Chapter 3: The Spell
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Our Capitán Salazar isn't far off... but don't be too eager for his arrival!
I was on the floor. I don't know when I'd sunk down on the floor, or how long I'd been there, but gradually I became aware of the dull complaint of my legs, followed by a sharp ache in my ankles. With a soft groan, I unfolded my legs and stretched them out in front of me.
"Ah, poor child," Eleni tutted.
I looked up to see she was kneeling down on the floor beside me, tugging the blanket out from where it had wedged between the door and my back.
"You cannot stay sitting here, Mademoiselle."
She shucked the blanket away from me.
"Levez-vous," she gently took my hand, helping me to my feet. "You need, at least, to change your dress, Mademoiselle."
I looked down. I was still wearing the same dress Lady Stanhope had been in when she threw herself off the ship. The same dress she nearly drowned in, my brain unhelpfully supplied.
"You need to put something dry on," Eleni said, as I steadied myself numbly.
"What I need," I muttered, "Is to be back home in my own body."
I raked hands through my hair in frustration. My fingers caught painfully on the damp knots and I sucked a breath in, annoyed.
"You will 'ave to look decent." The maid said pointedly as she stood in front of me. "You should change and comb your 'air. Especially since you still 'ave to go to dinner later."
"I have to what?"
"Dinner." Eleni nodded thoughtfully, as though an idea was taking hold. "My lady 'as been dining with the Captain and 'is officers every night. You must still act like you are Lady Stanhope. At least for now."
"Tell them I'm sick."
"No, you cannot." The maid was now adamant. "You must act as though nothing 'as changed. This afternoon was just an – accident. You must be a lady."
"A lady?" I almost laughed. "I can't imagine anything I'd be worse at!"
"But you must try!" She insisted. "We do not want them asking you any questions about what 'appened."
"Well, I hardly see how I'm going to avoid it if I have to go to dinner with them! And I haven't the slightest clue how to – I don't know the first thing about etiquette or manners or – anything about Lady Stanhope!"
Eleni's eyes briefly glittered with malice, but when I stopped to stare, she only pasted on a fake smile.
"I am sure you can act the part." She said lightly, before turning and crossing away to the chest. "Tomorrow we arrive at St Martin. You only 'ave to be Lady Stanhope for tonight, and that should be enough. Tomorrow, I can 'elp you disappear. You don't ever 'ave to be a Lady again."
She started rummaging through the chest.
"But for tonight, we 'ave to make you… presentable. Maybe, if you look pretty enough, they will forget to ask you any questions at all."
Twenty minutes later, Eleni was staring in deep disapproval at the way I was washing myself.
"C'est trés bête, bête, bête," she muttered, standing back in shocked censure as I stripped absolutely everything off.
"My Lady always wears a shift when she washes!" She'd remonstrated, but I didn't care.
I couldn't stand the way I stank of seawater, and the layers of wet clothes had added a nose-wrinkling coat of unfamiliar body odour to the mix. It was a relief to peel it all off. I did my best using the ice cold water in the shallow basin she'd fetched, but I refused the soap-ball she pointed out to me. It reeked. I just couldn't bring myself to wash with something that smelt exactly like the stuff they used to clean the floors of my old high school with.
Instead, when I asked her if there was anything else with which to smell better, she reluctantly passed me an ornately carved wooden box. Inside the box were two small glass bottles of perfumed oils. One smelt eye-wateringly like sweaty roses, but the other had a slightly more pleasant and subtle scent of orange blossom, so I chose that one to dab over myself. I shuddered at the thought of being stuck for a lifetime without deodorant.
Eleni had informed me, as she'd wrapped a clean corset over the heavy petticoat, and pulled the strings tight, that I did not have to worry too much about manners on a ship. She was certain that if I simpered and acted coy, it would be enough.
"Only one night," she kept saying, with a certain degree of satisfaction. "And then you can leave."
The uncertainty of what I would do after we made it to St Martin was not something I was ready to think on yet.
As Eleni laid out a selection of dresses for me to choose, one thing was hideously apparent: Lady Stanhope seemed to adore showing off cleavage.
"Is there any dress that doesn't show my breasts to the world?" I frowned.
"Breasts?" Eleni arched an eyebrow at me in great disdain.
"I mean, why do I need to show so much skin?"
"It is the fashion!" She said haughtily.
"Well, is there anything that at least covers my chest?"
"Mon dieu! Only peasants and puritans cover themselves to the neck!"
"Well, can I at least wear a shawl?"
"Absolument pas!" Eleni was firm. "You must look exactly as my lady does."
And she pulled out an extremely lavish dress with the lowest neckline of them all, in an obvious attempt to spite me. It looked like the kind of dress Marie Antoinette would've told peasants to 'eat cake' in. Its neckline somehow managed to seem even lower than the dress I'd woken up here in.
"I am not wearing that!"
"You want to pass as Lady Stanhope tonight, then you wear it!" She threw it at me. "They will be too busy staring at your breasts, to care that you do not sound like my lady, non? It will be perfect!"
And she stuffed the other dresses in the chest, before sitting on top of it and glaring at me expectantly.
I grimaced.
"Fine!"
After I'd put on the monstrosity of a dress, Eleni had pulled out yet more things from the chest. I couldn't help blinking in wonder as Eleni laid out a profusion of small boxes of powder and patches, brooches and rings and other trinkets on the bed. How much could one tiny woman wear? But it was when she pulled out an amulet that looked bigger than my fist, and plonked it down amidst an assortment of sapphire and ruby bracelets, that I had had enough.
"No." I put my foot down. "No, no, no, no, no!"
She finally relented on the issue of jewellery when I threatened that it was either the hair or the jewellery, but not both; but not before muttering, "Peuh! Commoner!"
