Madame Hadal unlaced Lucy’s corset and eased it off and Lucy adjusted her chemise against her slim figure, smoothing away the wrinkles.
“No, no, my dear, it must come off. There must be nothing between the corset and your body.”
Lucy blinked in surprise for a moment, then did as she was told. Perhaps the removal of the extra layer was the trick.
She held still as Madame wrapped the beautiful green corset around her and she braced herself against the mirror as the laces were pulled taut. The garment clasped her like a glove, cinching her waist tighter and smaller with each brisk tug. The bodice cupped her breasts like a lover’s hands, molding them into a flattering display of cleavage while the high-cut hips showed off her legs to their best advantage. At the Arabesque the girls had much more flamboyant costumes but the green silk was striking enough that Lucy hoped she might be allowed to wear it onstage for one of her solo numbers.
As Madame continued to draw the laces tighter Lucy expelled all the air in her lungs to allow the maximum shrinkage of her waist. It hardly seemed necessary. The garment felt as though it had been made to her exact shape, clinging to her like the lightest of gowns. It felt as much a part of her as her own skin.
But the most striking feature was the boning. Lucy’s body was well accustomed to the bruising whalebone of most corsets, the stiff ridges that held one firmly in place, compressing the ribs and whittling the waist. She was used to the incidental pain of bruised ribs and chafed skin, the shortness of breath that came with the practice of tight-lacing. Such things certainly weren’t the “torture” decried by those who abhorred the practice – merely the commonplace discomfort of any fashionable trend. But this corset was like nothing Lucy had ever worn. What she had at first taken to be silk was actually nothing of the kind. She’d never seen or felt anything like it. It was as soft as a baby’s skin, as light as a breeze.
“There!”
Lucy stared in wonderment at her trio of reflections. She could tell at a glance that her waist was now even smaller and when Madame measured it at fourteen inches she gasped.
“Fourteen! But how?”
Madame smiled, looking pleased with herself. “It is comfortable, no?”
Lucy nodded, unable to put her emotions into words. A powerful feeling of euphoria overwhelmed her and she sighed with pleasure as she turned this way and that, bending and twisting. She kicked up one leg, then the other, astonished by the freedom of movement the corset allowed. Even the most comfortable of corsets was restrictive to some degree but Lucy had never experienced anything like the freedom of movement afforded by Madame’s creation.
Without even enquiring about the price she said, “I’ll take it.”
“It’s incredible, Luce! Wherever did you get it?”
Lucy beamed proudly as she showed off her find. The other five girls flocked around her, stroking the strange material and exclaiming over her tiny waist. Lotte had already measured it twice, unable to believe her eyes.
“Do you think it might help the show if we all wore them?” Nettie asked hopefully.
Vesta snorted. “Those steel tarts in the perpetual motion parade can lace down to nothing.”
“Yes, yes,” Nettie said, rolling her eyes, “but they don’t have bones or organs to get in the way, do they? Where did you say you got it, Luce?”
Lucy told them.
“How odd,” Vesta said. “I passed that way just last night but I never saw any shop.”
“Perhaps it only opened this morning. Besides, it’s in a strange spot, sloping almost right down to the water.”
The word “water” had an unpleasant resonance in Lucy’s mind, but she couldn’t understand why it should make her feel uneasy. She found she could barely even remember the shop. All she could focus on was the beauty of her new corset.
“Well, I’m going straight there tomorrow!” said Lotte.
“Me too!” chimed the twins, Daisy and Claire.
“I hope Madame Hadal can keep up with us,” Nettie said with a giggle. “Perhaps we should ask Albert to hire her to be our exclusive costume designer.”
“If the Arabesque doesn’t go under. Remember we’re competing with electric elephants.”
Nettie gave Vesta a fierce shove. “Enough of your doom and gloom, missy! Are you going to help us or not?”
Lucy ignored the others as she arched her back before the mirror, marveling at her flexibility within the corset. She hadn’t even warmed up for the show yet but her body felt as lithe and liquid as when she was clad only in the sheerest of garments. One by one the girls quieted down, watching her, their eyes shining covetously.
Finally Vesta began to smile. “You might be on to something after all, Luce,” she said.
Even Albert noticed the difference in Lucy, complimenting her backstage for a particularly rousing performance. He even succumbed, without too much persuading, to their pleas for an advance so they could all buy one of the miracle corsets in time for the show the next night.
“It’s simply the most comfortable corset I’ve ever worn,” Vesta enthused, displaying her tight-laced body, encased in golden yellow.
“The most comfortable garment full stop,” Lotte corrected. Hers was the blushing pink of a new bride and suited her less curvaceous figure perfectly. “I can’t even feel the bones.”
“I wonder how she makes them?” Nettie said, stroking the bold scarlet fabric. The touch of her fingers seemed to alter the color slightly, a shift almost too subtle to notice. But then it was back to its original hue. Lucy had noticed the same effect with hers.
The girls were a riot of color and their show that night had the audience hammering the floorboards with their feet and demanding a second, then a third encore. Over the following nights they performed feats they had never imagined possible, moving effortlessly through their dances, as lissome as cats. And each night the audience grew until finally the show sold out for the first time in months. They noted with triumph several empty seats during the steam ponies’ routine.
