Hard Times: Three Women “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” - Mary Wollstonecraft, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," 1792.
* * * * * * * *
The staff at Cynthia's favorite health spa was too well-trained to actually allow their jaws to drop open at the sight of her, but she could see the surprise on their faces clearly enough, and had to suppress a smile at it.
"Mrs. Mordue!" The hated title again. That did help her refrain from smiling. "How nice to see you again."
As if they had not, she thought bemusedly, expected her to keep an appointment she herself had made, after finally coming to the wrenching decision to send that letter to Nathaniel's head of house. Of course, it was hardly a secret at this point that she was supposed to be having hard times - the sort where she pretended to be under a slab of lead and a tombstone, in fact, instead of merely in disgrace again. She supposed she shouldn't blame them too much for their confusion and surprise....
"Thank you," she said wearily.
"I see you've only registered for two days this time," said the receptionist, recovering her wits.
"Just a small rest cure, yes," said Cynthia. Just a weekend to try to recover her balance after all this dreadfulness with Nathaniel. Just a step outside of life. Not a full retreat.
Her doctors were, she thought, disappointingly unimpressed with her recovery on the whole, with one even saying to her face that it was only because she was really making an effort now. Soon, she thought, she might not require these cures at all, or at least much less often. But now, it would be pleasant, at least one more time, to give herself over into others' hands and have everything done for her for two days.
"I'd like particular attention paid to my massages and facials," she added. She spent a great deal of time just now trying to perfect her own complexion at home in anticipation of a spring wedding; no harm in having professionals contribute to the cause, however much, in their hearts, some of them might object to it if they knew why she was concerned.
Or would they object? The social order was what gave these girls their living, but they were not part of it, not really. Such an odd position to be in, especially since she assumed they weren't married.
"Of course, Mrs. Mordue."
Cynthia winced and impulsively said, "Miss Braun will do." The receptionist stared at her. "I haven't been Mrs. Mordue for a very long time now, you know," she almost snapped, despite knowing it was not really the receptionist's fault - in all these years, Cynthia had never allowed a single public mention of her divorce.
She wasn't Mrs. Mordue anymore, though, and she hadn't been for a very long time. Had Nicky ever married his secretary, she wondered, or was there still no other contender to the not-very-honorable title? And, more importantly, did it matter?
She thought not.
* * * * * * * *
The Hungarian facialist squinted intensely as she applied the moisturizing balm to Alicia's face. Alicia had undergone all these treatments many times before - more than ever in recent months - but she could never be quite comfortable with the sheer closeness, someone else's eyes that close to her currently completely undressed skin. Even her husband rarely ever saw her face without something on it, whether he knew it or not.
"Köszönöm," she said politely - thank you in Hungarian - when the application phase was complete. She suspected her pronunciation was terrible - she had literally only learned her first word of Hungarian after she had started patronizing this particular salon, and had only learned a few for the purposes of being polite; she did not think that she was really young enough to start learning many more languages, and the efforts with Gobbledegook she had begun several years earlier had greater utility for her - but people did appreciate efforts, particularly from airheaded socialites who those people would have tolerate rudeness from in any language.
Her facials were, truthfully, among her least favorite parts of her beauty routines, because during them, she had to lie still, close her eyes, and genuinely behave like an airheaded socialite whose brain neither had nor sought any higher stimulation. She perused papers and rags during the tedious process of having her hair - her best and most coddled feature - washed and combed, but it was, without a doubt, quite impossible to read during a Hungarian facial, and the massaging wasn't comfortable, either. It was, however, part of the game, and so she allowed her mind to roam as her facial muscles were abused for their own good.
How many, she wondered, of the workers here speculated about her behind her back? And did any of them do it at the behest of someone else? She hoped they did. It would make this expense so much less of an annoyance.
Her public profile remained largely static, but with the slightest bit of luck, it had not escaped the notice of the gossips that Alicia Pierce the Younger had slowly increased her use of the spas since she turned thirty, to the point now of excess (an excess she paid for by cutting other luxuries, many of which she liked better). No obvious hard times had come upon her, but clearly - she hoped - she was a woman beginning to struggle with her image. Aside from these endless visits to facialists and mineral baths and expert hairdressers, she had arranged for it to get out that her already shockingly unfeminine exercise routines had increased as well, and made a point of never more than picking at anything edible in public. No doubt some people simply thought her marriage was in trouble, but hopefully, the majority thought she was simply so shallow and vapid that she couldn't stand the thought of looking her age.
