Known At A Single Glance

I hurried to the door and pressed my ear tight against it.

“Master. We’re just outside your private retiring room.”
“Inside…”
“Sir?”
“Into the room, I said…”

From the talk drifting through, Hans had evidently brought Cedric along already. Cedric was so far gone in sleep he could not manage so much as a proper answer, and Hans was wearing himself out trying to keep pace with him.

Then the door swung open, and I ducked quickly behind it. While Hans laid Cedric out on the long daybed, I eased the door shut and watched, holding my breath.

“Ah, that bastard, I’ll see to him if it’s the last…”

He mumbled it, every word slurring into the next, and whom the anger was meant for I could not tell. He thrust his arm straight up as though he meant to swing a fist, then the strength drained out of him and he sagged limp, exactly as Gloria had. Somewhere in the middle of it the fist he had been slicing at the air with came down and caught him square on his own nose.

“Ugh.”

That one short groan, and he sank into a deep sleep. He had struck himself hard enough to swell his nose red, and still he snored on without so much as a flicker of an eyelid.

What in the world does he think he’s doing.

I threw Hans a look that asked what on earth this was about. He had plainly been put through it the whole way here, and he heaved sigh after sigh.

“He made to relieve himself into an empty liquor bottle, so I brought him here in a great hurry.”

Come to think of it, he had been at the whisky earlier as well. The drink and the draught together must have done for him twice over. I pressed a finger hard into the sleeping Cedric’s head and pushed; there was not the faintest sign he would wake.

“Well done, Hans. Go to the kitchen at once and bring Mia.”

Hans gave a single nod and left the room straight away. Soft purring breaths and a grating snore played out in that room together like a concerto, and I quietly closed my eyes and went back over the plan ahead.

Yes. Everything is going exactly to plan.

There was no need to worry and no need to hurry it along. If it only ran on like this, Cedric and Gloria’s world would meet its end at last. And yet I was not glad in the slightest. I was only bewildered, and uneasy.

What in the world are you hesitating for, Marienne.

I could not tell what had me so firmly by the ankle and would not let go, nor what it was that kept turning my head back over my shoulder.

That’s right. This is the right thing to do.

I had to say the words over to myself more times than I could count.

Before long, Hans and Mia came inside. Hans said he would go back to the ballroom, as planned, and keep watch on how things stood.

Once he had gone, Mia went straight to Gloria and set about stripping her at speed. While she worked, I hurried out of my own clothes. I stepped out of my shoes, unfastened my earrings and my necklace and laid them on the dressing table, pulled every ornament out of my hair, and went straight to the ties of the overskirt.

“I know it’s hard going, but we have to hurry. The hostess cannot be away from her own hall for long.”
“Yes, madam.”

I said it as I hauled the skirt off, and Mia nodded that she understood.

And so I came out of everything, down to the petticoat and the corset. Mia stripped away every last thing that had covered Gloria’s body and dressed me in it instead. There was no room even to catch a breath; every moment counted, and before either of us knew it, beads of sweat had gathered on my forehead and on hers.

And when the last of Gloria’s ornaments was fastened about my neck, I had come back, perfectly, to being ‘Marienne Drake.’

“…Is that it, then?”

I could not keep the emptiness out of my voice as I asked it. For months I had suffered as the price of having my name taken from me, and now, in the space of a few dozen minutes, a change of clothes was all it had taken to have myself back.

“Oh, your hair, madam. Sit here, please. I’ll put it up for you.”

Mia could have no notion of what I was feeling; she was intent on nothing but making me look wholly like ‘Marienne.’ I did as she said, sat down in the chair and gave my hair over to her, and deft-handed as she was, she had it copied exactly in no time at all.

“How is it?”
“It looks the same. No. It’s perfectly the same.”

I looked at myself in the mirror and swallowed dryly. Staring back at me was the very Gloria who, only a little while ago, had been spilling those simpering laughs over Herman.

Thinking of Herman, of all moments, in the middle of this.

