2. Persephone

Jenny Humphrey had been born far from Fifth Avenue, but she had considered it her home since she had first conceived of its virtues; she had fought hard so that every night, she might climb the servant's stairs to the attic and dream the moonlit hours away with thoughts of what her mistress would do the next day, and what she would wear, and who she would meet. Jenny wanted so badly to be part of that glittering world that it sometimes made her stomach ache, and indeed she looked the part: her eyes were fine and china blue, and her hair was blonde and would not stay beneath her cap no matter how she tried.

Now she took up a hot iron with gusto and tested it on one of her own fair strands. "It's ready, Miss."

'Miss' – Miss Blair Cornelia Waldorf – was wearing silk, a strange glossy robe that her late father had brought back from Japan, and in the morning light she was too pale. Milky veins showed at her temples.

"I'm so tired, Jenny."

"From the dancing, Miss, or from the late night?"

Blair bit her bottom lip to watch it bloom bright in the mirror, then took a seat on the gilded stool before it. "Both, I think."

She could see the lie present in her own dark eyes, but could not own to the truth even if she'd wanted to. What would she say, and to a person like Jenny in any case? The room was heated by a grand fireplace, but still Blair drew the kimono closer about her shoulders and fought off a shiver. He made her blood cold, made her flesh creep. He was a creature as unlike her as it was possible to be, and she feared him down to the very tips of her toes.

Jenny set to work with the iron, twining strands of almost black hair around it and letting loose to create a profusion of curls around Blair's face. The remaining hair would be pulled back and up into a neat bun, but both maid and mistress espoused the softening effect of a coy ringlet or two. They were very nearly the same age, Jenny a petite seventeen to Blair's eighteen. Both were small, slender and beautiful, but one had all the luck – and the financial capability – of the devil.

The other had fashion journals, worn shoes and a tendency to gossip.

"Were there any suitable gentlemen there?"

"That's enough." The rebuke came caustic, but still Blair stared at her flushed lips and felt chilly in the warm room. "That's an impertinent question, and you know it."

Jenny stepped back from the vanity and made a swift curtsy of acknowledgement. "I'm sorry, Miss Waldorf."

"No, I..." Princess. "I wore my slippers through last night, and I was very nearly trodden on by Mr Rose, and I didn't sleep well. I'm sorry for snapping at you."

Another lie, complete with its reflection in her reflected gaze. Jenny eyed the mirror a little coldly, then returned to her work without another word. Her silence filled the air and made it prickle, drawing the eye not to the tableau of two young girls, one dark and one fair, but to the room. There was a grand window on the furthest wall with trellised roses swarming on either side of it without, and white painted bookcases within. Much of the furniture was white: white bookcases, white marble fireplace, white vanity and writing desk. There was an old armchair set at a three-quarter angle to the hearth, and only it seemed out of place; Blair had dragged it up from the study herself on the day of her father's funeral, exertion giving way to grief and tears which had bounced off the cracked brown leather. That feat of never to be repeated strength had sent her to bed for a week, and she remembered him visiting her. He had spoken of his own father's death and proffered flowers like any other well-wisher, but he was nonetheless...different.

'You won't die of this, Waldorf. I swear.'

After that, it had been up to fate to play games with them – or had Blair been foolish to think she could love where she chose at all?

But what came of that foolishness? Blair asked herself, suffusing her spine with dignity and hardening her jaw. Nothing but pain for all concerned. She did adore the sort of novel in which love was pain, engendered nothing but pain, where one could die of love or the pain of love or both together; in the real world, however, pain and love meant nothing save the kind of cold which drew blood up from your insides and then promptly froze you and drained you dry.

It had drained her.

Stringing together her spirits, Blair dressed almost casually in a madder coloured shirtwaist and deep bronze skirt. Black lace lay against her throat, highlighting its pallor.

"Lovely, Miss."

"Thank you for your help, Jenny. You may go."

The maid left, but her mistress tarried to touch her own pulsing carotid, noting in the mirror where – with exact precision, with precise masochism – she had once been kissed.

The blood beneath her skin ran blue, so she could be in no doubt that it was frozen.

~#~

Serena was in the parlour, one hand on the carriage clock and the other forming a fist, her cheeks bare of rouge but flushed nevertheless. A neat line of golden tendrils bisected her forehead, and she was wearing a soft day dress of butter yellow velvet which rustled as she moved.

"B! B, thank God!"

"Were you worried?" Blair disdained the curve of Louis Quatorze chairs and settees that filled the long room, preferring to subside like a pasha into a pile of Persian style cushions in one corner, shipped from Turkey by her father in addition the room's many glowing carpets and queer ornaments. Serena too appropriated the scroll-worked and tasselled sprawl, her sunshine coloured skirts spreading all about them like a halo.

