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31_days2007-03-03 07:34 am
sassafras28.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2007-03-03 07:34 am
[March 3] [Original Fiction]: In Exile
Title: In Exile
Day/Theme: March 3:
Series: Original Fiction
Character/Pairing: Original
Rating: PG-13 (Semi-sexual situations)
Note: It’s very long. Sorry about that, it kinda got away from me.
In the long winter of 1902, the Empress showed absolutely no signs whatsoever of dying soon to guilty distress of all concerned. It had been nearly three months since any one of them had set foot outside the big house at the edge of the forest for more than a moment or two. They had become…connoisseurs of snowfall. They knew the fat, wide flakes that drifted lazily downward, dawdling and dancing on spirals of air. They understood the tiny, pointed specks of light that shimmered like diamonds and cut the sky. They had made the acquaintance of slanted, sleeting snow, wet and heavy, powder-dry flurries, almost like flour and the heavy, inexorable fall of flakes too huge and languid to ride the air.
They spoke little to one another, and buried themselves deeply in their separate occupations. When they did, by chance, discover another person on a narrow staircase or buried hip-deep in the pantry late at night, it was with faint surprise that they greeted one another. As though they were old friends, meeting for the first time after long years.
Ruprecht, who was the Empress’ only son, marked the passage of time by the condition and number of cigarette ends in the ash tray next to his chair in the library. The chair faced a huge window and he sat before it daily, watching the slow, never-ending fall of white snow on to white ground. He was not a great reader, and it was seldom that he picked a book off the many shelves but he felt a certain ease in the library, a place that required whispering and had a lock on every door.
Melisande, his wife of not quite one year, spent most of her days with pen and brush and, of late, the Empress herself. She set up her easel every morning in the front parlor with its heavy curtains and smell of mildew and old smoke. The old woman arranged herself on the chaise lounge in front of her, ramrod straight with tasteful diamonds glittering in her ears, along her neck. They had been a confirmation present, from her father. This had all been many years before the revolution, of course, and Melisande wondered absent-mindedly how she had managed to hold on to things of such obvious value.
Sometimes, Melisande wanted to ask her to remove the jewels, to wear her hair in two long plaits, as she sometimes did at night. Sometimes Melisande wanted nothing more than to take her handkerchief and scrub the blusher and kohl off her face, revealing like a magic trick the frail woman of almost ninety-two underneath. But she did none of these things, and only sketched her as she sat, her eyes distant and shining, twin to the jewels around her neck.
Harriet, who was, at fourteen, just a child, did not sit in on these sessions. She had a faint dislike of Melisande, whom she found wispy and wan. But she nevertheless passed by the parlor several times a day, her hands occupied with other tasks. And only her eyes moved over ever so slightly to watch the two women, silent and intent with an easel standing guard between them.
There was a portrait in the upstairs hallway, of the Empress when she was girl no older than Harriet. She was asture and hard-faced even then, the only girl but indistinguishable in expression from her four older brothers. She was seated, and they stood around her like a vanguard, each of them with a hand on her shoulder, her knee, the back of her chair. Each one claiming a piece of her.
Harriet knew them by sight, her distant, long-dead uncles. Christopher, the eldest, and Nathanial, who tore each other apart on a bleak and distant battlefield so far away that their last letters had arrived home two and a half months after the news of their deaths. Alexander, a frail boy with a consumptive constitution, not unlike Melisande, who had nevertheless joined the ranks of his father’s army and died with good intentions and promises of valor filling up his heart.
Family lore said that the Empress Kristiana, their mother, never recovered from the loss of Alex, who had been her acknowledged favorite. She took to her bed and the Empress had once, in a rare moment of disclosure, told Harriet how when the revolutionaries came and rousted them all in the middle of the night, her mother’s legs were as weak and useless as India rubber. One of the revolutionaries, she said, picked her up and swung her over his shoulder as easily as you would a sack of flour. Harriet wondered how she had felt, following a collection of armed men out of her home and into the night, with her mother’s white face expressionless, staring into hers. Dead.
