Heiresses of Russ 2014

by Melissa Scott

  Young Lavinia, however, found that she could not help but notice her. Indeed, swings forgotten, the young girl occupied the whole of Lavinia’s attention. Never had Lavinia felt such fascination; she could feel her heart thumping in her chest like a New Year’s drum. She walked up to the tall slide where the brown girl in her pinafore dress stood on the platform at the top of the slide’s ladder, her hands grasping the fanciful spiral guard rails on either side of her. The girl was readying herself to step across the platform and begin her descent down the long and wickedly steep slope.

  “You’re not scared, are you?” Lavinia asked from the ground, yelling politely.

  The brown girl started the tiniest bit, as if she had not expected to be noticed by anyone. She turned to face Lavinia, her right eyebrow perfectly arched above her sparkling dark eyes. The look on her oval face was of surprised—albeit polite—superiority. “No! Of course not. I’m just deciding how I want to slide. My dress, you see…although I’m surprised that you can.”

  Lavinia didn’t understand what the girl meant, but she nodded anyway. The girl was prettiest she had ever met, more than Lavinia’s sisters or even her mother. “If you’d like, I might slide down first to show you?”

  “Thank you,” the girl said, “but no. I can decide on my own. I always decide on my own.”

  “Are you certain?” Lavinia asked, wanting to keep the girl’s attention but not wanting to be obvious about it.

  “Yes. I don’t persuade easily.”

  “If you say so,” said Lavinia, affecting a sigh, “but please decide soon. I should like to slide, too.”

  “All right,” the girl said and faced the slope again. “I’ll be down in a moment.”

  In truth, Lavinia was prepared to wait as long as the girl liked if she could keep looking at her, but she thought it best not to say that.

  As if the girl could guess her thoughts, she frowned at Lavinia. “You’re being silly,” she said. “Stop looking at me! You’re not even supposed to see me!”

  Lavinia blushed a deep pink almost as ruddy as her father and sputtered, “I just want to see what you decide!”

  The girl gave her a weighing look that she could not read. Then with a graceful flounce of her skirt, she returned to the matter at hand, sat, and launched herself down the slide faster than Lavinia had seen anyone go. The girl’s laughter sounded like Cousin Tansy playing handbells at the holiday romps at their grandmother’s town house.

  Lavinia’s heart raced nearly as fast as the girl did down the steel slope of the slide. Lavinia ran to catch up as the girl sailed off the end of the slide and into the air, landing softly on her feet a few yards away. Lavinia had never seen anyone fly so far off the slide before.

  Being only nearly six years old, Lavinia Parrish didn’t know it then, but that was the moment when she first fell in love. Her small heart thumped faster as she approached the strange tea-brown girl in the blue and white pinafore dress.

  Lavinia started to congratulate the girl on her flight, but the girl just walked off over to the swings. “You shouldn’t go next on the slide,” she called over her shoulder. “I shouldn’t like you to feel bad about it later, since it shan’t be anyone’s fault. Come play on the swings with me, instead.”

  Puzzled, but happy to be invited, Lavinia skipped her way over.

  On the swings, they pushed off the earth and pumped the air as they raced and arced like joyful pendulums across the sky.

  In a moment of rest, collapsed on the soft grass next to the girl and looking only at the sky above, Lavinia quietly promised her that she would always be her friend. It was not quite what she meant, but she didn’t know how else to say what she was feeling. The girl sat up, her shadow falling across her face, silhouetted against the fathomless blue of the heavens. Giving Lavinia a look even more measuring than the one before, she replied that she would be Lavinia’s friend forever.

  It was not long before the other nannies showed up with their charges and the children’s yard was full with playing boys and girls. Although Lavinia had a few friends amongst them, they didn’t seem to notice her this morning, and she was too caught up in the thrill of the unknown girl’s company to care. The pair of them played on the swings and chased each other, although Lavinia was never able to actually catch the girl, and she took care to not catch Lavinia.

