A/N: I'm not sure what to make of this. Yes I know. I wrote it. But still.
Technically, this fic is a spin-off of my longer (abysmally long...) story "City of glass", but it can be read without it because it happens before, and is more of a backstory.
It started out as a finger excercise to familiarize myself with the background I was envisaging for Joly, Musichetta and Bossuet, and turned into something that is somehow in style pretty different from what I usually write, therefore I would really appreciate that you tell me what you think of it.
Also the approach at their relationship is probably a trifle non-standard...
Also, it turned out a lot more angsty than I planned...
Summed up as: Feedback really, really appreciated!
Thanks for reading.
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
They were my mother's pearls.
Tiny, white pearls at the end of the needles. The only keepsake I have of hers, a crude, simple piece of jewelry, quite cheap, nothing grand. I own so much better, now.
I wear them quite often, though. My black hair sets off the pearls, and it fits well with the collier he has given me last week, almost as if it were a coincidence, but I think it isn't.
There are men who pay attention to this sort of thing and he's one of the better ones. So I strife to be what he sees, sometimes, and sometimes I am what he needs. I am the canvas, and he may paint his picture on me.
"Like stars", he whispers as he removes the pins from my hair, and it comes tumbling down, thick, and black, and heavy, and like dust, I think, as I follow, meaning the taste in my mouth
god has given you one face and you made yourself another
It's Monday. He's the son of a comte. Always.
A younger son, mind you, but he's still full of money and laughs and anger, and brown, raucous curls. A picture before and after a moment of glory, like from a story, but I have no time for idle dreams.
He's married, I think, but it's nothing to me. He's Monday, and that's all I know.
Monday, I go to the "Vieux Moulin" or the "Maison des hirondelles", nice places full of light and laughter and the glitter of candlelight playing with the glasses. Expensive places. I wear a dress of rustling lace and the veil of my indifference like an armor.
His hand on my arm is strong and firm. He's the son of a comte and he's used to command the way the river is used to flow. I let him, because he wants it, and when he gets impatient, I give him fire, because he likes to burn, this one does, and it is well to feel like the player for once, and not the toy.
But that is for later, and now there is company. And I laugh and smile, and he is basking in the glow of my eyes as if he had no light of his own to give.
Sometimes, he gives me pearls and jewels, and I wear them on Mondays and hide them, later on, under the loose board in my bedroom, or in a crack in the wall.
Some I sell when he has forgotten about giving them, some I keep, because jewels are so much more stable than money these days.
We all lose our charms in the end, I think, when he mutters about stars in my raven black hair and I savior the moment while I can.
Men shut their doors against a setting sun.
I am kneeling at Euridice's grave, weaving my song with Orfeus, as one of three shepherd girls, my black hair hidden under a bonnet, but my eyes are still the same.
It is my eyes he sees, from the box in the second rang, as I demurely bow and sing, clear voice ringing out infallibly, because this is what I do. And still I see him seeing me, and I am not surprised to return to a set of roses when I return from the stage, fresh and sweet smelling.
It is Thursday.
So Thursdays now I go to "Le chat qui pêche" with this officer of the national guard. He's old enough to be my father, but I don't mind, because there is something to be said for experience, both in society and bedsport. He is generous, believes my story of the sick mother in Quiberon without questioning and helps me because he can.
He is jealous, though, and not eager to share, and so I am fire and ice, in the turns and shifting of weeks passing by. He learns quickly that he will follow my schedule or not at all, and this is a gamble I win, because I am young and he is old, and there is something to be said for vigor, both in society and bedsport.
I am not above taking what I can. I am the tide. I roll in with the fury of the moons, and what falls prey to foam and water, I take to the sea, never to return.
hell is empty and all the devils are here
There are these three, and many more besides, and I dance and I smile, and I scorn and I scold, and all the while, the little pile of money under my bedroom floor grows and grows. I keep them apart, and I am good at it, sell myself to them with laughter and smiles and wait for the rainy day.
Diamonds are a girl's best friends.
For you and I are past our dancing days
It is Wednesday and I am the second lady of the queen of the night, and quarrel with Emilie and Sabine about Tamino. All three of us have fallen in love with him, while he so clearly loves another, and now we quarrel about the bounty of his heart that is being lost to us forever.
Love is a fool's errand, I think, and I appreciate the irony of the song and the words come so much sweeter and easier. I smile in the candlelight and can love only where I am.
It is a Wednesday, so I am free to choose my own errands, but he is a welcome distraction.
He only comes when he is with money to take me out – he knows that much about me – but I don't expect gifts as with the others, because he is fun to be with and will appreciate the irony of today's performance. To be able to laugh, seriously, with someone, is a gift of another kind.
It is curious how with him I do not have to be anything, and it is curious that he knows. And still comes back.
With him, I am just Musichetta.
He is not much to look at, his hair, that has never been very strong to begin with, is already receding, the hairdress of a man twice his age, but he laughs about it, and laughs, and so I laugh as well until my sides hurt and I forget about tides and suns, stars and dust, if only for a while.
He has acquired some money – and the story alone is worth listening – and takes me out, but never the same place, and never one that I go to with the others (he goes as far as actually asking). And when, later, we are in my small apartment (he has none, at present, and is staying with a friend, but my place is discreet for a reason), I feel light, reckless and carefree, and for the briefest moment I wish he would find some money more often.
The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief
This Saturday he came for the music, not for me. It's "Orfeo" again, and he is not alone this time. I go through the motions, am a shepherd and a specter, and my voice rings out as usual, as if this day would never be different.
