Mistress of Night and Dawn (7 page)

And so began a long series of discussions between Siv’s parents and Aurelia’s godparents, and it was decided that if they did not encourage Siv to go, she was likely to take off anyway, and that if Siv was to go, Aurelia ought to go with her.

One month later, the girls’ tickets were bought and their cases were packed. They planned to take a gap year, after which it was expected that Aurelia would finally settle on a subject that she wished to study, and Siv would apply to audition at the School of Performing Arts. Her parents gave her one chance to make it, and agreed that if she were unsuccessful she would enroll in medical school, or another, ‘practical’ subject of her choice.

Board for both girls and extra tuition for Siv was arranged in the San Francisco suburbs with a retired dance teacher who Ginger knew of through his funfair connections, and who had once tutored at the prestigious School of Art and Dance in St Petersburg. Aurelia and Siv would contribute to their stay by assisting with providing lessons to the teacher’s few remaining pupils, and taking care of the old mansion that she lived in, on the Oakland outskirts.

Siv sniffed. They were in her parents’ garage, where Ginger was working on carving a series of tiny figurines from pieces of scrap wood, and Siv was hanging upside down from a thick rope like a bat. The air was fragrant with the scent of wood shavings.

‘Are you going to come with me to San Fran?’ she asked him. A tear was trying to run down her cheek, but gravity and her upside-down position sent the salt water flowing back into her eyes. She blinked.

Ginger paused and tightened his grip on the brass-handled pocket knife that he held in his left hand.

‘We talked about this,’ he said.

‘You could catch a boat,’ she replied.

‘We’ll see,’ he answered, and continued to chip delicately away on the face of his wooden model.

Ginger was utterly terrified of heights. He had never left England, and nor had he any desire to take the path that most of his friends in the funfair did and move from ticket collecting to either performing on stilts or working on the highly paid maintenance crews who looked after the Ferris wheels and other machinery whilst balancing on cherry pickers or dangling from harnesses in mid-air.

It was this fear that drove him to improve his skill working with rigging, but only from the safety of the ground. He was an expert with knots and with tossing coils of rope to his colleagues who worked above him.

‘Some friends of mine from the fair are having a party next weekend. In Bristol,’ Ginger continued, adeptly changing the subject. ‘A few performers who studied in America will be there. They’re doing a UK tour. Why don’t you both come? And you could make it a sort of farewell party, also?’

Siv began flipping her legs back and forward rhythmically so that the rope began to swing.

‘I’m not sure that being around funfair people would help Aurelia,’ Siv replied. ‘It will just make her think of Mr No Name.’

Without school to distract her, and with work only on Saturday mornings and one afternoon during the week, Aurelia had gradually sunk further and further into a sort of lethargic depression. She feared worrying her godparents by telling them about her mystery benefactor, so instead she had arranged for Gwillam Irving, the lawyer, to call Laura and John and convince them that they had inherited a sum of money from a much distant, now-deceased relative from a side of the family Aurelia knew they had both totally lost contact with. It was a white lie, possibly not even far from the truth. On learning the news, the elated pair had immediately set aside a substantial part of the money for Aurelia’s travel and university fees, and cancelled their plans to remortgage to cover the expense of sending her abroad.

The kindly old lawyer had been delighted to carry out the deception, and the trick had cemented Aurelia in his mind as his favourite client. Not only was she young and pretty and the whole situation intriguing, but the girl was a refreshing change from the usual egotistic, stuffy bores that he normally dealt with when tasked with the tedious problem of administrating wealth to heirs and other beneficiaries.

Aurelia, though, was uncomfortable about lying to her godparents, and she continued to flit indecisively between excitement at the upcoming trip abroad and an unsettling feeling that she should stay in England, as if the stranger’s kiss had somehow anchored her here.

‘Do you think the two are connected in some way?’ Siv asked Ginger when Aurelia was out of earshot. Besides Siv, Ginger was the only person who knew about both Aurelia’s mystery windfall and the kiss.

‘But surely the money must have been donated by a relative,’ he replied. ‘Her real parents, perhaps. And that would make the kissing guy her . . . well, that just wouldn’t be right. At any rate,’ he concluded, ‘it would do her good to take her mind off it all.’