"Yes," she admitted. "I saw him follow you onto the terrace...I was worried what he might do."

"It's what he's threatening to say that might be the end of me."

Serena gasped. "He wouldn't."

"I thought he wouldn't." The cushion beside Blair's left hand glistened like the guts of an orange, and she idly stroked its silky surface. "But he means to have his revenge, one way or another, and I have every faith in his ability to destroy me." Her voice lowered, and her fingers curled into fists atop the fabric as her lips curled into a sneer. "But I'll be damned if I just lie there and let him humiliate me and call me 'princess' in that wretched way of his. Charles Bass is a sickening creature, and he deserves to be exterminated."

"Sickening he might be," her friend interjected. "But that doesn't make him any less dangerous."

"I know that."

"Do you?" The look in Serena's blue eyes was steady, undaunted. "Because for all your faith in his destructive capabilities, I still believe you're thinking of the boy who used to love you, not the man of consequence he became. B –" She laid her hand gently over Blair's, both soft and white and unmistakeably of the beau monde. "You will be careful, won't you?"

"I'm always careful, S."

"Then why I am I not the one who has 'slighted the wrong man' and 'got herself into a world of trouble'?"

'Don't run.'

A deep flush stained Blair's skin at the recollection, skimming over it in favour of their first 'proper' meeting, when he had found her at the opera house. Penelope had assured her that that had to be learned if one was ever to derive any pleasure from the presence of a husband, and Blair had been determined to experiment...it had been their secret, like all their secrets, and now it too might come out in the wash. Hers was a fragile existence, a web of secrets and lies all balancing on the pinnacle of her purity; she felt like a top, standing on its point and terrified of tipping. She had indulged in novels and poetry and resigned herself to a loveless existence, but certainly not one lived in penitence for past misdeeds.

"Jenny?"

Serena spoke sharply, and the maid took three quick steps into the room.

"Will you be wanting tea, Miss Waldorf?"

"No." Blair was on her dignity in an instant, jarred from her thoughts, hot in the cheeks. "And don't lurk in doorways where you aren't wanted, always come in directly."

"Of course, Miss Waldorf. Miss van der Woodsen."

Both girls watched her bob and glide away, and Serena rose regretfully and shook out her skirts. She had removed her hat – a neat semicircle of embroidered white with three gold ruffles drooping over the brim – upon entry to the parlour and now appropriated it once again, continuing to watch the doorway as Blair too stood and began to assist her with the pins.

"I don't like your maid."

"Jenny? Oh, she's one of Mother's charities."

Outside in the foyer hovered that charity, back pressed to the panelling. She ran her fingertips restlessly over and over the glossy pelt of one of Blair's finest furs, her little ears pricked for scandal. Naïve as she was about who one should dine with in Paris and who one only knew when loans were required, Jenny was as a magpie when it came to gossip. Society girls stored up dirty little secrets, so why shouldn't she? While it was true she admired and, at times, even liked Blair, such knowledge of her transgressions could secure Jenny's place on the fringes of her world for many years to come. This time, frustratingly, Jenny had only caught a name – Chuck, which she supposed must be short for something, and Bass, a name she had never read in the society pages – with no whisper of what had been done to her mistress or what she now wished to do about it. It was a conundrum.

A mystery.

Jenny, however, spent her life in pursuit of butterflies, les belles de jour, and did not have time to dwell, instead skittering across the floor to retrieve Miss van der Woodsen's piped custard coloured coat when her two prized specimens exited the parlour. Serena coolly nodded her thanks, and Blair tucked a squiggle of hair back behind one ear and kissed her friend lightly on the cheek. They parted ways, and the majesty of the moment was not wasted on Jenny: one golden head one way and one dark the other, one exiting into the bright sunshine of the street while one carried the remnants of the night before with her, deep into the house and all the way out of sight.

Blair stepped tentatively over the conservatory's threshold where she was not supposed to be and felt the wonderful whoosh behind her sternum she always associated with doing wrong. Such pleasures and trespasses were not to be trivialised, she had decided, and her need for clarity of thought would be better suited amongst all this greenery than in the parlour where society could scent her and pay calls or court. Her shoes struck the walkway with pleasing amplitude, and plant tendrils clung to her long linen skirt as she brushed by. The ceiling vaulted high above her head, some glass clear, some stained. Squares of bright colour stood out starkly against her pale skin, and she laughed like a child and raised her sleeve to the elbow: white arm, red arm, white arm, green arm. It was vulnerability, of a sort.

