“Who are you?” she had asked him.
“Don’t you remember?” he had said. “I’m your father.”
That had upset her, because she must be very sick indeed to not know her own father, but he told her that she had died and come back to life, so it was natural that she’d forgotten things. He lifted her up with his gloved hands and carried her out of the room. She remembered seeing other sick girls on the hay, their eyes sunken and dull and their bodies very still. That, she wouldn’t have minded forgetting.
Cecily thought of those girls as she drifted off to sleep in the vast and silky bed Master Hornpull provided for her, cooled by the twining limbs of her ghostly sisters.
The next day, Cecily’s face was painted: her mouth made vermillion, her eyelids smeared with cerulean, her cheeks rouged rose. They had brought pots of white stuff to smear on her skin but she was already so pale there was no need. Cecily waved the servants off and pinned up her hair herself. She wasn’t very good at it and locks tumbled down over her shoulders. Mirabelle assured her that it looked better that way. Alice told her that she looked like a mess. Mirabelle said that Alice was just jealous. That might have been true; Alice had always been a jealous person.
In the parlor downstairs, Cecily’s father grabbed her elbow with one gloved hand and spoke through a broad, forced smile.
Vance was nothing like their made-up stories. He was short and slender, but handsome just the same. They danced and Cecily was conscious of the warmth of his hands though the fabric of her dress and the satin of her gloves, but she was even more conscious of the tender glances he gave to a small, curvy girl in a golden gown.
“He would have liked me,” Alice crowed. “I am exactly the kind of girl he likes.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you—” Cecily started, forgetting for a moment that she was speaking to the dead. Vance turned toward her, face flaming and lips spilling apology.
But when the priest asked Cecily to take Vance in marriage, she was named as Mirabelle. She repeated the words anyway.
“Does that mean Nicholas is mine?” Mirabelle whispered, her ghostly voice filled with surprised delight. He was her clear favorite in the stories. Cecily had made the boy in Mirabelle’s locket too bookish for her tastes.
“Vance,” Cecily corrected under her breath.
“Kill him already,” Alice hissed. “Stop mooning around.”
And, indeed, Vance was leaning toward Cecily to seal their vows with a kiss. She pulled back at the last moment, so that his mouth merely brushed her veil, then tried to smile in apology. As she turned to depart the ceremony with her new husband, she saw her father in the crowd. He nodded once in her direction.
At the party following the wedding, one of the guests remarked to Cecily how good it was that her father was taking an interest in society again, after falling out of favor with the King.
“He seldom talks to me about politics,” Cecily said. “I did not know he was ever a friend of his Majesty.”
The woman who had said it looked around, seemingly torn between guilt and gossip. “Well, it was when the King was only the youngest Prince. No one expected him to take the throne, because his father was so young and his two older brothers so healthy. But illness took all three of them, one after another, and once his Majesty was on the throne, your father was well favored. He was given money and lands beyond most of our—well, you know how vast and lovely your father’s land is.”
“Yes,” Cecily said, feeling very stupid. She had never wondered where these things came from. She had merely assumed that there had always been plenty and there would always be plenty.
“But after the Prince was born, your father fell out of favor. The King would no longer see him.”
“Why?” Cecily asked.
“As if I know!” The woman laughed. “He really has kept you in another world up there!”
Later, she went to a large bed chamber and changed into a pale shift that was still, somehow, darker than her skin. She stared at her arms, looking at the tracery of purple veins, mapping a geography of paths she might take, a maze of choices she did not know her way out of.
“You look cold,” Vance said. “I could warm you.”
Cecily thought that was a kind thing to say, as though he was more interested in her well-being than in her vermillion-painted mouth or the sapphires sparkling on her fingers. She didn’t have the heart to stop him from taking her hand and pressing his lips to her throat. Lying beside his cold afterward reminded her of sleeping with her sisters before they were only shades. The chill touch of his skin comforted her.
In the morning, the whole house wept with his sudden death. Alice and Mirabelle wept too, because although he was dead, he did not live on as they did. They could not catch his spirit as he passed.
She rode in a fast coach with her father and Liam was dead before word reached the household of Vance’s burial. The second boy was much easier than she expected. At this wedding, her name had been Alice. In their bedchamber, he’d barely spoken; only torn off her gown and died. There was no time to steal out to the gardens. No time to bury her sisters.
Cecily’s father was so pleased he could barely sit still as they pressed on to the palace. He ate an entire box of sweetmeats, chuckling to himself as he watched the landscape fly by.
He had brought something for her to eat too, a familiar mix of herbs that she left sitting in their bowl.
“I don’t want them,” she said. “They make me sick.”
“Just eat!” he told her. “For once, just do as you are bid.”
She thought about throwing the bowl out of the window and scattering the herbs, but the smell of them reminded her of Mirabelle and Alice, who barely smelled like anything now. Besides, there was nothing else. Cecily ate the herbs.
She could still taste them in her mouth when the carriage arrived at the palace. She half expected to be clapped in irons and as she passed whispering courtiers, Cecily thought that each one was telling the other a list of her evil deeds.
We first met in the library. I was tall and plain, with pock-marked skin. Yes, I’m the prince in this story. Did you guess, Paul? Cecily later told me that when I first smiled at her, I still appeared to be frowning. What I remember was that she had the blackest eyes I had ever seen.
“This is your betrothed, Cecily,” Cecily’s father told me.
“I know who she is,” I said. She looked very like the picture I had been given. Most girls don’t. Your mother certainly didn’t.
That afternoon, Cecily washed the dirt of the road off her clothing and went to walk in the gardens of the palace while her father made the final arrangements. The gardens were lush and lovely, more beautiful, even, than those of her father. Plants with heads full of seeds, large as the skulls of infants, lolled from thick stems. She touched the vivid purple and red fronds of one and it seemed to twitch under her fingers. The lacy foliage of another seemed like the parsley plant of her salad. Crushing it produced a pungent, familiar scent. It was like the breath of her sisters. She bent low for a taste.
“Stop! That’s poisonous!” A gardener jogged down the path, wearing steel and leather gloves like those that belonged to her father. He had hair that flopped over his eyes and that he brushed back impatiently. “You’re not supposed to be in this part of the garden.”
“I’m sorry,” Cecily stammered. “But what are these? I have them in my garden at home.”
He snorted. “That isn’t very likely. They’re hybrids. There are no others like them in all the world.”
She thought of the woman at her wedding telling how her father had once been close to the king. He must have taken cuttings from these very plants.