A true Luna princess

Celery is in fashion

*Isolde*

Most betrothals spring from one of two fierce emotions: greed or love. But my engagement was fueled neither by an exchange of assets between like-minded wolves, nor by a potent mixture of desire, propinquity, and Cupid’s arrows.

In fact, I am liable, in moments of despair, to attribute my engagement to a curse. “Perhaps our parents forgot to ask a powerful fairy to my christening,” I tell my sister Brielle on our way home from a ball given by the Alpha of Micklethwait, at which I have spent generous swaths of time with my betrothed. “The curse, it hardly needs to be said, is Rupert’s hand in marriage. I would rather sleep for a hundred years.”

“Sleeping has its attractions,” my sister agrees, descending from our parents’ carriage before the house. Brielle does not pair the positive comment with its opposite: sleep has attractions… but Rupert has few.

I actually have to swallow hard and sit in the dark carriage by myself for a moment before I am able to pull myself together and follow my sister. I have always known that I would be Luna of Howlstone someday, so it makes no sense to feel so keenly miserable. But there it is. An evening spent with my future husband makes me feel half cracked.

It doesn’t help that most of London, my mother included, considers me the luckiest of young she-wolves. My mother would be horrified… though unsurprised… by my lame jest linking the future Alpha with a curse. To my parents, it is manifestly clear that my ascension of the social ranks is a piece of singular good fortune. In short, a blessing.

“Thank the Goddess,” my father has said, oh, five thousand times since I was born. “If I hadn’t gone to Alpha School ...”

It is a story that my twin sister Brielle and I had loved when we were little. We would perch on our papa’s knees and listen to the thrilling tale of how he… plain, unremarkable… but connected to an Alpha on one side, as well as a bishop and a beta on the other… Mr. Darkwood..: had gone to Alpha school and become best friends with the Alpha of Howlstone, who had inherited his grand title at the tender age of five. At some point, the boys had sworn a blood oath that my father’s eldest daughter would become a Luna by marrying the Alpha of Howlstone’s eldest son.

My father showed giddy enthusiasm in doing his part to ensure this eventuality, producing not one but two daughters within a year of marriage. The Alpha of Howlstone, for his part, produced only one son, and that after a few years of marriage, but obviously one son is sufficient for the task at hand. Most importantly, the Alpha keeps his word and regularly reassures my father about the destined betrothal.

Consequently, my proud parents do everything in their power to prepare their firstborn daughter… the elder by a good seven minutes… for the title that is to be bestowed upon me, sparing no expense in shaping the future Luna of Howlstone. I was tutored from the moment I left the cradle. By ten years of age, I was expert in the finer points of etiquette, the management of country pack… including double-entry accounting… playing the harpsichord and the spinet, greeting people in various languages, including Latin… useful for visiting bishops, if no one else… and even in French cooking, though my knowledge of the last is intellectual rather than practical. Lunas never actually touch food, except to eat it.

I also have a thorough knowledge of my mother’s favorite tome, ‘The Mirror of Compliments: A Complete Academy for the Attaining unto the Art of Being a Luna’, which is written by no less a personage than the Dowager Luna princess of Ravenheart, and given to us girls on our twelfth birthday.

In fact, my mother has read ‘The Mirror of Compliments’ so many times that it has taken over her conversation, rather like ivy smothering a tree. ‘Titles,’ she had said the morning before the Micklethwait ball over marmalade and toast, ‘is bestowed on us by our ancestors, but soon blanched, when not revived by virtue.’ I nodded, I myself am a firm believer in the benefits of blanching titles, but long experience has taught me that expressing such an opinion would merely give my mother a headache.

‘A young she-wolf,’ Mrs. Darkwood had announced on the way to the Micklethwait ball, ‘loathes nothing so much as entering parley with an immodest suitor.’ I know better than to inquire about how one ‘parleyed’ with an immodest suitor. The High packs understands that I am betrothed to the Alpha of Howlstone’s heir, and therefore suitors, immodest or otherwise, rarely bother to approach.

Generally speaking, I table that sort of advice for the future, when I hope to indulge in any number of immodest parleys.

“Did I see Alpha Webbe dancing with Luna. Shottery?” I ask my sister as we walk into my bedchamber. “It’s quite affecting to watch them stare into each other’s eyes. I must say, the High packs seem to take their wedding vows about as seriously as the French do, and everyone says that the inclusion of marital fidelity into French wedding vows turned them into a splendid work of fiction.”

“Isolde!” Brielle groans. “You mustn’t! And you wouldn’t… would you?”

