She chuckled sadly to herself as she finished my make-up and picked up the brush to run through my hair. Her eyes locked on mine in the mirror, and even though I wanted to look away, I became mesmerised in the distressed denim of her gaze.
“I was clever enough to know I had to give more than just my body and submission to Noel if I wanted to survive him. Remember I told you before the night of the ball in London? Beauty fades, darling girl, and I needed something that would last. I almost wish now that I hadn’t endured. Twenty years is a long time to be beaten by a man with endless creativity…but I made the choices I made to survive, and then when I had a son, so that he would too.”
I glared at her, writing my own monologue in gold ink so that she might read it in my eyes.
She stared right back, her lips twisted with a conflicting mixture of pride and doubt, before she hesitantly unbuckled the gag and gently removed it from my stretched mouth.
I worked my jaw to relieve the ache before I said, “You’re right, I don’t care. You sacrificed a woman you should have empathised with. There were other ways to win the game, other moves you could have made.”
She bit her lip and then opened her palms to the air in benediction. “It was the most direct way I could find to checkmate.”
“Well,” I told her ominously because her fishing expedition for pity had not hooked me through the mouth or reeled me in. If anything, it made me hate her all the more. “The game isn’t over yet.”
I watched as she read the acrimony carved into my features, and then as her own face curdled like bad cream.
“Fine,” she whispered. “If you want another enemy while you’re here, I’ll be one. But you should know, the choice was yours.”
“I have never made my own choices under this roof, and I won’t be allowed to now,” I countered.
She pressed her lips together in a flatline as she realized just how dead in the water her efforts to sway me to her dark side were, and then with narrowed eyes, she put the ball gag back around my head.
Cosima
I found the kitchen the same way I’d left from the beautifully refurbished wood paneled walls to the old AGA cooker and every single kitchen servant I’d known before. Straight down to Douglas O’Shea.
The knife wound of his betrayal radiated through my back.
It might have been slightly ridiculous to think Douglas would abandon his position as head cook at Pearl Hall after I’d gone, but it wasn’t a stretch to think he would have resigned after Alexander openly renounced his father.
Yet there he stood at the long worn wooden table at the center of the room with a red apple in his hand, the peel curling over his many-freckled hand like the body of snake. The sight of his brightly glinting copper hair, red as the tip of a flame, and the ruddy collection of freckles splashed across his pale skin made my heart ache with nostalgia.
“Ducky,” he breathed, the sound of it like air leaking from a punctured lung.
He looked ruined by the sight of me. Tears pooled in his eyes, and his usually steady hands trembled as he put the apple down to brace himself against the tabletop.
“Out! The lot of you,” he ordered shakily.
I realized the entire kitchen crew had paused in their efforts to stare at me. The young servant I remembered was named Jeffery scuttled toward me on his way out the door and astonished me by tugging gently on my hand in a small sign of solidarity.
The gesture brought the tears haunting my throat out onto my tongue.
When I looked back at Douglas, he was blatantly crying.
“I’m in bloody shambles. I so wanted this to go a certain way,” he started between sniffles. “I wanted to be strong for you because I know how cocked-up this whole thing is, but ducky, the sight of you like that…” He waved a hand at my collared, shackled, and white corseted body. “It’s gutted me.”
“You and me both.”
He flinched at my cold tone, and then his eyes widened as he dashed around the table only to crash into the invisible wall of my rancor a foot before he reached me.
His hands fluttered like birds without a perch as he tried to explain, “I almost stormed out the second that tosser told me you’d up and left us. There was no way my sweet ducky would just run away without saying goodbye unless he’d done something to deserve it. Had my bags packed and everything when the great lord of the manor himself graced my doorway and explained a few things to me.”