Siv agreed, and Aurelia allowed herself to be talked into attending the party, although she was still feeling strangely out of sorts.

It was already dark when they left for Bristol. Both had spent considerable time packing their chosen outfits, as it was to be fancy dress.

‘Fairy tales? What kind of theme is that for a bunch of dudes?’ Siv had asked Ginger, when he had advised her of the dress code.

‘They’re not your typical dudes,’ Ginger replied.

Siv had gone as one of the Lost Boys from
Peter Pan
, in a pair of cut off-brown leggings and her short hair gelled up into a mohawk. Aurelia had opted for Little Red Riding Hood, although it had taken her most of the afternoon to curl her hair into ringlets.

‘Damn,’ she said, frowning at the mirror, ‘I look more like Goldilocks.’ The heat seemed to have brought the blond out of her normally auburn hair. Or perhaps it was a trick of the light that made her curls appear to be a paler shade.

‘I could have been one of the three bears,’ Siv replied, ‘but that wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.’ She pulled open the window and fired one of her fake arrows towards Ginger’s rickety old car as he pulled into the driveway to collect them. He had travelled down from London to pick them up and they had planned to take a scenic route, mostly by the south coast, to their destination, making the whole weekend something of a special event.

‘Hey, careful with that thing,’ he shouted. ‘I know how good your aim is.’

‘I missed you on purpose,’ she replied, as he bent down to pick up the shaft that had landed just short of his car.

Aurelia rarely travelled by car. Her godparents, both committed environmentalists, refused to own one, preferring to cycle or take the train everywhere. She quickly fell into a doze as the busy streets disappeared behind them and began to murmur and twitch as her mind filled with shadows, unnoticed by Siv and Ginger who were both lost in the heavy dubstep beat playing on the stereo.

She started with a cry when Siv shook her.

‘We’re here, honey. Are you okay?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Aurelia replied, forcing a smile. Her sense that she was being watched had grown stronger, and now she had the feeling that her dreams were also being invaded. Clearly the events of the past few months had begun to addle her brain.

Her lips were dry. She passed her tongue across them and tasted pomegranate.

And remembered the kiss.

Unrest was spreading fast across the country as the inequalities in French society had begun tearing at its social fabric.

The Ball Council had initially planned to set the celebrations in a small castle, just an hour’s ride from Paris, owned by a relative of one of the Council members, but influential advisers at the king’s Court had suggested a more distant location might prove more suitable so as not to draw too much attention. They had settled on a property in the south situated by the river downstream from Avignon’s ruined bridge. It was the summer residence of a distant cousin of the royal family and had been put at the full disposal of the Council, with all its attending servants given leave for several weeks and replaced by Ball functionaries so that a necessary veil of secrecy could be drawn on what would happen there.

It was both sufficiently isolated and opulent, its grounds bordered by high walls crawling with vines and other hot-weather vegetation, that the influx of visitors, performers, guests and set-up workers would not be unduly noticed in the nearby town during the course of the necessary preparations for the big night.

Some months ahead, Oriole had been brought to Avignon and installed in the house of Ball sympathisers, a stone’s throw from the imposing bulk of the Palais des Papes, and her training and grooming had intensified in preparation for the night of the autumn equinox when, as part of its annual ritual immemorially set on a day when day and night were the same length, the Ball would take place.

The legend persisted to this day that this tradition went all the way back to ancient Egypt and the times of Cleopatra, but no one now involved with it truly knew the origins of the Ball, whether it had begun as a religious ritual initiated by rogue priests in one of the many temples scattered across the deserts or as a heathen, pagan celebration of quite another nature.

Whenever Oriole was not being prepared for the Ball, she spent her free time embroidering or playing the harpsichord. In both of these enterprises, she had countless instructors, and like the shadowy, mostly silent, folk who supervised her around the house and the clock for the fateful day which was fast approaching, they were invariably masked. It was a matter of intense frustration to Oriole that none of these attendants ever allowed themselves to grow close to her in any way, beyond the essential communication of instruction, advice and education. She felt lonely, her childhood and the whole life she had enjoyed before she had been chosen fading into distant memories.

