Midnight's Song (12 page)

“Before I begin, I want to start by
explaining the nature of our true circumstances. As you know...you
are the living heir to this estate…should you choose to become one
of us.” Wren continued slowly. “Whether you chose to assume the
title or not, the person that inherits this estate will most likely
be a woman. There are no living male heirs, making it exceptionally
hard for us to maintain our property with the Magistrate’s
approval.”

“Wren – I think that the girl is well
aware of the fact that the Magistrate is against us for one reason
or another. Just get on with it and tell her!” Grandmamma spoke up
loudly from the opposite end of the room.

“Yes Mother, I’m getting there,” Wren
continued, her voice shaking. “We always thought that perhaps if we
were to refine you and present you to the public it would help us
to gain some sort of approval for our predicament. It has always
been our intention to present you to our circle, but now it has
already come to the attention of people in high places.”

“Who?” I asked through my dumbfounded
stare.

The room fell into a
momentary silence during which I would realize that this wasn’t any
ounce of good news or a choice which I would be able to decipher on
my own. The next few words from her mouth would make my heart drop,
as I would come to the cold realization that this choice was no
longer theirs
or
mine. It would turn me into nothing more than a puzzle piece,
a cleverly masked slave to their national struggle to keep their
freedom. As if I hadn’t already lost it all, if I didn’t comply I
would lose more than just
my
freedom. I would have to carry the burden of
knowing that I caused them to lose everything as
well.

“Elissa…in order for our family to
maintain our well-being in this world, we will have to begin
preparing you for a royal presentation. This is not in our hands,
and it’s not a request. At the beginning of the winter, you will
have to be the one to carry all of the family’s future in your
hands. You’ve been summoned by the Magistrate.”

“Pull your hair back like this,” Wren
told me, yanking my loose curls behind my neck before I even had a
chance to speak.

Tonight was a huge
night for the family. It wasn’t
the
night – but it was a momentous occasion
nonetheless. After three months of training, I had been deemed
ready to attend my first social function. This wasn’t by any means
my time to meet the Magistrate. There were still things that the
Devereaux family was unsure of, and it was fairly so. If I was
going to save this family by maintaining a proper, dignified and
even saintly façade; there couldn’t be one single glitch in my
behavior. That’s why tonight was only really just a
trial-run.

Whether it had been originally
organized as an occasion for a gala by itself or a celebration of
my “triumph” I still don’t know. I think that they might have been
celebrating my obligation – I mean, invitation – to see the
Magistrate. Though, I didn’t quite feel like it was something worth
throwing a party over. Whatever kind of celebration it was, it
wasn’t for me. I didn’t even really feel like myself anymore. I was
a bird trapped in a golden cage, with no choice but to go and do as
I was instructed until I satisfied my jailers.

My fingernails had
been trimmed and painted, and my face quite unenthusiastically
powdered. Wren stood beside me holding a myriad of hair ornaments
in her hands, clearly torn over which to use. Emily stood directly
behind me, holding the laces of my corset like the reins of a horse
and struggling to pull them back as if she were wrangling cattle.
It was unclear if she was struggling to pull on the strings to
girdle me in or laboring to cinch them tightly enough because there
was nothing there
to
girdle.

“Emily, pull it back as tightly as you
can!” Wren ordered.

The tighter the better, I suppose she
must have thought. As puny of a waist and frame as I had, my ribs
couldn’t help but disagree with this sentiment. Emily suddenly
jumped back and laced my corset as tightly as she could. I gasped.
Goodness, did I hate this feeling! Before I could say anything in
protest; Wren ordered me to raise my hands above my head and Emily
draped a blue dress over my shoulders.

It was shimmering but simply put
together. There was no long train or balloon-esque bustle. The
skirt wasn’t even puffy enough to need or even have the ability to
contain a petticoat. The only intricate part of the entire outfit
was the sleeves, which were detailed with a cascading, delicate
lace that crawled up and down my arms. There was nothing utterly
stand-out about this outfit. It was low-key, and that was precisely
what they wanted for tonight.

When it was all over, they both rushed
me in front of a mirror to proudly view the results of my
transformation. Emily quickly tied a ribbon around my now-cinched
waist and settled a golden shawl on my shoulders as a finishing
touch.

It seemed I was
ready for this, but I still had a sour feeling about this whole
thing. I had finally gotten at least a little bit used to living
with the Devereaux clan – avoiding Beeti’s ill temper and Stella’s
jealous insulting – and now I had to go back to square one and
start with a
new
group of gawking socialites all over again! I was being
subjected to the status of a circus monkey. If that status wasn’t
going to improve soon, I feared it would become permanent. And the
chances were that it would be. I knew that any time someone of this
caste was to look at me; they would only see the permanent tarnish
of the number
10.

“Just smile and remember your
manners,” Wren prompted upon seeing my troubled
expression.

It seemed to them
that I was ready. After all of the many lessons I had been taught,
it must have appeared that they had molded and refined me into a
polite, dignified young woman. Everyone believed that I had been
changed. On the inside, I was still the same person I had always
been. Their confidence had been put in the wrong place, it seemed,
because I still didn’t feel quite cut out for this.
The notion gave me mixed feelings. But,
underneath it all everyone knew that this wasn’t a choice. They may
as well have hoped that things were only going well, because if
they weren’t the future would surely be bleak. Wren soon grabbed me
by the arm.

