For As Long As The Lie Holds

Without meaning to, I squeezed my eyes shut. The low, soft voice that grazed past my ear; the scent of him riding on the cool night breeze; his lips full and near, round as the moon in the night sky. For a few seconds all of it spread through me like ripples over water.

“Oh my. Oh my.”
“Good heavens…”

A little way off, the ones who had spotted us turned hastily aside and made themselves scarce. Their voices carried faintly to me out of the dark.

“I do hope we haven’t intruded upon them at the very height of a good moment.”
“Ho ho — on the contrary, a touch of danger is precisely what makes such things delightful. I had my own green young days with my husband, just as those two are having theirs; and now I am quite old, and have forgotten such romance altogether.”
“Now, it wounds me to hear you say so. You are still young and beautiful, madam. But — what gentleman kisses a woman with such force as that…”
“It was too dark to make anything out. Perhaps I ought to have gone a little closer and feigned innocence?”
“Really, madam, you are wicked.”

By the time the ladies’ voices had faded out altogether, I lifted my eyelids slowly and looked at Herman’s lips.

They had not touched.

The lips that had come at me as though they would land at any instant had stopped short, leaving a gap between us that would barely admit a single finger. A gaze, and warmth, and breath, tangled together into a hopeless muddle at so bare a distance as this. I froze like someone who had forgotten how to breathe.

I knew he had done it only because nothing else could be done, because it was the one way out from under the eyes of others. Even so, even at such a moment, I could not master the mad pounding of my heart.

His lashes were too long by half. That deep gaze rested a long while on my lips.

Presently he drew carefully away from me. For a time he said nothing at all; then he swallowed dry and barely forced the words out.

“There’s no time.”

That was what I had wanted to say.

“We have to go, now.”

That, too, was what I ought to have been the one to say.

Over his shoulder I could see the banquet hall blazing with light. The plan had not failed yet; I still had my chance. The trouble was that Herman Ernst showed no sign of letting me go willingly.

Ought I not to tell him the truth?

If even now I laid out the whole business, how it had all come about, and begged him please to release me, I would be able to go to the banquet hall.

“Your Excellency.”

I called to him quietly, by a form of address that sat even more awkwardly on my tongue than ‘Herman.’

“I…”

My trembling gaze went to his hand. He was holding me still, faintly.

One word out of my mouth, and the whole thing would be finished.

That I was not the ‘Gloria’ he was searching for.

That he should let go of me, then, and please, enough of this.

But I could not, for the life of me, get that lie out of my mouth.

I had never yet been able to lay the whole truth bare to him as it was, and yet I had never once lied to him out of any wish to deceive. Circumstance alone had set me at his side under Gloria’s name; deceiving him was never a thing I truly wanted.

The truth is, the real reason I cannot leave Herman is…

Might it not be because the ‘me’ I had longed all this while to reclaim, I had gone and found in Herman Ernst, of all the people in the world?

Perhaps I simply cannot bring myself to deny the me who has settled, at some point or other, so deeply in Herman’s heart.

No one had known me for myself.

No one had wanted me, or believed me.

My parents could not recognize my place; my husband cast it aside; even the people around me denied it. Even were I to go back to such a place, I could not swear that I would truly be happy there.

What is it I want to find? No — what is it I must find?

I had thought it was simply the name ‘Marienne.’ My place, my honor, my standing, my station: everything Gloria had taken from me. But I had come to see that none of those things proved me, nor made me what I was.

Only when Herman Ernst knew me, and acknowledged me exactly as I was, had I felt that I had at last reclaimed the ‘me’ I craved so terribly.

Even if that ‘true me’ were shut up inside the shell called ‘Gloria.’

“If my wife is not you, then who in the world is she supposed to be?”

In that instant he took hold of me and whispered.

“Enough of this. Let’s go home now, hm?”

In the hand that held my arm so gently, I felt the faintest tightening of strength. He looked down at me with eyes that hesitated and would not stop hesitating, as though he wished to carry me off this very instant and did not dare.

How is it that you would gather in even a wife who meant to abandon her husband? So that I cannot possibly leave you.