“Are you asking whether I will ever be unfaithful to my fiancé once he’s my husband… if that day ever arrives?”

Brielle nods, and I shrug, feigning nonchalance.

“I suppose not,” I say, though secretly, I sometimes wonder if I might just snap one day and break every social rule by running off to Rome with a footman. “The only part of the evening I really enjoyed was when Alpha Pomtinius told me a limerick about an adulterous abbot.”

“Don’t you dare repeat it!” my sister orders. Brielle has never shown the faintest wish to rebel against the rules of propriety. She loves and lives by them.

“There once was an adulterous abbot,” I tease, “as randy…”

Brielle slaps her hands over her ears. “I can’t believe he told you such a thing! Father would be furious if he knew.”

“Alpha Pomtinius was in his cups,” I explain. “Besides, he’s ninety-six and doesn’t care about decorum any longer. Just a laugh, now and then.”

“It doesn’t even make sense. An adulterous abbot? How can an abbot be adulterous? They don’t even marry.”

“Let me know if you want to hear the whole verse,” I say. “It ends with talk of nuns, so I believe the word was being used loosely.”

That limerick… and my appreciation of it… points directly to the problem with my Luna-ification, or, as we label it, ‘Lunification.’ There’s something very déclassé about me, no matter how proper my bearing, my voice, and my manners might be. I certainly can play the Luna, but the real Isolde is, dismayingly, never far from the surface.

“You are missing that indefinable air of consequence that your sister conveys without effort,” my father often opines, with an air of despondent resignation. “In short, Daughter, your sense of humor tends toward the vulgar.”

“‘Your demeanor should ever augment your honor,’” my mother chimes in, quoting the Luna Princess of Ravenheart.

And I shrug.

“If only,” Mrs. Darkwood has said despairingly to my father time and again, “if only Brielle had been born first.” For I am not the only participant in the Darkwood training program. Brielle and I have marched in lockstep through lessons on the comportment of a Luna because our parents, aware of the misfortunes that might threaten their eldest daughter… a fever, a runaway carriage, a fall from a tower… have prudently Lunafied their second-born as well.

Sadly, it is manifest to everyone that Brielle has achieved the quality of a Luna, while I… well, I am just Isolde. I certainly can behave with exquisite grace… but among my intimates, I am sarcastic, far too witty to be ladylike, and not in the least gracious. “She looks at me in such a way if I merely mention The Mirror of Compliments,” Mother complains. “I’m only trying to help, I’m sure.”

“That girl will be a Luna someday,” my father says heavily. “She’ll be grateful to us then.”

“But if only… ,” my mother says, wistfully. “Dearest Brielle is just… well, she would be a perfect Luna, wouldn’t she?”

In fact, my sister has mastered early the delicate art of combining a pleasing air of consequence with an irreproachably modest demeanor. Over the years, Brielle has built up a formidable array of Luna-like traits: ways of walking, talking, and carrying herself.

“‘Dignity, virtue, affability, and bearing,’” my mother recites over and over, turning it into a nursery rhyme.

Brielle glances at the glass, checking her dignified bearing and affable expression.

I sing back to my mother: “Debility, vanity, absurdity, and… brainlessness!”

By the time we reach eighteen, Brielle looks, sounds, and even smells… thanks to French perfume smuggled from Paris at great expense… like a Luna. Mostly, I don’t bother.

The Darkwoods are happy, in a measured sort of way. By any sensible standard, we have produced a real Luna, even if that particular daughter isn’t betrothed to an Alpha’s heir. As we grow up, our parents tell themselves that Brielle will make a lovely mate to any man of rank. Alas, in time, they stop saying anything about their second daughter’s hypothetical husband.

The sad truth is that a Lunafied girl is not what most young men desire. While Brielle’s virtues are celebrated far and wide throughout the High packs… especially amongst the dowager Lunas… her hand is rarely sought for a dance, let alone for marriage.

Our parents interpret the problem differently. To their mind, their beloved second daughter is likely to dwindle into the shadow of a Luna, without becoming even a wife, because she has no dowry.

The Darkwoods have spent all their disposable income on tutors. That has left my sister with little more than a pittance to launch herself on the mating market.

“We have sacrificed everything for Isolde,” my mother often says. “I can’t understand why she is not more grateful. She’s the luckiest she-wolf in England.”

I do not view myself as lucky at all.

