Every word was a slap.
She felt the blood mounting higher and higher in her cheeks.
“But none of this is true!” she cried at last, hardly knowing what she was doing as she took a step, leaned on his desk, thrust her flaming face forward. “I wasn’t like that at all! I was young, and I was in love, and I tried to make you happy, I tried so hard, I did my best, I wanted to be a good wife to you, it was you—you—you who…”
“Who what?”
“Who fucked anything that moved, that’s what, from the day we got married!”
He appeared momentarily stunned, his mouth flapping loose. Then he was shouting again, their faces so close now she could feel his spittle on her skin.
“Oh yeah? And what would you have me do? And why would you even care? From the day we got married, you made it painfully clear that you wanted nothing to do with me, that I repulsed you! You felt no passion for me, it was like I married a paper doll. Have you ever, ever in your life, enjoyed a single kiss? I was twenty-four—and my beautiful young wife was so frigid she couldn’t even be bothered to part her lips for me, much less her thighs!”
She recoiled, pressed her hand to her mouth, her lips suddenly, treacherously, burning with an unbidden memory of another man’s fiery kiss. A shocked silence rolled over the room, tolling with vast, terrible things that could not be unsaid. Across the ringing stillness, they measured each other, two people wearing the black of mourning, two people who had just lost someone they loved. She knew that, in that moment, he hated her every bit as much as she hated him.
He pushed his chair back, away from her, spoke through his teeth, in control once again. “But here we are, and this is how it is, how it will be, from now till the end, and I will have my little diversions to which you will kindly close your eyes, and you will have your porcelain knickknacks, or whatever else catches your feebleminded fancy, and I will pay for it. I will tolerate this intolerable situation because I need to protect the public face of my company and because you happen to be the mother of my children. I just hope to God they will grow up to be like me, not like you. Now get out. I am mourning my father.”
The last thing she saw, before turning and leaving the study, was the brilliantly painted man smiling his beautiful, loving, mocking smile into her eyes.
That night, she did not sleep. Transparent Brie and Nibbles hovered above the mantelpiece, trading anxious whispers, but she ignored them. After torching the nettle shirt in the fireplace and stomping the two pearl buttons into dust with her heel, she lay in her starched white bed, staring at the cupid-infested ceiling, her thoughts a feverish jumble of disjointed, whirling images, fears, losses all running together—her children growing up with that man for a father, the beekeeper’s kiss, the kind old king’s death, the deceitful portrait, the magic mirror, the green-eyed duchess, the duchess’s hapless cuckold of a husband and his sorry end… It would have been better had you, too, fallen off your horse long ago, it flashed into her mind out of nowhere—but immediately, horrified by her own savagery, she disowned the unworthy thought. Yet once unleashed, it would creep back again and again, as she lay tormented, night after night after night, for weeks on end. For time passed, of course, as was its wont. Her husband was crowned king, and she became queen; they saw each other at official functions, but avoided each other’s eyes and exchanged not a word. Her heart broke every time she looked at her son, at her daughter. At night, she would go back to her room, to her bed, and lie there, not heeding the timid consolations of the mice, glaring at the cupids on the ceiling, the same thoughts churning round and round in her head: Oh, if only he had fallen off his horse early on in their marriage—after she’d become heavy with Ro, but before she had time to look into that poisonous mirror and learn the truth about the conception. She was still blind to the man’s true nature then, small lapses in their life had not yet joined together into one impassable gulf, and she would have been able to smooth over the more inconvenient incidents in her mind, would have been able to cherish the memory of their love for each other. And instead of wanting to scream “Your father is a monster, a monster!” into her children’s sweet, innocent faces, she would be telling her daughter how proud he’d been of her and asking her son to find the bright star that his father had become in the skies, then crying herself to sleep every night with soft, affectionate tears. Her life would be sad yet full of warmth, solid at its heart, good. Now it felt hot, not warm, but the heat was hollow, hollow and angry, and she was forever seized with fear for Angie and Ro.
For how, how would they grow up, with that man in their lives?
Spring turned into summer. One especially stifling morning, worn-out by the constant weight of her unhappiness, she gathered her courage and sent a servant over to the beekeeper’s cottage with a carefully worded note requesting a jar of honey for her breakfast table (to be delivered by the beekeeper in person). The servant returned alone, to inform her that the beekeeper’s place had been abandoned for weeks, his bees dispersed, and he himself gone, no one knew when or where. She tried to hide her disappointment, her apprehension, from herself, tried to forget the taste of cider on the man’s warm lips, tried not to worry about her husband’s ubiquitous spies, or think about exiles and executions that he meted out with such ready ruthlessness—but all through that day, she felt increasingly aggrieved by what she had come to regard as her one chance at her own small, private joy being wrenched away from her, so unjustly, so cruelly; and that night, all her suppressed emotions bubbled over in one great explosion of scalding fury, and she screamed a silent scream.
I wish he would fall off his horse!
Or get eaten by a dragon. An occupational hazard of being a ruler; though not his kind of ruler—not the kind who wields a quill instead of a sword—and there are no dragons left in our land, in any case. So instead he might choke on a fish bone during one of his fancy state dinners with the servant wenches pouring wine into his glass while he pinches them under the table. He would bite into his fish, and cough, and it would be a small, delicate cough at first, but then his perfect, gorgeous face would turn red, first red and then purple, and suddenly there he would be, those cornflower-blue eyes bugging out, not so pretty now, is he, mouth gaping, gasping for air, and before anyone even knows what is happening—dead, dead, dead!
Or maybe a heart attack. Of course, he is but thirty-eight, but they happen at any age, do they not, and more so if one’s lifestyle is so vice-ridden. Or a freak accident, there are always those—a lightning strike, a flash flood, a chance tile falling off a roof just when my husband is passing below, his expensive suede shoes stepping ever so confidently along the sidewalk… But no, I do not wish him ill, I’m not a vindictive person, I’m kind and good, all I want is justice, only justice, I want him to pay for depriving me of any chance at my own happiness, for marrying me when he knew he didn’t love me, for cheating on me with impunity from the very beginning, as if there were nothing at all wrong with it, as if I—I!—forced him into it myself, but of course I did not, I was so very young and I loved him, I loved that man, once upon a time I loved him, I did my best to love him—but not dead, of course I do not wish him dead.