It’s so ordinary, which makes it all the more sinister.
The footman rings a bell, and our ten minutes begin. The room is silent and uneventful for a few minutes, but then Marion misses a note and gasps, pulling her hand back from the keys as if she’s been burned.
In my distraction, I miss a stitch. There’s a sudden prick to my middle finger, like I’ve just been stabbed by an invisible needle. Blood beads on the tip and drips down the silver thread pinched between my fingers.
I glance at Olive, who is sitting with gritted teeth, bouncing her leg up and down uncontrollably.
From the other room comes the sound of voices, music, and then, suddenly, the smashing of porcelain. I keep my eyes down, terrified to miss another stitch.
I sew for another ten minutes, letting my eyes glaze over the horrible words I’m stitching, and then rotate to the next station, the pianoforte.
It doesn’t take long to realize why Marion gasped. I hit an incorrect A minor, and a sudden burn rips down my finger, right to the bone.
I jerk my hands back, and from across the room Olive cries out as the sewing needle pricks her.
The bell chimes after another ten minutes. A bead of sweat trickles down my spine. I’m stiff with terror, afraid of the pain that awaits me if I make a mistake.
My third station is the larger table. Scattered are lists of names—lords, ladies, other members of the peerage—and a diagram of a ballroom. She wants us to plan a seating chart.
I begin by arranging the names by seniority, bracing myself for whatever pain I’ll face if I get this wrong. I set down a name, and a shooting pain goes up my foot, through the joints of my ankle, then my knee, then my hip. I nearly buckle, but I’m too afraid to fall.
The bell rings. I rotate into the next room. The first task is to sit in a chair across from a footman who is playacting as a party guest telling an extraordinarily boring story about gardening. If you slouch or avert your eyes for even a second, an agonizing zip of pain goes down your spine.
The next rotation involves placing a porcelain plate on your head and walking the length of the room with perfect posture. Once you make one full lap, a footman places a second plate on your head, and then a third, and so on.
If you drop a plate, you must hold the shards in your hands as you make the next circuit.
The weight on top of my skull is heavier than I expected. I’m making my first circuit when the queen glides by, watching us. I don’t understand which part of this she enjoys. Is it our suffering? The power she has over us? Or is she just so bored after all this time, she can’t think of anything else to do?
She kicks up the corner of the rug with the tip of her silk slipper. My heel catches on it and I fall to my knees.
“That will never do, Lady Ivy. A princess must have perfect balance.”
I gather the shards in my hands and seethe. I make another turn, so angry I stumble again, and a second plate shatters at my feet.
The pieces leave tiny, stinging cuts along the edges of my fingers.
My final rotation is a solo country dance. The torture of this exercise is quickly revealed. If you miss a step, your knees buckle, sending you to the ground. I fall four times, each one harder than the last. Silent tears of pain stream down my face.
We must be halfway through the ten minutes when a shout startles me. I immediately fall to my knees as if cut like a marionette. The carpet bites into my skin through my thin stockings.
“Enough!” Marion Thorne is standing in the other corner of the room at the porcelain plate exercise. A stack of plates lie shattered at her feet. The footman rushes to the shards and picks them up to place in her hands, but Marion doesn’t allow it. She sidesteps and, with one full swipe of her arm, topples the white porcelain plates stacked in the corner of the room. There must be hundreds of them, and they fall with a mighty crash that shakes the floor.
The music stops. The other girls rush in from the adjacent room. Our hands are bleeding. We’re sweaty with an hour’s worth of effort, all of us panting.
“Enough!” Marion says once more. “If Bram wants me as his wife, he knows where to find me.”
She storms out of the room, leaving nothing but a swinging door and stunned silence in her wake.
Chapter Twenty
For a moment we just look at each other. Olive slips her pointer finger into her mouth to suck at where it’s bleeding. My whole body is so shaky with effort, I collapse onto a love seat, and Emmy joins me with a heavy sigh.
As if nothing out of the ordinary has happened, the footman rings his golden bell signaling the start of the next rotation.
There’s a glance of recognition that goes around the room, as if the thought crosses all our minds simultaneously. If we all refuse to do this, a loser and a winner cannot be chosen.
“Let’s call it a tie?” Greer proposes.
