Breaking Down

Again, this is not necessarily connected to my novel -I like to reuse names.

Etienne is away appeasing the Portuguese delegation, which is all the better; I can’t have him finding out about this. I knew that woman would return to plague him; yet pestilence in this form seems a horror undue even him. This is an intimate plight, one to remain cloistered among women.

My breath rushes, and my lips tremble. Adia Scarborough was a common whore; a false beauty, emboldened with passions not hers to claim; no doubt rotting in a syphilitic grave in some impoverished district. And here is my daughter, my beautiful, impressionable girl, practically lusting over her, finding her image in the holiest of places!

I can’t look Aurore in the face, I can’t notice her beauties without the Adia's harsh countenance spoiling them! I leave her under the eye of Evanna, the palest, youngest maid, and take to my bed for the morning.

The morning, I regret to say, becomes the week. Soon, rotted foot molders at my bedside table -I’ll take only drink.

Aurore comes to see me, I’ve heard, but I entreat Lizette, beg her to say I am ill. I am not ready to face my girl, for as I’ve lain here, night after sleepless night, things have come to me, horrible, pestilent things.

What sort of mother am I, who cannot prevent her daughter from devolving into a form entirely below her?

What sort of mother would rather lose herself in sudorific bedding, with only the broad-writ stars and her own maids for company, than meet her girl’s eyes and find in them what ails her?

My sort. My horrible sort.

If Aurore’s mind is addled, the fault belongs to me and to Etienne. To Adia, Satan’s gift, certainly, but it was not my Aurore who brought her here, not my Aurore who paraded her and her sinful ways before her own virgin eyes. That blame, to be certain, belongs to Etienne -it is his to bear, but I am at equal and horrible fault for not seeing it earlier, not preventing Adia's insidious penetration of our values and the heart of my girl.

The door cracks. It might’ve been one morning or twenty. “Maman?” Her voice is gentle, uncharacteristically so. I ache for her, for what my sweet daughter will one day become. Is becoming!

I will not turn my head. I will not. I won’t see that young, perfectly angled face rot and spoil with the stink of sin and earthly temptations. I lie still, perfectly so, but still, when the door groans and Aurore’s presence drifts away, it is all I can do to keep from wringing my hands ‘till they bleed.

Adia,I think to myself that night, as the sky churns and crackles with the makings of a tempest, you’ve won. You’ve broken me at last -consigned me to a miserable existence. Take my daughter -fatten her on whatever it is your vile breed feasts upon. She is yours. I haven’t the strength to keep her decent, to keep her safe!

Didn’t I once promise to rise to motherhood as brilliantly as the most exotic flower ever bloomed? Didn’t I shrink my courtly world to a nation of two, at the same time broadening panoptically so that my Aurore would feast on the succors of every corner of life?

I can feel my efflorescence collapsing, turning in with a vengeance upon itself. One day, a woman rose in me who was a proud, fierce specimen, who lionized her values and would not stray from them. But she was shrunken, done in by the especial charms of a wicked woman, she who could not manage her lusts, willing to work her desires through the mind of a young girl, even, to afford herself what she wanted most.

She fed on my boldness, and as she repasted sumptuously upon my joys, they died and withered. She sucked me barren -rescinded for long enough to give me a child, then struck crucially and took that child.

I stare at the moon, refracted by my windowpanes. In it, I find every weakness I’ve ever shamefully taken upon myself, every love I failed to keep and hold.

In these moments, I am sure, Adia’s skirts billow on her slim legs as the wind catches her, as she looks out on my moon and feels that I have given up my power.

She smiles.