Midnight in Everwood(45)
In a bid for distraction, Marietta retreated to the bathing pool. Though she didn’t bathe for fear of disturbing her bandages, it was cathartic to dip her fingers in the churning bubbles, the toffee-scented steam clouding around her. Pirlipata walked through the gauzy drapes and swam lengths in the pool. Afterward, she lay in the bubbles and spoke with ease to Marietta. On their families and friends and the passions that fuelled them. Marietta attempted to distil into words her love of ballet and the hold it had on her life, explaining, ‘Sometimes I feel as if the desire to dance might consume me. It nestles deep in my bones, a compelling force. I dance until the world falls away and nothing else exists save myself, in that moment, all-encompassing and all too precious. The truth of it is that it is a part of me and to take it from me would mean cleaving me apart, condemning me to live a half-life.’ She ought to have woven Aurora’s tale upon the stage, the culmination of years spent under Madame Belinskaya’s tutelage, instead of being lured into serving as entertainment for a cruel king. That loss cut deep.
Pirlipata had listened and understood before confiding in her that she missed climbing the rocks and mountains that ringed Crackatuck more than she missed her family. ‘Though they are not aware of my captivity, they have never once questioned my wedding King Gelum in some secret ceremony they were not privy to, nor have they seemed concerned with my lack of contact since our correspondence about their intended visit.’
‘One of the soldiers informed me that Crackatuck looks to the future,’ Marietta mused.
‘Yes. History is valued in Mistpoint, where they live their lives entwined with their islands of ancient weather-worn ruins, infused with their ancestors’ memories. In Crackatuck, we look forward. Our universities are greatly admired as we have always prized knowledge and culture above all. And that,’ Pirlipata added softly, ‘will be King Gelum’s eventual downfall.’
‘How so?’ Marietta listened closer.
Pirlipata spared a glance at the drapes, thin and bright as moonlight, susurrating in the steam. ‘He fears culture and art and what it may wreak upon his rule. Crackatuck have always held the majority of Celesta’s printing presses, yet the few that remained in Everwood were ordered to be destroyed. Books have been forbidden here since the king caught the first taste of rebellion stirring up his people.’ The drapes fluttered open for a moment, affording a glimpse of the suite and the door opening. Pirlipata fell silent at once. A single server was escorted in by faceless guards, deposited a silver tray heaped with dishes and departed. The guards remained. Pirlipata did not speak on the matter again but Marietta’s intrigue remained piqued.
Over the following days, Pirlipata and Dellara flitted in and out of the suite at the king’s command, dripping in glamour, clad in enchanted gowns that set the air around them a-glittering, while Marietta languished in a bitter concoction of defiance and regret. Her thoughts became sticky-slow as if her head had been filled with treacle and moving began to necessitate a great effort. She was consumed with imagining biting into moist chocolate cakes, polishing off entire vats of thick, comforting casseroles, tureens of soup, delicate pies submerged in heavy sauces, and heaps of bread, fluffy and crusty all at once. When she closed her eyes to rest a moment, she dreamt of garden picnics with Frederick and their nanny, of the honey sandwiches and lemon tarts they’d gorged themselves on, filling their mouths with sunshine. When they were older, they’d continued the tradition; though Nanny had since departed the earth and they were far too old for such trivialities, they’d picnicked in the name of nostalgia, the bottle of Frederick’s purloined vintage Taittinger their sole concession in adapting the menu.
Marietta opened her eyes one evening to Pirlipata peering at her with concern, gold threaded through her cloud of hair, golden butterflies dancing up the crescent moon-curve of her ears. ‘We cannot miss tonight’s frivolities but we shall find a way to bring you some sustenance,’ she said and Marietta spent the length of the ball dreaming in flavours and textures. She was greeted some time later with an anguished Pirlipata bearing a welted cheek and Dellara’s bloodied nose along with the news, ‘I am so sorry, Marietta; we were searched at the door.’
Curiously, her hunger abated. Some dim, near-forgotten part of her was aware that her faculties were impaired, yet the urge to care was fleeting and, in one misted moment, lost. Time blurred, her tenuous grasp on days trickling away into sleep. She dreamt of wraiths of mist feasting on a forest. Of ice-flecked seas, of winters that devoured all. Of eyes that froze her skin until she became a creature of frost, her hair a spill of snowflakes, her heart encased in sugar-spun glass. In the distance, a wolf howled. Drosselmeier materialised to gaze down at her, reaching out to twine his fingers through her hair. She fled through her fogged memories, hunted by tooth and claw, mice dancing along at her feet; her heart beat too fiercely in its glass case and she shattered from the inside out. Waking with a start, she searched the corners of the suite for Drosselmeier.
‘We must do something before we lose her, Dellara.’
‘We should be thankful that the palace has its own supply of fresh water imported from Mistpoint. If we were in the town she wouldn’t have lasted this long. I hear the courtiers’ whispers that the mineral sickness spreads further.’
‘A person cannot survive off water alone.’
‘Then we’ll redouble our efforts to sneak something in. I shan’t let another one die.’