He circles my wrists and pulls my hands away. For he is all man and stronger than me. “What of when the moon is down then? You’re my wife?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to love you only at night.”
The words slap across my face. I am harsh in return. “It would be better if I were a boy and you couldn’t love me at all? Except in dark alleys and illegal dance clubs? This is best.” Now that we’re here, together, all my doubts and uncertainties and fears are gone—I know what I want.
Hal pulls at his unwaxed hair. “I can’t change my desires, or I’d have stopped kissing boys a long time ago, Ophelia.”
“But you did! You kissed me and you loved it.”
“Don’t fool yourself. You’re no girl. I don’t know what you are. Girls don’t do what you did. You’re neither.”
I want to be both, I think, but I can’t say that. Hal abruptly releases my wrists and storms past me into the house, taking my heart with him.
Empty and numb, I sink to the spiky, frozen grass and lie back, staring up at the moon. At the spotlight of my madness.
And I remember how, just this evening as the sun still burned in the sky and I painted this color onto my lips, the moon was up, too, and visible. It rose before sunset, paler and blending gently into the darkening blue, but still there. Still the moon.
In darkness and light, in the shadows between, I go mad.
I know who I want, but I also know who I am. I remember when Hal said to me if we were caught, we’d be murdered, and he didn’t care when I kissed him. If he meant it, if it was true, he would love me still, in any clothes, in any body. Because my mouth and eyes and soul are the same.
But we need time. I can’t go begging to him, for he broke off marriage talks. I can’t play the girl only and win him that way, but neither can I arrive at Club Rose, hoping to see him, in my brother’s suit.
All I can do is figure out how to live with this madness.
I never intended for anyone to think I died. Yet I stand, on an afternoon so gray with heavy clouds it’s neither day nor night, in front of my family’s town house where the memorial service for Miss Ophelia Polonius is beginning.
Ice slicks the pavement and I shiver into the long, fur-lined overcoat that I stole from Father’s closet three days ago before disappearing near the train station. It slipped my mind that the river rushes on the other side of the meadow, and that when I was a little girl our nanny took both Lars and me there one day. I spent that afternoon telling my brother stories about mermaids who leave their undersea homes to get feet and walk on their own, and then I begged for weeks to go back. Mother forbade it because of the homeless wanderers to be found near the trains.
It’s no wonder Lars thought of the river before the trains. And I did leave my favorite silk scarf in the meadow for them to find.
I was only running away from Ophelia, but my family believes I killed myself out of distress at my ruined engagement. Over a broken heart. I shouldn’t have come back here, should have lost myself in the streets and clubs as I’d intended, or used Daddy’s money for a ticket to California. Yet here I am, clutching my coat, hat low, eyes down as everyone my family has ever known walks slowly up the worn marble steps.
Seeing them grieve will undo me. I’ll never be able to watch Lars stand stiff and pale, surrounded by flowers. They aren’t at church because of my suicide. Ophelia has been rendered unholy.
The thought does make me smile, but only a little bit.
Just before I turn away, promising myself that I’ll write to Lars as soon as I’m settled someplace, I see Hal.
The top hat suits him not at all, but the long coat swings around his ankles like a cape. All that black is muted and severe in the gray light, and his lips are pressed into a line. He sweeps through the crowd and inside, and I go after.
Everyone parts for him, and my prince’s path is unobstructed until he reaches the sitting room. It is draped in the darkest violet and black cloths, the windows shut and lit by candles. A portrait of me as a fifteen-year-old girl rests on an easel beside a spray of hothouse lilies.
It’s Lars who blocks his way.
“Devil take your soul,” my brother cries. My stolid brother—cheeks flushed and fists clenched. “You cannot be here, Halden King.”
“What is this?” Hal grasps Lars’s shoulder, to push him back.
“It’s for you that she’s here—or rather that she isn’t here, you animal.”
Mother calls from the back of the room, “Part them!”
My hands are on my face, and I hit the door frame for backing away so fast.
Hal releases Lars, palms up, “You can’t keep me from this.”
“You denied her in life, so how could you have her in death?”
Oh, my brother. Tears blur the scene and I am awhirl with sorrow. I should reveal myself here, now, and they will all be well.
But I would be trapped again, stripped and put back in my dress and feathers, caged and prettied up for the feast. I dig my fingers into my mouth to keep myself from speaking.
My whole family stands as a wall against Hal, and all the crowd of mourners pushes nearer to hear. Hal touches Lars’s face, and my brother flinches away. But Hal says, his voice raw and ugly, “I loved Ophelia.”
I don’t know if it’s because I’m weak or because I’m strong, but I push forward through the crowd. “Stop!” I say, throwing off my hat and stripping the heavy coat from my shoulders. Beneath it is my suit, my tight vest and pressed pants, my jacket and tie. I am a slim young gentleman with the face of a dead girl.
“O.” Hal rushes at me faster than Lars or Daddy or Mother, none of whom know me thus.
Whispers break out, and at least one feminine shriek, as Hal throws his arms around me and kisses me in front of them all.
We are the most incredible scandal to ever blaze through the city, they say.
I won’t marry him, though I love him. So Hal takes me away to Paris with his inheritance and we rent a flat, the two of us friends from school we say, in the City of Light to experience the best life has to offer.
My family never contacts me until Lars shows up in the summer, hat in hand on the steps of our building. When I greet him in my favorite new suit, which is pin-striped and the vest curves against me smoothly without my bindings, Lars squares his jaw and says, “What should I call you?”
“I’ll always be your sister,” I say, grasping his hand and dragging him inside to supper with us. He’s uncomfortable, but trying, hunting desperately for a way to understand this puzzle. That night, Hal goes out to the theater, where a friend of ours is singing, and Lars and I sit sipping brandy on the iron balcony. From there we can see the top lights of the Eiffel Tower, and all the hazy stars behind.
“This is dangerous, Phe,” he says, quite drunk so that his cheeks are blotchy.
I’ve loosened my tie and slouch with my head against the low back of the chair. “Lars, anything else would be wrong.”
“If you would marry him, you could come home.”
I purse my lips.
“Halden told me he asks you every day.”
“To be a wife would lock me into one thing, and I don’t know what I am, yet.”
Lars reaches across the little space between us and takes my hand. He flicks a finger over the topaz cuff link Hal gave me for my birthday last month. “You’re mad, is what you are,” he whispers.
I open my mouth and laugh at the sky.
About the Authors
Sarah Rees Brennan is the author of the Demon’s Lexicon trilogy, a series about demons, magicians, and two very troubled brothers. The first book was an ALA Top Ten Best Book and received three starred reviews. Most recently she is the author of Unspoken, the first in the Lynburn Legacy trilogy, a Gothic mystery with imaginary friends who turn out not to be so imaginary, and coauthor with Justine Larbalestier of Team Human, about a girl who isn’t very impressed by vampires. She lives in Dublin, Ireland, which she uses as a base for her adventures, and she blames Diana Wynne Jones for her incurable fantasy addiction. Visit her at www.sarahreesbrennan.com.