Kristiana looked capable in the portrait, sternly pretty if slightly equine. Her hair shone in the lamplight and she smiled very slightly, one pale hand resting easily, possessively on the Emperor’s arm. He looked very tall next to her, though she had not been a petite woman. He was dressed in full military uniform and he had a thick, dark beard that covered the lower half of his face and obscured his expression. He had bright, assured eyes, though, and his hands rested gently on the shoulders of his youngest, smallest son, Sascha, who stood in front of him wearing a miniaturized version of his uniform.
Sascha was fourteen at the time of portrait and not yet a man. Harriet’s cousin Ruprecht looked not unlike Sascha, had his same serious eyebrows and wan, poetic face. Sascha was nineteen years old when he died, shot four times and bayoneted thrice. His was the only body they ever recovered, floating in the long river that snaked through the center of what had been the empire. And everyone knew the story, how the youthful Empress had come out of hiding and returned to her homeland, which was still cutting itself apart and hungry for her blood. The aggressively plain black dress she had worn when she retrieved her brother-her twin’s-body, blue and bloody. The lock of hair she had cut and the tears that the newspaper men saw rolling down her chin. Her grief that was huge enough for a whole land, and all her broken people.
Harriet often stared at the Empress-that-was in the portrait in the hallway. The unbeautiful lines of her face, the indomitable tilt of her chin. She looked as if she knew, somehow, the future that was waiting for them all. She looked as if the knowledge pressed down on her, suffocated her with the hugeness of it, the horror of it, every day.
But that was all long past now, and the Empress was closing in on the end of her long life and the only question to be asked now was: who gets what? Ruprecht, everyone knew, would get the bulk of her leavings. What little money there was and the far more valuable land holdings, including the big house. Harriet knew he planned to sell it immediately. He had never liked the grim old place and had always preferred the family’s summer home on the coast. Golden and burning and pale, pale blue.
Harriet knew that she could expect a stipend from her good cousin, and a place at his table. And being the Empress’ only other relation, she had come to expect to inherit certain small things she had carefully expressed interest in. The portrait was one, for uncertain sentimental reasons, a little music box that the Empress’ husband had given her as a wedding present was another, and several pieces of jewelry.
Sometimes, while the Empress took her afternoon nap on the chaise lounge, Gemma, who was the maid of all work in the big house, could be persuaded to unlock the door to her mistress’ private bedroom. Gemma was twenty-two, and despite a lifetime of following the Empress from one grand social scene to another, she was surprisingly shy, surprisingly sweet. She paced nervously while Harriet tried on the jewels in the mirror, the rubies that hung in her ears like small, perfect drops of blood. The necklace of pearls and sapphires that had seen a thousand glittering ballrooms. The silver comb with little flecks of pale lapis lazuli.
“Come here,” she would demand impatiently of Gemma, when her pacing grew irritating. And then she would drape the girl in bright jewels. Gold to shine against her dark hair, emeralds to match her eyes. Gemma looked at herself in the mirror and touched her hands gently to her ears, her hair, her throat. She did not seem to notice the contrast of the rough red of her hands against the slender finery.
Gemma was very conscious of her hands, the rough prickle of her skin, the ends of her fingertips rubbed raw and uneven. Every night before she went to bed she rubbed white cream on them that smelled of lavender, a gift from the mistress. Her work often did not allow her to get to her room before very late indeed. After she had changed out of her dress, undone her long hair and finished writing to her family, she did not have much time to doctor her fingers. Invariably, her hands were still wet when Ruprecht’s footsteps sounded in her doorway. She left her scent on him. Lavender, delicate, watery, discarded by mistress for being “a frivolous sort of smell.” Melisande often caught the tang of it on her husband’s neck, his hair, his arms. She found it restive, soothing. Lavender, a flower she had always liked.
Gemma hid remembrances of him in a wooden cigar box her father had given her on her eighth birthday, when she left to become the Empress’ lady in waiting. “Put all your special things in it,” he had told her, resting his hand very briefly on her shoulder. She had seen him only once since then, looking stooped and white haired and impossibly old. Her mother, of course, was dead these nine years.