It was a few weeks later that Lucy confessed to the others that she had never actually taken the corset off. She had worn it every day since purchasing it, danced in it, slept in it. She had even bathed in it. The one time she had tried to remove it, she had experienced such intense pain that she instantly regretted her efforts.
“It’s as though the corset itself doesn’t want to come off,” she said with a sense of disquiet. “It’s as though it’s…become a part of me.”
Uneasy glances passed back and forth among the other girls and it was obvious that they hadn’t removed theirs either. Perhaps they too had tried and failed.
Nettie gave a nervous laugh. “It’s more comfortable than being naked,” she admitted. “Why should I ever want to take it off?”
MARTYRS to fashion! Ladies BEWARE! You are DESTROYING yourselves!
The leaflets had begun to proliferate with the renewed success of the Arabesque, which was due entirely to the popularity of the dancers. They astounded audiences with their flexibility and death-defying acrobatics. Word of their unparalleled acts of contortion quickly spread, as did Madame Hadal’s popularity when it was revealed that the dancing girls all wore her special corsets to maintain their exquisitely pinched figures. Now even proper ladies were flocking to the little shop, much to the consternation of their husbands, who were torn between a duty to disapprove of a craze with its roots in the coarse music hall and the undeniably alluring result.
Doctors warned of the dangers of tight-lacing, claiming that the practice led to insanity and even death. Clergymen, meanwhile, were more concerned with the moral and spiritual risks, blaming corsetry for exciting impure desires and imploring men to take their women in hand before it was too late.
There were even rumors of a young lady who had perished as a result of her refusal to take off her new corset. A doctor had apparently tried to remove it for her—surgically. The bizarre case was reported in the papers but the details were vague and so w
holly outlandish that no one lent the story any credence.
Naturally, the dancers were delighted to be at the center of a city-wide fashion revolution and its ensuing controversy, but it did rob their act of some of its mystique. With almost every woman in London now benefiting from the magnificent corsets, they needed to find a new angle to exploit. It was time to revamp the show.
“Aerial acrobatics?” Claire suggested.
The others shook their heads. The public had seen it all before in countless other shows, along with everything else from magicians to lion tamers.
They brooded in silence and after a while Nettie murmured, “Water.”
“What about it?” Vesta asked.
Nettie blinked as though unaware she had spoken. “Oh, it’s just…I had rather a peculiar experience last weekend. The Baron flew me to the seaside in his airship and––”
“You lucky thing!” Daisy cried. “I wish I could find a man that rich! My Mr. Chapman still insists on using his rickety old tandem pedal balloon when we travel. It always leaves my hair in disarray and absolutely everything in the sky races past us!”
Daisy had always been the quiet one but their success had made her positively garrulous. It had had the opposite effect on Nettie, whose former nervous energy was nowhere to be seen. Now she always seemed calm and serene.
“Go on, Nettie,” said Vesta, ignoring the interruption.
“Well,” she continued, “they had a sort of aquatic zoo there and I saw the queerest creature. The keeper said it was a new species. He called it a lightning squid.”
“A what?”
“Lightning squid. Apparently it imparts an electric shock through its tentacles to stun its prey. It’s quite extraordinary.”
Lotte shuddered. “Ugh! It sounds horrible!”
But Nettie shook her head, a haunted look in her eyes. “No, it was beautiful. I watched it for hours. What struck me most was the way the creature moved. Its legs rippled like waves. So graceful, so slender, so – liquid.” She hesitated. “Like us.”
The other girls considered this, nodding thoughtfully.
Lucy felt a sense of déjà vu. Water. A strange creature.
“Yes,” she said darkly. “Liquid. That’s exactly how I’ve felt since wearing the corset. Since the very first moment I put it on. Didn’t one of our notices say we moved like fish through the air?”
“Bah,” said Vesta, “they’re just trying to compare us to an animal act.”
“I thought it was a compliment,” Lotte said, blinking her wide innocent eyes.
“It was a compliment,” Nettie asserted. “And to be completely honest, I haven’t really felt at home on the ground since.”
Lucy found she was absently stroking her now thirteen-inch waist. She knew exactly what Nettie was talking about because she’d felt it too. As though her body were someone else’s and she was just along for the ride. But while it felt alien, it was also intoxicating. When she moved she felt lighter than air. The corset had truly changed her life.
If she entertained the thought of trying to remove it she was immediately suffused with warmth, with a sense of blissful intoxication that made her leave the laces tied. And if she tried to resist the pleasant feelings…
“Well, what’s so strange about that?” Daisy asked. “It’s hardly surprising we feel more graceful in such lovely corsets.”
“That’s not all,” Nettie continued, her voice low, her face pensive. “We went bathing in the sea afterwards and at one point I slipped down beneath the waves. I swam in the water as though I were merely dancing. I had no measure of how long it was but I must have been down there for some considerable time because when I emerged my fingers and toes were puckered as though I’d spent too long in the bath.”