  Lavinia had forgotten the girl’s warning about the slide when she heard the scuffle across the yard. Pimm de Balsa-Merriweather had declared that none of the children were going to play on the slide that morning until he chose to let them. He often did such things, smiling charmingly to fool the governesses who all thought him darling and keep them to their gossip instead of wondering why their charges went silent when he approached. Pimm was capricious and mean and big for his age, and Lavinia did not much like him.

  Although Pimm had forbidden anyone else to play on the slide, he did not use it, either. Instead of keeping the joy of sliding down it his own personal delight, Pimm sat at the end of the slide and glared at any of the children who approached.

  But with the eventual defiance born of the knowledge that her much bigger and very protective brother was home on leave from his boarding school, Rose-Martha de Clare, a small but brave blonde girl who lived in a house across the square, decided to scramble up the ladder before Pimm could stop her. Pimm started bellowing from the moment Rose-Martha’s black patent shoes rang on the ladder’s rungs. Pimm jumped off the end of the slide and ran to the ladder, all as Rose-Martha laughed and climbed in her lace-trimmed lemon-sherbet dress, nimble as the trained monkey the peanut vendor over on High Street kept to delight passersby.

  From the safety of the top of the slide, Rose-Martha turned to jeer at red-faced Pimm below, knowing he could no longer stop her. All the children cheered her in excitement and hollered in dread as Pimm climbed the ladder after her.

  Laughing, and meaning to sit in order to propel herself down the slide to escape him, Rose-Martha instead caught her skirt on the curling spiral of the guard rail, and the change that the black iron snare made in her momentum was enough to cause her to stumble.

  Rose-Martha’s descent should have been a graceful thing, ending with the cheers of her friends and a triumph over Pimm. Instead, there was the sound of her yellow dress tearing as she fell headlong and angular down the steep slope; an abbreviated shriek of surprised terror as she fell, silenced with the first bounce against the steel; then a cruel thud as she struck the ground head-first, and a final soft wet snap that was audible in the silence spilling across the play yard like a wave of horror. It was two heartbeats before the screams began and the governesses finally looked up from their gossip, crochet needles, and books.

  Lavinia saw it happen, although she did not quite understand what it meant. She turned to the tea-brown girl in her pinafore dress to ask what they should do, but the girl was gone.

  It was fortunate that at that point Miss ap Croutch, having dropped her penny-dreadful on her bench and run across the full length of the yard at the sound of the screams, swept Lavinia up in her arms and engulfed her in as maternal an embrace as she had known.

  Quickly feeling to make sure that Lavinia was whole and unhurt, Miss ap Croutch took in the scene with a glance: all the children frightened and sobbing, including Pimm, Rose-Martha’s splayed body at the foot of the slide with her head and arms twisted in unnatural directions, and Miss Polly Waszko, the de Clare governess, walking with a bowed head and steps slow and reticent, as if by delaying she could avoid the reality of it. Miss ap Croutch shouted, “Get a doctor!” although she surely knew there would be no use.

  Later, whilst standing in the viewing queue with her parents at the service for the young Miss de Clare, Lavinia thought she caught a glimpse of the tea-brown girl. It seemed to her that the girl held out her red-gloved hand and trailed it along the small black lacquer coffin as she filed past the body. Sad and confused, Lavinia remembered then that the girl had shared something with her, some secret promise or cle
ver thing that had made sense of the world, but she could not recall what it was. An enveloping sense of loss claimed her as her certainty fled, and, walking past the coffin, Lavinia cried.

  One morning several years later when Lavinia was six days away from turning fourteen, she woke up earlier than usual and came down to the warmth of the Mrs Begas’s kitchen.

  Lavinia was being sent to a new school—which was good, as she hadn’t liked her previous one. According to her father, it had been very well-regarded, but Lavinia found it dreary and the teachers cold. More importantly from Lavinia’s parents’ point of view, it was no longer the best place for the daughter of a good family due to a small scandal involving the headmistress and the mother of one of the students.