She took the box out sometimes, after he left her, naked and feeling the cold absence of his body. She lifted up the box and touched the small things inside it, the little silver earrings he told her not to wear, just in case, a letter he had asked her to burn, his handkerchief, a faded rose that he’d handed to her once, glossy and pink.
She wrapped the quilt tightly around her, shutting out the cold, pressing her face into the darkness. “Not tonight, little one,” she whispered to her bare abdomen, “you can’t stay yet, dear heart. But I’ll be waiting for you someday soon.” She patted her stomach, pressed her fingers into the divot at its center, as though it was a lifeline, a tunnel to the deep inside parts of her. Eventually, she fell asleep, buried in her quilt with her hand pressed like a prayer to her middle.
It was in this way that the butler, Pierce, discovered the nature of the affair. He woke her in the mornings, long before the rest of the house was stirring. And though he stood only in the doorway, he could see in the little gaps in the quilt her bare skin. Pale, almost translucent, the way milk looked when it froze in the bucket. There was a certain swollen quality about her mouth, a secret in her eyes.
He waited in her little hallway while she rustled and shuffled behind closed doors, he imagined the easy ritual of undergarments, outer garments, stockings, boots and hair. He imagined they way she looked, hastily reflected in the greenish mirror she kept, the crisp white of her underthings, carefully bleached, carefully starched against her cold skin. He imagined she was very, very cold, that if he were lie very close to her, frost would begin to rim his skin, that if he were to lie on top of her, he would feel the brittle, ice-sicle stabs of her bones through her skin.
“Where will you go?” he asked her once, as they walked together towards the warmth of the kitchen. She tilted her head to one side and twisted her white hands in her hair, bending and curling it into shape. He watched out of the corner of his eye the efficient movement of her fingers, a pale pink. The only spot of color on her person at all. “After the old woman is gone, I mean.”
She considered this for a moment, “I think I shall go with Miss Harriet, most likely…”she paused and then said in a way that would have given away her secret if Pierce had not already discovered it, “or perhaps I shall go with the mister.”
“And you?” she asked, her hands drifting slowly away from her hair, “what will you do?”
For a moment Pierce started, having not considered such a thing much for himself. “I suspect,” he said slowly, “I suspect I shall do much the same as you,” and he knew immediately that this was true.
“Oh good,” Gemma smiled in a way that brought pale, pale color to her cheeks, “I should like very much for us to stay together,” suddenly, she reached out and gripped his hand impulsively in hers. She let go almost immediately and they continued on their way and all Pierce could think of as they went was that she was not cold at all, but instead very, very hot. Burning, almost. Perhaps she was like an opal then, thickly pale on the outside and a furnace, something raging and uncontrolled, on the inside.
Pierce spoke very seldom with the mister and only delivered his newspapers to him and his endless packets of long brown cigarettes. He was setting such a package on the end table when he noticed the little thinning circle of hair atop the mister’s head. He would be bald them, perhaps in five years or ten. Stress did that to a man, a domineering mother, a sickly wife, a mistress who was demanding more and more of his time and attention. A rough lot, Pierce thought, and even in his head, the words hung heavy with disdain.
“Is there anything else you require, sir?” he asked, moving to adjust the curtains. Outside, it was snowing once again, but sparsely, large flakes at long intervals. Miss Harriet had taken the opportunity to get a bit of exercise, and she was tromping through the vast front yard, rendered featureless and bare.
“My mother told me today that she is refusing to die until spring arrives,” the mister said, his voice as white and expressionless as the land outside the window. Pierce was not quite sure how to respond to this.
“Sir?” he began, Ruprecht looked at him seriously.
“Pierce, this winter is never going to end.”
Pierce looked out the window where Miss Harriet had stooped to scrape the snow into a ball for throwing, and he thought that the mister may very well be correct.
