Mistress of Night and Dawn (9 page)

Impaled, Oriole felt as if he had become a part of her and every muscle in her strained to embrace him. She was filled and it was unlike anything she had expected, both an invasion and a surrender. She closed her eyes, and abandoned herself to every sensation that passed through her body.

The attendants who had placed her into the initial pose of penetration let go of her and she felt the Master’s hands holding her, cupping her buttocks, and he began to move inside her, methodical, relentless. She welcomed every successive thrust.

The music rose from the sorrow of the cello to a crescendo of screeching violins and the ensemble took flight on wings of melody until every note paralleled one of the Master’s thrusts.

Oriole didn’t know how long it lasted but eventually, a sound rose inside her and rushed to the surface and, unable to control her drowned senses, she screamed.

It was a scream of pleasure.

She was attached to the Master, his hands no longer supporting her. She wanted to faint as her orgasm tore through her, but instead she looked up at him. His veil was no longer present and his face appeared to her for the first time. It was handsome, feral, and kind.

Later, he would pull her off him and say, ‘It is done, Oriole, you will be the new Mistress. But first, the Inking.’

The following year, revolution swept the land and the Ball would not return to French shores or war-torn Europe for several decades.

‘Is that a church?’ Aurelia asked Siv as they approached the heavy timber door and Ginger pulled on the cord of an archaic bell to announce their arrival. The sound of raucous laughter and loud music was audible from the street and formed a strange juxtaposition with the sonorous clang of the brass.

‘It’s a converted chapel,’ Ginger answered, as the door swung open. ‘Cool, huh?’

‘Welcome! And great costumes . . . Just what we needed,’ said the man who greeted them. He was shorter than Ginger, but the exuberance of his manner took up more space than his physical body and made him seem larger in stature than he actually was. The tips of his hair were dyed a brilliant purple colour, which was barely visible through the lace cap that covered his head. He was wearing a sundress and a frilled apron, and holding a wooden spoon aloft as if it were a wizard’s staff.

‘Come in, come in,’ he said to Aurelia with a broad smile. ‘I’m the grandmother, and this is the wolf.’ He gestured to a young man standing alongside him who was dressed in the least fearsome wolf costume that Aurelia could imagine; a brown felt onesie with a large oval white spot on his belly. A few tufts of dark-brown hair stuck out from the hood, which was decorated with a floppy pair of felt ears and fangs.

The wolf smiled at Aurelia, displaying a pair of incisors that were infinitesimally longer than his other teeth, a fact that was more noticeable as his hood obscured part of the rest of his face, giving him an air of danger despite the cartoon nature of his costume.

‘Wow,’ Siv said, ‘you really do have very big teeth!’

‘All the better to smile at you with,’ the wolf replied, widening his grin even more.

Aurelia suppressed a shiver. It was cold in the chapel, and she had dressed for effect and not for comfort, in a thin white lace blouse, with a matching skirt and a light cotton red cape that fastened with a brooch around her neck but left her arms bare unless she pulled the material tightly around her body. Even then it wasn’t thick enough to keep out the chill. She now regretted ignoring Siv’s suggestion of slipping tights on beneath her skirt. Once the party got into its swing no one would notice who was in full costume and who wasn’t, Siv had said. But Aurelia was always attentive to detail, and so she had worn bare legs with small white socks and her pale-pink ballet flats.

Siv was half naked in comparison, in her outfit of ripped brown leggings and a black bra worn beneath a denim vest that she had borrowed from Ginger and then artfully distressed despite his protestations. Her arms, calves and torso were totally exposed to the elements and yet she was not sporting so much as a single goose pimple and could easily have passed for a miniature Rambo rather than one of the Lost Boys as she intended.

‘What’s in your basket?’ asked the wolf.

‘Flowers,’ Aurelia replied, lifting the lid of her godmother’s wicker picnic hamper to display a mixture of roses and tulips that she had bought from the market that morning.

The wolf bent his head down and sniffed. ‘Lovely,’ he said.

The flowers had crushed a little on the journey, concentrating the heady scent that wafted out so Aurelia felt as though she were carrying her own private garden.