Even in a situation like this, he showed me nothing but a boundless faith. My eyes had grown hot before I knew it, and I stirred my heavy lips.

“How…”

Me, whom truly not one soul had ever known.

“How in the world did you know me…”

Carefully, he wiped away the tears running down my cheek.

“Try that on someone you can fool. I’m your husband. Where in the world would you find a husband who couldn’t know his own wife.”

Even at a moment like this, he was a man who unfailingly came out with nothing but the right answer. And yet this world does hold husbands who, not content with failing to know their own wife, will swap her out for an identical twin.

Herman Ernst — how is it that every single time, you shake the world I thought I knew?

I know that to want you is greed.

I did not want to go back to a world where no one would grant that I was me. His side was the one place I wanted to be, the place where I could at last exist as the true ‘me.’

At least — for as long as this lie holds.

At Herman’s side, it did not matter in the least what my name was. Even were it ‘Gloria Ernst,’ the name I had wanted so badly to fling off, it seemed to me I could gladly throw my own name away if this was the only way to be with him.

“…Let’s go. Home.”

If anyone had asked whether I was confident I would never regret it, I could not have answered that I certainly would not. Only one thing I knew for a certainty: the place of ‘Marienne,’ scarcely won back at the end of my revenge, would not be a happy one.

“I want to rest now.”

Holding fast to the hem of his frock coat, I laid my face quietly against his chest. I had not the strength to lift a finger. My body, sunk all day long in tension, sagged limp, like a taut cord suddenly let go.

“Yes. Let’s go back.”

He shrugged off his frock coat as he said it and draped it round my shoulders. He was so exceptionally tall that the coat came down well past my knees and further still. I did not need to ask to know with what intent he had put it about me.

Because I am wearing not Gloria’s dress, but Marienne’s, no doubt.

For to anyone else’s eyes, we were at this moment Herman Ernst and Marienne Drake.

“Stay here until I have the carriage brought round.”

With a tender hand he fastened the buttons right up to my throat, then bent at the waist to bring his eyes level with mine.

“Answer me. Say that you will never again vanish without a word.”

He pressed it on me any number of times, and I barely managed to meet his gaze and nod.

“I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay right here.”

Only then did he move off, his face easing into relief. When that great frame had vanished among the shrubbery, I was left all alone in the rose garden, and buried my face in the coat.

I had thought he would be angry — that I had gone and made another such spectacle, just as at the triumphal banquet.

He had asked nothing. If anything he had seemed less angry than sad; the look in his eyes as he gazed at me, the hesitation at his fingertips, said as much plainly enough.

Perhaps this time I really shall be packed off to the ducal lands, with no way out of it at all.

The thought alone weighed my heart down.

“But I don’t want that…”

Startled by the true feeling that had leapt out of me unbidden, I hurriedly clapped a hand over my mouth.

You really have gone mad, Marienne.

Here I was, in a situation like this, frantically working out what excuse I might make in order to stay at his side.

If it comes to this, then I am deceiving Herman. How in the world am I any different from Gloria?

The moment I took his hand and walked out of this place, I was no longer the victim of an immoral affair. Everything that came afterward would be nothing but the price I must pay in full, since I had done nothing more than make a thoroughly selfish choice for the sake of my own happiness.

Even so…

If I had to pay the price regardless, might it not be all right to be a little greedy?

The social ball, which by rights should have run on into the following day, was petering away to nothing now that its host had vanished.

In the early dawn, by the time most of the invited guests had gone home to their own houses, Cedric Drake woke from sleep with a clear head, sprawled across the bed. The light spilling in between the curtains was clean, and the peaceful room lay as silent as the grave. Of late he had slept badly, beset by all manner of nervous complaints; he had not tasted such freshness in a very long time.

“Haah.”

He let out a long breath and stretched one arm high into the air. That was when he felt it. His side was warm. Rubbing his eyes muzzily, he turned to see who was lying beside him.

“…Marienne?”

But that could not be.

He started violently and scrubbed at his eyes again. Yet however many times he looked, the woman before him was Marienne Drake.

His own true wife, Marienne Drake, who last night had worn a lavish gown and danced held in his arms.