The Unsuitable

by Molly Pohlig

  In that moment, Iseult felt a remarkable sense of calm, so foreign to her that she did not immediately recognize it. Everything would come right. She would exit the dining room gracefully, with Mrs. Pennington’s help, and no one would be the wiser. The wedding would go off beautifully, and her father would see that he had misjudged her all these years. Jacob would love her very much, and they would have children who made them proud, neither strange nor silver. She would be contented, and at last feel like just another person in the world.

  She rose swiftly, with purpose and determination and positivity, and in the next moment she realized how very drunk she was and how erroneous were all of her preceding thoughts. Swaying as if on a small boat running into a large swell, she grabbed wildly at the table, upsetting her wineglass, her water glass, and much of the other tableware with a crash. Jacob leapt to her aid and took her arm, but unfortunately, so did Mrs. Pennington on the other side, so there was no one to set the napkin in place. The blood on the chair caught Jacob’s eye, and as the color left his face (not the silver but the underlying flesh tones) Iseult suddenly remembered a day when their cook (the one subsequently murdered by her beau) had showed her how to blanch vegetables.

  Mrs. Pennington saw Jacob’s face too, and was not at all subtle in belatedly carrying out her duty of placing the napkin on the chair. Iseult glanced up to see her father’s face turning colors as well. His cheeks went the shade of purple Iseult knew well from holding her breath while staring at her reflection. His lips went white, and even though she saw him through drunken eyes and he seemed to be rocking back and forth, she could tell that the clumsily executed ruse had not fooled him.

  But a small miracle interceded at that point, not enough to remedy the situation by any means, but enough to keep Iseult moving. Jacob grasped her arm even more firmly, and said in a lovely, kind voice, “Miss Wince is unwell, and I will help escort her to her room.” It was a voice that brooked no argument, and Mr. Wince was left speechless, still fuming, nodding his agreement. The sympathetic murmurs around the table sounded to Iseult as if they came from an audience and she herself was onstage. She had forgotten her lines and the other actors were forced to improvise her exit. She felt herself maneuvered gently away from the table, with Mrs. Pennington standing too close behind her. The three of them shuffled slowly out of the room. Iseult cast a thought back to the chair and the napkin, but decided that they weren’t worth another. The damage was done and would have to be faced at some point. For now, all she wanted was to be unconscious. She hoped dimly that Beatrice was as drunk as she was, because she did not want to see her in her dreams.

  They had reached the staircase when Iseult said very loudly, “I am very sorry the dress has been ruined.” She felt a tremor of embarrassment run through Jacob’s body at her side, and maybe it was because she was drunk, maybe it was because she was so humiliated, but it made her very angry.

  “You’ll have to get used to the sight of ruined dresses if you throw your lot in with mine, Mr. Vinke. I rip them and I tear them and then I bleed on them.”

  “Hush now, my dear, don’t make things worse,” Mrs. Pennington murmured.

  Iseult laughed and Jacob cringed. “Can things get worse?”

  They mounted the stairs in silence until Iseult continued: “I suppose things can always get worse.”

  Her knees buckled; she thought it would be a very good idea to sit down just where she was on the stairs, but found her plan hampered by her escorts, who locked their arms around her elbows. Iseult muttered to herself, “Angry angry angry they’re always angry with me for no reason why not give them a real something to be angry about for a change?”

  She forced her swimming eyes to focus on Jacob’s face, which was as dark red as she assumed the back of her poor dress to be. He wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at the stairs as if his life depended on it. Iseult didn’t blame him. A great wave of shame washed over her, and she wondered whether one’s feelings changed faster when one was drunk. As she was half escorted, half dragged over the threshold to her bedroom, she began to giggle.

  “This is highly inappropriate, even if we are engaged, Mr. Vinke,” she said. She was still clear enough in her mind to be thankful that her room was at least tidy. She could hear Mrs. Pennington and Jacob discussing her, but Beatrice had taken up scolding her again, so she could not make out what they were saying. She tried to hush her mother and heard herself make a grunting noise that turned into a growl. Her wave of shame receded into oblivion. She shook her head, attempting to shake the noise out, but that made her more nauseated, and she crashed sideways into Mrs. Pennington. Maybe she should go ahead and get sick, right here in front of Jacob. She wanted the humiliation to be complete. Anyway, she doubted that she would ever see Jacob again after this. And Beatrice was gaining in volume and in venom.

