It was overcast a few days later and everyone looking out their windows was forecasting snow. There was an expectancy in the sky, as though it were waiting for a church bell to break it. The leaves on the pond were like stamps that had been steamed off a letter.
Marie decided she would end the courtship with Philip that afternoon. She felt good about her decision. She knew it was one she would not have been able to make before her father died, and she was proud of her new independence. She imagined Philip wouldn’t be terribly upset about it. He must know it had been a strange bit of luck that had caused them to be together in the first place. She was too good for him. And in fact, she was too good for any of the men in the neighborhood. Sadie was gone and had taken all the blame of the murder with her. It was unnecessary to worry about the effects the murder might have on her reputation anymore. It had always been her father’s preoccupation anyhow.
She went to walk with Philip in order to break the news cordially. She considered doing it by letter, but she wanted to get his answer right away in order to get it over with.
They walked up together into the mountain behind Marie’s mansion in their coats and boots. Marie knew it was something she ought to do in private, in order to spare Philip a public humiliation.
“I have to tell you something,” Marie said, stopping when they reached the bank of the stream.
“What is it?” Philip asked.
“I cannot marry you.”
Philip was very, very quiet. He stared at Marie in a way she found physically threatening. The features on his face began to twist in an expression she had never seen before. She wondered why she had ever imagined he looked like Sadie. She looked and looked in his face, but Sadie was not there. Marie felt alarmed. She had an urge to run back to her house. But she stood there, waiting for Philip’s response. The cloud of white breath coming from his nose began to expand.
“You think you’re sweet and virtuous, but you’re none of those things. You are a little bitch, Marie Antoine. And there’s no way you can argue otherwise. I’ve watched you be cruel to all the other girls for years and years. I watched it and I always thought, I’m going to be the one who breaks that bitch. I’m going to pay her back for everything she has ever done. You belong to me. You think you’re going to break off our courtship and make a fool of me? You are only here because my family arranged for Sadie to be punished for your crime. You owe my family everything.”
Marie was taken aback by the brutality of his words. She had never heard a man speak to her in this way. And since it was alien to her, she knew it was something she shouldn’t be hearing and knew it was inappropriate. She realized the words were sexual. And that these words were a form of dark foreplay. One that made the girl freeze and lose her sense of reality. And wasn’t that the same effect unwanted kissing and stroking had on a woman?
As she realized what was happening, Marie turned to get away. She began to run. Her chest was heaving as her lungs and heart squeezed against her corset. She ran over the rocks of the stream.
Her foot sank in the soil. Her dress was sloshing through the mud and bramble. She felt as though she were in a dream as she was running from a possibly imaginary threat. She thought it was most likely Philip wasn’t chasing her. And why in the world would he be? What could he possibly do to her now?
She stopped for a moment at an incline of trees. She stopped and turned to see Philip was right behind her. He knocked her to the ground.
She felt herself being flipped over and her crinoline fly up. She couldn’t half see what he was doing to her. She couldn’t reach him with her hands. It was as though her dress were conspiring to rape her too. She kicked with her feet violently as he began to thrust his hips up to her. His breeches were down and he was inside her.
She stood up and the front of her dress was soaked in mud. Philip had already begun to walk away from her. It had started to rain. She stood in the rain and waited for the downpour to wash the mud off her. Then the rain turned to snow and she had no choice but to go home.
* * *
Marie yelled out that she needed a bath immediately. She sank into the bath in her petticoats. And her maids poured pitchers of warm water on her. “Just keep doing that for a while,” she said.
She knew from the way the maids looked at her that they understood what had happened. And also that it was something that happened on a more or less regular basis. This was part of life.
She stopped eating. She had always been so plump and jolly, but now she was growing thinner. She stared at herself in the mirror every day. She was glad she was changing physically because she couldn’t accept that anything about her could remain the same. She looked at her face as though it were that of a stranger. Her eyes seemed to have gotten wider and bluer. She stopped bothering to put her hair up in different ways. She let it fall down all around her in a tangled knot of thin golden strands. She began wearing the same simple beige shift dress every day. When she got stains on it she didn’t care. There was a coffee stain on the lace pattern above her breast that looked rather like the shape of Brazil. There was a menstrual blood stain on the back of her dress. It was a menstruation she was rather happy to see arrive.
She learned from the maids that Philip destroyed her reputation. He had sullied her character while he was outraged. And now he could not marry her. If he had waited patiently, he would have been able to use her ruin to make her marry him. Now he couldn’t even sue her for breach of contract. She was certain that Philip was outraged because he had missed out on this fortune. That he still saw Marie as rightfully his and, more important, he saw her money as his. He had ensured that if she wasn’t marrying him, she would never be able to marry anybody else either.
He did not describe it as rape. He told all the other men she had wanted it. He couldn’t resist. She had thrown herself at him. She was so filled with lust and expertise, she had clearly done it before. He had to hold his hand over her mouth because she was crying out so loud from pleasure.