  The excitement (and, were she honest, the nervousness) of knowing that she would be starting at a new school had brought Lavinia down to get a glass of milk and some warm bread and jam from Mrs Begas. The rotund cook had welcomed Lavinia into her vast and floury domain ever since she was small, and so Lavinia sat in her usual spot out of the way. It was not something she could admit to her rank-conscious lady mother, but she enjoyed watching the way the staff brought the house to life. Lucy, the maid who tended the fireplaces and swept, sang quietly when she thought herself alone. Cervantes, the butler, was terribly serious upstairs in the presence of Mr and Mrs Parrish but had a silly sense of humor when downstairs or alone with Lavinia and her siblings.

  Well before the family awoke, the kitchen bustled. Lavinia enjoyed watching the deliveries come to the service door: the butcher’s boy bringing plucked hens and eggs, the milk girls coming around with their enameled blue jugs, and the baker’s son dropping off the standing order of morning loaves.

  Tick, the butcher’s boy, a tall freckled lad with light brown hair sticking out like straw around his ears from under his white cap, had put the brace of hens on the hook in the cold room and settled the bill with Mrs Begas, and now was quietly flirting with Lucy next to the hammered copper sink. It wasn’t a serious courtship yet, but last week Lavinia had overheard Lucy being teased by the staff for mooning over the boy.

  Since Tick was on his slow way out, the service door was still open, and through it, Lavinia could see a girl about her own age step up to the threshold.

  The girl was a dream, with cool-looking skin the color of Lavinia’s mother’s favorite porcelain cups and soot-black hair, with lips the pale pink of new summer roses, and a sharp up-turned nose like the illustrations of pixies in the storybooks Lavinia’s nanny had read her when she was ill. She was so striking that Lavinia sat up straight on her stool, bread and sweet quince jam forgotten. The stranger was the loveliest girl Lavinia had ever seen.

  Sometimes, when she was ill or only half-awake and lingering on the borders of sleep, Lavinia thought she remembered—as if in a dream—a beautiful tea-brown girl on a slide, and fancied that the girl was possessed of a secret that would make Lavinia content or wise. Sometimes she would recall imagining that she’d seen the tea-brown girl walking on a crowded street or passing by on the city tram, the lovely girl’s appearance changing over the years as she grew up. Seeing this girl now, all that sharp memory and ache flooded back, and Lavinia half-smiled at the melancholy hurt; she weighed the beauty of it against this present moment. She could not decide if this girl was lovelier or not than those misty fancies. One of the two most lovely, then.

  The girl did not knock or hesitate but stepped in with a confidence that denied the possibility of refusal, her bearing even more regal than that of Lavinia’s grandmother, the Dowager Viscountess. Whether she was a shop girl sent on errand or a likely girl hoping for a maid’s position, Lavinia did not care. Seeing the girl standing there in her simple calico frock, Lavinia just wanted to watch her, and perhaps talk to her if she could summon courage enough.

  No one else turned to look at the strange girl as she walked in, although the conversation and bustle faltered and then resumed with anxious strength. Yet no one said anything at all as she crossed the grey slate floor of the kitchen and approached the sink, where Tick and Lucy stood murmuring and blushing at one another.

  Lavinia saw Mrs Begas look up as the girl walked past the great kitchen table where she sat planning the week’s menu. Mrs Begas frowned distractedly, as if merely remembering that the cheesemonger had forgotten to include the sharp bleu with her order and that she would need to send an errand boy to pick it up; she gave no sign that she saw the strange pale girl.

  The girl stopped next to Tick, whose shy banter with Lucy had fallen silent. Lucy blushed furiously enough that it showed even with her copper-brown skin and didn’t look up from the pot she had been drying for the last five minutes. Thus Lucy missed it when the pale girl leaned forward and kissed Tick on the cheek gently, like a mother might kiss her babe. Tick gave no notice to the girl’s presence, but Lavinia saw him shudder as if suddenly cold, and then Tick rubbed his chest and left arm absentmindedly, as if they ached like a trick knee in bad weather.

  Kiss given, and still seeming invisible to everyone else in the kitchen, the girl turned around and glanced at Lavinia, who had not moved from her stool in the corner. The girl’s dark eyes were sad, and Lavinia could not tell what color they might be, but they reminded Lavinia of a sparkling-eyed girl in the pinafore dress. The girl gave Lavinia a half-smile that seemed both bitter and sweet, like almond honey and regret, and walked out of the kitchen without a word.

