Sweet Savage Eden

I
   

W
hile the cold wind whistled and raged, threatening to tear asunder the rafters of the tiny attic bedchamber, Jassy clenched her hands into fists at her sides. She didn’t feel the cold as she stared down at the frail beauty on the bed cocooned in threadbare blankets. The woman drew in a rattling breath, and suddenly Jassy became aware of her surroundings, the unpainted rafters that barely held the walls together, the smut from the candles, the ancient trunk at the foot of the bed holding their few belongings, the cold that ever seeped in upon them. Jassy swallowed and her jaw locked tightly as tears pricked her eyes.

She’ll not die like this!
she swore to herself.
I’ll not let her! I shall beg, borrow, or steal, but so help me God, I shall not let her die like this!

But even as Jassy silently made her vows, old Tamsyn was staring at her sadly, shaking his head just slightly,
in a way not meant to be seen, and certainly not understood. But Jassy understood the motion all too well; Tamsyn had already given up all hope on Linnet Dupré.

“Quinine, girl. Quinine might help to ease her misery some, but that be all I can tell you.”

Tears welled anew in her eyes; she could not allow them to fall. Impatiently she brushed her small, work-roughened hands across her temple, raising her chin.

Tamsyn was wrong, she assured herself. He had to be wrong. What was Tamsyn but another beaten-down drunk to have found his livelihood with the rest of them at the Crossroads Inn? He claimed to have once been a physician who had even studied long ago at Oxford, but perhaps that was a lie. A lie like the dreams he had spun for her of a new day to come, of distant lands and faraway places, exotic voyages and emerald seas.

Her mother was dying. She had no time for dreams, and she dared not fall prey to despair.

“Quinine,” Jassy said briskly.

“Quinine,” Tamsyn repeated. “But ye may as well wish for the moon, Jassy, lass. The cost of a dose …”

His words trailed away, and Jassy gnawed bitterly into her lower lip. The cost for anything was dear when her mother’s wages at the inn came to no more than one gold coin and a bolt of cloth a year.

And when she was paid nothing herself, as well. Nothing, since she apprenticed to the cook and her endeavors would not be considered worthy of coin until she had completed five years of service.

She lowered her head suddenly, whispering in desperation, “I can beg Master John—”

“Save your breath, girl,” Tamsyn warned her. “Master John will give you naught.”

And she knew that he was right. The customers ate great platters of meat with rich gravy, they drank tankards of ale and imported French wines. Master John was quick to buy a round of drinks, generous to all his customers.

To his servants he was mean and cheap.

And, Jassy thought was a little sigh, they had stayed,
anyway, knowing that he was stingy and even cruel at times. They had stayed, for Linnet had always been fragile, not cut out to work, and only here, where they could share this little attic hovel and Jassy could do the majority of her mother’s work could they hope to survive.

A slight whimpering sound came from the bed. Jassy rushed to her mother’s side, kneeling down beside her, grasping her frail hand in her own. Her tears almost spilled then. Linnet did not appear real at all, but as some fairy queen. Even now she was fine and beautiful—now, when death lay a claim upon her. Nay, not death! Jassy swore. She would be hanged before she would see her mother die here, beautiful, beautiful Linnet, never intended for such a life in such a horrid, squalid place.

Linnet’s eyes opened, glazed with fever, all the more beautiful for that glaze. They were truly violet eyes, not blue, not gray, but deep, beautiful violet. A violet as lovely as the gold of her hair and the parchment-pale, but perfect, oval of her face.

A face not old in years but made to appear so by years of care and struggle.

“Mama!” Jassy gripped her hand warmly. “I am here!”

Then panic struck her, for Linnet did not recognize her. She spoke to the past, to people no longer present. “Is that you, Malden? Tell Sheffield that the curtain must be held, for I am feeling poorly, and that twit of a girl is no understudy to take on the role of Lady Macbeth!”

Again tears burned beneath Jassy’s lids, and dark despair seized hold of her. Linnet, she saw, was losing her slender grip upon reality, upon life. She reverted quickly to days gone by. To a tender past, a far grander place than the present. For Linnet Dupré had not always been cast into such a lowly state in life—nay, she had most oft been cast as a princess or an heiress. She had reigned as a queen, a queen in the London theatrical community. She had traveled to Paris and Rome; she had been welcomed and applauded throughout the Christian world.

In those days she had been courted by dukes and earls, by nobility and grandeur.

Somewhere among that grandeur she had produced Jassy.

And for many, many years Jassy had lived in grandeur too. Her mother had housed a multitude of servants—and treated them kindly! There had been Remington to answer the bell and look after the house; old Mary to cook; Sally Frampton from nearby Waverly to bathe her mother in rich lotions and dress her hair in the latest styles. There had been Brother Anthony to teach Jassy French and Latin, Miss Nellie to teach her to dance, and Herr Hofinger to teach her all about the world at large, the oceans and the rivers, the Romans and the Gauls. He, too, had filled her head with fantasy; stories about the explorer, Columbus; about the New World, the Colonies, the Americas and the Indians. He had told her tales about the Spaniards and the great defeat of the Armada, and how the English still met and tangled with the Spaniards on the sea, claiming pieces of the New World. And he had told her stories about the great houses and mansions and castles within England, and in her dreams she had been swept off her feet by a golden knight and taken to a glorious castle to reign evermore as its mistress. In those dreams Linnet would never be exhausted or overburdened. She would sit at ease and elegantly pour tea from a silver server, and she would be dressed in silk and velvet and fur.

That had all been a dream, in a far distant and different life.