Beautiful Freaks (3 page)

He was expecting horror, but he was
greeted
with a sight that was
nothing short of beautiful.

At first
,
Steptree wasn’t sure it wasn’t all an elaborate trick
;
that he hadn’t been
dragged from
his warm bed for the sake of a stolen statue. Approaching closer, he realised it wasn’t a statue
but
the corpse of a young man
. Still standing, the body had been posed in the movement of a kiss. His eyes were
closed
,
his hand raised
,
as if still cupping the
cheek
of his lover. The boy
glittered
, as if his skin
were
made of a quartz
marble. I
t was so white as to almost be a shade of pale blue.

Steptree gasped and tears pricked at the corner of eyes as he thought of how the boy was the same colour as the moon, and just as luminescent. Never before had the sight of death moved him to a feeling of such sorrow. In front of him was poetry that surpassed words.

The boy sparkled. The faint flush of a youthful blush was still painted on his cheek. Steptree extended his fingers to explore the thin translucent crust that covered the boy – it was ice. Perfect snowflakes had caught in the fibres of the young man’s velvet jacket and laced his eyelashes.

Steptree was an ex
ceptionally logical
man, but for the life of him h
e could not understand how, on a slightly chilly
October evening, a young man had
spontaneously
frozen to death. A creepy sensation spread over his skin and
an
alien sense of
superstition
entered his
thoughts. I
t was as if the boy had been placed under a fairytale spell.

“
Brown
, how is this possible?” Steptree asked, his mind whirling.

“It isn’t, Sir!
It isn’t possible.”

ALICIA

THE ICE-QUEEN

There is a beauty to the streets at th
at time of night. It is something otherworldly which reminds me of home. The fog is like a white wall of anticipation, or
smooth snow
– or
an innocent heart.

Each time
the killing happens, it
is t
he same. I am caught in a never-ending cycle of seasons. W
ith each spring comes hope and
with
each winter …
death.

Once upon a winter,
the fourteenth
after
my birth, the snow fell soft and deep and the world turned to ice. The meadows and the forests were covered with a white
beauty. It was a hard winter
;
a
cruel cold. Icicles hung from the branches of the trees and the roof of the house. As a child, Mama had warned me about the dangers of such beauty. If
an icicle
should fall, it would be as
deadly-sharp
as a blade.

And it was.

A splinter so sharp that it spliced through the fabric of my dress and the shell of my skin
,
before embedding itself in
to
the soft tissue of my heart with nothing more than a sharp gasp and a flinch of pain. As if to baptise the moment, a single drop of blood fell onto the snow.

By rights it should have killed me, but it had other, more magical, plans.

The cut healed quickly. It was as if the flesh had been keen to swallow the shard of ice. A small silver scar marked the spot
,
but
after a while
I thought no more of it.

The snows melted. The spring flowers grew and the love songs of the birds returned to the forest. With the spring came the gardener’s boy. His name was Rowan. He was
sixteen
and the apple of his father’s eye.

M
ama was not quite
so
keen on him, and
she
was certainly not very pleased about Rowan starting work in
our gardens
,,
mainly
because of
the close proximity
it would create between the two of us. My mother, it seemed, had the same intuition as a mother hen recognising that a fox had been invited into the hen coop. Rowan was a striking, handsome boy, over-confident and cheeky – just the kind of boy her innocent daughter might fall silly over.

I’d
only seen him once before,
whilst
in town running errands with Mama.
The boy
appeared
a fool
.
H
andsome, but a fool nevertheless – or so I’d gathered
from Mama’s tuts and rolls of the eyes
.
He’d strolled through town, all six
-
foot of him, with a blade
of field-
grass in his mouth, his hat twirling in his hand
,
and a sparkle
of
wickedness in his eye. He’d s
potted the group of older girls who
stood
outside the schoolhouse
in a small flo
ck, the
white cotton
of their skirts dazzling
in the spring sunlight.

“Morning,
pretties
,” he called, reducing them to a heap of blushe
s and giggles. Mary, our Sunday
School
mistress
seemed most affected
. She stood
t
wirling the cotton of her skirt
in her hand and sway
ed
on the spot as if hypnotised. Rowan must have spoken to them about their bonnets and dresses, as each took their turn to twirl in front of him whilst he bent down to inspect the intricate
needlework on their hems
. Mama had also stop
ped to watch
and offered me a commentary of disapproval.

“Impertinent boy! If their fathers catch him behaving like that, he’ll get a whipping.”

“Why?” I asked, “What’s he doing?”

“Talking out of turn, that’s what. It isn’t polite for a young man to speak to ladies about their skirts.”

“Oh,” I replied, s
till not fully understanding what was quite so wrong about it
. The thing I did clearly understand was that the boy made Mama displeased, and at
fourteen
,
I was happy to follow her opinion. I looked on
,
partly f
ascinated, partly disapproving, and th
is was how I
thought
of Rowan until the next time I met him.

