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Mircalla’s lips curled in a smile, her teeth bare and sharp. The candlelight glowed on her cheeks, creating shadows under her eyes. Valerie envied her, how she wrapped the entire room around her fingers with an indescribable charm, how even a breeze bent towards the outline of her body.
“Because they are not you, Mrs. Vertigo,” Mircalla whispered back. She leaned forward, searching Valerie’s face with attention. A single line appeared between her brows, focused and unyielding. Valerie swallowed hard. Never once had she heard these words, aimed at her, reverberating with such thumping cadence. The voice in the back of her head was crying for answers; she shivered and messed up her steps. Mircalla’s laughter rang in her ears. “I would always choose you, whether in a room full of promising men or alone in a lady’s house like this. I’d openly insult them all as my arms hung about their arms. Do you know that?”
“No,” Valerie admitted. She had an almost irresistible impulse to slide her hand up her bare skin and touch her lips, brace the tip of her finger against the roof of her mouth, see if it quivered like hers, felt like hers, anticipating a move that would rip this room apart and leave them together standing in its ruins, pulse to pulse.
“I’ve had my fair share of bliss and damnation though it was not always easy to tell which was which,” Mircalla breathed in. “However, on that day, when you took me in, opened your home and your heart to me, I knew… I knew I would love you.” Mircalla raised her arm and spun Valerie around. She did not hear the music anymore; the sound of her heart palpitating with excitement erased every echo, every melody until every sound rendered itself to a lucid flow. She was on the cusp of revelation, a sight coming from the depths of her soul like a rite and she wanted to dip her fingers to the bottom of it.
“When I look at you, I see who I want to be. I recall, in awe, where I begin. And I end with you. You, you, my darling Valerie.”
“Mircalla…”
Valerie gasped. She never wanted to be seen by anyone but her. Now, under her gaze, she roamed and lived and moved like a willow tree. Everything that had been gone from her, all that she had buried in her mind—a feeling of devotion so great that it threatened to engulf her—returned and she let herself be washed in her waves.
Valerie pulled Mircalla in and she kissed her with the hunger she restored day by day in her presence. It was devastating to touch her, consuming every previous desire. Valerie wrapped her arms around her, afraid to let go, and stroked the back of her head. The golden curls were silken in her palms. She held Mircalla down, revealing her neck, and made her way up to her ear with little kisses.
Mircalla moaned and threw her head back, struggling to make room for Valerie as she was already closer than she had ever been before. One of her arms found the indentation on her back and with a little touch, Valerie caved in. Mircalla licked the wound on her neck. The itch returned, coursing through her like an overflowing river. Their hands tangled with the rush, knowing very well that these were stolen moments, calm in the eye of the storm. They had to hurry, put an ease to these bursting flames before anyone walked in.
Mircalla directed them to a tall mirror. She grinned and hugged Valerie from behind, their eyes locked on the mirror, watching their outlines melt into one another, cheek to cheek, hair tangled. Valerie could notice now the slow and rare beats of Mircalla’s heart on her back, as if knocking on her bones to be let in, demanding access. Mircalla moved her hand up from Valerie’s stomach to her chest, she stopped right below her breast, feeling the fast pulse on her gloved fingers, responding to the call within. “I already let you in,” it was saying, “You are already here, in me, everywhere you can reach for is yours.”
“And if it wavers, I will drag and throw it at your feet,” Valerie added to the humming inside.
“What a shame we can’t keep your heart as it is,” Mircalla whispered into her neck, pressing her fingers harder, Valerie pressed a hand on hers. “Take it then,” she whispered back, “in whatever form you want it, it is already yours and I will follow you heartless, crawl back to you on my knees wherever you go.”
Mircalla kissed her neck.
“This is a very generous offer and I would be delighted to negotiate its terms. But…” She trailed off. Her face darkened, a shiver seemed to possess her. “I’m afraid we must return to the party.”
“No, Mircalla—” But nothing else came out of her parted lips. “Come back,” she said again, hoping it would convince her. Mircalla kissed her longer with mellow lips then, as if this was the last time.
“I’ll come back when you say the truth of your heart out loud."
