The Wildest of Them All, peaky blinders

VII. till death do us part

❂

Darcy's life changed decisively during the month of March. It wasn't easy, but it changed. The wedding was marked on the 13th, and ever since she put that ring on her finger, Darcy was unrecognizable. She was really engaged, officially engaged and to such a fiancé, a man of twenty-three, not a boy: kind, decisive, courageous. He was everything a girl would dream of as a child, except for Darcy; she'd never really fantasized over boys when she was little, or even in the past years and yet it was her who was getting married in two weeks of time.

She was stubborn, so utterly stubborn that she would never let anyone know how she felt in those weeks. She wanted to convince everyone that she chose him, that otherwise nothing would've happened, and no one could make her do anything, still. She changed, so she wouldn't have to admit that her classmates were on the right path, like Winnie, finishing school while she was getting married, at only seventeen.

Darcy melted in him, the same way as he did, they both gave and took from each other. It was fascinating; how she talked to Richard and how he seemed shaped by her voice. No one could adapt to the pact they were making, and they plotted for hours—the two of them—to act in a way that would quickly silence people, feelings, the arrangement of things.

The erasement of before.

Was it Darcy who had persuaded Richard to behave in a way that was making them the most admired and most talked about couple in the neighborhood? Was this her latest invention? Did she want to leave the neighborhood by staying in the neighborhood? Did she want to drag herself out of herself, tear off the old skin and put on a new one, suitable for what she was inventing?

It was strange for everyone in the neighborhood, for her family and friends, but especially for Winnie. She saw Darcy change in a few weeks, and although Winnie still didn't know anything about what she secretly called, in herself, after the bad experience of Arthur's meltdown at the boxing ring, dissolving margins. But she knew the story of the exploded brother, it was always lying in ambush in some corner of her mind; Winnie thought about it over and over again.

And she remembered, how seductive was her way of talking about herself and how distant it seemed now. The Shelby family, Winnie, her friends—they all had to acknowledge that the Darcy who once walked the neighborhood with a knife in hand, had disappeared. Sometimes, when her fiancé wasn't near, or when she was consumed by her family again—there was still the girl who had written a proper book at nine years old, who had learned to read and write a new language on her own, who had consumed half of Small Heath's library, even the girl who had shaped the idea of the betting shop and the business behind it. Moving the strings as if she weren't there at all.

But in the life of every day they no longer saw her, no longer heard her. The tense, aggressive Shelby was as if immolated. Although Winnie and Darcy continued to live in the same neighborhood, although they had had the same childhood, although they were both living their seventeenth year, they had suddenly ended up in two different worlds. Winnie was becoming, as the months ran by, a vibrant but disheveled, spectacled girl bent over tattered books that gave off a moldy odor, volumes bought at great sacrifice at the secondhand store or obtained from her teacher. Darcy went around on Richard's arm in the clothes of an actress or a princess, her hair styled like a diva's. Everyone looked at her from their windows, and felt that her earlier shape had broken.