From the day of her arrival here she had been ordered always to dress in her best finery; heavy dresses with elaborate embroidery and gold stitching, tight corsets seizing her waist in a vice and forcing her to stand straight at all times, even at leisure. Her hair fell across her shoulders in a shower of gold ringlets which took the servants hours every morning to arrange after the hundred and more strokes of the brush she swept through her hair before she went to bed the previous evenings.

It was as if she was constantly on show, about to be presented at court. The tight leather ankle boots she also had to wear on a permanent basis were an inconvenience, elegant but uncomfortable. There were days when, if left to her own devices, she would have so much preferred to gambol around on bare feet, her tall, elongated frame liberated from all its restrictions, her slight breasts unconfined.

Why would they not answer all the insidious questions that were nagging at her mind? Why had her parents consented to the whole enterprise and delivered her into the hands of the Ball’s attendants?

Her nights were full of strange and disturbing dreams the shape of which she had never experienced before, as if something in the food or drink she was being given was manipulating her thoughts, directing them into new, previously unfathomable directions. Oriole would wake in the early hours of morning, sweat still wetting the collar of her nightshirt, images of ice, fire and raging suns still bright in her mind, her thoughts running frantically in circles, losing contact with the comfort of reality.

But there was seldom time enough to catch her breath or dwell on the images and swirls of terror of the night, before the morning attendants would invariably enter her chamber and wordlessly pull the covers away, undress her, bath her, feed her, dress her in her now customary uniforms of gold and silk, billowing folds and delicate white stockings that reached to halfway up her creamy thighs, and escort her to the rooms where the training took place. And she had to concentrate again on every element of the ritual.

And day followed day.

Until the equinox.

Oriole had lost all sense of time and when she woke up that morning, her initial surprise was that it had unexpectedly proven a night empty of dreams, a welcome oasis of peace. She opened her eyes, squinted at the sunlight rushing through the half-open windows, realising someone had already pulled the heavy curtains apart. A shadow briefly obscured the light and her vision sharpened. The Matron, head of all the other attendants. Dressed in all her finery.

‘The day has come,’ the Matron said. ‘You must do us proud.’

Oriole blinked.

‘We’ve been told that the Marquis himself has designed this year’s ceremonial ritual. It’s a great honour,’ she continued.

Oriole had vaguely heard rumours of the Marquis. Not all favourable. Many said he was twisted and perverse.

‘Rise.’

The bed covers were pulled away and Oriole’s skin felt the clean caress of the morning breeze as it wound its way through the windows and awakened her senses. The sky outside was unbroken blue. She shivered briefly.

Under the gaze of the Matron and the masked attendants, she inelegantly crawled out of the bed. The moment she was on her feet, the silent women surrounded her and tugged at her night gown as she raised her hands to the ceiling to facilitate its removal.

She was led, naked, out of the door into the adjoining chamber where the copper bathtub stood at the centre of the room, coils of steam rising upward from its hot, perfumed contents. She carefully dipped a toe and tested that the heat was just on the right edge of warm and invigorating and her two legs willingly followed. Oriole closed her eyes and, with a shudder and an intake of breath, waited for the maids to pour the cleansing water over her shoulders and let it flow across the hills and valleys of her body.

As the two expert sets of hands proceeded to soap and massage the flow of water into her bare flesh, Oriole opened her eyes and saw the Matron examining her, in judgement, appraising the firmness of her nudity and the pleasing harmony of her curves, lines and pallor.

There was a shuffle, a movement behind, her and she heard another set of steps entering the chamber. She instinctively wanted to look round to see who it might be, but the Matron’s stern gaze drilled into her eyes, forbidding any attempt at movement. The stranger entered and she felt a hand cup her buttocks and then draw a line from the tip of her shoulders all the way down to the thin alley that parted her cheeks. Like a merchant assessing his merchandise. It must be a man’s hand. He coughed approvingly and turned her to face him as the maids wiped the final layer of soap away. It was her uncle, the man who had been appointed her custodian after her selection.