Lotte looked horrified. “But you might have drowned!”
“Yes. And by all accounts I should have. But I didn’t.” She lowered her voice. “I felt as though the water was where I belonged.”
As this sank in Lucy could see from the other girls’ faces that they had all experienced similar feelings. Even Daisy was silent.
“I did that too,” Claire said at last. “I was in the bath the other night and I put my head down under the water. I didn’t think it was odd at the time. I was only pleased that I hadn’t spoilt my corset by getting it wet.”
“That’s perhaps the strangest thing of all,” said Vesta. “We’ve all been wearing them for weeks and yet look at them.” She unbuttoned the front of her dress to reveal her shining yellow corset, its color as bold as the sun and as immaculate as the first day she had worn it.
A sense of unease came over Lucy. In her mind’s eye she saw a book, but she couldn’t make any sense of the image. “When I first went to the shop Madame Hadal said it was her special secret. I wonder what that secret is?”
Daisy pressed close to Claire. “Do you suppose they might be… bewitched?”
“Surely not,” said Lotte with a nervous laugh. “Besides, even if there were some sort of magic involved, why would we feel so much better? Shouldn’t we grow warts and turn into hideous crones or something?”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” Vesta said gruffly, “but there is most definitely something peculiar about these corsets and I’m going to find out what it is. Lucy, Nettie, will you accompany me?”
Vesta’s certainty made Lucy feel even more uncomfortable. She didn’t want to discover some unpleasant truth about the corsets but the girls’ combined experiences were too queer to deny and she was becoming frightened. “Very well,” she said at last, reluctantly. “Come on, Nettie.”
They passed several tight-laced ladies as they headed for the shop and Lucy couldn’t help but be struck by their unusual poise and beauty. She knew without needing to ask whose corsets they wore. It was in their beatific expressions, their knowing smiles as they met the eyes of the three dancers and nodded like accomplices in some loathsome plot.
“Something’s wrong,” Lucy said, peering across the river at the shop. The glare of reflected sunlight on the water made it difficult to see.
She turned the crank that jutted from the small platform at the river’s edge and a narrow rail rose dripping and clanking from beneath the surface. The water trolley rose with it and slid along the rail until it reached the bank. They waited for the trolley to drain before stepping into it and distributing their weight evenly along its slim length. Then Vesta slipped a penny into the slot and pressed the button to send the craft across the water.
“Good heavens,” Nettie said as they drew near. “The shop’s completely flooded!”
They clambered out and looked in horror at the water lapping up around the walls of the little building. It was almost half submerged.
“But how?” Lucy asked. “It hasn’t rained for days.”
Vesta shook her head. “I don’t know. Come on, let’s go inside.”
The front of the shop was untouched by the water. A new corset was on display in the window, with the same clockwork device showing off its tight-lacing ability. Business had clearly been booming, for a glittering new sign advertised in huge gold letters the “Sensational Creations by Madame Hadal, Queen of Corsets.”
The girls pushed inside and the bell tinkled merrily, as though nothing were amiss. A short expanse of dry floor sloped sharply down towards the flooded back end of the shop and they stood staring in horror at the encroaching water. Then the smell hit them.
Nettie cried out. “Ugh! What on earth––?”
Alarm bells jangled in Lucy’s mind and she looked around for the lectern she had seen on her first visit to the shop. “Do either of you remember seeing a book?” she asked.
Vesta frowned. “What kind of book?”
“It was big, like a family Bible. Full of some kind of weird writing and pictures. Just there.”
But where she pointed there was only a mannequin sporting a half-finished corset.
“I know I didn’t imagine it. And the shop smelled just like this to
o. Horrible. I remember now.”
Vesta looked alarmed.
“Where’s Madame Hadal?” Nettie asked. Then she added in a timid whisper, “Do you suppose she drowned?”
Suddenly there was a loud splash and a figure came swimming towards them from the back room. Madame Hadal’s head peeked up from the water and her face creased in a wet and wrinkled smile as she recognized three of her customers.
“Ah! Welcome back, my dears!”
They gaped at her, astonished.
“Madame!” Lucy gasped. “What’s happened to your shop?”
She looked puzzled and shook her head. “I do not understand.”
“The water. Everything’s flooded.”
“Oh, that!” She laughed, an ugly, discordant sound. “My water-flowers – they like it better this way. Come. It is almost their time. I will show you.”
“Almost their time?” Lucy echoed.
The girls exchanged a look as Madame slipped back down beneath the water and vanished from sight.
“That’s exactly what I did,” Nettie said excitedly, her eyes wild. In a flash she had stripped off her dress and flung it aside. “Come on!”
Before they could stop her she dived in after Madame Hadal. Vesta and Lucy hesitated only a moment before struggling out of their dresses too. They each sucked in a deep breath and followed their friend into the chilly water.
As the waves closed over her head Lucy knew immediately what Nettie had meant when she said she’d felt entirely at ease. Lucy had never been swimming in her life but as she moved deeper into the watery depths of the shop she felt as though she was coming home. The sensation was at once exhilarating and completely natural.
Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam Page 22