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“Not so much of that!” her aunt hissed, waving the maid of honor to take the jar away.
This was not an unfamiliar scene, to be propped up in a back room on some sort of chaise with two or three familiar faces close by, staring at her with concern, often patting her inner arms for circulation or fanning her, as if it would make her breathe any better. Rarely did they use smelling salts to wake her after one of her fainting spells, the acrid scent made her gasp for air quite violently sometimes, and force her heart to pound again.
This wasn’t even the first time it had happened in a church. Once when Diane was younger, she had tried to sing the hymns too exuberantly, took in a breath to find her throat wouldn’t work, and crumpled in the pew.
There was some amount of haze in her mind, as she took in forcefully slower breaths, leaning back in the chaise. Diane often found it better to take solace in that haze for the few moments she had it, where most of the conversation around her was nearly muffled. At least then Diane didn’t have to listen to discussions of how very fragile she was, how they should have known this sort of thing would be too much for her to handle, how they shouldn’t have let her come to this.
She hoped they wouldn’t have started discussing seriously that she wasn’t allowed to attend her own wedding. Who ever heard of a wedding going through with a lone groom!
Perhaps her aunt and uncle would find her a more boring man to marry, one with an even more uneventful lifestyle to plan her life carefully around.
Martin eased his way into the room. The words ‘Not you again,’ nearly fell out of Diane’s mouth in a groan.
Instead she winced and tried to look pleasantly at him. She could maintain patience for conversation with him when she was prepared for it, but feeling like she’d had a rug swept out from under her feet, she could not tolerate the thought.
“How is my bride?” he asked with a hopeful smile.
Diane tried to make her grimace seem a little sweeter, but it was like adding sugar to a mud puddle.
“I was going to wait until after the wedding, but I thought it might help to disperse this fraught air,” Martin said with a touch of theatrics, leading her attention to a thin rope in his hand. Down its line, he tugged a small white animal into view.
“A fainting goat for my fainting wife!” he proclaimed, looking especially proud of himself.
Diane saw her aunt and uncle exchange looks. She could practically read the thoughts they were sharing in that glance, raised eyebrows over the exotic, sudden surprise from the man they’d been vetting as suitable for her for the last six months.
Martin went on to explain he’d first heard of the breed from a trader who had brought them over from the colonies, how they would bound over fields as any goat before going stiff as a corpse.
“Just watch, any moment now,” he said, a little too much glee in his voice.
Her teeth clenched.
She’d always been known in town as ‘the fainting girl’, known to collapse rather suddenly. She’d already gotten used to someone exclaiming, “Oh, I’ve heard of you!” upon introduction, that her peculiar constitution had preceded anything else about her.
A weak heart, an apothecary had once ruled, and left the matter at that after he’d tried to bleed her arm for a fever, and she’d fainted at the fear of a leech touching her. At least then she’d already been in bed and hadn’t been conscious for the bleeding. Perhaps if it had been a physician or a surgeon attending her, she might have been given a different ruling, but there were none for miles.
Diane didn’t have a weak heart; that much she knew. She tried to tell the apothecary as much. She knew her body well, being the one living in it— she knew that her heart could race, or pound from sustained exertion with as much ease as anyone’s. But she didn’t have the right words to describe what it really was. Sometimes, she simply took in the wrong sort of breath. That laughing too hard or a yelp of surprise could get stuck in her throat, perhaps something was twisting or blocking. All Diane knew was that such a quick breath could leave her on the ground.
It didn’t matter, no one listened to her. Not once since the apothecary instructed her aunt and uncle that anything too boisterous or exuberant was out of bounds for her, even novels that were too dramatic were confiscated.
Life behind guardrails, Diane had long given up on being envious, or angry, or anything at all. She’d been so angry she was dizzy before, but it led nowhere, and seemed to only prove her guardians’ point. In these last few years, her most frequent emotion was merely resignation.
The apothecary’s word hampered everything, the friends she could have, the food she ate, the books she read, the hobbies she kept, her education, how her family treated her, everything. She wasn’t even allowed to practice the piano anymore.
She waited for her annoyance, no, her anger to subside, the way she waited out all strong emotions. But it only grew with every time Martin said again, “Any moment now, he’ll just topple over.”
Diane watched the small white animal, quivering in place the way all baby animals did, its existence as much of a joke as her own to Martin.
She had to look away.
Her eyes settled on Mr. Graves, standing outside the vestibule door with the rest of the wedding party. He stood just at the doorjamb, every now and then casting his gaze casually within.
The eyes of everyone within the vestibule were on the supposed fainting goat, watching for its trick even though they’d seen Diane accomplish it minutes ago.
Because of it, no one saw when Diane locked eyes with Mr. Graves and held his stare. She had complained to him on occasion of how people behaved after she fainted. He was rarely much for providing conversation, but he did listen. His gaze seemed to cut through the confused and worried air of the vestibule to her, the only one really looking at her.
Diane broke their eye contact quickly.
“Where are her powders?” her aunt was saying, looking around the room.
