by Rumer Haven
She would while away the time there sifting through trunks of colorful costumes and accessories, pulling one out after another and trying them on before the dusty mirror, and humming quietly to drown the moans and cries of “artistic inspiration” in the next room. Curiosity overtook sense when she craftily picked the lock to a wardrobe. Though limited experience prevented her recognition of the fabric found within, she knew at the touch these were of thread far finer than anything her mother had ever been asked to wear. Inside a little box resting in a bottom corner, she found even smaller cases containing a brilliant necklace, a bracelet, a pair of earrings, a ring, and…a brooch.
In retrospect, she understood these had been items on loan from the artist’s wealthy benefactor, for use in portraits commissioned by privileged families. At the time of discovery, however, she had known only that this was something precious to the painter, and she would take it from him just as he had been taking something precious from her.
It was many weeks later—after he had already tired of her mother’s features, which he had helped to fade—when he first arrived pounding at their door and demanding the brooch be returned. Her mother was understandably perplexed, but it was her father (who chanced to be home this day of them all) who knew precisely what had occurred beneath his nose and, after turning the artist out into the street in a rage of crass, violent threats, proceeded to inflict upon his wife the physical promise of those words.
The child never uttered a word, only willed that the brooch go far, far away from her for all the trouble it had caused.
Imagine her astonishment, then, when one day it did vanish! She had suspected theft or a poor memory, but either way was blissfully rid of it, never to be seen by her eyes again until it did return several years later.
Though not yet a woman by that time, she had taken to wandering the streets alone for long hours when, one night, a hand reached out to seize her arm. Although alarmed by the sudden motion, she breathed easily enough on perceiving an old woman crouched in the alleyway, illuminated only in part by a lantern of filthy glass.
“Do you see?” the ancient woman asked, her wild eyes staring beyond the girl. “Do you see her?”
My friend stiffened only to reply that she did not.
“Ess,” the stranger hissed, still clutching her arm. “Eehhss…or is it est as in the east? Yet she, she is in the west.” With one widened, bulging eye, she inspected the girl’s face and frame. “She is close to your age, you know. They both.”
My friend could make no sense of this speech. “Sorry, ma’am. I must go.”
The grip on her arm tightened.
“No, no. No fear.”
The woman then raised the lantern to her face, which appeared gashed by the fine black shadows cast by its moles; she muttered nonsensical words until both females’ attention was drawn to a metallic thud on the toe of my friend’s shoe.
Grabbing the old woman’s wrist to thrust the lantern towards the sound, she screamed at the sight of a brooch. Her brooch.
In the circular clasp of their arms, the girl and woman searched each other’s eyes.
“She will get it back, child,” had been the stranger’s last words.
“From that day I have believed in fate,” my dear friend now professed to me. “As mysteriously as this ornament absented my life when I requested it, it returned to me for a reason.”
For what had remained of her childhood, to escape the voices reverberating through her house’s walls, she would remove the brooch from her hiding place and rub it with her little thumbs, placing wishes upon it as on a magic lamp.
“I dared not pawn it, for it was the prettiest thing I had ever possessed or would likely. Until you, though I would not offend by claiming you as my possession. I only mean that I believe you are the reason this brooch returned to me. I do not understand how, yet I know why it brought me to you.” Closing my hand around the brooch again, she curled her own fingers around mine and pressed them to my breast. “So to you it now belongs.”
“I feel as though it has always belonged to me,” I said, my chest heaving beneath our tender clasp. “And now I belong to you.”
My sense of renewal ensued for the months to come. I felt in better equilibrium, with spirits and paintbrush uplifted again. I had neither the training nor the encouragement before to hone the craft, but my friend urged me on, and it transpired that she began to sit for me.
Despite the fact of our close relationship—or indeed because of it—for all outward appearances, we had to remain discreet. The lower servants were envious enough of the rank a lady’s maid enjoyed; I could only imagine their ire had they known the hours I allowed her to be at her leisure with me in my bedroom! I daily hid the canvas behind the wardrobe and replaced it with one of a rather plain still life that did not betray the rapid development and application of my talent, now that it was inspired.
Sensations awakened deep within me, and so often I felt a certain heat lick its way to my surface. Perhaps my stimulated state had thus rendered me more outwardly attractive, and perhaps Victor did recognize such, for he came to me once, but only once in all of those first months when my dear friend was in our employment. In that one night, I saw the sheepish vulnerability of the man I had first met; he seemed almost shy to approach me and stroke his fingers down my back. I trilled at his touch, and welcomed him into our marital bed, yet only that once. Thereafter, he did not return.
Had my beauty fleeted so soon? No, not so soon as his emotion; not so quickly as the bitterness of resentment could seep back into his tongue. Victor’s temperament had again run quite short with me, even when the thickening at my waist became perceptible to us both in the months to follow.
By springtime of this year, as yet among the deadened leaves of winter, woe was to befall me again.
I awoke to a familiar tacky clotting, then an alarming sight. I wailed in anguish and fainted once more.
