Disclaimer: Moulin Rouge belongs to the incomparable Baz et al. Harold Zidler belongs to himself. His family tree has been mutilated to suit my fancy; for this, I apologize.
Warning: Mild religion-based angst, if that sort of thing bothers you. Other than that, it's a walk in the park compared to, say, Tarot's tale. Speaking of which, does anyone suppose I should bump this thing up to an R rating? Given all the nasty subject matter I've crammed into it, I've been wondering.
Notes: This fic isn't dead yet, sorry to disappoint you.
When she strolled into the dressing room, wearing a ladylike gray suit and the sweet smile of a convent girl, the others almost didn't believe it. Fans, combs, and powder puffs froze in midair; words and laughs trailed off into nothingness; and several pairs of impeccably arched eyebrows simultaneously strained towards their respective hairlines.
The stranger didn't seen at all disconcerted. "How do you do?" she said, inclining her head and sounding as if she had stepped into an elite salon instead of a nightclub.
Pearly Queen was the first to break the silence, with a snickered, "The chapel's down two streets, dearie."
"Then I'll be certain to avoid it, thank you."
That earned her a few small laughs. Harlequin, ever solicitous, seemed ready to go over and introduce herself, but Sonata quickly caught her arm. Exchanging glances and whispers, the others turned back to the mirrors. For another long moment, there was silence. Then Tattoo, still in her undergarments, deliberately rose and stalked across the room for her dress, an action that never failed to intimidate tenderfoots. This one didn't so much as blink. Tigress, stretching on the floor until her forehead was at her heels, received the same lack of a reaction. Schoolgirl snorted. "What is she, blind?"
Unruffled, the newcomer sat down, removed her hat (simple but expensive, and topped with a delicate spray of feathers), and ran an impeccably gloved hand through her loose chestnut curls. "It's lovely to meet you all, too. Harold says I'm to use a spare dress until I've been here long enough to have my own made. Could someone please tell me where to find one?"
Arabia smirked disbelievingly. "Harold?"
The girl looked at her. "Yes, that's his name. And yours is Fanchon, isn't it? He's told me about you all."
Arabia blinked, but quickly regained her composure. "You've talked to Harold?"
She smiled blandly. "Of course. I'm his favorite niece."
It was less impressive than it sounded, but she had always enjoyed subtly shocking people, drawing attention to herself without appearing to do it intentionally. The youngest of five children, there was little to that particular art she hadn't learned. Clamoring with the masses never worked; refinement was out of place and therefore more noticeable. And, she privately believed, more entertaining.
She supposed she had her mother to thank, indirectly, for that ability. Mum seldom spoke above a murmur or had a logical look on her face, but she still knew how to catch people's interest. Not the conventional British housewife, she carried the air of a gothic heroine about her and a French accent she kept her entire life. Added to that, she lived in an almost perpetual state of dissipation, easily distracted by whatever idiosyncratic vestige of thought was nibbling at her mind, never caring a whit if she left went to town in a housedress with her hair spilling loose of its knot. A dreamer to the bone, she had met her husband in France and exuberantly left to marry him.
He was the one from Scotland and nothing like his wife. They were deemed a strange pair, him so grounded and her forever floating above it, but they balanced one another other well. Father had a jovial voice and strong arms—strong enough to toss a child of ten in the air and catch her with a laugh—and a head for making sense of both the figures that flowed in from his family's factories and the whims of his wife. Mum, while she could cook and sew as well as any other woman, was easily sidetracked by her thoughts and tended to leave the more tangible tasks for the maids to finish. One thing she was unfailingly partial to was reading, whatever material was available—second-rate romances, obscure treatises, classics six inches thick.
Naturally, it contributed greatly to her already fertile imagination. Mum had thought it romantic to name her children fancifully, and had spent many an hour scrawling lists of outlandish appellations drawn from flora, fauna, and deities hailing from every corner of the globe. It had been agreed previously that she could name the girls what she pleased if her husband was left to the boys. Which was why the children came to be called Primavera, John, Peter, Michael, and Penthea, the last being herself. Father managed to find ways around it, even so.