***
Melisande finished her portrait on the fourteenth day of March. Outside, there was a hailstorm. Harriet watched it from her tower window, Ruprecht from the library; Gemma and Pierce paused in their work to watch from the kitchen as ice balls the size of golf balls hurtled towards the white earth. Melisande hurried excitedly through the house, rousing all the occupants, and she noticed the storm only as a faint rumbling in the sky. The Empress, for her part, sat with her hands folded, facing the parlor window, but it was up for debate whether or not she was actually watching anything at all.
They all of them noticed a glee in Melisande’s face as they gathered there in the parlor. A true joy that shone in her usually sallow features. “I finished my painting,” she told them all, fluttering excitedly around her covered easel.
“Well, then,” Ruprecht said, feeling suddenly jolly in the face of her obvious elation, “give us a look.”
“Well, it’s not very good, I’ve only just learned oils, so bear that in mind,” she smiled like a little girl as she lifted the corner of the stained brown tarpaulin. They waited, a bit surprised to find themselves almost excited as she was, a strange, almost alien emotion for them all. She tore the tarp off in one smooth moment and for a long moment, no one spoke.
The Empress stared out at them from the canvas. Stoic and unblinking and impossibly old. Harriet laughed a short little trill as she recognized the fourteen year old from the upstairs portrait in her face, the lines that carved themselves around her mouth, along her forehead, the burden that she carried still in her eyes. Diamonds glittered at her throat, sallow and puckered now. They could imagine the day her father had clasped the necklace around her, the rasp his hands against the small hairs on the back of her neck and the way she looked at him, composed and full of love.
She looked antique, paper-thin. Her dress was old fashioned, her hair two or three decades behind the style. She looked like a thousand thousand palaces with the lamps lying broken on the floor and the ceiling cracked like a spider’s web. She looked like a girl in a black dress, standing at the edge of the river, the cold dark water they pulled her brother out of. She looked like Ruprecht, she looked like Harriet, she looked like her own mother, lost so long now.
“It’s lovely, darling,” said the Empress, reaching out a knobby hand for Melisande’s. The younger woman glittered for her and all at once, they noticed the tears that pooled and gathered underneath the Empress’ eyes.
“I’m not crying,” she said to them, “I’m just very, very, old, you understand.”
Outside the window, a sudden crack of lightning cut the sky, burned the snow like ash. Spring was on its way now.
Day/Theme: March 3:
Series: Original Fiction
Character/Pairing: Original
Rating: PG-13 (Semi-sexual situations)
Note: It’s very long. Sorry about that, it kinda got away from me.
In the long winter of 1902, the Empress showed absolutely no signs whatsoever of dying soon to guilty distress of all concerned. It had been nearly three months since any one of them had set foot outside the big house at the edge of the forest for more than a moment or two. They had become…connoisseurs of snowfall. They knew the fat, wide flakes that drifted lazily downward, dawdling and dancing on spirals of air. They understood the tiny, pointed specks of light that shimmered like diamonds and cut the sky. They had made the acquaintance of slanted, sleeting snow, wet and heavy, powder-dry flurries, almost like flour and the heavy, inexorable fall of flakes too huge and languid to ride the air.
They spoke little to one another, and buried themselves deeply in their separate occupations. When they did, by chance, discover another person on a narrow staircase or buried hip-deep in the pantry late at night, it was with faint surprise that they greeted one another. As though they were old friends, meeting for the first time after long years.
Ruprecht, who was the Empress’ only son, marked the passage of time by the condition and number of cigarette ends in the ash tray next to his chair in the library. The chair faced a huge window and he sat before it daily, watching the slow, never-ending fall of white snow on to white ground. He was not a great reader, and it was seldom that he picked a book off the many shelves but he felt a certain ease in the library, a place that required whispering and had a lock on every door.
Melisande, his wife of not quite one year, spent most of her days with pen and brush and, of late, the Empress herself. She set up her easel every morning in the front parlor with its heavy curtains and smell of mildew and old smoke. The old woman arranged herself on the chaise lounge in front of her, ramrod straight with tasteful diamonds glittering in her ears, along her neck. They had been a confirmation present, from her father. This had all been many years before the revolution, of course, and Melisande wondered absent-mindedly how she had managed to hold on to things of such obvious value.