When I returned to consciousness, I was perspiring, bound up in bed sheets. In a blurry haze, I saw my friend weeping in the corner at the sash window, which was already filling with gray-blue daylight; she had not been permitted to come any closer. The doctor, who had since arrived with all manner of tools to treat me, used the simplest of which to slice my wrist, jerking my left arm above a washbasin as I feverishly watched the blood drain out. Struggling to regain my focus, I wept and moaned my lamentations, looking about the room at the faces at my bedside that always frowned their disapproval in expecting so much from me. I searched for the one face that defied this pattern, now concealed behind her bony fingers.
My dear girl was permitted to nurse me back to health, but my strength was found wanting for a longer duration than ever before—before, in particular, such drastic and barbaric measures in healing had ever been attempted on my person, the same sort that had helped suck the life from our Princess Charlotte. When I think of the “monument” to Her Highness’s memory, indeed…To me, that edifice of marble is the gravestone of the Spirited Woman’s defeat, tamed to Her undoing.
Ah, that I had this woman instead, of flesh and bone and the spirit that I required, to remain with me at my bedside when all others abandoned me to shadow.
Chapter 8
Darkness of the Grave
21st-Century London
July 14
Am finally getting myself back out and about—or at least Rand is. He and Gwen had a big fight—heh-heh-heh—so when she ditched him for her parents’ house in the country the other weekend, he took me to Windsor Castle. It was a cool, spitting day, but we spent most of the time touring inside the castle and chapel anyway. The castle itself was impressive with its grand staircases and halls. St. George’s Chapel, though, was the real point of interest for me. Henry VIII and the reigning Queen Elizabeth’s parents are buried there.
I keep thinking about what Derek said, and, honestly, no wonder I’ve been so paranoid. In this city, you’re constantly confronted with your mortality, whether it’s the old buildings
or tombs piled up in every cathedral. I saw Henry’s armor, shaped to a body that no longer exists, yet I imagined it still inside, filling the steel shell with movement. I saw Catherine of Aragon’s wooden balcony, built for her over the altar, and I pictured her up there in silent prayer. I walk by and through these places and see the people striding around on streets of dirt, not asphalt, or riding in carriages, not cars.
I get enchanted by this romantic past and wish to be part of it sometimes, like it was somehow better. But was it? People back then probably didn’t think anything special of their everyday—they were just living it—so why are we so fascinated by it? Our stuff will survive us one day, too, and then will future generations gawk through glass at our smartphones and skinny jeans and revel in the mystery of them? We sigh over the art and aesthetic of Victorians who were riddled with disease, drinking from putrid water and breathing polluted air. I’ve seen massive gravestones at the cemetery with up to four or five names on them that are all children aged a matter of months, with the occasional exception of that one lucky son who got to live to year ten or even eighteen. That must have been a harrowing time of stench and heartache—about as fun as a corset severing you in half—but nostalgia coats it in a layer of stardust.
In any case, that was the reality hitting me when I saw the monument to Princess Charlotte in the chapel. No need to describe it here. It looked exactly like what I dreamed about the night Rand and I fought. The body beneath ivory cloth, mourners at her feet, her spirit rising and angels cradling “the infant in holy arms.” So, I must’ve seen a photo of it somewhere before. Here was a woman who died in childbirth in the early 19th century, no less mortal in her royalty after the doctors treated her through bloodletting. Really? That was supposed to save her from another miscarriage—draining her of more blood?! So, is the past something to be sentimentalized as so elevated, beyond our reach? They lived and died like we do and will.
AT THIS POINT, what reminded Margot of her mortality was the pain shooting through her right hand and shoulder. Her fingertips were blotched with white and pink from gripping the pen so tightly, and her printing had carved grooves into the paper.
Massaging the fine bones in her hand, she yawned and checked the time on the wall clock. She had five minutes until she had to go meet Chloé in Chelsea, so she chugged the rest of her tea and threw a tweed cap over her tangled hair. Grabbing her leather tote, she went to throw it over her right shoulder out of reflex when she thought better of it and instead shifted it to her left, then made her way out the door.
Though she wasn’t ecstatic about seeing her classmate again, Rand had been motivating her to socialize more. She was actually surprised, and maybe a little relieved, that Chloé still wanted anything to do with her. Margot had started going to class again intermittently, although, interestingly, it was Chloé who’d ended up not being there a few of those days.
“Margot, here!” Chloé waved from a small square table on the sidewalk. Her short tresses were swept back with a pair of tiny clips above her shallow forehead, and she looked like the ballerina her mother had wanted in a jagged mini-dress ruffling over leggings that defined her slim limbs down to a pair of flats.
Margot beamed one of her fake smiles and adjusted her sunglasses as she maneuvered in ninety-degree angles between the other tables. She bent to give Chloé a savvier cheek-to-cheek kiss than last time, then sat and adjusted for comfort on the chair’s wooden slats. “You look darling.”
“Merci.”
When Chloé didn’t return the compliment, Margot crossed her denim legs and sat up straighter to compensate for the lack of effort in her own appearance.
A warm smile soon spread over her classmate’s features. “I’m happy to see you again, Margot. It’s been some time.”
“I know, and I’m so sorry. Please don’t take it personally.”
“No, no, pas du tout. I wasn’t surprised.”
