Rosamund Hodge: Gilded Ashes

She thrusts the letter at me: thick, creamy paper, folded and sealed with red wax. I take it and feel the hard ridges of the wax; the paper flexes between my fingers.

“Stepmother won’t approve,” I say.

“She’ll approve when I marry him.”

Koré would make her heart beat backward to get Stepmother’s approval. It’s what makes her a fool: Stepmother has never seen her as anything more than an asset to the honor of our house . Is this scandalous plan at last her rebellion? Or just a final, desperate attempt to win the love that Stepmother isn’t capable of giving?

It doesn’t matter. If Koré can convince Lord Anax to marry her, then she will leave this house. Probably she will take Thea with her. Maybe they’ll even convince Stepmother to live at the palace with them, and then I won’t have to protect anyone.

Nobody to protect. I can hardly imagine such freedom.

“I’ll do it,” I say, my heart beating a swift, dizzy song of maybe, maybe, maybe . “I’ll do it.”

L eaving the house is easy. Nobody raises an eyebrow; I already do the shopping, as I do everything else for the household. Stepmother hasn’t bothered even trying to hire servants for nearly a year. She complains about the fickleness of the common folk, but I think it’s a mark of good sense that none of them will stay more than a month. They may not know about my mother’s ghost—they certainly don’t know our house is haunted by demons, or a mob would have burned it down long ago—but they can tell something is wrong.

Stepmother and my sisters don’t even realize anything is wrong. They are very great fools, all three of them.

When I reach the front gate, I pause and whisper, “I’m just leaving for a little, Mother. Koré gave me a delightful errand,” because I know her spirit is bound to our house, but I don’t know if she can see into the city. And I don’t know what she would do if I left and she didn’t know why, but there are demons at her command. I can’t risk her doing anything. It’s why I have never even thought of running away.

Delivering the letter should be easy too. The minor gentry scheme and curry favor for months before they dare approach the doors to the palace of Diogenes Alector Laertius, Duke of Sardis and First Peer of the island of Arcadia. But a mere nobody like me can walk up to the servants’ gate, hand over a letter to a palace footman, and be done. That’s what I leave the house planning to do. It’s what I should do.

Except, as I trudge through the narrow, twisting streets—as I skirt the edge of the marketplace, where a hundred vendors scream their wares at once while children sing and old men beg for spare coins—as the white-and-gold filigree hulk of the duke’s palace looms larger and larger above me, I think of Koré. I think of the seams where you can see that her dress has been turned inside out and re-sewn because the fabric faded. I think of the single pearl that she wears around her neck because Stepmother sold the rest to pay for expanding the house, though that string of pearls was meant to be part of her dowry. I think of the rich ladies I’ve glimpsed walking down the street, silk and lacing rippling with every move, white kid gloves and white lace parasols gleaming in the sunshine, golden bells tinkling in their ears.

Lord Anax is heir to the greatest dukedom on the island of Arcadia. However little he cares for parties or flirtation, he must care for his station. He is selecting his future duchess, and an anonymous letter on the mail tray, no matter how erudite, hardly has a chance of influencing him. And that’s assuming the letter ever reaches him. No doubt someone sorts his mail and burns all such foolish missives (surely he receives a hundred daily) before he has to read them.

I should hand over the letter and be done with it. But the thought of getting Koré and Thea out of the house and out of danger has infected me. I try to imagine what it would be like to draw one breath without my family as hostages, and I want it more than I’ve wanted anything in years.

And this is how I’m a fool: I know what happens when I want things, but today I try anyway.

Stepmother once said that her daughters were born to be adored, and I was born to be invisible. I think she meant that I was ugly, but it’s true: my stepsisters could never pass unnoticed. Koré is too magnificent: roll her in ashes and dress her in rags, and she’d still turn heads as people wondered who was the impoverished princess. Thea is too lovable: she could pass as a servant, but let her wrinkle her forehead once, and five bystanders would demand to help.

I’m nothing but a wisp of a girl with a sharp little nose and a cloud of dull brown hair that never stays neat. Shopkeepers look past me even when I’m trying to get their attention. Now I smooth my face into my best expression of brainless docility, the one I wear when Stepmother is even angrier than usual, and I walk into the duke’s palace.

It is amazing what people will let you do when you are wearing a neat but shabby gray dress and you scuttle demurely down the hallway, body angled toward the wainscoting as if you’re about to slip into it. Everybody thinks I am someone else’s temporary help, and I even get a lean, harried man with gray hair to tell me the way to Lord Anax’s study.

But after three gaudy flights of stairs and two hallways (one covered in writhing gold bas-reliefs, one paneled in silver and mirrors), I’m getting scared. I have never been anyplace so magnificent in my life; I feel like a clump of soot smeared across the gleaming floor of the palace. There are fewer people bustling through the halls than down below, but they’re all upper servants, clad in neat black-and-white uniforms. There is no more humble wooden wainscoting for me to blend into. My back crawls with icy fear; it takes all my will not to duck behind statues and into doorways every time somebody passes me. The only thing that holds me to my steady, purposeful stride is the knowledge that if I run, I will look guilty, and if I look guilty, I will be caught, and if I am caught, I will be punished, and if I am punished, Mother will know and she can’t know, she can’t, she can’t.

My cheeks ache. I realize I’m smiling.

Finally I reach the little green-painted door that the old man described. I walk inside placidly, ease the door shut—and slump against it with a gasp of relief.

I’ve done it. I’ve successfully invited myself into Lord Anax’s personal chambers. All the smiling, silk-clad ladies in Sardis would die of envy if they knew.

No, they wouldn’t ever envy a drudge who scrubs pots every day. And I’m not successful yet: I still have to find a way to make this letter special to Lord Anax, and I have to get out of here again. Without being caught.

Then I will have to come back tomorrow, because I doubt Koré will waste an instant.

I look around the room. After the terrifying glory of the hallways, it’s surprisingly comfortable. The clock hanging by the door is gilt, the bookshelves lining the walls hold a fortune in leather-bound volumes, and the huge, lion-footed desk at the center of the room is carved of cedar that’s been polished and varnished until it gleams dark red. But books slump out of their places or teeter in piles at the edges of shelves, as if they’re often rummaged through in a hurry. The desk is awash in papers; there are stacks of books, a brass slide rule, and a skull carved out of white marble.

Every room in our house, though shabby, is kept dusted and in perfect order, not even a porcelain shepherdess or a mildewed lace doily out of place. The honor of our house will accept nothing less. This room clearly belongs to someone who doesn’t need to please anyone. I imagine Lord Anax reading in his chair, his feet resting on the desk, and I feel a sudden stab of envy that he can live so carelessly.