by Molly Pohlig
“You look paler than before, Iseult. Don’t tell me you’re still ill.”
“I’m fine,” she said mechanically. “Just fine. But the day has been tiring, since I’ve been so unwell of late. I think I shall go to bed early.”
She pushed her chair back from the table. Mr. Wince made no move to rise.
She closed her eyes, a thing she did sometimes to feel herself sway with the earth’s rotation, a simple reminder that time was passing, that this moment would turn into another moment, and another, and another, until it was finally all over.
She opened her eyes. Her father continued to eat his dinner as if she were not still standing there. It wasn’t that Iseult was unaccustomed to the certainty that her existence in the world was of little importance to anyone, but sometimes it smarted more than other times. If she fell down dead at her father’s feet he would rejoice, although he would likely grumble that even though he was being spared the expense of a wedding, there were now funeral costs to contend with.
Iseult left the dining room and headed for the stairs. She heard Mrs. Pennington hasten after her and say … something, but she interrupted without turning or pausing, saying, “No, thank you, I shall see to myself tonight. Good night.”
Her knowledge of Mrs. Pennington’s affection for her, however small, however secondary to her love for her own children, made Iseult feel even worse. Iseult had long battled with herself over whether it was better to live hungering after the scraps of affection she had from Mrs. Pennington and her fickle mother, or to have nothing. After all, her father had not a shred of love in his life, and he was content. She couldn’t deny that his life had a cleanness to it that hers lacked. He was never caught up in trying to please someone who was ultimately unpleasable.
She felt as if the journey to her room was very long tonight, and darker than usual. She ran a hand along the gloomy wallpaper, flocked with something she’d never been able to figure out, just blobby shapes. Had Beatrice picked it out? Maybe while still in mourning for her family? It was wallpaper that spoke of misery; it would have been at home in a funeral parlor.
She locked the door behind her and, gathering her skirts, curled herself small into her mother’s chair. She tried to feel as penitent as possible, to let her mother know that she hadn’t meant it, the transgression still so recent that her leg began to throb anew. She knew she should clean the wound, but she hoped that leaving it a mess might prompt her mother to realize the confused, anxious state of mind that had led her here.
With a jerk, Iseult realized that she hadn’t thought of Jacob for hours and hours. How could he flood her mind so completely at times, and at others be so totally absent? She had read her share of romantic novels, and she’d never read about anything like this. Oh, it wasn’t that she wondered if what she felt was love, nothing like that. She didn’t think love was something that she was capable of giving or receiving, not even for Beatrice: for all they felt, they were merely in thrall to each other, their strange circumstances thrust upon them.
She did, however, wonder what Beatrice thought of love. Had she loved her husband? Iseult felt restless, smoothing her skirts over and over. She decided that she would meet Jacob tomorrow, and felt the thought roaming around her head, looking for Beatrice and not finding her.
She couldn’t sit still, so she got up and paced the room. She felt hot, so she began to divest herself of her clothes, button by button, hook by hook, discarding each item on the floor. The mess wouldn’t make her very popular with Mrs. Pennington or Sarah, but that couldn’t be helped. Maybe she would feel like picking it all up later.
It was unpredictable, this … Beatrice-less-ness.
Iseult came to rest on the seat at the vanity table, long fingers spread on the tabletop, and looked soberly at her reflection.
What would she have to do to make herself more attractive? Or at least, what a man would find attractive. She’d never found any need for prettiness before and didn’t know how to go about it. She studied herself in the glass. Paleness of course was to be desired, but the paleness of her cousin Elspeth, all sweetly peach around milky-white edges, soft and blurred. Iseult’s edges had points, and the skin over her cheekbones, chin, and forehead had a weak blueness, like the milk of an unhealthy cow. She rummaged through a drawer until she found a small pot of rouge that she had stolen from an apothecary as a child. Not because she had wanted it, exactly, but because she had found that she could.