Sometimes, Melisande wanted to ask her to remove the jewels, to wear her hair in two long plaits, as she sometimes did at night. Sometimes Melisande wanted nothing more than to take her handkerchief and scrub the blusher and kohl off her face, revealing like a magic trick the frail woman of almost ninety-two underneath. But she did none of these things, and only sketched her as she sat, her eyes distant and shining, twin to the jewels around her neck.
Harriet, who was, at fourteen, just a child, did not sit in on these sessions. She had a faint dislike of Melisande, whom she found wispy and wan. But she nevertheless passed by the parlor several times a day, her hands occupied with other tasks. And only her eyes moved over ever so slightly to watch the two women, silent and intent with an easel standing guard between them.
There was a portrait in the upstairs hallway, of the Empress when she was girl no older than Harriet. She was asture and hard-faced even then, the only girl but indistinguishable in expression from her four older brothers. She was seated, and they stood around her like a vanguard, each of them with a hand on her shoulder, her knee, the back of her chair. Each one claiming a piece of her.
Harriet knew them by sight, her distant, long-dead uncles. Christopher, the eldest, and Nathanial, who tore each other apart on a bleak and distant battlefield so far away that their last letters had arrived home two and a half months after the news of their deaths. Alexander, a frail boy with a consumptive constitution, not unlike Melisande, who had nevertheless joined the ranks of his father’s army and died with good intentions and promises of valor filling up his heart.
Family lore said that the Empress Kristiana, their mother, never recovered from the loss of Alex, who had been her acknowledged favorite. She took to her bed and the Empress had once, in a rare moment of disclosure, told Harriet how when the revolutionaries came and rousted them all in the middle of the night, her mother’s legs were as weak and useless as India rubber. One of the revolutionaries, she said, picked her up and swung her over his shoulder as easily as you would a sack of flour. Harriet wondered how she had felt, following a collection of armed men out of her home and into the night, with her mother’s white face expressionless, staring into hers. Dead.
Kristiana looked capable in the portrait, sternly pretty if slightly equine. Her hair shone in the lamplight and she smiled very slightly, one pale hand resting easily, possessively on the Emperor’s arm. He looked very tall next to her, though she had not been a petite woman. He was dressed in full military uniform and he had a thick, dark beard that covered the lower half of his face and obscured his expression. He had bright, assured eyes, though, and his hands rested gently on the shoulders of his youngest, smallest son, Sascha, who stood in front of him wearing a miniaturized version of his uniform.
Sascha was fourteen at the time of portrait and not yet a man. Harriet’s cousin Ruprecht looked not unlike Sascha, had his same serious eyebrows and wan, poetic face. Sascha was nineteen years old when he died, shot four times and bayoneted thrice. His was the only body they ever recovered, floating in the long river that snaked through the center of what had been the empire. And everyone knew the story, how the youthful Empress had come out of hiding and returned to her homeland, which was still cutting itself apart and hungry for her blood. The aggressively plain black dress she had worn when she retrieved her brother-her twin’s-body, blue and bloody. The lock of hair she had cut and the tears that the newspaper men saw rolling down her chin. Her grief that was huge enough for a whole land, and all her broken people.
Harriet often stared at the Empress-that-was in the portrait in the hallway. The unbeautiful lines of her face, the indomitable tilt of her chin. She looked as if she knew, somehow, the future that was waiting for them all. She looked as if the knowledge pressed down on her, suffocated her with the hugeness of it, the horror of it, every day.
But that was all long past now, and the Empress was closing in on the end of her long life and the only question to be asked now was: who gets what? Ruprecht, everyone knew, would get the bulk of her leavings. What little money there was and the far more valuable land holdings, including the big house. Harriet knew he planned to sell it immediately. He had never liked the grim old place and had always preferred the family’s summer home on the coast. Golden and burning and pale, pale blue.
Harriet knew that she could expect a stipend from her good cousin, and a place at his table. And being the Empress’ only other relation, she had come to expect to inherit certain small things she had carefully expressed interest in. The portrait was one, for uncertain sentimental reasons, a little music box that the Empress’ husband had given her as a wedding present was another, and several pieces of jewelry.
