Page 1 of The Betrothal

CHAPTER ONE

ISABELLE

My mother’s voice echoed through the background noise in my head. She was definitely speaking to me, but my eyes remained locked on the family across the restaurant.

The children were out of control. Their mother whispered threats as they tore around the table, while her husband sat opposite her, his brows furrowed with disapproval. Every few moments he would lean closer to her, forcing words through a clenched jaw, which resulted in her turning to the children with increased urgency, trying and failing to rein them in.

Out swung one glass door, children spilling onto the covered terrace where other diners enjoyed their meals; in swung the next door as they burst back into the room, running and giggling.

I couldn’t help the grimace creeping over my face. It was like an accident you could see coming but couldn’t look away from. My heart hammered, knowing their joyful games would end in tears in three, two, one…

The little girl tripped, landing on her knees. Fortunately, the mother stopped her fall for the most part, but naturally she erupted into tears, the cry breaking through the buzz of conversation.

“Isabelle, are you listening to me?” My mother’s voice broke through the haze, causing me to turn back to the table.

My sister followed my previous line of sight, her lip curling as she passed judgement on the couple. “The woman can’t control two children?”

I appraised her as she sat smugly between my father and mother in the booth of the restaurant we frequented on the outskirts of London. Although she had a large family, she had chosen to leave hers at home with the nanny.

Ester had four children. Four. She was a good mother. Her children were polite, obedient, disciplined, and I loved them dearly. But Ester was not kind, and I had wondered on several occasions whether her children would inherit that deficiency. I prayed not. Perhaps hoped is more apt. I truly hadn’t prayed in years. Not that I would admit that to my devoutly Christian family.

“I asked if you had finished packing your flat, Isabelle?”

“Not yet, Mother.” I tried to rein in the sigh. We had discussed this. “I have another week of working, and then my lease is up a week after that. I don’t have that much to pack.”

My job as a Graduate Teaching Assistant wasn’t much, but it was mine, a small token of freedom I planned to hold on to for dear life, even if only for a week longer.

Those of us who had yet to marry and have children weren’t permitted to work per se. Obtain an education, absolutely. Hold down a small job during that time, of course, but only if it was deemed an appropriate position.

My teaching assistant role supplemented my PhD, and although my thesis was finally submitted and I had been successful in my defence of my paper, the term hadn’t quite finished so I would work the technicality for as long as I could.

“Honestly, Isabelle, I don’t know why you bother.” My sister’s voice was shrill. “Father has let this all carry on for far too long.”

I observed Father for his input, but found him studiously ignoring her, gazing off into the middle distance, leisurely sipping his Scotch.

“You should be married with several children by now. I’ve never known anyone so old permitted to remain unwed.”

Ester was married at eighteen, and children followed at two-year intervals, like clockwork. Now at twenty-six, nearly four years my junior, she used every opportunity she could to emphasise how noteworthy my unmarried and childless state was.

Although it wouldn’t be that way for long. Cold dread washed over me at the thought.

“Thank you, Ester.” Father chose that moment to enter the conversation.

My mother responded to his endless support of my education choices with a small huff.

As head of the household and father to an unwed woman, he undertook all decisions on my life until I took a husband.

In this day and age, women held little to no autonomy. Our society prioritised the family unit and population growth, all thanks to the unfortunate decline in population that began several generations ago. Birth rates had fallen, marriage rates even more so, and society as a whole suffered.

Something had to be done! That something was now lovingly termed the Genesis Protocol, ‘be fruitful and multiply’, and the result? Society as a whole no longer suffers. Women do.

The propaganda would say it classified fertility and the nuclear family as a virtue, encouraging traditional gender roles and patriarchal authority. It allowed women to meet their biological destiny, to perform their duty to society, to create prosperity through proliferation.

Those more cynical amongst us might say it created arranged marriages for men who, without the political leaning, might have their elite DNA disappear from the human populace without record.

The horror of natural selection when you had been selected to be lost to attrition.

Our Genesis Protocol looked like marriage and motherhood as a female’s duty. But in reality, it enabled forced relationships, registry systems, breeding assignments, and child quotas as a political agenda.