in trouble all over again.
The twins had taken their morning stitchery to the Tapestry Salon, one of the less fashionable sitting rooms in the palace. Jeanne liked the quiet, and Tess the tapestries, which depicted a seagoing adventure involving serpents and icebergs and flying fish. A younger Tess might have gone in search of the weavers to ask them what legend they (or their forebears) had been trying to depict; she might have scoured the library for references or asked Pathka the quigutl, who knew an awful lot about serpents of every sort.
Tess the lady-in-waiting, however, sadder and sixteen, had no time for such involved and esoteric interests. Who would have dressed old Lady Farquist if Tess was selfishly haring off after her personal curiosity? More important: who would put Jeanne forward in the world and find her a husband?
Jeanne, embroidering at the other end of the couch, was too sweet and mild to do it herself. If she were left to her own devices, no one would have noticed her at all.
“Lady Eglantine’s soiree is tonight,” Tess was saying as she basted a new sash onto Jeanne’s blue satin gown. She’d add mother-of-pearl beads, too—she’d gleaned some off Lady Mayberry in exchange for a particularly succulent bit of gossip—and no one would recognize the dress when she was done. The Dombegh twins couldn’t afford many new clothes, so Tess, the stronger seamstress, had learned to be resourceful.
“Couldn’t we stay in for once?” said Jeanne, leaning her blond head against the back of the velveteen couch and gazing out the window at the snowy courtyard. “I’m tired of all this.”
Jeanne was tired? Imagine the tiredness of the person who dressed her, altered her clothes, and carried her messages. The one who vetted eligible bachelors and navigated the treacherous web of palace politics with no thought for herself, doing everything for Jeanne’s happiness and that their family might be saved. That person must be bloody exhausted.
Tess basted fiercely, stabbing the needle in and out, and kept her mouth clamped shut.
The twins had no option but to attend every soiree until Jeanne’s future was settled. Tess frowned over her work, trying to find the words that would best persuade her sister. “I’ve heard a certain someone is going to be there,” she said, tilting her head and batting her eyelashes.
Jeanne knew whom Tess meant, and blushed, but still she opened her mouth to protest.