Even knowing exactly what I intend to wear, I spend as much time as I can laying it out, then applying my intricate makeup, until at last I’m reduced to spending a quarter hour in graceful stillness, a statue by the post of my bed, wondering how in the world I’m to prepare myself for the formal ball. And in only an hour.
I can’t even unfasten my walking dress without a second set of hands. And I can’t com someone for assistance. Molli volunteers for the overtime-pay role of guide duty on Wednesday afternoons. Pretty young girls are practically Sonoma’s corporate mascots these days, to the point that the bust of Demeter in the company logo has on occasion been satirically recast as Persephone. If the commentators only knew. Lady Mei spends most Wednesdays in the women’s center at the Hameau de la Reine, presumably at her father’s behest, though she might be making a permanent place for herself there. Lord Aaron, who could almost certainly arrange a dresser for me, has either left Versailles on business or, in a fit of angst, hidden himself from M.A.R.I.E.—and, therefore, everyone else. I’ll go naked before begging Lady Medeiros’s help twice in one day, and anyway, she’s surely enmeshed in her own preparations for the ball. I could raid my parents’ apartments for discreet access to some dressing-bots, but all my clothing is in the Queen’s Rooms. What am I to do—carry my outfit across the palace like a washerwoman?
The brisk clacking of heels heralds a deliverance in which I can take no joy. Each footfall is heavy, awkward, exactly the way I walked before Giovanni corrected me. So unmistakable is the cadence of my mother’s footfalls that I have almost half a minute to camouflage my frustration and panic before she strides through the doors.
Typical Mother: avoiding me for nearly forty-eight hours after consenting to this appalling new living arrangement. If I didn’t know her better, I’d say she was afraid to face me. But I’m beginning to understand how she thinks; what she wants is for the move to be fully and irrevocably completed before she has to listen to me beg her to put it back to rights.
Too late, she will say.
Except that she won’t say it, because I refuse to complain. Not to her.
The dozen or so people loitering in the Queen’s Bedchamber pause to ogle the new addition to what I’m sure they must have found a dull show. Without asking permission or even dropping a curtsy—as much as to say You’re not Queen yet, and don’t you forget it—my mother pushes the golden gate open and strides over to where I’m frozen in my most languid pose.
“You’re not dressed,” she hisses, taking in my rumpled walking gown and the pieces of my evening finery laid out on the bed.
I’m starving and exhausted, and I hate that she’s here and that I’m going to have to confess my helplessness to her. “I’m not certain how I could be,” I say with a tight jaw.
“You haven’t a dresser?” she says, her eyebrows climbing. Everyone in the room can tell that she’s appalled and disappointed in me, after I’ve been doing such a good job keeping them uninterested—redirecting their focus onto the filigree about the chamber instead of me. It’s worse when someone else strips your carefully crafted illusion away. My mother and the King both have that irritating habit.
“In,” my mother orders, pointing at the door to the wardrobe behind me and scooping the masses of fabric off the bed. “Go! I will take care of you today. We’ve no time for a substitute.”
Together we pass through the door beside my new bed, into the wardrobe, and I can’t decide which is more debasing: having my mother reduced to a dresser, or being so personally desperate as to allow it.
Even so, when she closes the door and instructs me to turn so she can unhook me, I sigh in relief that at least this undressing isn’t required to be carried out in the public arena.
“Where are the Society people?” my mother demands. “You’d think those lackwits would be more punctual, seeing as how they really only have to work one day a week as it is. It’s no wonder we’ve mostly replaced them with M.A.R.I.E.’s bots. I’ve half a mind to buy another block of Amalgamated.”
Amalgamated Robotics Inc. manufactures all the bots in Versailles Palace, as well as their central control system, M.A.R.I.E., who even on her ostensible day of rest tirelessly attends to the palace’s orderly, if marginally less roboticized, operation. Sonoma Inc. partnered with them sometime before I was born, and whenever someone fails to do my mother’s bidding, she blames human frailty and threatens to buy more shares of Amalgamated stock.
“You did make an appointment with the Society people, didn’t you?” she asks.
I wouldn’t even know how. What remains of the Haroldson Historical Society is a small cadre of experts in Baroque culture, art, and fashion. I had no idea they helped the Queen dress.
But then, I’ve never been Queen on a Wednesday.
My silence is all the answer Mother requires, and she sighs melodramatically. “I can’t believe you’re so unprepared, Danica.”