26
She found it hardto carry on with conversations, and sat long watching the snowflakes from a window. The night had changed. A sharp stillness had fallen upon the guests, lulled by the sound of wind, and the only thing that was moving at all was a tall figure, casting a long shadow on the deserted drive. The doctor emerged minutes later, standing with his back to the room, and surrounded her in a pensive shade.
“Mrs. Vertigo,” he exhaled, brushing snow off his shoulders. He hurried through his words, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about them, and did not wait for her to reply. “I must have a word with you. Immediately.”
Valerie did not expect to find him this agitated. His alarm appeared heightened as they passed the dancing couples and servants with empty trays. For a while, he was silent. They were far from the crowd, but not too far to spark rumors. His lumpy hand was slowly twirling the stem of a glass, he turned to her again, and said in the most nervous accents:
“Do you remember the day Miss Karnstein arrived?”
He was out of breath. The familiar steely gaze did not tell her much, yet it was enough to dislike his complexion. She nodded as they walked along the room. Valerie could see the immense heat that hung over the musicians, dancers, host as it dulled their sensibilities with moist and inescapable steam that was gushing from their pores, smearing their faces with an unfriendliness that chilled Valerie to the bone.
“Do you remember the note I meant to give to you?” He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. Valerie nodded again. She tried to speak, to say anything to break the chains of this oppressive moment, but she recalled the man’s hardened gaze, the way his seething grip made her skin crawl. He held it between his thumb and middle finger, his pressing gaze still in place, then unfolded it. His knuckles were scarred. Some of the wounds were fresh, uneven marks of bright red. She felt being seized by a sweeping dizziness, a mass of noise and fumes closing around her, when he handed the note to her.
She looked at the paper then at him in the eye, with her blank, unseeing stare, as if she were staring at a gulf and its misty distance. The words spurting from her mouth were crimson as though she was slashed with a sword. “Who gave this to you? When?”
She swallowed and looked at the note again; its yellowed edges, the smudged ink fading in the middle, her half-closed eyes glancing over each curve of the letters. She was fighting against her consciousness, against beginning to see what awaited her.
“Valerie Vertigo is the beast,” the note said, “I have proof.”
Under the broad strokes of ink, in what was unmistakably her sloping signature, was Cecilia Harker’s name. In a panic, Valerie searched the room. Among crystalline, unformed dancers that moved on their own accord and the mellow-toned music, Cecilia Harker was standing. A vague, brittle silhouette, her bright irises rolling one way and the other with the terrible intensity of her laughter. She drew her shoulders together in a moment of realization; the plot of all of their conversations, the weariness of all sensations was engulfing her again. She burnt like a ship in a tempest.
As tears welled in her eyes, Mircalla’s voice echoed like a bell, unbidden and taunting. She did not hear what the doctor whispered in her ear, the voices colliding with another, or protest when Cecilia dragged her back to the crowds. Her host’s eyes were hysterically defiant and remarkable. She was speaking, Valerie could see that, however, not a word reached her ears. She heard her name mentioned before a cheer went up from the buzzing crowd, yet she felt that it was scarcely possible to react. Her body was being dragged on limp legs, the room swimming in and out of focus. In one way or another, her name made all the people, men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of perturbation, for when Valerie heard her name again, it came with the sound of heels clicking on the polished floorboard. The guests were stepping back; their pale lips parted over the egg-white teeth; brows arched and twitching. Again she saw the same contemptuous expressions, toying with their gloves and ruffles, shoulders slightly raised in a challenging manner.
“My guest of honor,” Cecilia was saying, “But many of you know her as the bride of Sir Ethan Vertigo. The mistress of the peaks. But today, you shall meet her again. A side of her, like the new moon, you have never seen before.”
Valerie wondered if she had always been thus, like a candle on the verge of guttering, from as far back as she could remember, had she not waited for fate to wreck her, to dissolve into fission, night after night? She did not find it hard to surrender. There was no room for deliverance, she reflected. Cecilia turned on her heels, throwing her hands in the air and spilling a good amount of champagne on the floor meanwhile, then motioned to the other side of the room, into the darkness.
