Desdemona and the Deep

by C. S. E. Cooney

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For Julia, Moss & Desdemona

  1: A BENEFIT FOR THE FACTORY GIRLS WITH PHOSSY JAW

  FOUR STORIES ABOVE THE Grand Foyer of the Seafall City Opera House, each painted panel in the barrel-vaulted ceiling depicted a scene from one of the three worlds. Which world it happened to be depended on the tint and tone of the panel: daylight was for Athe, the world of mortals; twilight represented the Valwode, where the gentry dwelled; and midnight belonged to Bana the Bone Kingdom, home to all the koboldkin. Through these wheeling coffers of world-skies—day dancing into dusk, dusk swirling into night, night into day again—cavorted the bright-winged, the beautiful, the bizarre. In that ceiling, at least, human and gentry and goblin all intermingled together, like they had in olden days before the doors between worlds were barred and the boundaries set.

  At the center of the ceiling, like the pistil of the three-petaled World Flower, bristled a recently installed chandelier: an armillary sphere barbed with crystals, brass processes, and electric bulbs. It had been designed, ostensibly, to lull music lovers into a belief in a more orderly, benign, and attentive cosmos than evidence endorsed.

  Standing precisely beneath it, a very short woman.

  Her gown bore more rosettes and plumes than a parade float. The satin sash across her chest read: STRIKE THE MATCH. She had a round, rust-brown face, iron spirals of hair cropped close to her skull, and black eyes, lamp-bright. She wore on her brow a corona radiata of shining platinum. No mistake this woman had chosen for herself the spiked crown of heroes and deities; she wished to set an example for the gathered crowd. Heroes gave everything—and deities rewarded self-immolation with immortality.

  “Good evening, friends and sisters!” Her voice was a one-woman brass section, as cheerful and relentless as reveille, complemented by the chime of her spoon against a champagne glass. “Good evening!”

  Two hundred fifty-four women fell into an obedient hush. They rustled and ruched together at the foot of the Ceremonial Staircase.

  “Let me begin,” said the woman, “by thanking the Seafall City Opera House for so generously donating their Grand Foyer this evening. What a beautiful space for our beautiful cause!”

  Her gloved palms initiated the applause, each muted thunderclap sweeping the room with a new flash flood of enthusiasm.

  “Next,” she continued, “but no less important . . . Let me thank you all so very much, my dear friends, for supporting our first annual Factory Girls with Phossy Jaw Charity Fund-raiser! So far, it has been a wild success!”

  The answering applause lasted longer and was even more ebullient. The women, her women, had labored tirelessly, lobbied endlessly, and spent lavishly to make this night possible. Now, dressed in their finest, approved by their peers, buoyed by champagne and the glow of good work done well, they were prepared to commend themselves for it.

  Against the back wall of the Grand Foyer, facing the Ceremonial Staircase, silent auction tables displayed their wares. As be-bannered, be-rosetted, and be-plumed as the mistress of ceremonies, they flaunted on fine linens the wealth of a queen’s treasure house: basalt busts that bore the gravitas of deep antiquity, art jewelry from the museum collection, original paintings, travel vouchers, and baskets sporting rare vintages and costly cheeses sealed in red wax. Over all the tables presided a tall, youngish woman who bore little resemblance to the woman addressing the crowd, except perhaps in a certain stubbornness of jaw.

  She watched her mother with an expression borrowed from her father’s face—boredom, a hint of disdain, barely disguised exasperation. But something else flickered in her black eyes. An admiration so fierce it danced on the barbed wire wall between resentment and worship.

  “How,” asked a voice from behind her, “can it be an annual fund-raiser, if it’s the first?”

  The woman twitched a bare shoulder the exact shade of the bronze silk taffeta she wore. “Shut up, Chaz!”

  “I was only asking,” Chaz replied, affable and wounded.

  “I am not speaking to you.”

  “You are though, Des,” he argued. “You just said—”

  “I am never speaking to you again.” Lifting her chin but still not looking at him, Desdemona Mannering contradicted her dictum immediately. “You are three hours late, Charles Abelard Mallister. We had plans.”