“How do you mean?”
“Shall we go inside and order?”
“Oh. Sure.”
The two ladies ordered ready-made baguette sandwiches and sparkling water at the counter and paid before returning to their outdoor table with trays in hand.
As Chloé delicately unwrapped the cellophane from her jambon et fromage, Margot asked, “So, um, you were saying before?”
Chloé looked at her with interest but showed no recollection of what she was talking about. She instead paid compliments to the sandwich. The sun shied away behind the clouds, making Margot’s sunglasses redundant, so she reluctantly removed them.
“You look tired!” Chloé said.
“Yeah, I feel tired, though God knows I get more than enough sleep.”
“You’re just so dark under the eyes.”
Margot shrugged. “Sinuses.”
She expected Chloé would prescribe some obscure, posh cream or something, but the lecture would’ve fallen on deaf ears. For all her bathing before, Margot hardly bothered with skincare anymore.
A tremor rippled within her ribs when instead her friend looked imploringly into her eyes and said, “Take care of yourself. Please.”
Margot squinted and gave a sideways smile. “I do, and I’m fine.”
To her relief, Chloé changed the subject. “Are you wearing contacts?”
“No, but I get that a lot. I think because my eye color’s actually two—”
“I only ask because you’ve worn spectacles in class.”
“Oh, right. Reading glasses. I just use them if I have to concentrate a long time.”
Margot felt that same strain of maintaining conversation with Chloé, who took a crisp bite of her baguette and put the burden of filling the silence on Margot.
She thought hard, but only the mundane came to her. “So, um, speaking of glasses, I need to find an optometrist here. I have these floaters, or—I don’t know what you’d call them, but do you know what I mean? Those little things that float around in your eyes sometimes?”
Chloé looked at her but only chewed.
“Well, I know everyone has them, but mine have increased to the point where I really notice them all the time, and it never used to be like that. Then maybe as of a week ago, I’ve been getting little pinpricks of light flashing into my vision.”
Chloé took another silent bite.
“I saw online it could be retinal detachment, so do you happen to know how much an eye exam would cost here, out-of-pocket?”
Swallowing and wiping her mouth, Chloé at last replied. “No. I have clear vision.” She widened her eyes as though showing off that fact, then dropped her gaze to her sandwich. “So I’ve never bothered.”
“Okay. I’m just a little concerned I may have literally cried my eyes out.”
She’d only meant it as a joke, but Chloé looked concerned again. “Cried?”
The small talk is too much work. To hell with it. “Yes, I’ve been crying a lot lately, and before you ask why, I really don’t know.” Margot picked up her baguette. “Anyways, I’ve been doing all the talking, so just shut me up.”
“Oh, life’s been dull,” Chloé said with amusement in her “clear” eyes. “I need you to entertain me.”
Margot stalled with a voracious bite of her sandwich, signaling Chloé to just continue feasting on her own. This bought a minute of silence as she shifted her attention to the motor and foot traffic on the Fulham Road.
Once ready to become the floorshow again, Margot spoke up with more daring. “So, before. You said you weren’t surprised I’ve been acting the way I have.”
“Yes,” Chloé finally acknowledged. “I got the sense early on that you were…” She appeared to measure her next word carefully. “Transitioning.”
Margot nodded. “I’ve had a tough time adjusting here on my own. It’s different from what I expected. I’m different. I mean, I feel different.”
Chloé’s eyes twinkled. “You’re unhappy in love.”
“Love?” Okay, left field. “No.”
Chloé raise
d her brow.
“I mean, I was in love and had a bad breakup, but that was months ago.”
“Why should time matter?”
“Because I’ve had a while to get over it. And for all I know, he’s found himself a new fräulein by now.” Rather than an imagined Swiss Miss, however, the woman in Rand’s photographs flickered to mind. Still unsure who that was, Margot huffed a cynical laugh. “But I’m not pining for the guy. Not anyone. I honestly don’t see what value a relationship would bring to my life right now.”
She channeled nervous energy into picking the fat off her prosciutto. One by one, she coiled the white strings at the side of her plate.
Chloé frowned. “Is that really how you feel, then? About love? What about this man you’re living with now?”
Margot inhaled a flake of bread crust into the wrong pipe, and she coughed spastically for a moment.
“We’re not really living together. I’m staying with him. He’s a friend. And taken.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. No matter how committed they are.”
Margot’s head jolted as her eyes widened.
Chloé smiled. “I only mean that, when you have a soul mate, what is meant to be will be.”
“Right, que sera sera, as you and Doris Day would say. But sorry, Rand is a flatmate, not soul mate.”
When Chloé cocked a brow in lieu of words, Margot dropped her eyes to her plate and began to straighten the thin strips of fat into a line. She found it easier to speak earnestly to Chloé when not looking her in the eye.
“You know, I did used to believe in that. But I’ve heard soul mates aren’t necessarily the people we’re meant to fall in love with. They’re just mirrors that show us something we can’t see on our own.” With a fingertip, she curled the greasy white strings into one big spiral on her plate. “So, in that respect, maybe he is mine. In even the short time I’ve been here, he’s been there for me, calling me out on stuff.”