Dark and Deepest Red(21)

Then, if she does not do exactly as she should, kindling.

So, on the night of the great dance, the one meant to cure the fever, Lala presents herself to Enneleyn, to Melisende and Agnesona. She offers herself, so they will make her into the sort of girl more likely to be tossed admiring glances than spoiled fruit.

The sisters fuss over her hair.

“Is Sewastian so handsome up close?” Melisende asks.

“Did he say anything about us?” Agnesona asks.

“I cannot believe you had him all to yourself,” Melisende says, as though Lala met the man in the loft of a barn instead of him escorting her to her own questioning. “I could die of jealousy. My father won’t let me alone with a man until I’m a wife.”

“Are his eyes so blue indoors?” Agnesona asks. “I bet they were deep as the sea.”

Before Lala can remind them that she has never beheld the sea, only the canals and the Rhein, Enneleyn sweeps between them.

Enneleyn throws dresses across the bed and onto chairs. She casts an herb-green gown onto her bed, its weight rippling the red and white roses embroidered into the brocade. She tosses aside one in the golden tones of dried wheat and mustard seed, stitched with leafed vines and red grapes.

Lala’s heart bends in sympathy to whichever of her family’s maids will have to put them all away, seeing to the wrinkles. But she offers these girls nothing but a grateful smile. If she does not keep herself in the good graces of Strasbourg’s favorite daughters, what little guard she and Tante have left will thin even further.

It is already threadbare enough.

Enneleyn holds a wine-colored kirtle between them and gives it a wistful look.

“It really is too bad,” she says. “I would lend you this one but”—she sighs—“some priest will declare it too red.”

She throws it atop the others.

Something in Lala turns, and for a moment she despises Enneleyn, in a way as small but heavy as how she hated Geruscha and Henne four years ago.

She turns the hate over in her hands. It is not about Enneleyn being spoiled, or pale, or adored.

Just as she hated Geruscha and Henne for seeing a part of herself she wanted to hide, she hates Enneleyn for not seeing it.

Melisende offers Lala a bit of her lip potion, each of them dipping their ring fingers in.

“And will you dance with your fairy prince tonight?” Melisende asks.

Lala smooths the lip potion over her mouth, pretending not to hear the question. She tenses her heart against the thought of Alifair, how she must ignore him tonight especially, when all will be watching.

Enneleyn tucks an amber-adorned hairpin just behind Lala’s ear. “When we are through with you, you will have your pick of a dozen young men.”

Lala’s guilt is heavy as damp wool. Her silence, her allowing these girls to think she is looking for a new love, feels soaked in disloyalty. But the closer she stays to Alifair, the worse peril he will face.

Agnesona tries her pale powders on Lala, even though they are far too light, and only make Lala appear sick.

Her skin and Dorenia’s is no browner than it has always been, and not much darker than that of the men who work in the fields. Beneath the July sun, Alifair’s back deepens even through his shirt and tunic. If it is something in her features—her dark eyes, the shape of her nose and lips—has she not looked this way all her life?

Something has made them all glance at her again. Something has made the word Zigeuner spread within the city walls. And deep within her stomach, Lala fears it resembles a growing crowd of women spinning over the cobblestones. It has the same shape as the word witchcraft, the hint of it dangerous as a coiled adder.

She lets Agnesona add blush to her cheeks, made from pigment and rosewater; Agnesona frowns when it takes layer upon layer to show on the brown of Lala’s skin.

That frown makes Lala’s neck tighten. Is Agnesona taking a more careful look at her? Is she reconsidering whether Lala’s particular shade of brown can truly be explained by Italian blood?

Is she thinking the word Zigeuner?

Lala’s heartbeat feels as though it will drum through her throat.

“God in heaven,” Melisende says, snatching the pigment. “Don’t make her look a whore.”

Lala tries to smile, but her face fights the effort.

The sisters each tie on new kerchiefs bought from a traveling merchant, the cloth embroidered with birds and flowers and trimmed in gold thread. Their particolored dresses make them seem lovely mirrors of each other, the left side of Melisende’s cotehardie the same green as Agnesona’s right, and the right half a dawn orange, matching Agnesona’s left.

Their world, and Enneleyn’s, is one of leaf-green pottery glaze, of drinking glasses blown in gray black. These girls’ fathers are the reason Strasbourg boasts its own gold coins. And those coins, minted next to the Pfalz, now travel the continent, their gleaming backs declaring the glory of the men who called them into being.

Wealth, to these girls, is a language as familiar as beauty.

If letting these girls dress her will make her seem soft and blameless, she will let them as willingly as though she is their doll. If their rosewater and tinctures will gild her enough to make her look like one of them, she will offer her cheeks and wrists, and accept all the paling powder in Strasbourg.

The brown of her skin has drawn the suspicion of a city. Maybe these girls, with their complexions that seem poured from spring cream, can veil her from it.