She had opened the jar at the time, touched it hesitantly, and immediately felt wicked. So there it had stayed at the bottom of the drawer, until now. The gold was flaking from the lid, and it stuck to Iseult’s hand as she opened the jar. She sniffed the contents but smelled nothing. Had it gone off? Did such things even go off? It looked the same as she remembered from all those years ago, and still a part of her was tempted to jam a finger all the way in.
She swiped her little finger gingerly against its sheen, inspecting her fingertip for evidence. Nothing, other than some grime under her nail. She smushed harder at the rouge, and the surface splayed under the pressure, like butter. She rubbed finger and thumb together and peered closely at the result. It was very red, although not unpleasantly so. Dubiously, she held her thumb up next to her cheek and leaned closer to the mirror. Even at this proximity the color made her face appear fairly ghastly. Well, more ghastly than before. What would happen when the rouge was on her face? She removed her thumb from the mirror’s gaze. It couldn’t look much worse.
She dabbed a little on her right cheek, then her left. She squinted in the dimness. The effect was not unflattering. Was she, though, beginning to detect the faint, clinging scent of roses? She disliked roses; she thought they smelled sweetly of decay. But the smell was very faint, almost unnoticeable.
With no mother to chastise her out of it, Iseult decided then and there that she would indeed paint her cheeks with rouge before she went off to meet Jacob in the morning. She was tempted to go to bed with the rouge on and not have to start again, but Mrs. Pennington might see, and she was not sure what effect it might have on the bed linens.
19.
She woke in the morning, wrenched into daylight from her dreams by an unseen hand, sweating, her mouth gummy and tasting like too much wine.
Mrs. Pennington was opening the drapes to a beautiful day. Too beautiful. Suspiciously beautiful.
“Are you all right?”
Iseult jumped at Mrs. Pennington standing suddenly beside her.
She put her motherly hand on Iseult’s forehead. “You don’t feel warm but … your cheeks … are you feeling ill?”
“No, no, I’m fine. I feel fine,” Iseult said hastily, scooting herself out the other side of the bed. “Please help me get ready, I should like to go for a walk.”
She could hear Mrs. Pennington summoning up the breath for a lecture as Iseult hurried past and shut herself in the bathroom. She was afraid to look in the mirror, and instead looked at the cold tiles at her feet while she tentatively touched her left cheek. It didn’t feel right. It felt bumpy, swollen. She touched the right. It didn’t feel any better.
Peering through her hair, Iseult grabbed a small disc of mirror that had belonged to Beatrice. She looked somberly at one cheek, then the other. Maybe rouge did go off, after all. Both cheeks were a strange shade of red, the color of roses that had not only been dead for some time but were also coated in a layer of dust. And underneath the terrible color were uneven raised patches, like those on a topographical globe of the kind found in gentlemen’s studies. And all this made the rest of Iseult’s face even more sickly pale than usual.
Her heart sank, although thanks to her stubborn, pragmatic resistance to hope, it didn’t have far to sink. She momentarily congratulated herself for self-protection. But it was a small victory. A very small one. Although she hadn’t been silly enough to hope that nothing would go wrong, she had still been hopeful that the thing to go wrong wouldn’t be her face.
But she wasn’t going to let this
stop her from meeting him. After all, she was the one who had succumbed to vanity. It was right that she should suffer for it.
* * *
Iseult felt nauseated as she set off to meet Jacob, but consoled herself with the fact that the weather was at least cool enough that she wouldn’t sweat, and that the veil Mrs. Pennington had arranged over as much of her face as possible wouldn’t look too terribly strange. The housekeeper had fussed and fretted and wondered aloud what could have caused Iseult’s cheeks to catch such dusky fire as they had done. She had a very suspicious look in her eye, and clearly believed there had been some mischief on Iseult’s part, but Iseult did not budge, refusing to meet her gaze. She also did not answer questions as to her destination, instead waving a hand vaguely in the direction of the blue outdoors.
