Beautiful Freaks (8 page)

He winked, turning the statement into some kind of dark joke which I couldn’t fully understand
,
but
which
I could f
eel
like a shadowy presence. They both laughed, raising their glasses
of port
in salute. A worm turned in my stomach and I fought the urge to be sick right there and then, all over the marble floor.

My mother was a smart game player. She’d had years of practice and knew that if she wanted him to raise his stakes,
she needed to make him hungry -- to dangle
me like a temptation in front of him and seduce him into throwing more gold into the middle of the table. So she declined his offer of marriage with the promise that my sixteenth year would find me a sweeter prospect.

When he had left, I appealed to her as my mother, “Mama, please. I can’t stand Vincent. He frightens me.”

“He’s a prince
, a
handsome one.
He is rich
beyond your dreams and titled with a family name over eight hundred years old. Of course he
frightens you – as your master, he
should. You will come to love that fear.”

“I will not marry him, Mama.”

With that
,
her hand darted out like a striking cobra and
hit
me hard across the cheek, “You will do as I say, child.” Her face was
hard as stone and her tone cold.
“Do you understand? When I say smile, you will. When I say lick your lips or loosen your laces, you will. When I say let him kiss you, you will – just as you will do so when
he
tells you to. Do you understand? His wish is your command.”

I looked at the floor, hoping she wouldn’t see the tears welling in my eyes. Even though I knew I was risking another slap, I couldn’t help but ask, “Why?”

Rage erupted in
her.
“Why? Because it is my will, and gold doesn’t grow on its own.”

I looked at her in disbelief. Although we had spent the years moving further apart, I did not recognise this stranger in front of me. It was as if I had suddenly stepped into the pages of a fairy story and my mother had been replaced with the wicked stepmother.

“Mama,” I cried
,
but she ignored my distress and walked out of the room, lifting her chin high as she did.

All through that year Vince
became
my mother’s shadow. He was never more than a couple of feet away from her skirt hems. With each visit would come gifts so extravagant and rich that my mother had to undertake several building projects just to house them
all
.

All the time he was with her
,
I saw him watching me.
He inspected
me
as if he were
the potential buyer of a piece of art. My mother was happy to arrange these inspections for his pleasure.
She’d have
me play the harp for hours on end
whilst she’d
sit in the shadowy corner of the room, sewing or reading
.
Vince
nt
would be offered a chair
,
square in front of me
,
as if I were part of a private show and he were my only audience. Everything about
these situations
filled me with
feelings of
disgust. The way
his
eyes travel
led
over my body as I played made me feel as exposed as if I had been instructed to strip naked.

Once
,
when my mother left us alone for ten minutes to deal with some household matter, he left
his
chair and made his way over to the window behind me. My heart skipped in my chest with the same instinct as a stalked animal.  I knew the window was not his true destination
. H
e
stepped
up behind me and
I
felt
the warmth of his body, and could smell the musk
of male sweat. He
leant
in, his breath falling on my skin causing me to shudder and strike a series of wrong chords.

“I have a gift for you,” he whispered.

I turned my eyes to him and saw him flash a smile of pearl
-
white teeth. He was so close that I could see the dark black whiskers of his beard growing t
hrough the skin over his chisel-
cut bone structure. Suddenly his flesh made contact with mine as he swept back my hair. Then the cool dropping
of metal slithered down over my
collar and into my cleavage. His fingers followed in its track. Lightly, fleetingly, almost as if to give the impression that it was accidental. He moved my hair back into position and
spoke
close to my ear,

“It belonged to my mother. A five-carat African diamond.”

I felt the hard stone nestle in the well of my breasts.

“Thank you,” I said as politely as I could.

“My pleasure. It will give me something to focus on when you play.”

I blushed and shivered all at once. Footsteps echoed before the door and he hastily took his position back in his seat. I played on as
my mother instructed.

It wasn’t that
Vincent wasn’t handsome, he was.
I could see how easily he might break a woman’s heart, but there was something about him, beneath the exquisite dress and handsome façade that was shadow
-like and terrifyingly
dark
. My every instinct told me to run.
Of course it could have been the effect of the rumours and servant gossip that lead me to these unfair fears. Vincent was twenty-eight but had already been married three times. He had been widowed twice and his third wife had been
placed
into a lunatic asylum. When I had brought the matter up with my mother
,
she had laughed and told me not to listen to the gossip of serving girls.

She explained that he had married his first wife at eighteen and she had died in a tragic accident falling from her horse within the first year of their marriage. At twenty it was perfectly reasonable for him to find another wife, which he did. They were married three years before she tragically died in childbirth. Whilst in the depth of grief he had fallen in love with a princess
,
who rather tragically turned out to be mad. The romance had been so rushed that there had been no time to realise the maladies she suffered until it was too late. In the middle of the night she had gone into
a frenzy
and tried to stab him. The marriage was annulled on grounds that she was clearly insane.