He does not wait for me, but I see them, on my way home, sitting outside a café close to the theater, smoking and drinking, and he tips his glass to me in a mock salute that suits him well.
"Sit with us, Musichetta", and this is not how I do things, but today is apparently different, and the evening is warm and my flat will be boring, and so I follow him and am invited by an unknown man who smiles too much and fiddles with his cane constantly.
His hair is the color of the sand of my homely shores, and curling in the nape of his neck, the eyes, hidden behind spectacles, are just a slightly darker shade of sandy brown.
I was told that in the land of Egypt, the far-off place in the desert where Napoléon has traveled and brought back so many interesting things, people vanish under sand, never to be seen again.
But I am bréton. I know nothing of this sort of heat.
i pray you, do not fall in love with me, for i am falser than vows made in wine
He does not stick to the rules.
He comes and goes as he pleases, and when he comes to the opera, he catches me unawares and talks and laughs and looks at me with those brown eyes as if I were what he sees in me.
He learns only slowly, but one day, his friend must have explained to him who I am, because he takes me out as the others do, and like them he is generous, but unlike them he is tender, and when I enter the place where he lives, there is a memory of summer at the beginning of October hanging between the walls.
He is careful as he removes the pins from my hair and they wander through his fingers as he looks at them with the slightest frown while I wonder if his hands will be strong or careful, for he is a strange boy.
"Don't they hurt?" he asks finally, wincing, and I am tempted to say yes.
yet do i fear thy nature; it is too full o' the milk of human kindness.
His name is Joly. It's his friend who tells me, together with the story, that they call him "jolly", like the English would, which is joyeux, and more than that.
It suits him, with his laughter and his fidgeting. He is a boy, not yet a man.
And this is so easy.
I tell him of my mother when I see him again, his head on my shoulder, his fingers in my hair.
"Oh", he says, and thinks on it a moment.
He is rich, I know this, the cane, the clothes, and I can see it in the way he moves and holds himself, but he is also young and full of dreams and foolishness, but I cannot be idle and reckless and I will not be swallowed by the sand.
I will not always be beautiful.
But I will always want to live.
"Can you describe the symptoms?" he asks, and whatever I have been expecting, this is not it.
There is no mother, of course. There was, but that is very long ago, so long that I do not remember much, but I am a very convincing liar, and I know how to make believe.
"This sounds like gout", he says, thoughtfully, and watches me with eyes the shade of winter sand. "Unusual for someone poor", and he retreats slightly, immediately, as if in fear that he has offended me, but I want him to think I'm poor, don't want him to know about the money under the floor and in the wall and so I smile and he smiles in return. "I could travel there and have a look at her", he offers sheepishly, reassured. "I study medicine."
For a moment, I just stare.
And then I lie with silver tongue, about a doctor who comes to her, but for whom I need money, every day, every week, and he nods, slightly dejected, but does not let go so easily.
"They say the best cure is the right food", he explains with some enthusiasm. "No bread. Little sugar. Drink much, but no alcohol, and take care that…", his words have the notion of rambling, and it would be endearing if she were someone else, but I am Musichetta, and I know how to lie.
"He knows that", I intercept, and he smiles sheepishly.
"Of course. And of course I'll help you."
It sounds almost off-handed, with his tousled hair and his gaze, that goes to his fingers distractedly, but I know that Joly cannot be anything but honest.
He fletches his hand, once, twice.
"Sometimes I think I may have caught that as well", he muses. "My joints hurt", but I twirl my hand in his hair, and suddenly his fingers are anything but stiff and stumbling.
Every man has his fault, and honesty is his.
Days go by, and he does not follow the rules.
He arrives one Monday, and I don't see him, as he stands on the sidelines, covered in my ice, for my fire belongs to another that day.
I do not see the expression in his eyes as I go.
Swallow your own sand, I want to say. I am a child of the north. I have no use for fancy.
And while he stays away, his friend is still there.
I am never alone.
But he takes a very long time to learn to play by my rules.
if you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?
He comes back after two weeks, on a Saturday, and I know his friend has explained again.
He's a kaleidoscope. Young and wise, taking me out on a dance until both of us are dizzy with laughter and spinning, and then he tells me incomprehensible stories of magnetism, irons and a man called Faraday to explain it, but the next day he's not speaking to me, because he is going to Saint Germain to look after a family stricken down with consumption.
It makes me feel uneasy, because I am used to being the unpredictable one, and he will imagine coming down with the same disease for days on end.
He will go back, though.
They say in Egypt, there is so much sand that it can swallow and bury houses whole.
But I will not fall.
Even though I wake up in the morning with the remnants of sand in my eyes and I wish I could cry to rinse them, but tears won't come.
i wish you well and so i take my leave,
i pray you know me when we meet again.
He finds out about the others, eventually, and then guesses about the lies.
"Why?" he asks, so softly, and so incredibly, incredibly hurt.
"I want to live." I say. And I apologize to no one.
"You could have asked. I would have given money to you anyway if you needed it."
"Oh", I say, because it is all I can think of as I look at his retreating back, wishing for his smile.
a fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
For a month, I am drowning in sand.
And then, on a Saturday, I go to him.
I apologize to no one.
But he understands why I am there, and he lets me in and laughs, and I pretend not to see the lingering sadness in his eyes.
Pretend not to feel as if I had trampled a beautiful flower.
I forget the pins on his desk, the next morning.
There is enough hurt in me without them.