  Mrs. Tracy Mannering—Mission Advancement Director for the Factory Girls with Phossy Jaw Charity, mistress of this evening’s ceremonies, and Desdemona’s mother—had personally assigned her daughter to oversee the silent auction tables that night. She had assumed that Desdemona would be delighted. So commanding, so inexorable, and manufactured of such titanium goodwill were Mrs. Mannering’s assumptions that when Desdemona received her invitation to the benefit (along with a full duty roster), she had little choice but to agree to work the tables.

  But if Desdemona knew one thing, it was this: if misery loves company, malice adores it. Aping her mother’s style, she informed her best friend that he, too, would be dishing out auction items by the silver platterful at her mother’s “Phossy Gals Follies,” as she put it. What’s more, she’d added with a burst of inspiration, he would be doing it en travesti, in a gown of his choice.

  It would not be the first time Chaz had attended an event costumed like a woman. He occasionally wore gowns out to nightclubs, quite often to private parties, and always whenever spending an evening alone with Desdemona. But so far he had never worn one of his gowns to any function coordinated by the hoity-toity aunties of high society. Whether this was out of shyness or dread Desdemona could not tell, and had never asked, but she thought it high time Chaz outshone them at their own game.

  When he’d protested, she’d simply scoffed. Those clucks, she’d said, wouldn’t care if Chaz showed up “in the scud” and suspended by his piercings from the chandelier so long as he helped generate funds for their precious cause. This, therefore, was her dare:

  They would each dress in a bespoke gown by their favorite couture designer—Desdemona’s by Ernanda, Chaz’s by Manu Lirhu. At the auction tables, they would give bidders a chance to vote on whose ensemble was the more spectacular. The loser would donate the worth of their gown to the Factory Girls with Phossy Jaw Charity. The winner would buy the loser a drink of their choice the moment they were emancipated from their offices.

  Reluctantly, Chaz had agreed. But he soon grew enthusiastic. For months now, they had been planning their gowns, meeting in secret with their designers and obsessing over minutiae, each boasting how entirely they would cast the other under their glittering shadow.

  And then—after all that!—Chaz had not materialized. Not till now, anyway, when Desdemona’s duties were all but done. An awful night it had been, too. She had thought she would be bored. Instead, Desdemona felt scraped raw, with a headache behind her eyes and at the back of her neck. Her mother was a loudmouth, a scab-ripper, a visionary. Tracy Mannering did not care to wrap fine lace around decay; she wanted everyone to see the purulence. And now Desdemona would never be able to unsee it.

 
Across the foyer, Mrs. Mannering’s trumpeting tones sobered to a deeper bassoon.

  “As you know, Seafall’s most intrepid young journalist, Salissay Dimaguiba, wrote a fearless exposé last year on the insalubrious conditions these young women daily endure in their work environment. It provoked such outrage among our community that I—with my dear friend and colleague Audrey Alderwood—organized the Southern Leressa Convention Respecting the Prohibition of White Phosphorous in Matches.”

  “What a button-popper!” Chaz’s clove-sweet breath tickled Desdemona’s ear. “Don’t her secretaries edit her speeches?”

  “No one edits Mother.”

  Mrs. Mannering’s speech rolled on: “All proceeds from your generous donations shall go toward the construction of a new ward at the Seafall City Working Women’s Almshouse!” She paused for more applause. “The ward will be dedicated entirely to the treatment of girls suffering from repeated close contact with the poisonous fumes of white phosphorus. Now, without further ado . . .” Spreading her powdered arms, she embraced the whole room and all the beaded chiffon, embroidered velvet, winking sequins, and fluttering fans.

  “. . . It is my honor to introduce to you the most scintillating stars of this evening! The young women of Albright Match Factory!”