  Lavinia rose from her seat but hadn’t taken more than one faltering step toward the door when she heard a clanging crash across the kitchen. She jumped and swiveled to see Tick clutching his chest on the slate floor with specks of foam on his lips. Lucy knelt next to him, the copper pot she been drying having bounced and landed behind her.

  Lavinia could see that Tick wasn’t breathing; Lucy started to wail, a thin keening sound like all her new hopes boiling away in a kettle of despair.

  Lavinia ran to the door, wanting to find the girl, to demand to know what she had done, to kiss her, to ask whom she was, to know what happened, to know her name.

  She wasn’t there.

  For a moment then Lavinia knew, knew it as well as she knew her own name and her own secrets, that the girl had been real, even if no one else had seen her.

  Stepping back inside, that knowledge quietly dissipated like the truth of dreams lost in morning light, and Lavinia felt a sick pit of dread open up in her belly. Everything seemed flimsy around her. She struggled to take in the scene again, the loss making her uneasy and uncertain. She met Mrs Begas’s grim eyes from across the gulf that had opened up in her kitchen.

  “I’ll go wake Father,” Lavinia said.

  From where she stood, Lavinia could see that the coffin was simple but poorly-stained pine. Tick’s family didn’t have much money and probably saw no reason to waste the collection taken up for them on something that would moulder in the ground and bring no comfort to the living come winter.

  It wouldn’t have been appropriate for a girl of Lavinia’s station to attend the funeral for a butcher’s boy (or so she knew her mother would have said, had she dared mention it to her), so she watched from across the street as the mourners walked in a solemn cortège out of the little stone chapel on St Thelmus Street.

  At the end of the short stream of family, butchers, and shop folk, a pale girl walked in a calico dress, her dark hair uncovered. She saw Lavinia and slowed her pace. Lavinia dashed over to walk beside her.

  “It was a sad service,” the girl said as Lavinia joined her, before Lavinia could launch into her ten thousand questions. “Tick’s mother was so confused and crying, and his father was silent and hurt. Tick’s uncle died the same way, when Tick was a baby. A weak heart.”

  Lavinia’s questions dried up, and so she just nodded and walked alongside the girl.

  “There weren’t many flowers, and the coffin was just a simple box and not very well made.” The girl glanced at Lavinia then, sidewise and blue. “I would have thought that they’d use a little m
ore care to see him off. It’s important to show respect.”

  Lavinia nodded again. She still wasn’t sure what would be the right thing to say, to ask.

  As they reached an intersection, the bells of the little church tolled behind them. Lavinia turned, surprised by the carillon. She was moved by the beautiful and unexpected tribute for the dead boy.

  At her side, the porcelain-pale girl said, “I should go. I have other places I’m wanted. Goodbye for now, Miss Parrish.”

  Startled, Lavinia whirled back to the girl, an arm flung out to hold her from leaving, but she was gone. Lavinia searched up and down both streets for several blocks before she thought to wonder that the girl knew her name.

  A little time after that, Lavinia forgot what she was looking for, and who it had been that had known her name. A trifle puzzled, she went home.

  As a young woman, grown out of the awkwardness of adolescence and having filled out, Lavinia found her health, although mostly quite good, grow unexpectedly precarious. When she was seventeen, she contracted scarlet fever at boarding school in Brasyl, and she came closer to death than anyone truly realized. Delirious, she babbled to the physician and the matron that she had seen the pale girl many times in the edges of crowds and from across busy streets, but that the girl would never speak with Lavinia again and always disappeared before she could reach her. Believing Lavinia to be especially ill and in want of rest (as she remembered nothing of this confession once her fever broke), she was sent back to the family home.

  It was then that Sister Marival del Kurosawa was hired to instruct her, since Lavinia had insisted on receiving as good an education as her brother, and she would need special tutoring in order to secure a place at the Royal University.

  The scholar-nun was sharp, and brisk, and cold. She was never mean, and never treated Lavinia with anything less than a full measure of dignified seriousness and respect should Lavinia undertake the effort to learn, but she did not coddle her.