Sometimes, while the Empress took her afternoon nap on the chaise lounge, Gemma, who was the maid of all work in the big house, could be persuaded to unlock the door to her mistress’ private bedroom. Gemma was twenty-two, and despite a lifetime of following the Empress from one grand social scene to another, she was surprisingly shy, surprisingly sweet. She paced nervously while Harriet tried on the jewels in the mirror, the rubies that hung in her ears like small, perfect drops of blood. The necklace of pearls and sapphires that had seen a thousand glittering ballrooms. The silver comb with little flecks of pale lapis lazuli.
“Come here,” she would demand impatiently of Gemma, when her pacing grew irritating. And then she would drape the girl in bright jewels. Gold to shine against her dark hair, emeralds to match her eyes. Gemma looked at herself in the mirror and touched her hands gently to her ears, her hair, her throat. She did not seem to notice the contrast of the rough red of her hands against the slender finery.
Gemma was very conscious of her hands, the rough prickle of her skin, the ends of her fingertips rubbed raw and uneven. Every night before she went to bed she rubbed white cream on them that smelled of lavender, a gift from the mistress. Her work often did not allow her to get to her room before very late indeed. After she had changed out of her dress, undone her long hair and finished writing to her family, she did not have much time to doctor her fingers. Invariably, her hands were still wet when Ruprecht’s footsteps sounded in her doorway. She left her scent on him. Lavender, delicate, watery, discarded by mistress for being “a frivolous sort of smell.” Melisande often caught the tang of it on her husband’s neck, his hair, his arms. She found it restive, soothing. Lavender, a flower she had always liked.
Gemma hid remembrances of him in a wooden cigar box her father had given her on her eighth birthday, when she left to become the Empress’ lady in waiting. “Put all your special things in it,” he had told her, resting his hand very briefly on her shoulder. She had seen him only once since then, looking stooped and white haired and impossibly old. Her mother, of course, was dead these nine years.
She took the box out sometimes, after he left her, naked and feeling the cold absence of his body. She lifted up the box and touched the small things inside it, the little silver earrings he told her not to wear, just in case, a letter he had asked her to burn, his handkerchief, a faded rose that he’d handed to her once, glossy and pink.
She wrapped the quilt tightly around her, shutting out the cold, pressing her face into the darkness. “Not tonight, little one,” she whispered to her bare abdomen, “you can’t stay yet, dear heart. But I’ll be waiting for you someday soon.” She patted her stomach, pressed her fingers into the divot at its center, as though it was a lifeline, a tunnel to the deep inside parts of her. Eventually, she fell asleep, buried in her quilt with her hand pressed like a prayer to her middle.
It was in this way that the butler, Pierce, discovered the nature of the affair. He woke her in the mornings, long before the rest of the house was stirring. And though he stood only in the doorway, he could see in the little gaps in the quilt her bare skin. Pale, almost translucent, the way milk looked when it froze in the bucket. There was a certain swollen quality about her mouth, a secret in her eyes.
He waited in her little hallway while she rustled and shuffled behind closed doors, he imagined the easy ritual of undergarments, outer garments, stockings, boots and hair. He imagined they way she looked, hastily reflected in the greenish mirror she kept, the crisp white of her underthings, carefully bleached, carefully starched against her cold skin. He imagined she was very, very cold, that if he were lie very close to her, frost would begin to rim his skin, that if he were to lie on top of her, he would feel the brittle, ice-sicle stabs of her bones through her skin.
“Where will you go?” he asked her once, as they walked together towards the warmth of the kitchen. She tilted her head to one side and twisted her white hands in her hair, bending and curling it into shape. He watched out of the corner of his eye the efficient movement of her fingers, a pale pink. The only spot of color on her person at all. “After the old woman is gone, I mean.”
She considered this for a moment, “I think I shall go with Miss Harriet, most likely…”she paused and then said in a way that would have given away her secret if Pierce had not already discovered it, “or perhaps I shall go with the mister.”
“And you?” she asked, her hands drifting slowly away from her hair, “what will you do?”