“The only reason I can countenance marrying Rupert,” I tell Brielle, “is that I will be able to dower you.” I strip off my gloves, biting the tips to pull them from my fingers. “To be honest, the mere thought of the wedding makes me feel slightly mad. I could bear the rank… though it isn’t my cup of tea, to say the least… if he weren’t such a little, beardy-weirdy bottle-headed chub.”

“You’re using slang,” Brielle says. “And…”

“Absolutely not,” I say, throwing my gloves onto my bed. “I made it up myself, and you know as well as I do that the Mirror for Bumpkins says that slang is… and I quote ‘grossness of speech used by the lowest degenerates in our nation.’ Much though I would like to attain the qualifications of a degenerate, I have no hope of achieving that particular title in this life.”

“You shouldn’t,” Brielle says, arranging herself on the settee before my fireplace. I’ve been given the grandest bedchamber in the house, larger than either our mother’s or father’s chambers, so we generally hide from our parents in my room.

But the reprimand doesn’t have its usual fire. I frown at my sister. “Was it a particularly rotten night, Brie? I kept getting swept away by my dim-witted fiancé, and after supper I lost track of you.”

“I would have been easy to find,” Brielle replies. “I sat among the dowagers most of the night.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” I say, sitting down next to her and giving her a fierce hug. “Just wait until I’m a Luna. I’ll dower you so magnificently that every gentleman in the country will be on bended knee at the very thought of you. ‘Golden Brielle,’ they’ll call you.”

Brielle doesn’t even smile, so I forge ahead. “I like sitting with the dowagers. They have all the stories one would really like to hear, like that one about Alpha Mettersnatch paying seven guineas to be flogged.”

Her brows draw together.

“I know, I know!” I exclaim, before Brielle can speak. “Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. All the same, I loved the part about the nursemaid costume. Truly, you should be glad you weren’t me. Howlstone stalked up and down the ballroom all night, dragging Rupert and me behind him. Everyone groveled, tittered behind my back, and went off to inform the rest of the room how uncommonly unlucky the FF is to be marrying me.”

Between ourselves, Brielle and I generally refer to Rupert, future Alpha of Howlstone… as ‘the FF,’ which stands for foolish fiancé. On occasion, he is also ‘the HH’ … half-wit husband, ‘the BB‘ … brainless betrothed, and… because we are fluent in both Italian and French… ‘the MM’ … mindless marito or mindless mari, depending on the language of the moment.

“The only thing lacking to make this evening absolutely and irredeemably hellish,” I continue, “was a wardrobe malfunction. If someone stepped on my hem and ripped it, baring my arse to the world, I might be more humiliated. I certainly would be less bored.”

Brielle doesn’t reply; she just tips her head back and stares at the ceiling. She looks miserable. “We should look on the bright side,” I say, striving for a rousing tone. “The FF danced with both of us. Thank goodness he’s finally old enough to attend a ball.”

“He counted the steps aloud,” Brielle states. “And he said my dress made me look like a puffy cloud.”

“Surely it cannot surprise you to discover that Rupert lacks a gift for elegant conversation. If anyone looks like a puffy cloud, it’s me; you look like a vestal virgin. Far more dignified than a cloud.”

“Dignity is not desirable,” my sister says, turning her head. Her eyes are full of tears.

“Oh, Brie!” I gather her into another hug. “Please don’t cry. I’ll be a Luna in no time, and then I’ll dower you and order such beautiful clothing that you’ll be the wonder of London.”

“This is my fifth season, Isolde. You can’t possibly understand how dreadful it feels, given that you’ve never really been on the market. No gentleman paid me any attention tonight, any more than they have in the last five years.”

“It’s the dress and the dowry. We all look like ghosts, but not transparent. You, of course, are a willowy ghost, and I’m a particularly solid one.”

Brielle and I wear matching gowns of frail white silk, caught up under our bosoms with long ribbons trimmed with seed pearls and tasseled at the ends. The same streamers appear on the sides and the backs of the gowns, rippling in the faintest breeze. On the page, in Madame Wellbrook’s pattern book, the design looks exquisite.

There’s a lesson here..:. a dismal one.

Just because fluttering ribbons look good on a stick-thin she-wolf portrayed in a pattern book does not mean that they will be, when festooned around one’s hips.

“I caught sight of you dancing,” I continue. “You look like a bouncy maypole with all those ribbons trembling around you. Your ringlets are bouncing as well.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Brielle says flatly. She brushes away a tear. “It’s the Lunsfication, Isolde. No man wants to marry a prude who acts as if she’s a ninety-five-year-old dowager. And…” she gives a little sob, “… I simply can’t seem to behave any differently. I don’t believe that anyone titters behind your back, unless from jealousy. But I’m like nursery gruel. I… I can see their eyes glaze over when they have to dance with me.”