"Vera, Penny, have you been good girls today?" calling them when he came through the door each evening. "That's it, then. Give a dance, eh?"
And they would, Primavera perfectly, Penthea still spinning with childish clumsiness. They were what Mum dreamily called warrior dances, the same steps Father's ancestors had danced through in order to celebrate victories after striping their faces with paint and riding to claim their brides, burning villages as they came. Penny was never sure that was accurate, as was often the case with Mum's explanations, but she liked the dancing well enough. It was different and far more fun than the stuffy waltzes other girls learned. When Primavera was too old to find any fun in it, Penny did them alone, showing off whenever they went visiting friends in York or Mum's brother in Paris or Dad's parents in Edinburgh. John sometimes joked about taking her all over the world and showing her off as Scotland's youngest living warrior.
When the fire came, that was the end of that plan, and any others.
Mum was half-sleeping by the fireplace and no doubt assumed the conflagration was only another part of her dream-world. When she finally came to, the pages of her book were blackening in her lap. Penny heard her screams through the haze of a dream, and disregarded them—they couldn't be real; Mum never raised her voice. Only when she grew thirsty enough in her dream to wake up for a drink did it become clear something was wrong. The darkness seemed thicker than usual, and Penny sat for a few perplexed moments on the edge of her bed before realizing the thickness was smoke and it was choking her.
Her first impulse then was to believe she was still dreaming. Hoping for clarification, she went staggering into Primavera's room and a coughed on a smoke-clogged yell when her watering eyes distinguished the shape of her sister crumpled on the floor, ringed in flames. When she unthinkingly grabbed for her the older girl's arm, wanting something, anything, to hold onto, all she got was a handful of ashes. By that point she was half- fainting from the smoke and half-blinded by her tears, and when she groped her way downstairs she fell halfway. The parlor was an inferno, and she ran through it without hesitation to get to the door. Flames caught her nightgown; she screamed when she felt their white-hot fingers lashing her legs. Somehow, she made it out the door, then plunged into the night and ran herself senseless until a neighbor found her.
Oil lamp, was the first thing she heard once she was back in her right mind, bandages swathed halfway up both legs, hands too tremulous to hold a teacup. Must have tipped over, they never had a chance, miracle the youngest had come out alive. Terrible shame, best contact the closest relations.
She asked after the ashes that had been clenched in her fist, begging that they be saved. They gave them to her without asking why, and then handed her Mum's salvaged rosary, one of a mere handful of such things, and told her to keep God close. It made Penny think. Before, she had loved the crisp order and sanctity of the church, sometimes toying with the idea of becoming a nun—the only downside to it being the lack of opportunities for dancing. But it was thanks to the Lord that she was left with nothing but a pocketful of ashes and a few dance steps. An indignant voice in her mind pettishly declared there was no earthly reason she should want to be close to someone so cruel.
They gave her comfort and she gave them smiles, but the question continued to tear at her.
The Lord is testing you.
You'll be reunited someday.
Keep on being a good girl.
She ran through every sympathetic saying she had ever heard from minister, teacher, or other all-knowing adult, and threw each one aside in turn.
It bothered her to no end. Her family was gone and God hadn't lifted a finger to soften the blow. The good, she had always learned, were rewarded, and she was sure she had never done anything nearly wicked enough to merit such harsh treatment. She wondered for s short time if the entire ordeal really was a test, and if maybe she would earn sainthood by it someday. Then she remembered sainthoods were only bestowed posthumously, and vehemently decided there was no way she would suffer through life for God so He could glorify her once she was done with it.
I'll throw it back at Him, show how His test went wrong. So listen, God, I'll be a good girl, good as I was before, but I won't go out of my way for you, no more praying or groveling. I did all that before and you smote me anyway, so if I'm to get in your good graces now it'll have to be for who I am, not how much I curry favor with the Lord.
