Halcyon Days­

By G. P. Sarmiento

When a woman plays with mercury-based lipstick, she finds it doesn’t make her husband notice her more. It makes her more insane. From years of exposure, she has yet to give her husband a child. Convinced he’ll only love her if he has an heir and fearing the end of her miserable but luxurious life, she rips the bastard child of one of her servants from her own belly and passes the child off as her own.

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Louisiana, 1882.

“Her type of French don’t marry,” said the maid to the new servant as they peeled onions in the kitchen, looking out through the wide corridor into the yard where a very tall man and a very young woman sat on a white Windsor bench. “They don’t marry for love. They don’t marry for money.”

“What then?” the girl asked, her eyes wide open with interest.

“What else? Sex.”

“Is that why she didn’t take his family name?”

The old woman scoffed, cutting her hand with the knife and swearing. “They ain’t married. She can’t take his name, even if she wanted.”

“So he’s not married?”

“Oh no child. He’s married alright,” the woman said, looking over her shoulder. “That just ain’t his wife.”

The girl looked out again, trying hard not to stare but the woman’s yellow dress seemed to call for her attention. It buttoned down the front with a high neck and bustle, and what she could only imagine was a masochistically small corset.

“She’s beautiful.”

The woman raised a dark eyebrow and said, “Don’t let Lady hear you say that.”

“His wife knows about them?”

“Well of course,” the woman responded as if nothing, focusing on her bloody onions and tossing them out to the chickens. “She ain’t the first, Susanna. And she ain’t gonna be the last.”

-----

The lady of the house, Marguerite Hyde-Nomini, sat before her vanity that Sunday, the first day of March, when a shy knock came at her door.

“Come in,” she said loudly but devoid of emotion. The room seemed to echo her voice.

Susanna entered with a tray of food. “Breakfast, ma’am,” she said, afraid to take another step in.

“Come here, girl,” the lady said, her eyes following the girl in the mirror. “What’s your name?”

“It’s Susanna, ma’am. Your husband hired me.”

“Well of course he did. You’re pretty.” There was hidden disdain in her voice but the girl tried not to take it too personally.

The lady took a stick of red cream and dabbed it on her lips. Her pale skin seemed to turn to powder in the morning light. She stood up and walked towards the bed. Her stomach seemed a month along. “May I ask what that is?” Susanna asked, setting down the tray and trying to pretend she was staring at the lips and not the stomach.

“Lipstick. I doubt you’d understand.”

“Why do you wear it?”

“I suppose it’s to get his attention, not that it works… I won’t be eating today,” she said with a sigh. The girl gulped and turned around with the tray. “No wait!” she called.

Susanna turned around and faced her mistress. “Yes?”

“Talk.”

She had no idea what to say, so she fed her mistress’ ego. They spoke of their childhoods and their lives and at some point, Susanna’s curiosity diverted to her husband.

The mistress looked suddenly ill. “I have yet to give him a child. So long as I remain merely a title of land, he will never love me,” she said. It would be the only time she was allowed to feel pity for Lady.

-----

Susanna’s time at Nomini Manor was short before she became pregnant with the Lord’s child. It was evident, even to Marguerite. She predicted it, even, or else wouldn’t have bothered to befriend her. Lady was nothing if not calculating, so she hid Susanna away in the catacombs. She wrote a letter to her husband and signed it in her name, a goodbye.

Lord, though anticipating his child’s birth with Lady, remained clueless to Susanna’s status. Then the time came for Lady to give birth. Lord had been called away to Virginia and wouldn’t be back for a month.

Her servants gathered around her. The midwife had been called but it was too late. The baby was stillborn. In her grief the morning after, she called for her lipstick as always and ran down to the catacombs to see Susanna.

The poor girl cowered in a corner among the tombs, her stomach as large as could be. A tray of food rested empty by her filthy thigh. When she saw Marguerite storm in, her own stomach gone, she quickly ran against a wall behind one of the newly built tombs, small in anticipation of the birth.

“The third!” Lady yelled. “The third child lost! But you! You have what I want. And damn it, if I have to take it, I will.”

She grabbed one of the hammers from her baby’s coffin and struck Susanna across the head. She found a knife among the catacombs and tore the baby from her servant’s belly.

