“A rose?” I waggle my fingers. “Then what are all these stinky thorns?” I descend on her, tickling at her midsection. She squeals, pushing me away.
“Don’t! You—You’ll get mud on my skirts!”
“I am the mud monster!”
“No, no, save me!” She roars with laughter.
“That’s enough.” Helen cuts through the brief moment of levity with a severe note. Even though she’s younger than me, she acts like she’s the eldest. She’s the one really in control between the three of us. Mother’s favorite. “Laura, come,” she orders our younger sister.
Laura looks between Helen and I but relents to Joyce’s second-in-command.
“You cannot keep acting like that,” Helen scolds Laura.
“But I—”
“These childish notions. Don’t you want to be a proper lady?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then you should start acting like one.” Helen’s short-cropped blonde hair falls over one side of her face. She has been coddled her entire life, and yet she moves like an assassin. She’s constantly lurking in the shadows, and in my nightmares.
Someday, Laura will wake up and be just like her. The sweet girl I know will have been finally crushed under Helen and Joyce’s heels.
“What do you need, Helen?” I try and bring the attention back to me to spare Laura.
“Oh, I came to deliver a message.” Helen’s smile is like a snake’s. It’s the same smile as her mother’s. The same smile Laura will learn to make, in time. There are very few things about my father remarrying after my birth mother’s death that I consider a blessing. But knowing that I don’t share blood—and that horrible smile—with the woman who raised me is one of those few things. “Joyce wants you to go and mop the entry for our guests today.”
A sudden and intense aroma of smoke fills my nose. I refrain from rubbing it. Whenever someone tells a lie, the scent of smoke is thick in the air. I tried to explain the sensation before and was locked in my room for speaking nonsense. So I’ve kept silent about the gift since then. It has become one of my precious few tools of survival.
“You mean I must leave and stop sharing your delightful company? How will I ever survive?” As I go to enter the manor through the door at Laura’s right, Helen catches my arm.
“Don’t think that just because you’re getting married you’re suddenly better than us. You’re a bastard child, born out of wedlock, and a shame to our family name. You’re going to marry the lord of some sad little nowhere plot of land and live out the rest of your days in the obscurity we’ve prepared you for.”
Laura stares at her toes. There was a time she would’ve stood up for me. But that willingness has been crushed. Such sweetness…such light…fading right before my eyes. And I’m too weak and sad to stop it.
“I don’t want to keep Mother waiting.” I yank my arm away.
No matter what she says, I can gloat a bit today. I am the first to marry. Something that Helen wants desperately. She sees me as getting something before her for the first time in her life. The irony is that it is also the last thing I would ever want.
I enter the manor through a short hallway that deposits me into the main entry. Wilted flowers slump over the edges of cracked vases and perfume the air with the peaty and sickly-sweet scent of the early stages of rot. The delicate paintings of the ceiling are soot-stained from years of burning candles with not enough cleanings between. Before the incident on the roof, Joyce tried to force me up on one of the rickety ladders not long after the first time my father left on one of his ships to try and clean the ceiling. Given how young I was, I’m fairly certain she was trying to kill me. “If you’re still burdening our coffers at this age,” she 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, already 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 enters my mind, 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 birth mother, the mysterious woman my father met in his journeys as a young merchant and brought home with him, ignoring all expectations 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 here and now, it almost seems too 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 now.” 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 painted the same shade as her gown. “Do your best to clean up as well 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. That I could 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. There’s an instinct to the response. It’s not me. It’s what she’s trained me to be.
“Excellent.”
We go our separate ways, and I retreat to my room.