The door closed behind her; Iseult thought of how, when she was small, Mrs. Pennington had followed her on her walks. As Iseult got older, she got faster, while Mrs. Pennington got slower, and eventually Iseult was free to roam without looking over her shoulder. No one cared where she was.
She had left too early, so she took a circuitous route that would probably result in her being late. She had never mastered being perfectly on time. She bounced one hand off her thigh to see whether it still hurt from the most recent wound (it did not; not much), while her other hand fiddled with the veil tumbling from her hat. It was old and gray; it had belonged to Beatrice. Veils were not much in fashion at the moment, so Mrs. Pennington had had to sift through a number of boxes before she came back with it, sneezing. Finding that it wasn’t terribly easy to see where she was going, Iseult took advantage of a moth hole in the veil, and she worked her little finger into it to give her a wider view.
She was well aware that this was causing people to stare at her, but she reasoned that they would stare harder if she fell in the street. It was going to be her third time seeing Jacob, again without Beatrice there to tell her what to say. Not that she always went along with Beatrice’s suggestions, but it was still comforting to have a little bit of input.
She could hear by the church clock that she was late, but restrained herself from going any faster. Before rounding the corner that she knew would reveal Jacob in the distance, she stopped to put a steadying hand on the stone wall next to her. It was cool and pleasant to the touch, and she was tempted to lay her cheek against it. She could imagine her mother telling her not to. She longed for Beatrice’s voice, longed for it with a physical pain in her hands. It was an emptiness pressing against her from the inside.
Come back, she thought. She looked around, but she was alone. She leaned against the wall, tracing a crack in the stone. She got close enough so she could feel her breath returned to her.
“Come back?” she whispered, through her veil, to the wall. Her eyes felt warm and swollen, stinging tears building up somewhere behind them.
She heard someone walking on the pavement toward her, and she stepped sharply back, smoothing her dress as if she were in the middle of doing … something. It wasn’t a very good impression of a normal person, but it was serviceable enough. The gentleman passing didn’t turn and stare.
Her head still felt thick, but it was time to go. She gave it a quick, sharp shake and walked around the corner in an imitation of resolve.
There he was on the bench, as she knew he would be. Her heart gave a lurch that was instantly transmitted to her feet, and she briefly tripped over them. To smooth out the trip, she walked faster, and must have been something of an alarming sight looming in Jacob’s field of vision, for he looked up from his newspaper, startled, and jumped to his feet.
“Miss Wince! Hello—I wasn’t … expecting you,” he said, trying to refold his paper with one hand while taking hers with his other. Unfortunately, he was folding with his right hand, and therefore only the left was available to extend itself to her. Iseult had stuck out her right hand, so they ended up awkwardly patting each other’s elbows before the whole gesture was simply abandoned.
“Oh, but I thought your letter said that … Would you prefer that I go?” Iseult couldn’t tell whether she was embarrassed or relieved.
“Not at all!” he said, much too loudly. He was obviously trying not to stare at Iseult’s veil.
“But…” Every fiber of Iseult’s being told her to pick up her skirts and run. Was married life to be constant embarrassment? She could tell that passersby were staring at them. That was one benefit of the veil, though: she couldn’t actually make out any plainly curious expressions, but she could perceive faces turned toward them.
“It’s just that I didn’t think you were going to come.” Jacob cleared his throat and put his newspaper, which was refusing to be folded, into a nearby dust cart. “You didn’t seem to be very excited about the prospect of … all this.”
Iseult’s panic must have translated into her body language, because Jacob took her arm and began to walk her down the street. “I did not expect you, but I am glad that you came. Pleasantly surprised, as it were.”
Iseult searched herself frantically for Beatrice’s presence. She knew that a compliment was most likely expected, but compliments were not a thing which she was accustomed to giving out, receiving even fewer. She did not even merit the compliments she received from Beatrice. She sometimes wondered if all mothers lied as much as her own.