  One floor above the crowd, from doorways dotting the mezzanine, the Phossy Gals trooped out. As drilled by their hostess, they processed stiffly down the bifurcated staircase. The line leaders stopped on the penultimate step above the smooth tile of the center landing. The others paused behind them. Suspended in motion, hands resting on the marble banisters, these jaded and decaying flowers peered out from their tiered garden to meet the gazes of their benefactresses below.

  Desdemona was too far away to perceive details, but thanks to Mrs. Mannering having foisted their acquaintance upon her earlier in the greenroom, she could imagine them clearly. Their faces twisted by osteonecrosis. The stench of infection rising from their abscesses. Swollen joints, collapsed jaws, exposed bone, barren eyes. Some wore neck and back braces to bear up their frames, because their disintegrating skeletons could no longer do so—very like, and also horribly unlike, the gilded caryatids of the Seafall City Opera House, which looked decorative but carried the weight of the painted roof upon their naked, golden shoulders.

  The Phossy Gals ranged from mid-teens to mid-twenties, the oldest being about twenty-seven—Desdemona’s own age—though years of factory work had so hagged the “gal” that she seemed a veritable goblin crone, fit only for boiling babies and picking her teeth with their bones. All the young women had been putting in ten-hour workdays at Albright Match Factory as mixers, dippers, and boxers for the better part of a decade.

  After an appreciable hush, Mrs. Mannering ascended the green marble staircase. Once more she took center stage, right in the middle of the landing, and began introducing each of the young women by name. The Phossy Gals plastered on choreographed smiles that showed more hole than teeth and resumed their slow descent down the Ceremonial Staircase. When they reached the center landing, their two lines interweaved to form a single file behind their hostess, and at her signal, they followed her (some resignedly, some defiantly) to the ground floor of the Grand Foyer, where philanthropists, politicians, and journalists waited to mingle with them.

  “The cost of a more comfortable death,” Chaz murmured, “is dignity.”

  Desdemona tossed her head. “What about any of this do you find undignified? This is probably the grandest night of their lives!” Earrings chiming expensively, she confided, “Mother agonized for weeks over whether it would be more shocking to parade her product line of Phossy Gals in ordinary homespun or drape them in diamonds and accentuate their deformities with lipstick. I advised the latter. If you ever throw me a ball to honor the half of my face eaten up by a tumor, don’t let homespun within a mile of me. Aunt Audrey backed me. She wanted press coverage, photographers, possibly a riot.” She shrugged. “People like diamonds. They’re dignified.”

  “It’s a dime museum display,” Chaz countered flatly.

  Desdemona sniffed. “They’ll overfund by the end of the evening.”

  Chaz’s silence grew pointed enough to conduct symphonies. But because he refrained from indicating the obvious, that he recognized every single one of the gowns those girls were wearing, Desdemona decided not to claw his eyes out. She had been too embarrassed to confess any time these last months that she—at her mother’s instigation, of course—had loaned a dozen and a half of her old gowns to be taken in, hemmed, mended, and otherwise spruced up for the Phossy Gals Follies. Loaned! As if she’d ever wear them again after tonight.

  She was sick of looking at them. No matter where they were in the crowd, or how often they moved, her eye was drawn unerringly to what had belonged to her. Those familiar shimmers of silk, flappings of fringe, twinkles of beadwork, graceful folds of velvet . . . What did they feel like now, on those bodies? Especially that hag—her age double—with her black hair done up in a voluptuous bouffant, just as Desdemona’s was.

  No. She wouldn’t look any more.

  She flounced in an about-face to survey her friend. Fully prepared for an eyeful of resplendency, what she saw instead made her frown. She blinked, thinking she’d missed something.

  But she had missed exactly nothing. No wig, no jewels, no shapewear. Above all, no gown. Not even some semi-retired thing she’d encountered on Chaz on a previous occasion. Certainly not The Gown, the one that he had spent a small fortune to commission from Lirhu themself.

  “What is this? A, a what? A soup-and-fish suit?” She was so shocked that she sounded shocked, which Desdemona did not like. But . . . that suit! And not even Chaz’s best soup-and-fish suit! White tie. Black jacket, white piqué waistcoat, black patent leather shoes . . . Boring.