  * * *

  you have humiliated your father for the last time little bitch little changeling you are no daughter of mine no daughter of his it’s clear someone swapped you maybe the nurse who let your toe fall off the real parents didn’t want you they brought you back they insisted they leave with an entire child and because because your father poor father had no wife to know her own child in his grief he accepted this poor substitute into his family his home and this is how you betray him

  * * *

  “Can’t you leave me alone for even a moment?” Iseult shouted, enough in control of herself to brace her muscles against any backlash from Beatrice. But although she felt something like a burn in the scars on her neck, it paled in comparison to the way that Jacob dropped her arm as if it were on fire.

  Iseult had never known her emotions to change quite so quickly. She felt like a boat in more ways than one, tossed into each new feeling at random, and seasick, oh so seasick. She didn’t want to explain, she didn’t want to apologize, she didn’t even want to die, she just wanted to be dead.

  She sank slowly down onto her bed, and into that idea. The bed was soft yet stable; would death be like that? A quiet yet comfortable nothing? There was a wrench in her neck and she closed her eyes, wondering how the room could still be spinning if her eyes were closed. She considered whether there was a point in apologizing to Jacob, and decided that no, there probably was not. From her face-down position on the bed, she waved her hand dismissively at him.

  “You couldn’t have helped me, even this once?” she shouted at Beatrice as Mrs. Pennington attempted to shush her and cover her shame with a blanket at the same time. Beatrice raged back in decidedly unladylike language. With great difficulty, Iseult turned her head so she could see Jacob, standing like a tin soldier, but like the one in every set who couldn’t stand up quite right and always toppled at the very moment when all the others were ready. They looked at each other as Mrs. Pennington fussed around, and if Iseult had been sober she would have been impressed that he maintained eye contact with her.

  She lifted her head from the mattress for a moment, but then decided to put it back down and say what she had to say from there. “I release you,” she said, very clearly for someone who had consumed as much alcohol as she had. “You need no longer con … consider yourself affianced to my disgraced personage. You are free to marry another, should you so choose.” Feeling quite magnanimous, she smiled at him, entirely heedless of whether her pointy teeth were showing.

  He merely looked at her gravely and said, “I will marry you exactly as planned.”

  Even Mrs. Pennington was shocked into stillness. There was a charged silence, and then Iseult lurched from the bed, moaning, “I’m going to be sick,” and stumbled to the washroom with Mrs. Pennington fast on her heels.

  As to what happened after that, Iseult, luckily, retained no clear memories. Needless to say, it was a very long night. Jacob saw himself out, and Mrs. Pennington was akin to a saint. This was because she loved Iseult as much as she loved her own daughter—perhaps more, if she thought about it, because her daughter had a mother and a father and a brother to love her at the ver
y least, and Iseult had no one. She held Iseult’s shoulders as they heaved, and stroked her sweaty forehead, and told her over and over that everything would be all right, because she knew something that Iseult didn’t, and she was afraid to tell her, and she knew that it would prevent everything from being all right.

  25.

  Iseult woke the next morning with a monstrous headache. The first thought that came to her shrieking brain was that this must be how Zeus had felt when Athena started banging away on her silver helmet from inside his head. Iseult would have been grateful to hear banging on a helmet; Beatrice might have been using words, but Iseult couldn’t make any of them out apart from the frequent obscenities. She very slowly raised herself up on one elbow, surveying the wreckage of her room. The pink dress, so imbued with hope the day before, was now a crumple of fabric on the floor, and through her haze Iseult could see that the bloodstains, now dried to rust, were even worse than she had feared. Her legs were tangled in a clammy swirl of nightgown and bedsheets and damp rags that had been wrung out and put on her forehead. There was a porcelain bowl with a towel draped over it, mercifully concealing the contents.

