Page 118 of Prince of Masks
My mouth flattens.
My teeth bite down on the insides of my cheeks.
Grandmother dusts those comments over me from time to time. If she doesn’t voice them, she’ll show them. Gift me presents that centre around my looks, how poorly she perceives them. Cosmetics, spa vouchers, hair serums, the latest skincare.
On my sixteenth birthday, she touched my cheek and before I could think it might be some affection, some regret, she said she supposes I’mpretty for a village girl, at least.
For my eighteenth, she sent me a pre-paid consultation with a cosmetic surgeon.
It hurt.
But it’s a lie.
I have eyes, I have mirrors. I know what I look like. I’m not ugly. I’m just not brilliantly beautiful like the rest of my family.
Pretty for a village girl...
I always thought that it was something to do with being a deadblood. That maybe the magic that courses through their bodies is what makes them so lovely to look at.
And mine is dormant, as is my sparkle.
“There is no time to change out of this atrocity,” Grandmother says and steps back. Her cane hits the floorboards as she looks me over. “You missed lunch. You will join me in the parlour before dinner at seven.”
I nod, once.
My stomach twists—it dares to gear up for a hungry growl, but I tense in my core muscles to pause it.
I didn’t have more than two slices of toasted sourdough as I packed up this morning. Then the car took me away. Hours later, and I am on the brink of eating my way through the walls. Maybe that’s just the dramatic urge to escape.
Keeping my chin lifted, I follow Grandmother through the narrow foyer to the door on the left, the parlour.
Her hand flicks in the direction of the musty armchair.
I take the order and sit.
Ankles crossed, hands folded on my lap, my spine is already aching from the stiffness imposed upon me.
The crackle of the simmering fireplace is the background tune to Grandmother grating a book off the shelf.
I watch her move. Slow, but not poorly, not as a senior should move. Rather, it is self-patience, the attitude that the world must wait for her.
I wish she liked me more.
I wish I got an ounce of her strength.
Maybe then, no one would torture me.
Before I was born, her husband passed, and per law my father became the head of the estate. He inherited. Became the man of the manor.
Grandmother Ethel moved out the next day.
She didn’t move into Craven Cottage because it’s her favourite. Not because she loves it here, though she does. She chose to move out of Elcott Abbey because she would rather live on her own, out in the countryside, than be subjected to her son’s authority.
That is the sort of woman she is.
Proud. Fiercely independent. A curator of our ways, and yet a rebel against them.
I don’t mind that so much on paper. I would like a sprinkle of that in myself, to be honest.