However, she would have been highly grateful for a lie from her mother at the moment.
“What’s that?” Jacob’s silver face loomed up through the hole in the veil. Her father had often admonished her for muttering under her breath. Perhaps marriage was just a repetition of the current state of affairs, but worse. Husband instead of father, new house instead of old, complete solitude instead of her mother’s companionship.
“I said, I … I am not excited.” The words tumbled out, and Iseult was mightily glad of the veil covering her face, which was surely now even brighter red than before. “I mean, I am … not … used to being married.”
She gave it the inflection of a question, then shook her head as if to do so were a means of rewinding time. “No, obviously, we are not yet married. And I have never been married. I am not used to … acting. To acting married.”
She groaned, and moved to pull her hand from his arm. He kept a tight hold on her fingers, though, and didn’t seem at all bothered by her stupidity.
“Neither am I, Miss Wince, neither am I. I think we will learn to act married together.” He said this with a smile, much to Iseult’s surprise. “And maybe then someday we won’t even have to act anymore.”
Again, what was she supposed to say? So she stayed quiet as they walked several blocks in not completely uncomfortable silence. It was only when he guided her toward the door of a tea shop that she found her tongue.
“What, do we mean to … go inside?” Iseult thought quickly and employed a trick that had always served her well with Mrs. Pennington. She wiggled one foot around until her heel slipped into a crack in the pavement and sank as much weight on it as possible. Mrs. Pennington was stout, but she was a poor match for a wiry child who didn’t care to be moved.
“If you are ashamed to be seen with me, I can assure you that while we will be more visible to a small number of people inside the tea shop, we will be less visible to the larger number of people on the street.”
He said this with such an unflappable, even tone, as if he were not discussing the presumption that his future wife would prefer that not even strangers be aware of their connection. Iseult felt shabby and small, and she wished to express that she hadn’t meant that, but what had she meant? And if she had, why wasn’t he upset?
“People must have been very unkind to you,” she said, feeling not quite herself. It certainly wasn’t what Beatrice would have instructed her to say. She didn’t want to wait for his response. “I think they have been unkind to me as well. Perhaps this is why we have been … entangled.” (She knew that was not the word that should have been put in that place, but it was too late to retrieve it now.) “Of cour
se we will go inside. Of course, of course.”
And she put on what she hoped was a decent approximation of a smile (surely the blurring effect of the veil would come to her aid in making it more realistic) and made for the door with something like confidence.
Naturally she had forgotten that one heel was tightly wedged into the ground.
She pitched headlong into Jacob’s chest, dislodging her veil and the hat along with it. Jacob managed to grab her about the waist before she could topple any farther, and he righted her before fetching the hat and veil, which had fled her head in the breeze. He walked back to her, smiling. She was ashamed of herself for so many reasons that it wasn’t even worth trying to categorize them. The not-smile was still frozen on her face, and it didn’t help matters when the smile fell from Jacob’s.
Her mind went blank until he reached a silver hand up to her cheek.
“Oh, God,” she said aloud, batting his hand away without thinking.
“Are you all right?” he said, only retracting his hand a little, leaving it hovering in the air between them.
“Yes, of course, I just, I don’t like to be, my face, I mean, I think I must have eaten something that didn’t agree with me. I suppose.” The thought flitted through her that it was strange to sometimes have so much trouble formulating words in the mind and getting them out through the lips, and to sometimes not be able to stop the words from pouring out, to have them spring fully formed from she knew not where. And sometimes both of those things seemed to happen at the very same time. Jacob was still staring with concern at her cheeks. She couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Does it look so very dreadful?”
She thought a smile twitched at the corner of his mouth, but it could have been a muscle spasm as well, for it was only there for a moment. “It is not so very dreadful. Some tea might improve the situation, don’t you think?”
Was he teasing her or was he in earnest? She decided that she did not care. She was tired. All this being in the presence of another person was draining. She nodded. She would like some tea.