To Make A Moment With Herman Eternal

I left the Drake manor all but carried in Herman’s arms. Inside the carriage it was no different. The tension went out of me all at once and my body refused to obey me. Herman said nothing, only gave me his shoulder. I leaned into him, closed my eyes, and felt his hand patting me, over and over, in a steady rhythm.

I don’t want to think about anything.

I was so terribly tired. That one day seemed to have held forty-eight hours in it, and I felt as though I had lived through some impossibly long stretch of time.

I was still wearing Herman’s frock coat when we reached the townhouse. I walked into the bedroom on weary feet, and Elli came scurrying in after me.

“My lady, what a trying night it must have been. Do sit and rest yourself. I’ll have it done in a—”

I shed the frock coat, and Elli could not keep the shock off her face. The dress underneath was nothing like the one I had gone out in, so I could hardly blame her. Worse, it was cut so low across the bosom that one scarcely knew where to look. For Elli it must have been quite unsettling.

“…I-I’ll help you change at once!”

Even so, she asked nothing, and set about helping me out of it. I gave myself over to her hands and let my heavy eyes fall shut.

Herman must think I stole that dress and put it on so I could go to Cedric.

Perhaps that was where my unease had begun.

“I’ll ask you nothing, so say nothing to me — just come away with me.”

If he was angry, I wanted to beg his forgiveness. If he was hurt, I wanted to go on apologizing to the very end. But he had made up his mind, it seemed, to skip the whole of it.

He hasn’t said one word to me the entire way here.

Of course I knew well enough that his silence was not anger. Those gentle hands had done nothing but soothe me, over and over, in my exhaustion.

“Shall I have a bath drawn?”
“…No. I want to sleep.”
“Very well. Rest, then. I’ll leave you now.”

Without my asking it of her, Elli bundled the dress up tight inside the coat and carried it away. The door closed, and I collapsed onto the bed. I wanted to wait for Herman; I felt I ought to wait for him. But I could not master my eyelids, and they kept sliding shut.

I mustn’t sleep. Herman is…

From some point on I remembered nothing. Only that I had dreamed a long dream.

A dream of riding a great swan, flying away somewhere.

The next day, at breakfast. Herman was reading the morning paper, no different from any other day.

“Herman.”

I had been studying his face for some while before my lips finally stirred. His eyes turned to me about then.

“…Are you angry?”
“No.”
“Then…”

When I let my words trail off, Herman folded the newspaper.

“Honestly.”

The voice was the same as always, but the end of it trembled a little.

“I’m frightened. That you might leave me again.”

His wife had done such a thing at a ball, and still he had not once raised his voice. Beneath the table I tore at my nails and forced down the guilt surging up in me.

I want to beg Herman’s forgiveness. Truly, from the heart.

A sincere apology meant solving our fundamental problem first.

And to do that…

The first step was to tell Herman the truth and become ‘Marienne’ again. Whether he would then be generous enough to accept an apology from the ‘Marienne’ I had turned back into was another question altogether.

“I’m sorry. Truly.”

And so this was all I could give him.

“For frightening you.”

An apology that was nothing but a shell.

Herman gazed at me a long while, then made himself smile.

“That’s enough.”

As though he would forgive everything.

Then he took up his meal again, as if nothing whatever had happened. I watched his face a moment before I quietly reached for my own cutlery.

Perhaps this ice-cold peace is the better thing after all.

Neither of us was blind to it. The fundamental problem had not been solved. But to keep this peace we chose to bury the events of the night before, and we agreed on it without a word.

From that day on Herman clung to me to a degree that was almost alarming. So much for my fear that he might pack me off to the ducal lands.

“Shall we have a photograph taken, the two of us?”

He had left his own study standing empty and taken deliberately to working in my private library. The excuse was a discussion about hiring laborers, and the restless glances he kept stealing at me told me it was nothing more than that.

“A photograph?”

When I echoed the word back at him, he claimed he could not hear me well and dragged his chair right up close.