‘Do I spy another Lost Boy?’ a voice interrupted. The voice came from the stairwell behind them where a young man was hanging upside down with his knees over the balustrade. He was dressed entirely in different shades of green and wore a hat on his head with a bell on the end that tinkled as he swung around the stair rail and dropped onto the floor below with a soft thud. He was barefoot and his finger and toenails were painted in vivid lime, a colour that Siv often wore.

‘I’m PJ,’ he said, directing his attention entirely at Siv.

‘I’m Short,’ Siv replied, using the nickname that Ginger still endearingly used for her.

‘I’m getting a drink,’ Ginger interjected, pushing his way past Peter Pan and the wolf to find the kitchen. Siv and the crowd that had gathered in the hallway to greet them followed his lead and went in search of the rest of the party.

No longer the centre of attention, Aurelia was left to explore. She tucked her basket under her arm and pushed open the door to the living room, where various other characters from Aurelia’s childhood tales were reclining in all manner of poses.

The room was enormous, with a ceiling easily twice the height of any ordinary home. It was split into the area that would have once held the congregation who came to worship, and a raised smaller area at the back that was once a pulpit but had since been filled with colourful rugs, bookshelves and a piano.

A red-haired mermaid was perched on a blue stool in the corner of the pulpit, her legs stretched out in front of her and encased in a tight diamanté sheath that glittered when it caught the light. She was resting her head on a large golden harp. The costume suited her so well that it took Aurelia a moment to notice that from the waist up she was entirely naked. Her breasts were thick and large and decorated with a silvery powder that gave her skin a fish-like appearance to match the sheen of her tail.

First Aid Kit’s ‘King of the World’ boomed from a stereo system set into an alcove where the church organ would once have been played and added a jolly folk feel to the ambience. Three young men were dancing a jig in the room’s centre. They were light on their feet and so quick and lithe that it was the sound of tapping from their steps, rather than their movement that indicated all three of them were hooved. Each of them wore curled horns on their heads that were extraordinarily thick and large in comparison with the delicacy of their facial features. In the dim light they could have passed for satyrs rather than men in costume. Aurelia crept closer to take a better look.

Suddenly a candle stuttered and started again and Aurelia jumped as a dark shade flew up the wall alongside her, before she realised that it was her own shadow. She laughed and shook her head at the fancy that had come over her. Of course the dancers must be people in costume and nothing else. This was real life and not a fairy tale. Aurelia gasped when she realised that, besides their horns, hooves and tails, all three men were fully naked.

Siv and PJ reappeared next to her, each holding a large goblet filled with a deep crimson liquid. Siv passed a spare glass to Aurelia, who took the glass and sniffed its contents suspiciously. The drink smelled like the flowers in her basket, and not like anything that she might previously have considered drinkable.

‘It’s some kind of syrup,’ Siv said, ‘made from rose petals and star anise.’ She threw her head back theatrically and took a large gulp of her own glass, and then poked out her tongue as if to demonstrate that it was not poisoned. ‘Isn’t this amazing?’ she said, waving an arm at the naked dancing men. ‘It feels like the funfair, but better. We’re going to do some tricks later,’ she added, throwing her arm around PJ’s shoulders and giving him a squeeze.

‘Where’s Ginger?’ Aurelia asked.

‘Gone to check the rigging,’ she replied.

Aurelia looked up at the ceiling and whistled between her teeth. Thick ropes twisted over and under beams and rigging points, forming a complicated web.

‘It’s awfully high,’ Aurelia remarked, drawing her brows together in worry.

‘PJ will be with me, and he’s an expert at this stuff, don’t worry.’

‘It’s true,’ PJ said. ‘I feel safer in the air than I do on the ground.’

‘Does the P stand for Peter?’ Aurelia asked him.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Persephone. Persephone John. Percy sounds too much like a name for a pig, so everyone calls me PJ.’

‘PJ went to the circus school in San Francisco,’ Siv explained. ‘And he says he’ll help me plan my audition.’

Aurelia looked at Siv suspiciously. She had removed her arm from PJ’s shoulders, but showed all the other signs of an intense flirtation. The mohawk that she had spent hours gelling into pointy perfection had already been misplaced into a mess of tufts on her head, as she absent-mindedly ran her fingers through her hair, a habit that she developed whenever she had a crush on someone.

