Werewolves & Glass slippers

New humiliation

*Ella*

I know quite well that the household is on my side. They can’t help it; it’s bred into the bones of the best servants. They are trained to serve Alphas and Lunas, ranked wolves, not those of their own class. Obviously, they sense that Minna’s origins are not true. For my part, I imagined that my stepmother is a shopkeeper’s daughter who has married a colonel. I hadn’t thought she was..

What she is.

A fallen she-wolf. My father’s mistress. A trollop, by any other name.

No wonder poor Anastasia finds herself with child. Her mother is hardly qualified to steer her through the season. For that matter, I'm not entirely sure how to behave in polite society either. I was only twelve when my mother retired to bed and sixteen when my mother finally died and my father remarried. Though I’ve learned how to use cutlery, the finer nuances of behavior in polite society escape me.

I’ve had a year of dancing instruction, but it feels as if it happened in another lifetime. Aren’t there rules about talking to princes, for example? Do I have to back out of the room after speaking to one? Or is that a rule that applies only to kings and queens?

I find Anastasia’s maid, Rosalie, in Anastasia’s dressing room. Years ago, the chamber had been designated for guests, but at some point, Anastasia has amassed so many dresses… and we have no visitors… that it has been transformed into a wardrobe.

I look around with some curiosity. The room is lined with cherry cabinets clearly stuffed with gowns. Flounces of lace and corners of embroidered fabric poke from half-open drawers. The room smells like roses and fresh linen.

“Cherryderry told me of the dinner tonight, and the seamstresses coming tomorrow,” Rosalie says, “and I’ve been through all of Miss Anastasia’s gowns.” That would have been no small task, given that Anastasia has half again as many as her mother, though they are more neatly arranged. “I think you should wear this tonight, as it won’t need more than a stitch or two around the bodice.”

She holds up a gown of the palest pink silk. It isn’t particularly low-cut, but it looks to be tight until just below the bosom, when the overskirt is pulled up into curls and furbelows, revealing a dark rose lining.

I reach out a finger. My father has died before we would have begun the visits to modistes to assemble a wardrobe for my debut. I have gone straight from funereal blacks to sturdy cambrics, reflective of my changed position in the household.

“Couleur de rosette,” Rosalie says briskly. “I fancy it will set off your hair a treat. You won’t need a corset, being so slim.”

She starts to unbutton me, but I push her hands away.

“Please allow me…” Rosalie begins.

I shake my head. “I’ve been dressing myself for years, Rosalie. You can help me put that gown on, if necessary, but I will pull off my clothing myself.” Which I do, leaving me in nothing more than an old chemise. I do own an old corset, but they are too uncomfortable to wear, as I am on horseback every day.

Rosalie doesn’t say a word, just looks at the tired chemise, and the way I have darned it… not terribly well… and the length of it… too short. “Your father...” the maid says, and pauses.

“Turning in his grave, et cetera,” I say. “Let’s get on with it, Rosalie.”

So the maid begins pulling out hairpins and clicking her tongue like someone counting pennies. “I never would have thought you had all this hair!” she says finally, having unpinned and unwound all of my locks.

I don’t care to have it messing about. “It gets in my way while I’m working,” I explain.

“You shouldn’t be working!” Rosalie cries. “It’s just wrong, all of this, and seeing you there in that chemise like a dishcloth. I didn’t know.” She throws down her brush and pulls open a deep drawer. Inside are stacks of pristine white chemises.

Rosalie snatches one. “Miss Anastasia won’t even notice, not that she would care because she isn’t like her mother. She likes silk for her chemise,” the maid says, jerking my chemise over my head and throwing it to the side. “I prefer a nice cotton, as sweat stains these terribly. But there, if you aren’t dressed properly to the skin, you aren’t really fitting the part, when all’s said and done.”

The chemise settles around me like a translucent cloud. It is trimmed with exquisite lace.

Had my father lived and had I debuted, I would have worn garments like this all the time, not fraying, tired garments in sober grays and blues that make me look like the poor relation I am.

My mother had left me some sort of small dowry, but without the chance to meet any eligible men, it hardly matters. For years I’ve been telling myself to leave the house, to go to London, to find work as a governess… anything to escape. But that means deserting the tenants and the servants to Minna’s haphazard and unfeeling oversight.

So I haven’t left.

