Wrong Side of the Coffin: A WIPpersnappers Anthology

In the Eye of the Beholder (Part 1/2)

In the Eye of the Beholder

by Ibrahim S. Amin

Baroness Kyrvalla sat at her dressing table. Behind her, Marcilla the housekeeper stationed herself by the door, crossed her arms, and oversaw maids who bustled around the room, but they all faded into phantoms at the edges of the mirror. Faded, whilst the Baroness shone at its centre.

She turned her head. Bathed in the dark gleam of her eyes from each angle, lingered on the one that would matter most this morning, then reached for her hairbrush.

"I can do that, Baroness!"

Baroness Kyrvalla stared at the maid's reflection. The others froze mid-labour, gawped, but that wretched girl just beamed. Beamed!

"I used to do Lady Graun—"

"I'm sorry, Baroness." Marcilla strode over. "Caelia's new. It's her first day."

Kyrvalla glared at the girl in the mirror, at the soft round face, typical of the stock the housekeeper recruited from the local villages.

"Caelia?"

"Yes, Baroness?" Her smile faltered.

"Your peasant hands may touch my furnishings in the course of your duties. They may handle my gowns and my jewellery if Marcilla so instructs. But if you ever again presume they're fit to touch my hair or my face, I shall have you flogged and then dismissed. Am I understood?"

The girl dropped her gaze, nodded, and moved her mouth as though she'd forgotten how to use it.

"Get back to work," the housekeeper said. "All of you!"

They scampered, returned to their tasks, faded once more at the mirror's edges, and Baroness Kyrvalla inhaled, exhaled, met her own eyes. The anger seeped away. Her eyes glittered again and her hair shone too, ebon tresses that captured the light and worked it into an almost sapphire sheen. Not even the girl's stupidity could ruin today.

The maids completed their work. Marcilla banished them, bowed, then followed in their wake. Footfalls disappeared into distant parts of the castle. Her new maid's blunder aside, the housekeeper marshalled the servants with a master strategist's precision, manoeuvred them like pieces on a board. Thus, when the Baroness left her dressing chamber and walked her gallery, she did so alone. As always. No porcine faces appeared to sully it, no footsteps clunked or brushes scritched. She glided onward through its tranquillity. Glided past each portrait that adorned its walls.

A child posed in the first painting, a girl not yet grown into her looks. But the seeds were there, and in each painting that followed she bloomed by degrees, until the Baroness walked past the face which had met her in the mirror, rendered by the brushes of artist after artist. All blazed her beauty to the world. Two sculptures stood between some of the furthest pictures, one marble and another bronze, and these too returned her gaze and her smile. Her smile broadened when she passed beyond them. An empty space. One soon to be filled.

She quickened her pace, sashayed into the chamber where Vincenzo Ferro waited. He sprang from the seat near his easel.

"Baroness Kyrvalla."

He folded himself into the bow they favoured in his country, dipped so low it revealed the thinness of the white hair at the crown of his head and then the back of his pink and silver doublet. When they'd first met, she'd half-expected his aged frame to lock or snap.

"Master Ferro." The Baroness tilted her head a fraction of an inch. "Shall we continue?"

"Of course, Baroness."