When my mother relayed Vince
nt’
s story to me
,
it seemed completely rational and I even scolded myself for having filled my head with silly fancies, feeling guilty that perhaps I had been misjudging
him. Maybe he was
not
a
villain
,
but just the
victim of tragic circumstances. But then there were the servant’s versions of events, which although close to my mother’s
,
put things into a rather shadier light.

Gwen was the palace’s wash maid and as such was the easiest to tap for information without being spotted or overheard. When I saw her in the gardens pegging out the bed sheets
,
I pounced, having carefully thought out my questions beforehand. 

After a small amount of small talk about the weather and palace life
,
I asked her as casually as I could, “So Prince Vincent, he’s handsome isn’t he?”

“Yes, m’lady. He certainly is that.”
She shook her head and removed
a peg from her ap
ron pocket before continuing, “O
n the outside
,
he’s a very pretty fella.”

She turned to me and looked at me in a way
that
told me she was telling me more but was afraid to loosen her tongue in case she came to harm.

“I’ve heard that he’s not quite so handsome on
the inside though, Gwen. Is
that right?” I picked up a corner of one of the sheets, hoping that this act of solidarity might gain her trust.

“So they say.”

“What do they say exactly?” I asked, smiling at her reassuring
ly
.

“I don’t know, Miss. I shouldn’t be talkin’ bout fine folks with my low tongue.”

“Gwen, it’s only me and no one
need
ever know that you told me.”

She smiled, caught on the fence of indecision. Then she relaxed and with relief I saw that she was going to spill the beans.

“Well, Miss, t
here was some talk about the princess Annabel
,
h
is first wife. You know? The one that fell from her horse …
supposedly
fell from her horse. It was Martha’s husband, Joe that found her. In the woods she was
…
all beat
up. Her body was covered in bruises – it were as if she had been bare
-
knuckle fighting.”

“The result of the fall?”

Gwen laughed, “Aye, so the palace said, but Joe said ‘
I
t must’ve been a bloody strange thing to fall of
f
a tethered horse and get that much damage
.’
No,” she shook her head, “there were someone did that to her. Someone punched and kicked her to death.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking of something to say that might encourage her to talk on about the rest of his wives
.
I didn’t need to think for long
though, as
Gwen was in full storyteller flow.

“Then he married that other girl, princess Lucia. She was a pretty little thing. The palace said that she died during an early childbirth and she did, but that’s only a part of the truth. Sally, my cousin works
over at the palace as a chambermaid
. She was close to the events as you can get, so I knows it isn’t just gossip. The princess was pregnant but it was very early days, she was barely showing and he was still visiting her chambers at night. I don’t think he was too happy about being told to go back to his own sleeping quarters and so a fight broke out. He’s got a fierce temper
,
so he has. Sally went to go in and see that her mistress was all right
,
but his footman grabbed our Sally by the arm and told her to be leaving them alone.
Told her that
the business of a husband and wife were no business of the serving staff.

“She stood outside of the door for twenty minutes listening to her mistress sobbing and her master raging in anger. It was as if he were breaking everything in
the room.
Sally begged the footman to go in and calm the situation but he just smiled and said,
“Our master is a passionate man
.”

“There were horrible high
-
pitched screams, as if an animal were in distress. Then the prince came storming out of the room, blood on his white undershirt and the look of the devil in him. She ran in to find her mistress on the floor, curled in a ball and blood everywhere. She lost the baby
,
and by morning her own life was lost too.”

I gasped at the thought of it. Although I didn’t like Vince
nt
and suspected him of a shadowy and cruel nature, I had not thought it possible for him to be such a violent brute. I was captivated by the tales that were unfurling, and although doing nothing to ease my mind, I felt that I was learning to recognise the devil
,
which might just help me escape him in the long term.

“And his latest wife?” I asked, both wanting
,
and not wanting to know.

“He turned her mad. No one really knows how, but he did. He’s grown more
quiet in his cruelty – got
worried about the rumours he heard circulating around the
palace. Growing up ‘as made him more sly, b
ut that
ain’t
a good thing in my opinion. A quiet cruelty always
offers
the deepest
cut
.”

“Yes,
”
I whispered.
“
I know what you mean.” I smiled at Gwen, thanked her for
talking to
me and walked off to the woods to think of an escape plan.

*

On the eve of my sixteenth birthday my mother hosted the most lavish ball our palac
e had ever witnessed. I
t wasn’t just a celebration of my birthday but of my engagement to Prince Vincent.