He stands.
There is no blanket shielding Harmon’s supposedly damaged lower body. He smiles, and an undercurrent of unfamiliarity taints his voice. My Autumn suite grows deathly cold, rose and jasmine draining from the air.
This man is not my Harmon. This man has his face, but nothing else of him is the same.
His hair is coiffed, his clothing finer and his mannerisms much more aggressive than those of the man I know.
“Arna Maria, my dearest love,” he says. “I ache for you. If only we could be together. I would take you to see the grand touring exhibition of Rudiliere’s sculptures on Ellah, and then to the library on Gizienne. Why must we live so far apart? When will this torment end?”
Arna Maria? Who is she? A friend from the university Linklounge, perhaps?
“I love you, Arna Maria, as I have loved no other,” says Harmon. “Will your father not agree to our marriage? Soon I will have gold. Plenty of it. We can go anywhere we want.”
My breath catches sharply in my throat. “I love you, Arna Maria, as I have loved no other.” I know this line by heart. The very same words he has used on me. The exact words, as if taken from a script. A script he no doubt reiterates as many times as amusement dictates.
I fall to the floor, clutching at my chest. He has sent the wrong message to the wrong woman—how many of us has he accumulated in his Link harem? Is his error accidental, or an intentional act of cruelty? Harmon, my lovely Harmon, is a fraud.
“Say it to my face,” I whisper, all my dreams in ruins. Say it to my true face, not this cold, projected likeness. I will steal a ship from the Vazquenadas. I will fly to Bellady’s moon and discover the truth for myself.
I feel my heart burn and shrivel. I am no longer in control. I find myself limping through my father’s mansion, eyes blurred with tears, my mind consumed with the hideous image of my darling Harmon smiling at another woman with love that was supposed to be all mine.
Daria. Where is Daria? She will know which of the pilots can be trusted. I will make her take me with her. We shall escape from my father as he drinks himself to senselessness downstairs.
My uneven footsteps echo loudly on the polished marble floors. Room after useless room, yet I feel invigorated through my tears. Driven forward by my pain and confusion. Surely my Harmon does not mean those words? I have misheard him. Misinterpreted what he said, that is all.
Above the sound of my own anguished cries I hear another little voice. Instinctively, I head towards it, pushing through double gilded doors. A sickly stench assails my nostrils. Something putrid. Horrible. The wailing is much louder now, and I recognise it suddenly; the crying of a baby.
I find the infant through another doorway in the spring suite nursery. Baby Ann Elisabeth lies screaming in her crib in a mess of her own excrement, a drip feeder taped crudely to her arm. She looks to have been in this condition for some time. Where is nanny Daria? And then it strikes me that this is Fourthday—three whole days away from my father’s scheduled visit. Daria could be anywhere on AmberJade. My father would never know. So long as the baby is healthy for daddy’s visit, no one cares what happens on the other days.
I lift the squalling bundle from the crib, detach her from the apparatus, wipe her as clean as I can manage with the corner of the sheet. I pull a fresh towel from the linen closet and wrap her tightly.
The stench is indescribable. Covering my nose, I run from that awful place. My father will have to be informed. Daria shall be found and banished in disgrace.
I must find my father and present him with the filthy, squalling stint. I will demand he pay proper attention to his house and change his self-indulgent ways. I shall demand a ship of my own, and a pilot to fly me far away from this horror and decadence.
Baby Ann Elizabeth continues to howl as I carry her through my father’s house, through room after empty, pointless room till we reach the grand dining chamber. I will display the dirty stint before his precious dinner guests. Let them all smell its neglect. Interrupt the recital or the pretty song, or whatever he has the six-year-old performing for that troop of drunken Vazquenadas baboons.
I push open the double lacquered doors with my shoulder. The dining room is empty, the table still laid but the dishes abandoned. A butler whose name I do not know steps up to greet me, a crisp white linen draped over one arm.
“Would Miss Luisa Alice care to partake of refreshment?” he asks.
I lift baby Ann Elisabeth from my shoulder and present her to the butler.
“Take this to my father,” I say as calmly as I can, but I know my voice is wavering. If the butler thinks my request bizarre, he makes no obvious show of it. He lifts the squalling stint-child from my arms.
I wipe my hand across my face and find it damp with tears. My clothing reeks, and I realise that I am so terribly tired. I sit in the nearest chair, pick a crumpled napkin from the table and use it to mop my brow. Beside the napkin, a full glass of red wine that I drain in one gulp. I do not normally care for wine but I must have fortification if I am to face my father and demand a ship.
The wine spreads warmth through my veins. My thoughts begin to focus. I must have a ship. I will fly to Harmon and demand an explanation of his actions. It is only when I reach for a second glass that I remember his other words. Soon I will have gold. Plenty of it. Surely he could not be referring to my gold; the gold I plan to steal from my father? Where is my father and his revolting guests? Where has everybody gone?
I stand and walk the length of the dining chamber, through the double lacquered doors and through a further identical set. Servants bustle around me cleaning up the detritus of the evening’s festivities. Nobody speaks a word.
I find one of the Vazquenadas on the balcony fucking an underbutler. I turn my face away—I have no quarrel with them. The rest of the family staggers about in the garden below. I only want to speak to my father—what those degenerate foreigners get up to is their own business.
I cannot locate him in any of his regular haunts. I find only the Summer and Winter stints huddled together, whimpering. They will not tell me what is wrong. Has news reached them already of baby Ann Elisabeth’s neglect?
I wander through my father’s house opening door after door until I come at last upon his bed chamber—a room I have been forbidden to enter, a room I have never given any thought to at all, until this moment.
The door is not locked. My father is accustomed to obedience. He never locks any of his rooms.
Through the door, I see my father in his four-poster bed. Alongside him, sprawled across red silk sheets, a fifth Ann Elisabeth—a child somewhere in age between the six-year-old and the Summer and Winter stints. Nine perhaps, maybe ten. She is naked. Her lips and cheeks are rouged, her eyes lined with jet-black kohl. She wears gold bands around her wrists and ankles. She smiles wickedly as I enter my father’s room. Our eyes lock and I see that her heart and mind are devoid of all emotion: no happiness, no light, no love.
There were five Ann Elisabeths in my father’s house but now there are none. There is only me, Luisa Alice, the child he never wanted by the wife who abandoned him and ran into the jungle rather than endure another moment in his presence.
I have cut the power to the palisade. Smashed the generators with an iron bar. The skies above the house, once filled with my precious swallowtails, will soon be humming with the dark wings of other flying creatures. Abominations with stingers, barbs and fangs. Jester beetles and other monsters with a taste for human flesh.