An hour later, my hair is curled and tousled and swept up into an approximation of Anastasia’s. My face is dusted with rice powder, the better to approximate the pampered look of my sister’s skin; I am swathed in pale pink, and my lips are painted to match.

I stand in front of the glass waiting for a moment of startled recognition. To realize that I really look like Anastasia, that I too would be accounted a great beauty.

Not only do I not resemble my sister, but I would be accounted a beauty only by a blind man. I look too angular and the dress hangs oddly from my shoulders.

Rosalie plucks at one sleeve. “You’re broader in the arms than Miss Anastasia,” she mutters.

I glance down at my offending limb and know exactly what the problem is. I spend at least two or three hours a day in the saddle, or in wolf form, trying to manage the estate the way my father’s bailiff had done before my stepmother threw him out of the house. My arms are muscled and lightly colored from the sun. I can’t imagine that other young she-wolves face that particular problem.

What’s more, my cheekbones are too pronounced, my eyebrows too sharp. “I don’t look like Anastasia,” I say, a bit dismally. I had vaguely hoped that fashionable clothing would transform me, making me as beautiful as my sister. A she-wolf whom all the high packs consider a diamond.

I look more like a flinty stone than a diamond. Like myself.

“The style doesn’t suit you,” Rosalie admits. “Pink wasn’t the right idea. You need bold colors, more like.”

“You do know why I have to look like Anastasia, don’t you?” I know perfectly well that Cherryderry has followed me up the stairs and positioned himself outside my stepmother’s bedchamber, intent on hearing the entire conversation.

Rosalie sets her mouth primly. “Nothing that I shouldn’t know, I would hope.”

“I am to accompany Alpha Blanklake on a visit to Pomeroy Castle, and I need to make everyone there think I’m Anastasia.”

The maid’s eyes meet mine in the mirror.

“It won’t work,” I say, accepting it. “She’s just too beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful too,” Rosalie says stoutly. “But in a different way.”

“My mouth’s too big, and when did I get so thin?”

“Since your father died and you started doing the work of ten people. Miss Anastasia, bless her soul, is as soft as a pillow, but she would be, wouldn’t she?”

I eye the material draped over my bosom. Or rather, where my bosom ought to be. “Can’t we do something about my chest, Rosalie? In this dress, I don’t seem to have one at all.”

Rosalie plucks at the extra material. “You’ve a nice little bosom, Miss Ella. Don’t worry. I can’t do much for it in this dress, but I’ll find others that will work better. Thanks be to the Goddess, Miss Anastasia has more gowns in her chambers than a modiste would after a year’s labor.” A moment later, she tucks two rolled-up stockings into the front of my chemise, and that is that.

It’s odd how our similar features result in such a different appearance from Anastasia’s. Of course, I am five years older. All ruffled and curled and made up, I look like a desperate aging virgin.

Panic is a new sensation for me. Never having been offered the chance to dress like a quality miss… least not for years… I’ve rather forgotten that my nubile years are passing.

I’ll be twenty-four in a few weeks, and I feel as long in the tooth as a dowager.

Why haven’t I noticed that I’m not rounded and charming and delectable anymore? When did bitterness enter my bloodstream and… and change me from a young she-wolf into something else?

“This isn’t going to work,” I say abruptly. “I don’t have the faintest resemblance to a young debutante who took the mating season by storm.”

“It’s a matter of wearing the right clothing,” Rosalie says. “You don’t look your best in this gown, miss. But I’ll find a better one for you.”

There isn’t much I can do but nod. I had thought…

Well, I hadn’t thought much about it. But I know that I want to be married and to have children of my own.

A sharp pang of panic rises in my throat. What if I’m already too old? What if I never…

I cut off the thought.

I will do this visit for Anastasia, for my newfound sister’s sake. After that, I will leave, go to London, and parlay my modest inheritance… the money my mother left… into a marriage license.

She-wolves have done that for years, and I can do it as well.

I straighten my shoulders. Since my father died, I have learned what it feels like to be humiliated: to tuck my hands out of sight when I see acquaintances for fear they will see my reddened fingers. To hold my boots close to the horse’s side so that no one sees the worn spots. To pretend I left my bonnet at home, time after time.

This is just a new kind of humiliation… to be dressed as lamb while feeling like mutton. I will get through it.