Glitter (Glitter Duology #1)(34)
Together we pass through the door beside my new bed, into the wardrobe, and I can’t decide which is more debasing: having my mother reduced to a dresser, or being so personally desperate as to allow it.
Even so, when she closes the door and instructs me to turn so she can unhook me, I sigh in relief that at least this undressing isn’t required to be carried out in the public arena.
“Where are the Society people?” my mother demands. “You’d think those lackwits would be more punctual, seeing as how they really only have to work one day a week as it is. It’s no wonder we’ve mostly replaced them with M.A.R.I.E.’s bots. I’ve half a mind to buy another block of Amalgamated.”
Amalgamated Robotics Inc. manufactures all the bots in Versailles Palace, as well as their central control system, M.A.R.I.E., who even on her ostensible day of rest tirelessly attends to the palace’s orderly, if marginally less roboticized, operation. Sonoma Inc. partnered with them sometime before I was born, and whenever someone fails to do my mother’s bidding, she blames human frailty and threatens to buy more shares of Amalgamated stock.
“You did make an appointment with the Society people, didn’t you?” she asks.
I wouldn’t even know how. What remains of the Haroldson Historical Society is a small cadre of experts in Baroque culture, art, and fashion. I had no idea they helped the Queen dress.
But then, I’ve never been Queen on a Wednesday.
My silence is all the answer Mother requires, and she sighs melodramatically. “I can’t believe you’re so unprepared, Danica.”
I doubt there’s anything in the world that could make me feel more a child than being berated by my mother as she’s dressing me. “Well, Mother, perhaps that’s because no one bothered to prepare me. I might have managed with a few days’ warning, which I happen to know you had.”
A blush blossoms on my mother’s cheeks. She says nothing, but the fingers pulling the dress from my shoulders aren’t gentle. “It wasn’t my decision.”
And she’s correct. Someone has dropped the proverbial ball today, and I continue to suspect that the King himself allowed some of these oversights merely to torment me.
Once I’m unclothed, my mother reaches for the pile of shimmering silk and gasps. “Solid red? You can’t wear this.”
“I can and I shall.”
“I’m not certain how, as I refuse to help you into it,” she says, dropping the gown into a heap on the floor.
My temper rises like magma into a volcano, but I refuse to erupt. “Well then. When the King—and the press—ask why I’m attending the ball in a shift and corset, I’ll be sure to tell them whose fault it is.” I stride smoothly to the wardrobe door, open it just wide enough that the crowd in my bedchamber can’t see me, and beckon with a flourish. “You’re dismissed, as I’m apparently finished dressing.”
My mother stomps over, wrenches the door from my grasp, and slams it shut. “You will obey me, Danica, and you will select more suitable clothing.”
“I won’t,” I say, my shoulders shaking in fury but my voice calm. “What are you going to do—evict me? I am the resident of Sonoman-Versailles’s Queen’s Rooms. I’ll wear what I please, and you’ll help me, or the tabloids are going to have an exceptionally happy day.”
She mutters something about my willfulness, accompanied by a vaguely unfavorable comparison to Lady Cynthea, but I close my ears to it and simply turn when she tosses the skirt of the satin dress over my head.
It’s a gown I had made two years ago; in many ways it’s rather sadly out of fashion, to the extent such a thing is possible in the retro-culture of Sonoman-Versailles. But it’s striking enough—and the only one I have that’s wholly red.
“You should be grateful,” my mother says as she fastens hooks and ties laces.
“Grateful for what? Being kicked out of my home?”
“For all of this,” she says with an encompassing flutter of her hand. “This engagement. You’re going to be Queen, Danica. How can that not please you?” She gives a sharp tug on the back of my dress, and it’s all I can do to stay on my feet.
“He’s a monster,” I hiss. “A sadistic bully who gets sexual pleasure from his lovers’ pain and fear. And you sold me to him. Forgive me for failing to feel any debt of gratitude for that.”
My mother isn’t provoked in the least. “It’s not as if we’re going to tuck you into your wedding bed and put your sheets on display in the morning, as they used to in these very chambers. You needn’t have anything to do with him outside of the public eye.”
“Thank you for permission to do exactly as I intended.” I turn back to the full-length mirror, shifting slightly so I can’t see her. “You still bound me to him. I’m as blackmailed in all of this as he is.”
“But your mother holds all the cards.”
“That might be a comfort if I had a mother who cared for me half as much as she cares for herself.”
She doesn’t reply, but when she reaches the line of hooks down my back, she pauses. “This bodice is too large. We ordered this dress at least a year ago. Longer. I remember I didn’t like it then, either. What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I snap, then curse myself for losing control, even for that tiny instant. She fumbles at the fastenings, and it takes me a few seconds to realize she’s undoing them. “Mother, stop,” I protest, but her fingers are nimble, and before I know it, the back of the dress is entirely unfastened. I feel her hands circle my tightly laced waist, measuring.