Violin Romance

 

It all started at the ball.

 

But when I think about it, it really all started a long time before that. When I think about it, it all started with that one rainy afternoon spent with my sisters, when Meredith had shaken my hair out loose and put her bonnet on me for a joke. And all the others had shrieked with laugher, and before I knew it Octavia had flung her cape around my shoulders and Artemisia had thrust her fan into my hands and because they were practically crying with laugher, I’d played along, fluttering my eyelids and pitching my voice high.

 

And then, as my sister’s became distracted by Camille stealing my hat and jacket and playing at being a man, brushing a lock of hair across her top lip and scowling, I’d chanced to glance in one of the huge mirrors my mother adored and my reflection had leapt back at me like the looking glass itself had shattered and a sliver of it pierced my heart.

 

It had all seemed so right.

 

A face that I had never been fond of took on a new light; a body I had always hated suddenly had the suggestion of something else. For just a second before, embarrassed, I pulled the bonnet off my head and tossed it back to my third youngest sister, it seemed to me that I was… not as I had been.

 

If it hadn’t been for Giselle, I don’t know what I would have done.

 

My mother was away, presiding over some ceremony or other under the full moon in the company of her witches. I had been to one such ceremony once, all beautiful, statuesque women and charming gentlemen with bewitching eyes, strong willed and full of the vivacity of the darkness, all bowing to my mother, the queen amongst the ravens. My father was never at home at night – the horse that no other could saddle carried him away swiftly to roam amid the stars. Once the sun touched the distant horizon he could hardly bear to be beneath a ceiling. Sometimes I wondered how on earth my sisters and I had been conceived.

 

Octavia had been playing Chopin in the drawing room while Medea read and Camille did her embroidery. Nausicaa was out gazing at the stars, as she always did of an evening, Artemisia had gone for a late night ride; Judith and Lucretia were in the library, Lucretia probably working on her next sonata, Judith perhaps reading some thick tome in a lost tongue. Meredith would be out among the rose gardens, as she nearly always was. I had been unable to locate Giselle, the youngest of my sisters, but had assumed she had gone to bed early, as was her custom. I had feigned that I felt a little ill and crept away. Although neither I nor my sisters had the grace and majesty of our mother, or the raw power of the earth and the forests and the night sky that manifested in my father, but we had our little gifts – and mine was that I was never any more or any less than I wished to be, or to appear to be. I could pass by totally unnoticed an inch from my father’s hawk like eyes, and he would swear I had not been there, and even the blackest lie would slip past my mother’s scrying without a thought. And so they thought nothing of it.

 

And so, silent as a ghost in amongst the glass and mirrors of the palace, I had crept into Judith’s dressing room and, lighting a single candle, cast my eyes onto the silks and velvets that surrounded me. It was like being afloat in an ocean of colour. Judith was the closest to my height and build of my sisters – perhaps Artemisia, the oldest, would have been a better choice, but…

 

But Artemisia did not have this colour, this vibrancy in her gowns. She dressed simply, practically, whereas Judith, strong and stalwart she may be, had her lace and her fripperies and her ball gowns and her glass slippers. And, terrified as I was to admit it… this was what I craved.

 

At first, the idea had repulsed me… things were as they were, they could not be otherwise… but the unending hatred I had always held for my own body would not cease, no matter how little I ate or how much, or how many scars laced my pale, slender arms. And slowly but surely I had been drawn to it, had considered it every time I glanced in one of those cursed mirrors that were everywhere, had entertained the notion every time one of my sisters rounded a corner or descended a stair in a new gown. I had found myself peering through the curtains when they dressed, memorising… that goes there and this goes here and that laces up the back

 

I knew the one I wanted. It was forest green taffeta and hung off the shoulders with huge slashed velvet sleeves gathered at the wrist and a black lace trim and a bustled overskirt. For a moment I couldn’t breathe from fear of finally going over the edge – finally having to give in and admit what I was – and then like some puppet master guided my hands I had slipped the smooth, beautiful fabric over my head and, facing away from the long dressing mirror, fumbled with the buttons at the back. It was… heavy, I’d never thought it would be so heavy… and at the same time so light, so free, so loose in places and so tight in others. The mere fact that my throat and shoulders were bare panicked me for several seconds – I had never bared anything but my hands and face in public before, it was not done – but slowly I became accustomed to how it fitted, how my body looked in it, how it felt against my skin and the hands that ran over the skirt and the bodice and the beautiful sleeves. It wasn’t perfect – my hair was loose because I didn’t know how to style it, my face had no paint or powder, I had no jewels or baubles, my feet were bare and I still wore my breeches underneath, but…

 

Turning, slowly, breathlessly, I looked up into the mirror and gasped aloud. I barely recognised myself, but then again… I had not looked directly into a mirror for so long. Everything I had hated about myself was altered according to the dress, made into something… something… I can say it… something beautiful. It was so wrong and so right all in the same moment.

 

And then my eyes slipped past my own reflection to another, standing some way behind me.

 

“Giselle!” In that moment, wheeling around in a hiss of taffeta, I was filled with the fear that I would be humiliated, scorned, even harmed when my family discovered what I was, more to my horror, more than that, I was filled with the sadness that I would never again feel as I had just a few seconds ago.

 

Giselle was barely illuminated in the single candle. She wore a gown of ivory and pale gold, the kind with panniers underneath, and her hair, blonde as the cornfield at harvest time, was loose in curls down over her shoulders. Her pale blue eyes were in shadow, but I could imagine the coldness and cruelty they held. And for a second my heart ached that I, with my dull brown locks and dull green eyes and thin, bloodless body all of bones and skin and nothing more, would never look like her. Why, oh why, were all my sisters blessed with such beauty and I was not?

 

And then she took a step forward, extending a hand, and her eyes were illuminated. They were neither icy nor hateful, but calm – critical, yet honest.

“You need a corset. And a petticoat.” She stopped, still holding out her hand. To me. “And I’ve an emerald choker that would match that nicely.”

I couldn’t reply. I was too confused; I could barely understand what she was saying. I’d been discovered… she knew what I was… a freak! There was something wrong with me, some part of me that was so terribly wrong that it could never be spoken of, that I had to hide from everyone, and now I had been discovered at my most vulnerable, when there was no way to explain it and… and she was reaching out to me.

“Come, brother,” Her voice was quiet, understanding, like she was talking to a small child or a scared horse. “If this is what you want, then you may as well do it properly.”

 

I took her hand.

 

And that was how it all started.