“Stop!” Marina protested, as her waist was squeezed into a circumference two sizes smaller than it had ever endured before. “I can’t breathe!”
“You’ve never been properly corseted, miss,” sniffed the maid, tugging harder. “Or you’d know that a lady doesn’t need to puff and wheeze like a farm wench in a field. Shallow breaths, miss. A lady looks as if she isn’t breathing at all.”
Giving a final tug, the maid allowed Marina to stand straight up again—indeed, the corset hardly allowed any other posture. The laces were tied; three stiff petticoats, the last one of rustling black silk, came next. Then a chemise. And finally, the shirtwaist and skirt.
Feeling faint from lack of air, Marina was steered to a chair beside a dressing table with a mirror above it, both painted in dark ocher and ornamented with those baroque gold curlicues. The maid deftly unbraided her hair, brushed it out just as ruthlessly as she had done everything else and with a fine disregard for any pain caused when she encountered tangles, and proceeded to put it up in one of the pompadour hair styles that Marina had seen only in newspaper sketches. She had always longed to see her own hair like this—the arrangements looked so soft, and so very smart.
She’d had no idea that getting her hair done up in the fashionable style would involve being stuck so full of sharp-pointed hairpins that she thought her scalp was bleeding from a dozen places before the maid was through.
The maid fastened a jet cameo at her throat, and a matching jet locket on a slender chain around her neck. “There,” she said at last, implying now you’re fit to be seen.
The person staring back at Marina from the mirror was no one she recognized. The face was drawn and very white, and huge violet eyes stared back at her, with faint blue rings beneath them. Her pallor was only accentuated by the black silk of her blouse. Her hair had been arranged in the upswept style most favored by the PBs, with their delicate heart-shaped faces. It didn’t suit Marina Roeswood.
“I’ll take you down to meet your aunt now, miss,” said the maid. “I am Mary Anne, and I will be your personal servant here from now on.”
Giving her no choice in the matter, apparently. Personal maid—or watchdog for her aunt?
My own personal maid. Why does it seem as if she’s higher in consequence than I am?
Perhaps, in this household, Mary Anne was.
“What happened to my things?” she asked, in a small voice, cowed by the icy correctness of the maid’s manner. “My clothing—my books, my instruments, and my music—”
Another of those superior sniffs, and the maid looked down her long nose at Marina. “Miss could not possibly expect to wear those—frocks—in public,” Mary Anne replied. “Madam said explicitly that they would not do, they would not do at all. Not the sort of thing miss would wish to encounter Madam’s friends while wearing. However, the rest of your things have been put away in your private parlor.” She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the door. “Now, if you will please follow me, Madam wishes to speak with you.”
As if she had a choice.
She followed the maid, who led her through that door and into a sitting room furnished in opulent reds, with a Turkey carpet on the floor, the whole done up in the style of the early part of Queen Victoria’s reign. Quite frankly, Marina couldn’t think of a pair of rooms less likely to make a Water Master comfortable. The bedroom produced a heavy feeling, the parlor made her feel horribly warm. Together they made her feel stifled, smothered. The ceilings in these rooms were high, they must have been twelve feet or more, and yet she still felt closed in and overheated. And there wasn’t a chance that she’d be allowed to redecorate, either. She longed for her wonderful little room in Blackbird Cottage with an aching heart.
They walked for a good five minutes, going down a floor and all the way across a series of ever-more-opulent rooms. At the other end of the enormous house waited Arachne Chamberten, her new guardian.
Mary Anne opened a final door and motioned to Marina to enter as she stood aside. Still breathless, still feeling that her high collar was much too tight, Marina went in, and the door closed behind her.
In the center of a (relatively) small red room, in the exact middle of a carpet figured in red and black that looked to Marina’s frightened eyes like a bed of hot coals, was a large, highly-polished wooden desk of ebony. Behind that desk sat a stunningly beautiful woman. Her hair was as black and as glossy as the heavy black silk-satin of her gown. Her skin was as white and translucent as porcelain. When she looked up, her black eyes stared right through Marina, her red lips smiled, but the smile didn’t seem to reach beyond those lips.
She stood, and held out both hands. “Ah, my niece Marina, at last!” she said, in a sultry voice, warm as velvet laid before a fire. “You cannot know how deeply I regret the rift your parents saw fit to make with me; I saw you only once, at your christening, and never again. You have certainly changed greatly since that time.”
Marina felt her lips move stiffly into a parody of a polite smile as she walked forward. She extended one hand, intending only to offer a mere handshake to her aunt, but Arachne drew her forward, captured the other hand before Marina could snatch it out of reach and guided her to a chair beside her own behind the desk. Having both her cold hands, with skin roughened by the work she did in the kitchen and around the house, imprisoned in Arachne’s warm milk-smooth ones, felt distinctly uncomfortable. She tried to stiffen her own spine, and confronted Arachne’s knowing eyes. “What do you mean when you say ‘the rift my parents saw fit to make with you?’ I never heard of any rift,” she protested.
“And you never heard a word of me, did you?” Arachne countered. “That is precisely what I meant. Your father, who was my brother, and your Roeswood grandparents who were our father and mother, chose to cut me off from the family because of my marriage to Allan Chamberten. Perhaps it would be more charitable to say that it was my—our—parents’ fault, and poor Hugh, child that he was at the time, simply followed their example. So I bear him no ill will; I only wish that I had managed a reconciliation before this. But who could have foreseen that he and Alanna would come to such a tragic end?”
For a moment, Marina thought that she would reach for the black silk handkerchief tucked into the waistband of her skirt in what could only be a feigned show of grief. For if she had been so totally estranged from Hugh and Alanna, how could any grief she felt be anything but feigned?
But she did nothing of the sort. She only, sighed, and smiled, and squeezed Marina’s hands. “Well, you and I shall be remedying that wrong, will we not? I take my responsibility as your guardian quite seriously, you may be sure of that.”
“But I had guardians!” Marina burst out, angrily. “I was very happy there! Why did you send those horrible men—and policemen!—to kidnap me away from them? They were the people my parents chose to take care of me, not you!” She tried to wrench her hands away, but Arachne’s grip was so strong it couldn’t be broken.
Arachne bestowed the kind of pitying look on Marina that might be given a naughty child who had no notion of what she was saying. “My dear child, please. You are—at last—old enough to understand just how foolish your parents were—and how selfish.” She shook her head. “Just listen to me for a moment, please, and don’t interrupt. Are you under the impression that I don’t know what they did with you? Do you think that I am not aware that they simply deposited you in that hive of artists and left you there? That they never, not once, attempted to see you? That they never troubled to see to it that you received the kind of upbringing someone of your wealth and social position should have had? And why do you think that happened?”