It was not, she thought, an impression she would have believed, had she been observing herself. She had, after all, had a fairly impressive youth, in terms of accomplishments and sheer stubbornness. Thad had married her because he saw her as a worthy partner, rather than just an ornament or an incubator. Most people, however, were very stupid, and furthermore, would likely not think that far back, especially since she had gone to some lengths to emphasize to the public that her only real interests were flowers, charity boards, and her children even before she had started pretending to go mad for a youthfulness she was no longer really entitled to.
Not that flowers and her children weren't interesting, of course. She badly wanted a new greenhouse, as being able to produce more of her own citrus and strawberries would help with the large portions of her skincare which she mixed up for herself, besides being entertaining and good for the children. The only question was whether or not she would be wasting money to build a new greenhouse right now. If her rat-faced 'nephew' and the likely largely ornamental incubator (Evan was a darling creature, of course, but the Brockerts on the whole had never impressed her as people - they had no iron in their blood or their backbones, for the most part, at least the ones she'd met. This Emerald had apparently somehow gotten into Aladren, but Alicia only expected this to make so much of a difference) he was engaged to were allowed to force her out of her home...She thought it was more likely that Aunt Bettina and poor Uncle Malcolm would be ejected from their house at last - what use did they really have for it, as old as they were, and with the Anns running their boarding house and Melinda married for almost as long as there had been Anns? - but Marcus' faction might try to dislodge her just for spite, and it was hardly worth the money to build a greenhouse now just to go to elaborate efforts to make it nearly unusable in three years....
Petty, of course. She should be the bigger woman. She liked her house, though, and did not even really wish to leave it to advance up the mountain. If she was forced to move down, then she was not sure she would really be able to resist the temptation to seek a little payback, however petty and small, in advance of more dramatic measures later.
If they would only swear - in some magically binding fashion, of course - simply to leave her and her family alone, she thought she might accept that deal, if Thad didn't feel too strongly about it. That, however, was unlikely. They had already, no doubt, thought they could win it all even before Emerald, and no doubt were even surer of it now.
Perhaps they were right. Perhaps. If they were, though, she would still do all she could to make their victory as Pyrrhic as possible - and in the meantime, would continue this small propaganda campaign of idiotic behavior, in the hopes that any one of them would let their guards down far enough to give her a sliver of advantage in any of her plans or backup plans. She disliked the part, but there were, after all, advantages to looking pointless.
* * * * * * * *
"Hey - isn't that the lipstick lady?"
Margo turned from tidying up some blush testers to look over Janna's shoulder, and was surprised to see that it was, in fact, the Lipstick Lady - the woman they called so because she visited the high-end cosmetics counter they worked at in this high-end New York department store very regularly, and in exchange for being shown the new products and made over a little, always bought at least one new lipstick. Or had done so regularly, anyway, until several months ago, when she had simply stopped appearing for some reason.
Now, it seemed, the Lipstick Lady was back, though she did look a little different. Her luxurious dark hair was about the same, except for perhaps being a bit longer - they had put together that she also went to a salon to have her hair washed and blow dried and fixed just before she came over to their counter - but she looked like she had lost weight, and some color in her face, which was already fair for someone whose hair was so close to black - she was quite pretty, really, the Lipstick Lady, especially for someone who talked about a husband and a little girl from time to time. The dominant theory at the store, based on how her clothes all were clearly quality but rarely recognizable to them, was that she was married to some diplomat who dressed her in the highest fashion of some foreign country, but left her so bored that she wandered into upscale department stores to shop for lipstick all the time anyway.
Tragic, that. Margo so wished she could trade places with her, spare the poor thing the boredom.
She was careful not to allow any trace of that sentiment on her face, though, as the Lipstick Lady came up. "Mrs. Welles!" she said enthusiastically instead. "So good to see you again! It's been a while."
The Lipstick Lady's blue eyes had been staring off into space a little, but came back to Margo's face. She grimaced slightly, and glanced back over her shoulder, then back at Margo; to Margo's surprise, when she was looking forward again, the Lipstick Lady had unmistakable traces of tears in her eyes.
"Yes," said Julian Welles, levelly. "It has been. I'm sorry. I've had...hard times recently."