Courtney Summers - Defy the Dark

“‘Doubt thou the stars are fire; doubt that the sun doth move; doubt truth to be a liar; but never doubt I love,’” my brother reads. “It’s a love letter.”

“Oh, God!” I snatch for it, but Lars tucks it against his chest.

“Ophelia?” Daddy stands up to tower over me.

I bite my bottom lip. “It’s for me.”

Mother sips her tea, lifting the china slowly and setting it back with just as much care. We all wait for her, though I suspect I’m the only one whose heart is melting down into her stomach. She says, “Who is it from, Lars?”

“There are only initials. H and K.”

My hand trembles as I hold it out, palm up. I’ll not beg.

“Wait.” Daddy gently touches my hair. “Darling, we want your happiness. Tell us this boy is a suitor, tell us who and perhaps we’ll let you write back.”

The fire crackles behind me, the only sound but for my dying, rushing blood.

“H and K,” Mother says. Her gaze scours me, appraising me as she would the wardrobe of her best friend and rival, Mrs. Tealy.

Lars unfolds the letter again, reads silently over it. “If he wrote it himself, he’s educated. A poet, but no poor artist. ‘Thine evermore, whilst this machine is to him, H.K.’ That machine his body?” My brother pouts his mouth as he ponders the mystery of poetry, never his forte.

“Oh, please,” I say, flapping my hand. “It’s meant for me, not all my family!”

“Why would he send it to Lars?” Daddy asks.

My voice is too shrill. “Perhaps because he thought my brother could be trusted to secretly pass love notes between us.”

Hurt jerks Lars’s brow low, but I can’t stand it any longer. “Hal King. It’s from Hal King,” I say, balling my fists into my dress. I’m done for. Doomed. I shut my eyes and wish for the full moonlight to transform my face and body, for the sun to set forever.

But silence reigns in our cozy sitting room. I peel my eyes open and look at my family: Lars is surprised but still hurt, Daddy wears a slowly dawning expression of glee, and Mother is pensive, as if she’s never seen me before.

I use their distraction to take the letter from Lars’s limp fingers and flee to my bedroom.

There’s never any doubt I’ll be given permission to write back. He’s too rich to ignore. My only requirement to my parents is that the letters be private. Anything they might’ve felt about propriety was ditched in favor of dreaming that their daughter might marry into the powerful King family. It isn’t that we aren’t well-off enough, for Daddy’s father and grandfather both garnered huge wealth shipping along the first railroad out West, and our name has been a part of New York’s rosters for nearly two hundred years. But even at that, Poloniuses are always second-in-command. A mayor’s right hand or the clerk to the state’s governor. Kings don’t marry subordinates no matter how rich or well bred.

Until now, is the promise whispering in my parents’ dreams.

I write to Hal. Oh, do I write to him. I tell him everything there is to know about me, only edited to keep out details such as that the specific moment I realized I preferred Tennyson and the sharp wit of Mark Twain came when I happened to be embroidering. I write about my own dreams: traveling and studying, dancing in Paris and climbing the Pyramids in Egypt, that I’d even like to learn to read the ancient pictographs. Wouldn’t it be lovely, H, to write these letters in complicated hieroglyphics? Perhaps we will make our own language, my prince.

He writes back with poetry: long, complicated poems about the nature of life and what comes after death, on mankind and fear and what makes us into cowards or brave men. I repeat them to myself over and again, until I can recite them from memory. I write, What will we do, my prince? How will we live and love? And Hal King replies, We love beyond all things, beyond material considerations.

Beyond our bodies and our sex? I ask.

I love you for your poetry, and for your mouth and your eyes. All these human bodies come with mouths and eyes. But few men I have known, no, nor women, neither, have had in them such poetry as you.

For my mouth and eyes, for my poetry.

And as weeks pass, I slowly begin to share some lines of our poetry with Lars, for he delights in puzzles and rambling philosophy. He knows I forgive him, though I can’t quite say it in case he decides to pay too much attention to me when the sun sets.

For yes, I still go out. I put on my suit and shiny shoes, button up that tight vest, and knot the slim blue tie at my throat. I walk alone through the streets with a cigar, stopping sometimes at a club, but mostly roaming the darkness, my coat pulled to my chin, hat low. Ice and snow make barricades, but they are no more fierce than the barricades tightening around me as every night passes. As it grows nearer to Christmas, when I know Hal will come home, and what will happen when I see him again?

On December 13th, Daddy comes in to dinner with a letter in hand. The green wax seal is broken, and he waves it triumphantly. “I have heard from Charles King. He and his wife, Gertrude, will be joining us for the solstice night dinner to discuss the possible engagement between our daughter and their son.”

My skin bursts into a rage of tingling, and my hands are frozen in my lap. I blink quickly, as if to make up for being unable to move the rest of my body, as Mother exclaims, “Wondrous!” in a rare show of enthusiasm.

Lars leans over to me, touching my elbow. “Phe? Aren’t you happy?”

“Oh, yes,” I whisper. In my evening dress I am soft and drooping, unable to stop the inevitable.

The night of my downfall, I take care as I put on the gown Mother commissioned in a whirlwind of fittings. The low ribbon waist suits my hipless body, and the overdress is beaded in a white-on-white floral pattern. White makes my skin shine and my dark eyes bright. I mold every curl precisely and put dark pink paint on my lips. In my mirror, I am unusually beautiful, but sad. Through my eastern-facing window, I see the half-moon rise behind the city, though the sun hasn’t yet set.

Lars arrives to escort me into the formal dining room, tall and straight in a suit like I should be wearing. “Ophelia,” he says, pausing just before we enter. He smiles his vague but reassuring smile. “Halden is come with his parents.”

Horror makes my skin feel as though it’s peeling away. I try to put my hands on my face, as if I could hide the femininity with only my fingers. But Lars catches my wrists gently, folding them together. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not—not prepared to see him! Why didn’t I know?”

“Mother said he even surprised his parents by racing home early.”

“God help me.”

He frowns. “Don’t do anything you don’t wish to do. Only be true to yourself.”

“Oh, Lars,” I say, overwhelmed by the injustice in his words. There is no choice now.

Together we go in, and there he is. Hal King in a suit blacker than night, but a moon-silver tie hangs from his neck, tacked down with a pink-ruby pin. His mouth betrays his discomfort, and I can only imagine how strange it is for him—to have written to a son but be suddenly thrust upon a daughter. His chin lifts as we enter, as all the men stand from the table for me.

Mrs. King swirls around the table to catch my hands in hers, which are covered by long, silky white gloves up past her elbows. “My dear, we are so thrilled to have found such a beautiful cure to our son’s melancholy.”

I force a smile, but I see behind her that Hal glances back and forth between Lars and me, and his face falls by increments into a glower.

His uncle Charles is wide, with a sash of scarlet striping him from shoulder to hip. He says to Daddy, “Yes, yes, what an occasion!”