She excelled during her time at the school Father's parents sent her to, although she skipped mass regularly no matter what the consequences. When she came of age, she claimed the inheritance Father's family had been holding for the past several years and, after several days of careful consideration, parted with nearly all of it. She came close to contributing to the church, but then restrained herself and—look, I'm still a good person—had a school and an orphanage established instead. Then she sat down and wrote a letter to Mum's brother Harold in Paris.
I don't care to spend my life shut on a shelf in some countryside convent. My oldest brother used to tease about taking me around to dance, and I'd much prefer that to wasting away behind a pew.
And now she was at the Rouge, being put up in the house of an uncle she hadn't seen since she was nine. Since then, their only contact had been through occasional letters and the regular payments she received from Mum's family. He was as charismatic as she remembered him, and had opened a larger, more successful dancehall than the one he had operated during her last visit. It struck her as funny, initially, that he seemed as different from his sister as was humanly possible. Mum had dreamed for everything out of reach, while he jumped for it without hesitation. After the shock wore off, she noticed that, in her own way, Mum had been, if not as ambitious, at least as fanciful as her brother. Surely the inside of her head had been as vibrant as the Moulin Rouge; Harold was just resolute enough to uphold his dreams outside of his mind as well as within.
Her first meeting with the rest of the girls was as awkward as she had imagined, but she managed to gain the upper hand by identifying them all based on descriptions Harold had given her. When a few of them seemed to doubt her claim of being his niece and pointed out that Harold had never mentioned her before, she serenely explained she had been in Britain tending to family affairs. When they found out she had relinquished her inheritance and begun life at the dancehall voluntarily, they thought her adventurous but crazy, which made for several interesting conversations.
She was not a born dancer, and felt she had to work harder than everyone else in order to prove she was a good performer and not just Zidler's niece. "I'm used to different dances," she muttered in embarrassment on her second day, after failing to learn the steps of a new sequence.
"Are you a ballerina?" piped an angelic-looking girl. "So'm I. Maybe we can get an act together."
"I'm not a ballet dancer. I do warrior dances."
Once the snickers began to rise around her, Penny had twirled Mum's rosary back into her pocket launched into a demonstration. She ended with a conventional curtsey and walked out of the room before anyone had a chance to speak. Afterward, she noticed with quiet satisfaction that the others treated her like a true dancer instead of an addled leech.
When she decided to have her first dress made, she sat up for over an hour with Harold trying to decide what sort of persona she wanted to assume. He ran through each dancer's role, in the hope she would catch an idea from one of them, but she only frowned. "Gypsy, Spanish, Arabia," she muttered. "Horses aren't for me, no; none of this prancing around pretending to be Arabians or Andalusians." But the only gimmick she could come up with was that of a fallen nun, which was scarcely accurate and not particularly appealing. He mentioned, then, that he had heard about her Scottish dances, and Penny had paused in thought.
She took a gamble when she made up her mind to have a tartan dress made. No one had ever had a similar costume, and there was no guarantee the look would be a success, but in the end it concurrently triumphed and secured her position. In addition, it was a tribute to her father, and it let her wear thick socks that covered the burn scars on her legs far better than stockings. She kept a purse, a sporran, tied at her waist, and sewed into the lining all that was left of home.
"Do you keep anything in here?" Harlequin asked her once, lifting the pouch from where it lay on a dressing table.
"Not really," Penny answered blithely, watching the other dancer's reaction through casually downcast eyes. "Just some of my sister's ashes sewed into the lining."
Harlequin blanched and put it down.
Penny, smiling inwardly at her ability to underhandedly unnerve even in the hard-edged environment of the Rouge, picked it up and pretended to scrutinize the stitches. "Drat. It needs mending. Don't mind if a bit slips out, will you?" She made sure to smile warmly at the other girl before leaving the room.
Still a good person.