1. The Hothouse Flower


    Date: 9/14/2015, Categories: Historical, Author: FeliciaGreene, Rating: , Source: LushStories

    Royal jewels. A glacial calm settles over me; I am in the eye of the storm. I rise silently - thank God we were not sleeping entwined - and slowly gather my clothes, trying to remove the worst of the mud and grass. My corset is a challenge. Each lace is drenched; the whalebone squeezes me like a noose. One shoe is found, then the other. The purple silk is heavy, so very heavy, but I pull it into place without so much as a gasp. I leave the clearing without looking back. I want to run, God knows I want to run, but running attracts attention. Running is what criminals and traitors do, and although I am not entirely sure that what I have done puts me into either category, I know better than to think it puts me at an advantage. She was so lascivious, and yet so innocent. A bright and showy hothouse flower, suited only to one environment. If her climate changes, she will suffer greatly. I think of the stone hitting Alain's carriage, the angry mob at the outskirts of the city. Perhaps the climate is already changing. I think of the boy in the cart. Your kind aren't popular. How unpopular? Aristo pig! I need to find that boy with the cart. I am considering again, the considering that comes when weeping will not do, and it is productive. I have a jewel sewn into the lining of my dress; not a large one, but enough for a ride back to Paris and then, God willing, a ship's cabin. I can write appropriate ...
    letters, forge appropriate names; the house will be emptied of everything valuable before Alain arrives back in the city. My precious bedroom stores, accrued so secretly and so pathetically, will be sold for ready cash. The real stores, the basement stores, will be shipped away with me. My silk dresses will be sold as well; dark cotton pieces for me now. Inconspicuous clothes, and an inconspicuous name, and a slightly less polished accent. It will be a different flowering from what I had imagined, but a flowering nonetheless. My patch of earth will wait for me. My orchids will travel in a secret pouch, next to my skin. One never knows. * Two days later, and the cart is headed for the docks. My luggage is waiting for me on the boat. The boy has insisted on accompanying me; he seems to find what I am doing admirable, or at least amusing. He is well paid, and we have skirted the edge of many a mob. I have begun wearing the tricolore . It seems safest. When I am not dirtying my fingernails or flattening my vowels, I am dreaming of a white smile, a linen shift tossed upon wet grass. A southern wind is blowing; a Versailles wind. Normally it brings the scents of food and flowers, sometimes snatches of music, and I turn my face towards it. Today, it brings the smell of burning. I turn my face away. 'Hurry the horses,' I say to the boy, and he whips them into a frenzy. 'I want to be in that boat by nightfall.'
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