“Yes. A photograph.”
“What sort of photograph…”
“A portrait photograph of us. Husband and wife.”

In the Empire of Balter, nobles and men of capital commonly invited a professional photographer in to have their picture taken. A few hidebound nobles still insisted on painted portraits, even in an age when rail was being laid through the capital and ships the size of the imperial palace were being built. But a photograph asked no one to hold a pose for long, and it was easier to keep than a painting, so more and more people were coming to prefer it. More than that, when a couple exchanged pendants holding portrait photographs of one another, they were taking a moment of each other and sharing it between them. That little pendant held a fleeting instant of time and an everlasting love, and it was no mere ornament but the very symbol of a pledge between two people.

And a portrait photograph, of Herman and me…

I knew it for greed. I had no right to stand proudly at his side. And yet, when I took his hand and walked out of the Drakes’ ball, I had resolved to allow myself greed at least that far.

Just once, I would like to.

To make a moment with Herman eternal. The mere thought of it stirred something in my chest.

“I mean to call in the finest professional photographer in the capital. I’ll be in my naval uniform, and you in a white dress.”
“…”
“I think it would do to set something like a corsage on your head, as well. I mean to have it taken in a garden with the roses in full bloom — one more flower atop your head is nothing at all.”

Abruptly, Herman leaned toward me.

“Well?”

He was suddenly close, chin propped on his hand, asking it as lightly as that. I gazed at his face as though bewitched and lost the thread of the conversation entirely.

“Er — what was it you said? I’ve quite forgotten.”

Herman smiled at that, as though I were hopeless.

“Do pay attention. Your husband is right here — where in the world are your eyes wandering off to?”
“I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else. Say it once more.”
“Me, in a naval uniform. You, in a white dress. The place, the rose garden. A corsage atop your head.”

Sketching each word as he said it, I could only part my lips a little when the finished picture rose up in my head.

“Herman, that’s far too…”

It’s just like a wedding photograph.

I could not bring myself to spit the rest of it out, and swallowed it down hard.

“I need a photograph to hang in the townhouse in the capital. And I should like a pendant with your picture in it, besides.”

A pendant with Herman’s photograph in it. To me as well, that was a treasure more coveted than any gold or jewels. It did not matter if one pendant was all I had gained in exchange for giving up my own name. When the day came that all of this was brought to light and I was parted from him, anything would do, so long as it let me chew over my memories of him.

“Let’s do it.”
“Hm?”
“I said it sounds lovely. The photograph, the pendant — whichever.”

Anything would do. All of it. Except that the harder I tried to be happy, the more anxious I grew.

“This seems far too much…”

I said it looking down at the jewelry box Herman had held out to me. Wrapped in blue velvet, it was so large I could not have covered it with both hands.

The iron gate of the townhouse might have worn clean away, for all the people who had come and gone through it these past few days. Dressmakers, bespoke shoemakers, jewelers, beauticians to see to my skin. And so many others besides came calling for the sake of our photograph that after the third day I had given up counting altogether.

“Go on buying like this and I shan’t have jewelry boxes enough to keep the necklaces in.”

Herman had been using the photograph as a pretext to press any number of jewels on me, and the necklace he had just handed over looked the most expensive of the lot. I had not so much as opened the box, and its size alone had startled me already.

“Then we shall simply buy more jewelry boxes. Though really — why did you go and sell off perfectly good jewels of yours?”

He must have meant it as a playful jab, but a joke tossed off in jest can still land like a blow. It struck home, and it cost me no little pain to bear.

So he has known all along, and said nothing.

Well. Every time I went to meet Detective Richter I had handed over jewels of my own, a few at a time. In the end I had no choice but to hurry to the defense of the necklace box he had just given me. It would be a disaster if he took it into his head to demand I bring out my own jewelry box, empty as it now was.

“I have ten fingers. And exactly one neck.”
“And what of it.”
“I mean that this is quite enough. However expensive the jewels, I can hardly wear them all at once.”