“Grandmamma wanted a word with you
before you go,” she informed.

Emily and Wren exchanged nods, and she
left the room. Wren took me out of the room and down the hall to
see Grandmamma. After a quick nock, her distinct, grumbling voice
called out from the other end of the door and instructed us to come
in. When we entered she weakly motioned for me to come kneel at her
side.

Tonight Grandmamma wasn’t going to be
attending the gala downstairs. These days, she rarely came out of
her room to do much except to eat with us. Tonight, she was
bedridden. Gently, I knelt on the floor at her side. She took her
frail, shaking hands and tenderly brushed a curl from my
face.

“Your birth is of no
matter to me, and it shouldn’t be to anyone else! Elissa, you are
like a fresh red rose, ready to
bloom
! I know that you will do well
tonight.”

She patted my cheek lovingly and then
hurried to dismiss me. Grandmamma truly did have her own way. It
was one I would never be able to understand in all its capacity or
even in part until much later on. The things that she said were
seldom understood, but always with good reason. When I stood back
up, Wren rushed over to brush the crinkles out of my dress. I could
immediately hear the string quartet begin its symphony
downstairs.

“They’re starting. It’s time to go,”
Wren urged. She took me by the arm and led me down the stairs. The
entire way, she constantly reminded me to stand up straight, hold
my head high, walk in graceful motions…ect. After a while it was
slightly irritating, but before I could breathe a single word of
irritation we were at the towering double-doors that led into the
grand ball room. A burly doorman stood there stoically guarding the
way. When he saw us, he quickly rushed to open the door and
announce our arrival.

So much for being low key.

“Announcing the
arrival of Lady Wren Devereaux; the
third
keeper and heiress to
Devereaux Estate!” The man loudly barked to the crowd of attendees
standing at the bottom of the stairs. I flinched. Now it was my
turn. “And accompanying her is Miss
Celeste Devereaux;
ward of the
Devereaux family.”

Celeste?
Really? I honestly thought that this issue had
been resolved. That was not my name! They knew it was not my name!
And…
ward?
I was
not their ward! The word sounded more fitting for a prisoner. Yet
again, I technically was a prisoner in at least some sense of the
word. Sensing the objection brewing inside, Wren discreetly clasped
my hand and brought it forward, speaking to me through the corner
of her mouth from behind a plastered smile.

“Just remain
composed, and we will get through this
,
” she whispered.

I sucked it in, cupping my
hand on top of Wren’s and gracefully bobbing down the stairs. For a
few moments, the entire room stared at us. There seemed to be at
least a hundred of them, at various ages and all with their noses
in the air. After a few moments of peculiar stares, the crowd
turned their attention away from us and back toward the socialites
that they had each been casually conversing with before. Though,
now the subject matter of their exchanges had changed. No one could
be without opinion about the human spectacle which had been
presented to them. There was proof of it in every small fragment of
their conversations.

“Look at her size!” I faintly heard
someone mutter from behind.

“She seems decent,” another person’s
voice piped up to the side.

“Her lineage is unclear…” someone
else’s gruff voice called from a few feet away.

And those were only a few of the
things that I heard on that night. The only way to keep myself from
becoming discouraged by their reckless gossip was to pretend that I
didn’t hear the most stabbing words of it. Considering that mostly
all of their words were stabbing ones, I would have to pretend that
I was deaf.

“They are fascinated with you,” Wren
whispered, attempting to reassure me.

“I can see that,” I plainly told her
in return.

She and I continued to walk through
the crowd until we reached a corridor on the side of the dance hall
that seemed to be free of most people. Once I had been delivered to
a safe place, Wren gave me a small nudge and suddenly left me. For
a few seconds, I felt sheer panic. Then I saw a group of women on
the other side of the room that were motioning for her to join
them. Before she moved too far from me, my aunt turned to me to
inform me of exactly where she was going to be while I was left to
my own devices.

“I must go now,” she told me. “But you
will be alright! Stella and her friends are close by. Remain with
them for tonight and don’t cause trouble. I will see you in a few
hours.”

And just like that,
she left me.
I’ll see you in a few
hours;
the words echoed through my mind in
a way that made me feel near resentment. What did she expect me to
do all this time? Stand here quietly and wait for my turn to leave?
For once, I didn’t quite hunger for as much independence as I
normally did.

“Can you believe the
complete
insolence
of this all?” Stella’s shrill voice suddenly piped up,
shattering my train of thought.

A few feet from me, I noticed Stella.
In comparison to everyone else, she was dressed quite lavishly
tonight. Her pink gown was long and flowing with a train that
trailed the floor to a completely exaggerated degree. Also, her
hair was quite an odd sight. It had been harshly twisted into a sea
of tight, artificial looking curls. She looked over and saw me, but
quickly grimaced before she turned away and faced her group of
“friends.”

They were an
odd-looking bunch, really. Six of them in all, each one wore
something expensively lavish and stood with an expression that
seemed just as arrogantly dissatisfied as Stella’s herself. There
wasn’t anything all too distinct about them; except for one
2
^nd
caste boy whose features appeared to almost unerringly belong
to an actual horse.

“My Papa fought and
died a commander in the Magistrate’s army; and this is what I’m
being given?” Stella continued, directing her words mostly to a
fiery redhead standing next to her. “No more parties! No more
socials! All because of this…this…absolute
nothingness!
First they bring
her
into the picture,
and now this? It’s reprehensible!”