For a moment Pierce started, having not considered such a thing much for himself. “I suspect,” he said slowly, “I suspect I shall do much the same as you,” and he knew immediately that this was true.
“Oh good,” Gemma smiled in a way that brought pale, pale color to her cheeks, “I should like very much for us to stay together,” suddenly, she reached out and gripped his hand impulsively in hers. She let go almost immediately and they continued on their way and all Pierce could think of as they went was that she was not cold at all, but instead very, very hot. Burning, almost. Perhaps she was like an opal then, thickly pale on the outside and a furnace, something raging and uncontrolled, on the inside.
Pierce spoke very seldom with the mister and only delivered his newspapers to him and his endless packets of long brown cigarettes. He was setting such a package on the end table when he noticed the little thinning circle of hair atop the mister’s head. He would be bald them, perhaps in five years or ten. Stress did that to a man, a domineering mother, a sickly wife, a mistress who was demanding more and more of his time and attention. A rough lot, Pierce thought, and even in his head, the words hung heavy with disdain.
“Is there anything else you require, sir?” he asked, moving to adjust the curtains. Outside, it was snowing once again, but sparsely, large flakes at long intervals. Miss Harriet had taken the opportunity to get a bit of exercise, and she was tromping through the vast front yard, rendered featureless and bare.
“My mother told me today that she is refusing to die until spring arrives,” the mister said, his voice as white and expressionless as the land outside the window. Pierce was not quite sure how to respond to this.
“Sir?” he began, Ruprecht looked at him seriously.
“Pierce, this winter is never going to end.”
Pierce looked out the window where Miss Harriet had stooped to scrape the snow into a ball for throwing, and he thought that the mister may very well be correct.
Melisande finished her portrait on the fourteenth day of March. Outside, there was a hailstorm. Harriet watched it from her tower window, Ruprecht from the library; Gemma and Pierce paused in their work to watch from the kitchen as ice balls the size of golf balls hurtled towards the white earth. Melisande hurried excitedly through the house, rousing all the occupants, and she noticed the storm only as a faint rumbling in the sky. The Empress, for her part, sat with her hands folded, facing the parlor window, but it was up for debate whether or not she was actually watching anything at all.
They all of them noticed a glee in Melisande’s face as they gathered there in the parlor. A true joy that shone in her usually sallow features. “I finished my painting,” she told them all, fluttering excitedly around her covered easel.
“Well, then,” Ruprecht said, feeling suddenly jolly in the face of her obvious elation, “give us a look.”
“Well, it’s not very good, I’ve only just learned oils, so bear that in mind,” she smiled like a little girl as she lifted the corner of the stained brown tarpaulin. They waited, a bit surprised to find themselves almost excited as she was, a strange, almost alien emotion for them all. She tore the tarp off in one smooth moment and for a long moment, no one spoke.
The Empress stared out at them from the canvas. Stoic and unblinking and impossibly old. Harriet laughed a short little trill as she recognized the fourteen year old from the upstairs portrait in her face, the lines that carved themselves around her mouth, along her forehead, the burden that she carried still in her eyes. Diamonds glittered at her throat, sallow and puckered now. They could imagine the day her father had clasped the necklace around her, the rasp his hands against the small hairs on the back of her neck and the way she looked at him, composed and full of love.
She looked antique, paper-thin. Her dress was old fashioned, her hair two or three decades behind the style. She looked like a thousand thousand palaces with the lamps lying broken on the floor and the ceiling cracked like a spider’s web. She looked like a girl in a black dress, standing at the edge of the river, the cold dark water they pulled her brother out of. She looked like Ruprecht, she looked like Harriet, she looked like her own mother, lost so long now.
“It’s lovely, darling,” said the Empress, reaching out a knobby hand for Melisande’s. The younger woman glittered for her and all at once, they noticed the tears that pooled and gathered underneath the Empress’ eyes.
“I’m not crying,” she said to them, “I’m just very, very, old, you understand.”
Outside the window, a sudden crack of lightning cut the sky, burned the snow like ash. Spring was on its way now.