  And over there, in Beatrice’s blue chair, was Mrs. Pennington, asleep, which was at least part of why Beatrice had been cursing. Incrementally, Iseult raised herself to a sitting position and edged first one foot and then the other to the floor. Once the room stilled, she stood, holding onto the nightstand for support. Concentrating hard on uprightness, she shuffled over to Mrs. Pennington, who was snoring softly in a patch of sunlight. Iseult was surprised that Mrs. Pennington snored. Indeed, she was surprised that Mrs. Pennington slept at all. She had a room near the kitchen, but Iseult had never so much as glimpsed its interior. Mrs. Pennington sighed and turned her head from one wing of the chair to the other. A crease ran down one cheek, and Iseult wanted to cry. Instead, she patted Mrs. Pennington’s hand softly where it lay on the armrest. And patted and patted until she woke up. Mrs. Pennington looked confused, but then smiled.

  “Shall I always wake you like this from now on?” Iseult said, feeling a little better already. Mrs. Pennington’s smile did a curious thing, disappearing and then reappearing in less than genuine form, and Iseult thought that the night in the chair probably had not been very good for her. Gritting her teeth, she reached down and helped Mrs. Pennington up. “I do feel surprisingly hungry, is that normal?”

  Mrs. Pennington grimaced and stretched and rubbed a spot on her back. “If my husband’s any indication, yes. And it’s not surprising, you can’t have a thing left in your stomach after last night. Let’s go downstairs and have Sarah fix us something. I do hope your father has left the house already.”

  Iseult leaned down to pick up her robe, which had also landed on the floor, noting that any change in elevation made her head feel squeezed. “Oh, this mess!” Mrs. Pennington said, helping Iseult into the robe. She shook her head. “Later, after we’ve had some breakfast and the dust has settled.”

  * * *

  Sarah scuttled about like a frightened mouse in the kitchen, but she managed to make some porridge and scrounged up some bread rolls left from the disastrous dinner party. It seemed that appetites had been lost after her abrupt departure. Sarah scurried from the room once Mrs. Pennington had given her a little nod. Iseult bent over the bowl of porridge; the steam felt nice on her face. She closed her eyes and nibbled on the inside of her lip to be sure that her hunger really was greater than her nausea. Her saliva tasted bitter, but she opened her eyes and hazarded a tiny spoonful. As luck would have it, Sarah could not, untutored, cook a single thing that ended up having any flavor, so it went down smoothly. Iseult stared at the pleasing, comforting gray blandness.

  “Will Father still force me to marry him, do you think?”

  She knew that Mrs. Pennington was going to sigh a lot during this conversation. “If Mr. Vinke’s family doesn’t withdraw the offer, then yes, I believe he will. And judging by that young man’s gallant behavior last night, I would say he’s all for continuing. I didn’t expect he’d have so much backbone.” The two women exchanged a glance, each ashamed that she was wondering whether his backbone was silver too.

  “It was a catastrophe,” Iseult said through a larger mouthful of porridge. “However could he be determined to marry that?”

  Mrs. Pennington crossed her arms and leaned wearily back in her chair. “Well, you certainly made a spectacle of yourself. So I would think it has to be that he’s fond of you.”

  Iseult wasn’t up to chewing, so she let the porridge dissolve slowly in her mouth. Beatrice wasn’t screaming any longer, but Iseult could hear her fuming; she wondered whether her mother was gathering strength for a renewed attack. How were they all going to adjust to married life? At that thought, Iseult’s neck grew hot and itchy, but she resisted the urge to scratch at it. She’d put Mrs. Pennington through enough. She would try to be a good girl. But the evening’s debacle had muddled her mind, and there was a detail she could not recall. Feeling stupid, she stuttered, “C-could you remind me, Mrs. Pennington, j-just when is the wedding?”

  Mrs. Pennington gave her the smile you give a well-loved puppy or a toddler who’s made a bit of a mess. “Enjoy your porridge, dear, you’ve another month and more.”