Privately, I agree that the Lunsfication program has much to answer for. But I wrap my arm tighter around my sister and say, “Brielle, you have a wonderful figure, you’re sweet as honey, and the fact that you know how to set a table for one hundred has nothing to do with it. Marriage is a contract, and contracts are about money. A she-wolf has to have a dowry, or no man will even consider marrying her.”

Brielle sniffs, which serves to demonstrate how upset she is, as she normally would never countenance such an unrefined gesture.

“Your waist makes me positively sick with envy,” I add. “I look like a butter churn, whereas you’re so slim that I could balance you on the head of a pin, like an angel.”

Most young ladies on the marriage market… Brielle included… are indeed ethereally slim. They float from room to room, diaphanous silk sweeping around their slender bodies.

I am not one of them. It is the sad truth, the canker at the heart of the Luna flower, another source of stress for my mother. As she sees it, my overindulgence in vulgar wit and buttered toast stems from the same character defects. I do not disagree.

“You do not resemble a butter churn,” my sister states, wiping away a few more tears.

“I heard something interesting tonight,” I cry. “Apparently the Alpha Prince of Ravenheart is going to take a princess. I suppose he needs an heir. Just imagine, Brie. You could be daughter-in-law to the most stiff-rumped starch-bucket of them all. Do you suppose the Luna Princess reads her Maggoty Mirror aloud at the dining table? She would adore you. In fact, you’re probably the only she-wolf in the kingdom whom she would love.”

“Dowagers always love me,” Brielle says with another sniff. “That doesn’t mean the Alpha prince will give me a second glance. Besides, I thought that Ravenheart was married.”

“If the Luna approved of bigamy, she would have put it in the Mirror; therefore, its absence suggests that he is in need of a second chance mate. My only other, rather less exciting, news is that Mother was told of a lettuce diet tonight and has decided that I must try it immediately.”

“Lettuce?”

“One eats only lettuce between the hours of eight and eight.”

“That’s absurd. If you want to reduce, you should stop buying meat pies when Mama thinks you’re buying ribbons. Though, to be honest, Isolde, I think you should eat whatever you want. I want quite desperately to marry, and even so, the idea of marrying Rupert makes me want to eat a meat pie.”

“Four pies,” I correct. “At least.”

“What’s more, it wouldn’t matter how slim you became by eating lettuce,” Brielle continues. “The FF has no choice but to marry you. If you grew rabbit ears, he would still have to marry you. Whereas no one can countenance the idea of marrying me, no matter what my waist looks like. I need money to… to bribe them.” Her voice wavers again.

“They’re all port-brained buffoons,” I say, squeezing her hand. “They haven’t noticed you, but they will, once Rupert dowers you.”

“I’ll likely be forty-eight by the time the two of you walk the aisle.”

“On that front, Rupert is coming over with his father to sign betrothal papers tomorrow evening. And apparently he is leaving directly thereafter for the wars in France.”

“For goodness’ sake,” Brielle says, her eyes widening. “You really are going to become a Luna. The FF is about to become the BB!”

“Foolish fiancés are often killed on the battlefield,” I point out. “I think the term is ‘cannon fodder.’”

My sister gives a sudden laugh. “You could at least try to sound sad at the prospect.”

“I would be sad,” I protest. “I think.”

“You’d have reason. Not only would you lose the prospect of being ‘my Luna’ for the rest of your life, but our parents would hold hands as they jumped off Battersea Bridge to their watery deaths.”

“I can’t even imagine what Mama and Papa would do if the goose that promised golden eggs was turned into pâté de foie gras by the French,” I say, a bit sadly.

“What happens if the FF dies before marrying you?” Brielle asks. “Legal or not, a betrothal is not a wedding.”

“I gather these papers make the whole situation a good deal more solid. I’m certain most of the High packs believes that he’ll cry off before we get to the altar, given my general lack of beauty, not to mention the fact that I don’t eat enough lettuce.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You are beautiful,” Brielle says. “You have the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen. I can’t think why I got plain brown eyes and you have those green ones.” She peers at me. “Pale green. The color of celery, really.”

“If my hips were like celery, then we’d have something to celebrate.”

“You’re luscious,” my sister insists. “Like a sweet, juicy peach.”

“I don’t mind being a peach,” I say. “Too bad celery is in fashion.”