Eleni did get her revenge however, when it came to combing out the long hair.
I winced as she pulled hard to get the knots out, and thought fondly of the leave-in conditioner I had at home – still hundreds of years away from even been invented. After an eternity of yanking the comb through, she then set about braiding my hair, working a string of pearls through the braids in a painfully elaborate style for dinner. She tried twice to put powder in my hair - and both times I arched away, refusing.
"You will be so unfashionable!" She lectured me. "You will be laughed at before the first course is even served!"
But I was growing determined to see the impending night through, and without a single speck of powder, no matter how much Eleni huffed and pouted. I knew I had enough common sense to make it by.
Somehow.
But there was more I had to worry about than a small dinner on a ship somewhere in the Caribbean. I had to worry about what would happen if I died in this body. I wondered if somehow - in spite of everything - if dying in this body might somehow let me wake up back in mine. Perhaps death was an option. Perhaps death was the way to go home. But the thought of failing… it was too great a risk. And I was too scared to really consider how to go about doing it, if I was being honest with myself.
I then wondered how desperate Lady Stanhope had been, to fool herself into thinking that a magic spell demanding the sacrifice of her own life would actually work, and I thought again how something in Eleni's story didn't sit quite right in my brain. I was torn between feeling sympathy for the woman whose body I now occupied – and anger, because her selfish act had torn me from my own body and thrust me into a situation I had no idea how to even begin to navigate.
"There," Eleni finished, standing back to critically study her work. She reached for a handmirror. "Would you like to see?"
"No!" I said quickly.
Eleni frowned.
"I don't want to see what I look like," I said apologetically. "I'm – I can't."
"Pourquoi pas?" Eleni asked in annoyance. "Why not?"
Because I wasn't sure how I'd cope with seeing a different face than my own in a mirror. I wasn't sure if my brain wouldn't completely shut down. And I needed a functioning brain right now, more than ever in my life.
"I'm - I'm just not ready to see."
She opened her mouth as though to argue, so I quickly changed the subject.
"Can you tell me more about what this love spell was, that your lady was trying to do?"
"Peuh! You ask because you think it is the spell's fault!" Eleni grumbled, as she started to put things neatly away. "It's not. She was just trés bête."
"Details, please." I asked tersely.
"Peuh," she snorted, "You are not 'aving any magic like 'er or me, you would not understand – "
"I want to know!"
She stared at me.
"Trés bien," she suddenly shrugged, avoiding my angry look, and fished out a folded up piece of yellowed paper from her bodice.
"This is the spell."
She held it out to me.
The writing was scrawled, the ink smudged across the page, as though done in a hurry. I read through it slowly, finding the writing at times hard to decipher, but I persevered until the end. Something about the spell wasn't adding up.
"I don't know magic." I said slowly.
The maid made another disparaging snort, as she shoved a jewellery box away in the chest.
"But I can read. And this isn't just a love spell." I read over the beginning once more. "This is a spell to be with your soulmate."
"Oui," she looked away, "Your soulmate."
"And throwing herself off the ship was going to accomplish that?"
"All magic demands a sacrifice." Eleni was stern. "It just didn't work."
"Or…" I couldn't help disagreeing, "It did work. But her soulmate just wasn't who she thought it'd be…"
Or when she thought her soulmate would be.
I looked down at the spell.
What if the spell actually had worked?
I thought of the hospital ceiling I'd been staring at before everything went blurry, the voices calling out to take me to ER… I wondered what they'd make of it when the lady whose body I'd swapped with woke up in the hospital, and started speaking in a weird 1700's English accent… But, unfortunately for me, there was nothing I could do about that.
I was stuck here, in this time, in her body.
Permanently.
Until, apparently, I died.
And she'd live out her existence, with all the amenities and hygiene and comforts and freedoms the 21st century had to offer, in my body. Not to mention, with this stupid soulmate the spell had apparently taken her to be with. I felt my brow wrinkling as I crumpled the piece of paper in the ridiculously tiny hand.
"Perhaps," Eleni said slowly, as she mulled over my words. "Perhaps, I – we can try again. We can fix this mistake, by making the correct sacrifice…"
"Really? And, pray tell, what sacrifice," my voice cracked with sarcasm, "Is the 'correct' one?"
The maid stared darkly at the wall of the cabin, before shaking herself and assuming a lighter tone.
"For love? Who can tell. Love magic is strange, and never works the way you think."
"Well," I said, mocking her light tone with a fake bright smile of my own, "You know what. Fuck Lady Stanhope. Fuck this century, and fuck your stupid love magic!"
I turned and wrenched at the door. I couldn't open it. I stared dumbly down at the handle, trying to figure out how it opened, and feeling angrier than ever that even the doors in this century were beyond me.
"Open this stupid door!"
"Non, non," she came towards me, alarmed, "What are you doing?"
"I need some air!" I said loudly. "I need to get the hell out of this room and I need to breathe some damn air!"
"Non, s'il vous plait, calm yourself!" She wrapped a hand around my wrist. "S'il vous plait, stop!"
She had the knife again. She must've picked up the knife from the bed – sometime between putting things away and while I'd been pulling at the door latch – and now she was holding it, a strange look on her face. And in that second, I saw she was building up the courage to actually use it.
A sudden knocking on the door startled us both.
"Lady Stanhope." Lieutenant Scarfield's voice cut through the door.
"It is the Lieutenant!" Eleni whispered, the knife dropping to her side at once, "Tell him to go away!"
FRENCH TRANSLATIONS:
Levez-vous - Stand up
C'est trés bête, bête, bête - That's very silly, silly, silly
Absolument pas - Absolutely not
Mon dieu - my God
Pourquoi pas - Why not?
Trés bien - Very well
S'il vous plait - Please