I gave my head a quick shake to be rid of it. Now that I was Marienne Drake once more, I had to tear Herman Ernst out of my head by the roots. I must never call him to mind, not even by mistake.

“Erm, madam, but this dress of yours…”

Mia held up the dress I had been wearing and pointed at Gloria, lying naked on the sofa. I waved a hand lightly, to say that it hardly mattered.

“Put it on her, roughly. As things stand, that will look the more natural.”

They had driven me out without putting so much as one thing into my hands, and I would gladly have left nothing at all on their bodies in return. But I could not bring myself to show their naked flesh to all the world, and so I held the urge down, hard.

“Now let’s move Gloria to the daybed.”

Once the dress was on her, roughly, Mia and I took hold of Gloria’s limp body from either side. We knocked her against things once or twice as we dragged her to the daybed, but thankfully she did not wake.

Robin seems to have got hold of a sleeping draught of considerable quality.

She never once opened her eyes through all that commotion. Whatever else might be said of him, the man was a detective who did his job to perfection. Beside Cedric, sprawled limp as an earthworm, I laid Gloria down, dressed as though she had stopped halfway through pulling the gown off.

“Here’s the wine you asked for.”

Mia handed me the wine she had fetched from the kitchen. I set it down beside Cedric and Gloria as though it had always stood there, then arranged the two of them into postures a shade more suggestive.

“Well, honestly.”

The handiwork was my own, and even so the scene of adultery came off so perfectly that all I could do was laugh, hollow and humorless.

“You go out first, Mia.”
“Yes, madam. I’ll give you the signal when the corridor is quiet.”
“Good. You’ve done well. Once this is all finished, I’ll send word to you through Robin.”

Mia stepped out of the retiring room, and a moment later gave the signal by knocking three times at the door. I looked the room over once more for anything I might have missed, then took hold of the door handle.

“…”

And then, all at once, I turned back and looked at Cedric and Gloria.

You two go through it as well. Just the same as I did.
I mean the experience of falling asleep and waking to find the whole world changed.

I glared a while at the two of them, sleeping dead to the world, and then I opened the door.

The retiring room a single door away had been like a war; the second-floor corridor of the banquet hall was utterly peaceful. A breeze blew in from somewhere and swept over me, and I dropped my eyes and ran them over the place that felt so bare.

“…Oh. Right.”

The bodice of the dress left far too much of my chest bare. It went past awkward and well into shameful.

How on earth was Gloria walking about in a thing like this.

But there was no time to be fretting over such a matter. I pressed one hand to my chest and hurried off toward the hall. Success was budding close enough to touch, near enough that I had only to reach out a hand, and the thought of it made the tension I had forgotten rear its head once more.

Back to the hall first, and then find the ladies of the reading circle. Babble at them as though I were quite beside myself, and finally burst into tears.

After that, it would follow of itself. I had only to gather up the ladies as they asked whatever the matter was and lead them to the retiring room where Cedric and Gloria lay tangled together, and it would be finished.

Herman, though…

As things stood, I could not tell whether he was in the hall or somewhere else. But he would surely be waiting for me while I was away, so the odds were good that he was inside, talking business.

And if Herman were to know me before I could bring the ladies of the reading circle to the retiring room.

I shook my head and shook the dreadful imagining off with it. There was no possible chance of it. Not even my own parents had known me. How, then, was Herman Ernst supposed to know me? What was more, I had come back now to being the ‘real Marienne.’ Nothing had changed but the dress, and yet I was Marienne now.

Not Gloria.

Still, one never knew, and so I resolved not to turn my eyes Herman’s way at all.

It was just as I rounded the corner.

“…Gloria?”

A vast shadow lay dark far ahead of me, and my breath stopped altogether. No, it would be truer to say that I forgot how to breathe. Herman Ernst, the one man I had so badly wished not to meet, was gazing at me without the slightest wavering.

“Ria.”

He called me once more. That one word turned to nothing the heart I had only barely gathered back together, and my flawless plan, and all of it besides.