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bait_backup2011-06-20 08:49 am
cellarandmoon.livejournal.com) wrote in bait_backup2011-06-20 08:49 am
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Family built of blood and rust, find a place because we must
It’s awfully white, don’t you think?
*Not that it’s any sort of a surprise, exactly. This is the third fitting in as many weeks and she’s watched in the mirror as the dress has taken shape around her: bracelet-length sleeves, the tight and shiny cuirass of the bodice, a great bloom of voluminous skirts, all blinding and brilliant white.
It was really the only choice. The wedding is to be more Esmerelda’s than either of theirs, a placatory gift to soothe her, or at least distract her, from the marriage that has somehow earned her permission if not exactly her blessing. To that end it’s to be a thoroughly Anglo wedding, of course, and the past few weeks have been a bewildering swirl of alien customs and oh-but-we-must-have’s: an extensive menu and flower arrangements and musicians and other things that Amrita has simply nodded her head at numbly. And of course the thing simply demands a white dress. Evan’s favorite pastime may be indulging her every last whim but the truth is, if Amrita is to carve out even the barest facsimile of peace with this woman, now or ever, it won’t do to rub her face in it--to add public insult to injury, to put a baldly obvious face on the scandal and stalk down the aisle in scarlet like a fallen woman in a wireless serial.
But it made a decent bluff. To that end she’d done her time at Craven and Stone and had come up with armloads of distraction: heavy books of traditional zardosi embroidery, of court paintings of Rajput and Maratha brides, each and every one one in brilliant red and gold. It had worked, and Amrita had gotten mostly what she wanted otherwise, and she is mostly very pleased with what she sees. But there’s a bit of a helpless chill, now, as she looks at the white-gowned girl in the mirror: she’s helplessly reminded of her mother in mourning at her own bedside, of every widow in her wide extended family--not an auspicious connotation by any means.
Antoinette Bertille herself is there, a stout and silly woman with a mop of red curls who is fussing over Amrita with pincushion in hand. As she makes her little adjustments here and there, the woman’s gaze flickers nervously between where Amrita stands on the little pedestal before the mirror and the chair where Esmerelda is enthroned in silence.*
*Not that it’s any sort of a surprise, exactly. This is the third fitting in as many weeks and she’s watched in the mirror as the dress has taken shape around her: bracelet-length sleeves, the tight and shiny cuirass of the bodice, a great bloom of voluminous skirts, all blinding and brilliant white.
It was really the only choice. The wedding is to be more Esmerelda’s than either of theirs, a placatory gift to soothe her, or at least distract her, from the marriage that has somehow earned her permission if not exactly her blessing. To that end it’s to be a thoroughly Anglo wedding, of course, and the past few weeks have been a bewildering swirl of alien customs and oh-but-we-must-have’s: an extensive menu and flower arrangements and musicians and other things that Amrita has simply nodded her head at numbly. And of course the thing simply demands a white dress. Evan’s favorite pastime may be indulging her every last whim but the truth is, if Amrita is to carve out even the barest facsimile of peace with this woman, now or ever, it won’t do to rub her face in it--to add public insult to injury, to put a baldly obvious face on the scandal and stalk down the aisle in scarlet like a fallen woman in a wireless serial.
But it made a decent bluff. To that end she’d done her time at Craven and Stone and had come up with armloads of distraction: heavy books of traditional zardosi embroidery, of court paintings of Rajput and Maratha brides, each and every one one in brilliant red and gold. It had worked, and Amrita had gotten mostly what she wanted otherwise, and she is mostly very pleased with what she sees. But there’s a bit of a helpless chill, now, as she looks at the white-gowned girl in the mirror: she’s helplessly reminded of her mother in mourning at her own bedside, of every widow in her wide extended family--not an auspicious connotation by any means.
Antoinette Bertille herself is there, a stout and silly woman with a mop of red curls who is fussing over Amrita with pincushion in hand. As she makes her little adjustments here and there, the woman’s gaze flickers nervously between where Amrita stands on the little pedestal before the mirror and the chair where Esmerelda is enthroned in silence.*