Siv and Aurelia had spent hours discussing the problem of what to do with Ginger since he would not be coming with them abroad. He had said that he was too afraid of flying, and Siv had taken his fear as a personal affront. If he had truly loved her, Siv said, he would have found a way to follow, even if it had involved swimming across the ocean. Perhaps now Siv was simply angry with him, or maybe the speed at which she had seemingly discarded her feelings for Ginger was just a sign of her eminent practicality. Siv was a straightforward sort of person who was unencumbered by notions of sentimentality. She simply got on with the way things were, without worrying about how they might have been.

‘We’re going to find somewhere to practise,’ Siv said, and she took PJ by the hand and together they skipped over the stone floor to the stairwell and then disappeared from Aurelia’s sight.

Aurelia took a small sip of her drink. It tasted sweet and woody. She took another mouthful. The longer she swirled each sip, the more the flavour developed on her tongue. Before she knew it her glass was empty and she suddenly felt an urgent craving for more.

She clutched her glass tightly and prepared to cross the room to the kitchen in search of a jug of the red liquid, but the music had gathered pace and the partygoers who had previously been lounging on cushions scattered across the room were now on their feet dancing alongside the three horned men to the rhythm of a heavy drum beat that grew faster and faster with each passing moment until Aurelia felt as though she were trapped in a whirlwind of bodies rather than a party.

Even the mermaid had lost her melancholy expression and had abandoned her harp for the dance floor but, incredibly rather than dancing on her feet, she was walking on her hands with her ankles in the air, still bound together beneath the tight sheath of her tail. Her bright-red hair trailed behind her as she moved like a tongue of fire snaking across the cool grey stone floor of the chapel.

From the corner of her eye, Aurelia noticed another shadow moving in the candlelight, the only individual present who hadn’t joined the dancing.

He stepped into the light.

‘The suit is a bit hot for dancing,’ the wolf explained. He was holding a jug of the red drink. Aurelia’s throat cracked as she spoke.

‘May I?’ she asked.

‘Of course, please.’

He filled her glass to the brim, and Aurelia dropped her head back and gulped it down. Again she was overcome by an overpowering thirst. Again he refilled her glass.

‘I made this,’ he said. ‘It’s my mother’s recipe. I’m pleased you like it.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s delicious.’

Aurelia licked her lips. The music had slowed again, and along with it, all the dancers had stopped their twirling and begun to sway in unison to the gentle but steady beat of a chant, ‘Hoof and Horn’, that pounded so heavily from the stereo system the beat seemed to be coming up through the floors and pouring from the ground up into her legs that were now beginning to twitch.

‘Take off your shoes, you’ll feel it more,’ cried a girl who wore a white blouse with a bluebell-coloured full skirt overtop and a curved staff in one hand. She grabbed Aurelia by the waist and spun her around so that her red cape flew out like a sheet in the wind. The girl laughed and twirled her staff.

She too, like everyone else at the party, was barefoot. Of course, it was simply polite and commonplace to remove one’s shoes before entering another’s house as a visitor, so perhaps this should not have been surprising. But at all the parties Aurelia had been to, most of the other girls, particularly the shorter and the plumper ones, wore high heels. Aurelia was self-conscious of her height and preferred not to stand out when she could avoid it, so she tended to wear ballet pumps. Such a large number of bare-footed people in a room, half of them at least partially unclothed, made Aurelia feel as though she wasn’t at a party at all but rather in the woods and surrounded by nymphs or other creatures who were only partially human.

‘Who are you?’ Aurelia asked breathlessly, as she tugged off her socks and slippers and tossed them into a corner.

‘Little Bo Peep, of course,’ replied the girl who continued to spin without showing any signs at all of dizziness. She was obviously naked beneath her blouse and as she moved her breasts swung like pendulums in time with the music. Her nipples were clearly visible through the sheer fabric and were a deep, rich brown, the same shade as her hair and her eyes.

Aurelia planted both feet onto the stone floor and spread her toes. As the music reverberated through her, she felt her body moving entirely of its own accord. She joined the other dancers, lifting her arms over her head and allowing whoever was nearest to take her by the waist and spin her so that her skirt flew out and her cape twisted and turned, even catching on one of the horned boys’ heads and tearing, but Aurelia didn’t care, so long as the music continued.