  Giving her best friend the once-over for a third time, Desdemona’s plucked eyebrows arched like aqueducts. Where were his peacock tails? His painted silk cravat? The Monkey Face orchid in his lapel? Chaz sported none of the usual stained-glass ostentation, the masterstroke of adornment, that transformed him from well-dressed into a work of art.

  His face canted away from Desdemona’s scrutiny, Chaz watched Tracy Mannering instead. She was introducing one of the Phossy Gals to the vice chancellor of Southern Leressa and the Federation Islands. Force of personality (and a firm grip on the arms of each party) brought these polar opposites of the social spectrum resoundingly together in a handshake. There should have been drums. Chaz even pitched his voice to be drowned out by them. “I thought my Lirhu gown inappropriate for this evening.”

  “How so?” Desdemona demanded. “If my Ernanda is appropriate, your Lirhu must be! Look around you. Not a single gown in this room costs under ten stacks—most of them twice that!”

  Chaz sighed. “If the society aunties saw me in my Lirhu, they would laugh indulgently and consider it all a very charming sort of clowning.” He worked to keep his voice even. “But to me, it is not clowning. This is.” He gestured to his jacket and tie, his hair arranged in its careful slick, all those flaming curls flattened, and made a sharp gesture, as if to fling it all away. He said, forlorn as a foghorn, “And so . . . I forfeit our dare, Desdemona.”

  He seemed to expect a scold, or a second round of the cold shoulder. But Desdemona was already sliding out from behind the auction table to wrap her arms around his wiry, tense, boringly black jacket-clad arm. Sticking her face in the hollow of his throat, she nuzzled him until he giggled and shied away. Chaz smelled divine. She could just about murder him for his nose. He always managed to obtain the newest perfume days before it officially launched.

  She announced magnanimously, “All right, Chazzy darling. I accept your forfeit. You know I love to win! So, you’ll write Mother a cheque for the Matchbox—that’s what we’re calling the new Almshouse ward—and I’ll buy you your favorite Sophia Ampoule at the Chiamberra just as soon as she signs our release papers.”

  Relief plain on his powdered face, Chaz said,
“Already delivered the cheque. However . . .” And here his tone shifted slyly, settled into something more artificially plaintive. “However, Desi, I don’t fancy cognac tonight. No Sophia Ampoule for me. I want something . . . different.”

  “Oh?” Desdemona braced herself. She knew that tone of voice, what it boded. “Loser’s choice, of course,” she said with some acerbity. “What are you in the mood for, pray?”

  “Rum.”

  “Chaz! You don’t even like rum!”

  “Liberty rum, specifically,” Chaz explained with beatific blandness. “Imported from Rok Moris. Crafted to commemorate two hundred years of independence from the Empire of the Open Palm. Comes in its own case. Worked leather. Embossed.” His rouged smile glinted like gentry rubies. “A limited edition: only twenty crystal bottles in the whole wide world. The Chiamberra, I’ve heard, has one of them.”

  Desdemona scowled. This Liberty of his would, at a guess, cost her approximately whatever Chaz had spent on his Lirhu gown. Which, of course, he had planned!

  Very well. He’d won this round. But she would not go down without a spat.

  Rubbing her cheek hard enough against his shoulder that it left a smear of opalescent powder on the black wool, Desdemona pushed away from him. “You’ll have your Liberty—and choke on it! But I’ll see you in your Lirhu gown before the week’s out, or I’ll be damned! Bring it over to Breaker House tomorrow night. We’ll raid Father’s champagne cellar, have ourselves a private dress-up party. Father’s going away tomorrow morning on a long vacation with the Countess, so we’ll have the run of the place. No one to scold us if we slide down the banisters.”

  They grinned at each other.

  The smugness in her best friend’s face reminded Desdemona that she still had a dog in the fight. So far they were at a draw: one gown, one bottle of rum. Each costing approximately ten thousand monarchs apiece. Fair enough. But Desdemona knew something Chaz did not.