The child, defenseless and early, cried in her arms as the light in his mother quickly gave out.

-----

Eight years later, Lord had raised his son to be a perfect replica of himself. Lady had been happy, for a time. Her secret remained hers, but she noticed her health was slowly decaying as was her beauty. All she had now was that lipstick to keep her feeling pretty, loved.

The smallest hint of change and she immediately burst out in anger, quickly followed by hysterical tears. She had stricken several servants throughout the years and at one point, her own son. This is when her husband took notice.

“Marguerite, what’s happened to you? You used to be beautiful. You used to have class and etiquette. Now you’ve turned into a sad whore! Wipe that lipstick from your mouth!” he confronted her one day.

“Whore? So says the man who spends Hallow’s at Herring’s!”

“Touch my child again and I’ll send you back to the hole you came from, understand?”

Marguerite started to laugh. “Your child? Yes, yours. Not mine! He’s all yours. I want nothing from him,” she yelled. Lord Nomini looked taken aback. “I killed her! I killed her for you! And this is how you repay me? You don’t deserve him.”

“What?” he yelled back, taking her arm and pulling her towards him. “Who did you kill? Who did you kill?!”

“Would it matter? Would you remember her name?” she said, a single tear escaping her. “Remember Susanna? I killed her for you, Mattheo. I took your bastard child from her and gave him class. I gave him our way of life and-- and he’s you! You don’t deserve him! You don’t deserve him! You don’t deserve him!”

In a mad rage, Lady stormed through her great manor to the terrace where his son would surely be sleeping in the noon hammock. She grabbed the first silver candlestick she saw with her decrepit hands and went to swing at her boy when Lord came up behind her and pushed her to the ground.

The boy suddenly woke, jumping from the hammock to see the end of his parents’ squabble.

“Go inside, boy. Forget what you saw here,” the father commanded sternly, holding the candlestick in his hand high above them as if he could strike her at any moment. As soon as the boy left, he turned back to her. She had already begun to crawl to the hammock to pull herself up when she saw the horizon of midday across the river by the manor.

She turned back to her husband with weary eyes and said, “What’s happened to us, Mattheo?”

“You can’t lose what you never had, Marguerite,” he said coldly, turning back into the manor.

Knowing her place at the manor was gone, she lunged herself at him with only bare hands just as he swung around to speak again. The candlestick in his hand slammed against her just as she turned, throwing her over the edge of the terrace onto the ground three stories below.

Mattheo looked down at his hand and at her body below and ran downstairs, not to the yard but to the catacombs.

There, in the corner, Susanna’s skeleton still rested against the wall, the tray still by where her thigh would be. He saw his lost children’s coffins and he made a decision. Marguerite would have her place in the tombs, beside Susanna so when his son grew up, he too would have a place in the family Lord loved so much.

--The End.--

DID YOU KNOW?

Inspirations and references:

Long corridors -- French architecture, when blended with Louisiana weather, gave birth to wooden homes with various entryways.

Windsor bench -- Built with a wooden seat into which are fixed the backrest and undercarriage. Typically, the backrest is formed of steam bent pieces of wood. It was originally of British origin but in this case, is used as a French trait of Louisiana.

Bustle -- A wired undergarment meant to lift up the dress in the back, popular in the 1880’s with corsets and bonnets.

Susanna -- The name was inspired by a main character in Legends of the Fall, who couldn’t have children and later killed herself, meant to be ironic.

Marguerite -- from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

Hyde -- from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Nomini -- means “name” in Latin. She is also referred to as “Lady” throughout.

Catacombs -- Long tunnels under old family houses used as family cemeteries and basements, since rich families seldom moved, merely added to the house if more space was needed.

History of lipstick -- For a long time, lipstick was considered trashy because only working girls wore it. Then Queen Virginia of England made it a fashion statement by keeping her face ghostly white and contrasting red lips. This is why he calls her a whore.

Lady mad that he couldn’t make it to Hallow’s -- Short for “All Hallow’s Eve” which was an early form of Halloween, sometimes celebrated as a form of Thanksgiving-like, family event.

The candlestick as the murder weapon -- A reference to the game “Clue” where a candlestick was used as a murder weapon.