She should not have been vulnerable here.

She should have hidden behind all her Louis Quatorzes or taken to her bed and called for ice, and not forgotten herself long enough to drown out the sound of his footsteps on the gleaming floor.

"How did you know where to find me?"

His answer was stunningly archaic. "I could always find you in places where beauty is born and dies."

The air was balmy, almost unpleasantly so.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You do." He curled his fingers around a many tongued blossom, met her gaze; crushed it. It was barbaric, and she could not take her eyes from his. "You understand flowers because you know they can't be lovely for ever, and neither can you. You'd sell your soul for the right match, be it for your mother's sake or yours."

"But not for yours."

"Very astute – but no, that's not my game." Chuck was resplendent as he caressed the broken flower head, dainty and now dead. The sunlight fell on him unbroken, catching in the molten set of his eyes, lighting all the elegance that money could bring and all that used to lie between them. "I don't want you anymore, and I can't see why anyone else would."

"Then leave."

"I would, but..."

"But?"

"But you're here."

Blair's mouth twisted, and she felt her stomach twist with it. "Spit it out," she told him. "You'll choke on your own smugness otherwise."

"As you wish." In a moment of pause, he laid his sleeve against the deeply purple petals of a black tulip, making as if to match the colours before rising to meet her ire with so little temerity that she might as well have been a flower herself. "No man loves where he's not wanted, so you'll fall for me – day by day and hour by hour, but so they all can see this time." There was no light in his look, no emotion behind the words. He spoke of love with an empty heart, and it was stunning and callous and his voice was like careless velvet. "We'll dance, we'll smile, we'll court; and if when I'm done some fool still wants you, you have my blessing to be as monotonous and birth as many heirs as you so desire."

"But you hope no one will want me."

"Yes."

"So I'll be alone."

"And tortured, preferably."

"And if I don't play along?"

"Then the world will know every inch of your body as intimately as I do."

Blair turned her cheek and forced her face into composure, but even her profile was stony. "You know nothing about me," she said, in a hateful little voice that was low and hard and colder than frost.

"How odd, when I was the one to make those pretty eyes shut."

The eyes shut, but not in pleasure this time. For all he was a few feet away, he may as well have twined his fingers into her hair and yanked her head in the direction he wanted it. Blair saw the game, knew the game to be as damning and complex as she herself could have created. Her mother would be horrified by a renewal of this acquaintance, so he would drive away her family. She would be unable to defend or explain herself to Serena, Isabel, Penelope, so he would strip her of her friends. Finally, every eligible gentleman would soon think her captivated and beyond their grasp, so her future would dissolve as quickly as the sunlight dissipated into a halo of green around the ferns.

She loathed him.

There was no word for how much she loathed him.

"Why not draw a sword and run me through?" She inquired acerbically. "Or, better still, expose me now? Why have me dance and scrape and smile for you? Unless..." Blair opened her eyes, and swallowed her foreboding to let challenge bode black in her pupils. "Unless you want more."

One corner of Chuck's mouth pulled; he did little more than bare his teeth at her inference. "You held a certain fascination when you were beautiful – delicate – and untouched. I almost hoped you would be married when I returned, out of my reach, no longer likely to risk yourself by entertaining gentlemen alone in your house." He flicked the brim of his hat in one quick movement, and the brim tilted rakishly over his right eye. "Who knew I would find you waiting for me, and just as unguarded as ever?"

"You disgust me."

"Perhaps. But you'll still play, for the simple reason that no one cares for your own skin as much as you do."

"I hate you."

"That was funny when I loved you." His fingers were stained red from spilled pollen. "Not anymore."


Thanks to: Bellemme, Lexi1x07, chuckandblairlove, niinjjakiitten, dreamgurl, xoxogg4lifexoxo, MegamiTenchi, Arazadia, Laura, Kate2008, Maribells, blair4eva, thegoodgossipgirl, SaturnineSunshine, QueenBee10, TruC7, Star-crossed92, batgirl2992, abelard, blackheart4life, Whatevergirl1985, Lalai, Rf, CBfanhere, Lil Miss Chuckles, tinamarie333, notoutforawalk, GGfan73104, flipped, mlharper, teddy bear, louboutinlove, iloveglee123, vivalachair, lisottina81, Spiros, syatapandlisten and ggloverxx19. An additional 'God bless' if you, like me, really ought to be revising right now.
Fan Forum ladies and Gossip Girlsss girls, you are the strawberries and crunchy granola on the yoghurt that is my life. I've got my eye on you motley crew on Fan Forum, though...if you wait until I've finished the entire fic to review, I shall be very cross with all of you!