*

I
t was a glorious morning, the kind that holds the promise of summer.
I’d been sent out to gather primroses for the Easter table, an errand that provided relief for everybody concerned. Mama was fussing around the house in perfection-mode and doing a really good job of winding up all the household staff. She already threatened to fire the linen maid and beat the grounds-man’s boy for treading mud into the scullery. It was clear that being sent on flower duty was a way of removing me from the firing line.

The day was full of cool sunlight. The soft
cooing of the wood pigeons and the distant sound of a metal spade digging the
hard earth made a natural duet and reminded me that the best patch of primroses were by the kitchen gardens.

It would mean having to pass close to Rowan
,
but as we’d never spoken, it didn’t seem too much of a threat.
I blushed at the thought of it. Just because we hadn’t had a conversation, it didn’t mean I hadn’t spent many hours watching him work from my bedroom window. Despite convincing myself the boy was arrogant and an idiot, there was something about seeing him at work that I found captivating.

I skirted around the wall, planning to sneak up on the patch of primroses without being spotted. He was at the far end of the garden, turning over the salad beds, whilst singing loudly. I giggled and fell back behind the wall, cramming my hand over my mouth to try and stifle my laughter. When I’d calmed myself enough to risk another look, I poked my head around the corner to see Rowan’s grinning face less than a hand-stretch away.

“Morning,
B
eautiful!”

I let out a little cry of surprise, before burning with embarrassment and then anger. “Morning, Ugly!” I responded venomously.

Rather than insulting him, he found it amusing, and a smug, satisfied smile flashed across his lips, followed by a wink.

“Touché!” he teased.

With nothing clever left to say, I shouted at him to, “Get lost!
”
before picking up the hem of my skirts and running home to the safety of Mama.

The flush of humiliation still burnt on my cheeks as
I
ran, but the anger I’d felt inexplicably turned into a smile
. Suddenly everything seemed to shine, and by the time I fell through the front door, I was laughing like a fool.

Mama greeted me from within the shades of the house, calling out
,
“Alicia, is that you?”

“Yes, Mama,” I replied through ragged breath.

I knew the sound of my strained speech would
attract her attention
. She disapproved of physical exertion
;
thought it un-ladylike. Her starched
,
white apron preceded her by several inches. When she caught sight of me – my hand on my stomach, catching my breath, my cheeks red and blotchy – she tipped her head to her left and looked at me with something between puzzlement and judgement.

“Whatever has happened?”

“Nothing,
Mama.” I looked away from her interrogating eyes and caught my reflection in the m
irror. There was something different
; an enlarging of the eyes, a hardening of the bone structure, the painting of a blush, and a staining of the lips.

Mama tutted, turned on her heel
,
and left me behind for the kitchen.

“Mama?” I called after her
, bewildered as to what crime I’d
committed.

She looked back over her shoulder and ordered, “Go and take a cold bath and change your dress.
The guests will be here shortly and you look … excitable.”

‘
Excitable?
’
I shook my head, puzzled by her strange choice
of word.

Taking the
stairs two at a time, still feeling as if I’d been injected by a sudden bu
rst of energy, I headed towards my chamber.
I
gnoring Mama’s instructions to run
the bath
cold
,
I
heated th
e copper pans on the stove and poured hot water in until it steamed. With a final act of defiance, I added an excessive amount of rose oil – it was the smell of the gardens.

I stepped in, indulging in the feelings of sunlight that glowed from within; luxuriating in new exotic images of smiles and hands, of eyes flashing with
curiosity and invitation. A
s I lay
back
, the oil turning my skin to silk and the heat of the water sending me into the in-between space
of
sleep and waking, I felt my heart
needled by a sharp pain; sharp e
nough to draw a gasp before it passed
,
and I slipped once more into thoughts of the gardener’s boy.

*

Throughout
the rest of the spring
I barely saw him
.
Mama never asked me to go and gather flowers again, and she told me I was now too grown to go out and play. I
was instructed
to fill my time with the activities of a
young lady
; sewing,
playing the piano, or writing letters to distant, elderly relatives. But after months of this claustrophobic existence, I erupted in a rage of frustration, complaining that, “I would rather be dead then be a ‘lady’.” Mama, reeling from the shock of her daughter speaking to her so out of turn thought she’d teach me a lesson by sending me to work the mornings in the kitchen. Her punishment backfired and my time in the kitchen became the highlight of my otherwise tedious and dull existence.

Mama had
failed to
realise that at least three times a week Rowan would deliver a box of vegetables, fruit
,
and eggs from the gardens
to the kitchen – sometimes there’
d
even
be a large river salmon or a brace of rabbits which
he’d
hunted.
Our cook, catching my gaze and my blush as Rowan made his delivery on my first week, insisted every week afterwards that I be the one to go and open the door to him. I lived for this moment – the feel of Rowan’s body as he pushed past me in order to get the box through the door. I could have moved out of the way, and he knew this, which is why his presses grew slower each week. As he passed he’d always whisper,
“Hello, Beautiful.”