The roses bloom red and pretty, but even so there’s something very wrong about them. I pick up Sibilia’s dance card from the sofa pushed against the wall and squint at the flowers Elise had to paint during the night so that our sister wouldn’t learn about the surprise. Every petal is as it should be, every leaf, too. But…
“Table. On the table. Next to the pastels.” Merile raises her voice at Beard. She holds the silver mirror in one hand, a piece of paper in the other. Being five years older than me, my sister gets to oversee the preparations while Celestia and Elise ready Sibilia for her big night. Though I don’t think she’d know what to do if Irina and Olesia weren’t there to advise her.
“Are you certain you’ve ogled at yourself from all the possible angles yet?” Beard asks my sister as he lowers the tray of meringues on the oval table that has been moved before the windows. Irina nods both in approval and disapproval, two thin fingers lifted to her lips.
“No.” Merile sniffs, tilting the mirror so that she can better see the ghosts. Rafa and Mufu spin with her. I’ve brushed their coats to shine copper brown and silver gray. “Punch. What’s taking so long with the punch? They’ll be ready any moment now, and we’re not—there’s still so much to do!”
But I think the drawing room looks like a different place already, as it’s meant to look. We—or the guards actually—have already moved the furniture against the walls and looped the maple leaf chains to hang from the ceiling. There’s not much left to do for me, apart from the very important task, but the time for that comes only later. I dangle my feet over the sofa’s edge. I’m bored.
As if sensing this, like Nurse Nookes always did, Olesia turns around and drifts across the carpet that’s been set very straight. She sits down next to me and brushes the roses with the tips of her pale fingers. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Pretty…” I whisper back at her, though with Merile overseeing—that’s what she calls it—the guards entering and leaving the room, no one is paying any attention to me, not even Rafa and Mufu, because they’re too busy hoping that one of the guards would trip and scatter treats. I glance at the roses once more. Though Papa looks at them fondly from the sky, he’s not yet up in this world and won’t be for some time still, as it’s not yet even five here. The time for shadows…
I realize what’s wrong with the roses. “They have no shadows.”
Olesia leans closer to me, to flick the dance card open. Though of course it won’t open. She doesn’t have a shadow. Or she does, but not in the way living things have.
I turn the dance card open for her, careful not to wrinkle the paper. “Maybe they’re ghost flowers.”
“Perhaps you are right.” Olesia tousles my hair that Elise refused to braid this morning and repeatedly told me not to braid myself either. Everyone has been tousling my hair lately, since… I’m not going to think about the gagargi or what I saw in his shadow. I don’t need to think about that. Not for three weeks or so at least. Not until he sends for us.
“Do you think we’ll start soon?” I ask the ghost.
Olesia glances at the locked door of the room Celestia and Sibilia share. Well, it’s not really locked, but I like to think it’s that way, because we have the key and if we wanted to, we could lock and open it at will! But we don’t want to do that, and we don’t need to do that, because Elise arranged with Captain Janlav that she and Sibilia and Celestia can use the room to get ready for the Ball, that’s how she calls Sibilia’s surprise. And that’s not the only thing she arranged—the decorations and the treats and the dance cards are all of her doing. She talked and talked and smiled and smiled until Captain Janlav and the guards agreed that they’d never wanted to do anything as much as to celebrate my sister’s debut.
“No, not yet,” Olesia replies after thinking about my question for quite a while, though neither she nor her sister actually bothered to go and check up on my sisters. Lately, they haven’t been very good ghosts. They haven’t done much of the floating around or walking through the walls and they don’t appear that often anymore either and when they do, they don’t stay for long. It’s as if they’ve grown lazy.
Though I could have, I haven’t grown lazy, and Nurse Nookes would be proud of me. And Mama, too! I can read and count all by myself now. But there’s not too many people around to tell about it. Nor that many things to read. Not that many things to count either, apart from hours and days.
“One. Two. Five.” I poke each dance listed. There’s five of them and then five again, with blank spaces left for the names of the cavaliers. Waltz, polka, the one with the tricky name that I call goose song, mazurka, and then there’s the chicken dance. “Ten.”
“I am looking forward to dancing,” Olesia muses, gazing at the guards from under fluttering lashes. They look different today, too, with their clothes freshly laundered, with their hair braided with red ribbons and thick red belts tied around their waists. “We have never had a ball in this house.”
“Surely you had at least one!” I say, because lately the ghosts have also started to forget things. They’ve always been pale, but now they’re definitely beyond any color. I realized this upon coming back from visiting the shadows. I could have stayed with them in the dark. They were very friendly, and the ape and the swan were there, too. They promised to take good care of me. But I told them I couldn’t stay for long because my sisters would grow worried about me. And when I woke up, my sisters were so relieved that I knew I’d been right to return.
“Perhaps we had.” Olesia glances at Irina as if hoping her sister would agree with her. But Irina is too busy guiding Merile to notice either of us. As she drifts closer to the table, farther away from us, she dims so much that I can barely make out her shape. Maybe the ghosts are fading because they’ve let me and Merile and Sibilia see them too many times. “Yes, we definitely had.”
I’m happy to see her happier, though I think she believes now what she wants to believe. But I don’t mind. There’s no harm in that.
“Tonight, I shall dance every single song. I shall start with…” Olesia purses her lips as she studies the guards. Then a man enters the room, and Olesia smiles as a cat with a full plate of cream just placed before her might. “That one.”
The man with no beard or moustache, with his hair braided up and boots polished to shine, doesn’t look familiar at all. As he crosses the room to join the other guards, his heels clack an excited tune. Who can he be? He laughs at something Captain Janlav said and tugs his shirt’s edge down with both hands as if it were too short. It’s only then I recognize him. “That’s Tabard.”
“Tabard? Yes, he is a fine-looking fellow, though those ribbons and belts should be white.”
That’s what Elise said, too, but red was all that Captain Janlav could find, so red is what we have to make do with. But I don’t want to think of that now. I’ve sat nice and still long enough already.
“I want to dance the chicken dance,” I announce, and jump down from the sofa. It’s not fair that everyone else gets to have fun tonight but Merile and me! The guards pay no attention to me as I sneak toward the gramophone, past Merile’s turned back. Done with the preparations, they’re patting each other’s shoulders and chatting, pleased with themselves.
“Which one is that?” Olesia asks, trailing behind me.
“It’s the tricky one.” I like how the steps form knots and watching my sisters stumble around, though usually it’s only Sibilia who gets confused.
Olesia frowns at me when we reach the gramophone. “I am afraid I am not entirely sure which one you mean.”
“Cot-cot.” The discs are in a neat pile. I shift the sleeves to spell out the names. The one I want starts with the sounds chickens make. “Cot-cot-cot.”