  In the next moment there was a great crash from the pantry, and Mrs. Pennington leapt up to see what was the matter. Sharp muffled words were spoken, but then there was a murmured conversation, with Sarah’s voice rising in something like panic. Suddenly Mrs. Pennington rushed through the kitchen at a much greater speed than she was usually capable of, all the time avoiding a look at Iseult. Sarah remained in the pantry. The clatter had shocked Beatrice into silence, but it was a sinister silence, as if she knew something that Iseult didn’t, although of course that was impossible.

  * * *

  mother … mother … can you tell me what is the matter? i am afraid something is very much the matter.

  please mother i am frightened if you know what the matter is please tell me.

  your future is coming sooner than you thought

  what? what does that mean can you tell me? you are only making me more afraid making things difficult, please mother, I am sorry for last night, please don’t keep secrets from me.

  * * *

  Iseult sat in her chair and shivered. She tapped at the porridge with the bottom of her spoon; it had congealed already. It was a shame that people didn’t have that talent, to gradually form a second skin over themselves, a sturdier protective barrier that built up resistance over time, that eventually couldn’t be breached. She felt she had been working on such a barrier for years, a thickening of scar tissue that would keep people out. And it generally worked that way, but Beatrice kept ripping holes from the inside that made her vulnerable, unstable.

  She hadn’t noticed Mrs. Pennington reentering the room until the older woman was crouched down next to her.

  “You mustn’t; your knees will ache later.” Iseult limply pulled at Mrs. Pennington’s sleeve, but she would not be budged, and Iseult was frightened by the watery look in her button eyes.

  “My dear, I don’t want you to worry about a thing. It seems that after last night events are to move a little more swiftly than we’d anticipated,” she said, and Iseult was aware of feeling very far away, even as she continued to pluck uselessly at those familiar sleeves. “It’s the wedding. Your father has moved it up.”

  “The wedding?” Iseult managed to squeak. “Mine? To—to when? How soon? I don’t think I’m ready—”

  “Darling, hush and take a breath.” There was a decidedly uncomforting catch in Mrs. Pennington’s voice as she patted Iseult’s arms. “I doubt you’d ever feel truly ready, so why don’t we just go and get it over with, eh?”

  “How soon?” Iseult said, feeling the panic rise like the tide.

  Mrs. Pennington wouldn’t even meet her eye, and Iseult saw a fat tear drip down her cheek that she hurriedly brushed away. “A week.”

  The world st
opped, and Iseult left herself, or maybe it was more that there was a thick shell surrounding her. She smiled, wondering if having a shell made her a snail. Mrs. Pennington was still talking, but Iseult wasn’t listening. The matter of Mrs. Pennington’s knees was no longer of concern, and Iseult rose and left her there on the floor. Iseult left the kitchen and walked calmly up to her room and locked the door.

  She went directly to her mother’s chair and sat. Where else would she go? She looked around the room at the things that had always surrounded her. Would they be going with her? She’d no idea. What about her clothes? Was she to be allowed out of mourning for good?

  Usually such a thought would have spun Beatrice into a fit, but she sounded happy.

  * * *

  my darling it is for the best you will be very happy and very good and your father will see what a good and happy girl you become and he will change his mind and perhaps one day soon we four can all live together in peace

  mother if you are trying to make me laugh i don’t know if this is the time. you don’t seem to understand what father is doing. he may as well be banishing me. i would be surprised if he can bring himself to speak to me again at all.

  * * *

  But Beatrice was not to be argued with today; she was too excited about the wedding. Iseult was still at a remove from herself, not caring anymore what Beatrice really wanted for her, for them. There were thoughts in her head that she should probably be engaging with, but when she stretched out her hand, they would slither out of reach and drift away. She tried to think of Jacob, about what he might feel about this news of a hastened wedding to a woman he had last seen drunk and bloody, but the thought of Jacob made her stomach flip-flop, so she stopped. She thought she had better resign herself to its flipping for the foreseeable future. Until the wedding, at least. The wedding night? The morning after? Forever? She rubbed her stomach uneasily, almost sure she could feel a large fish slapping its tail against the inside of her ribcage. Would she have to get used to this?