The Bricks of Shame

Dolores Artois.

She was born into a family whose history could be called either long or short, depending on how one told it.

What that meant was this: in Beloff, the country where she lived, she belonged to the social class known as Immigrant Nobility.

It had all begun when her father was slandered by a country gentleman back in their homeland.

Her father was a terribly stubborn man who did not know how to bend his pride, and so enraged by an intolerable verdict that he resolved to emigrate to Beloff, taking his wife and three children with him.

Dolores was six years old at the time.

Her first memory of Beloff was of white clouds stretched smooth as if painted with a roller, and the sky bleeding violet in the gaps between them.

After three days at sea, the Artois family arrived with bodies and hearts alike worn out, and even the air carried a damp, musty stench they had never known before.

Black birds wheeled overhead. Dolores was in the middle of grieving a hair ribbon she had treasured until it faded to a sun-bleached yellow—she had left it in the carriage without noticing and lost it forever.

Her father, ears scarlet with fury, stared straight ahead and said nothing.

Is this the right place? Have we made some terrible mistake?

It was her role to carry the youngest, Pablo, then still an infant, while her mother—slumped like riverside brushwood—held the hand of her little sister, Anaïs.

Directly before them stood a single shabby wooden building, its planks barely holding together, the sort of place one expected a ghost to walk out of.

There was no fence, and when the wind blew, the hinges creaked—kik, kik—a dreary sound that raised gooseflesh. Her mother burst into tears. That place was the first home of the Artois family.

It was a tragedy beyond all laughing.

Back when they lived in Victuria, there had been an emigration broker from Beloff who came calling at their estate now and then to keep company with them.

Her father trusted the man a great deal. Indeed, it was likely Marc's encouragement that had given her father the courage to try living in Beloff at all. Marc had boasted loudly that he would take full responsibility for their relocation.

But just as they were to board the ship for Beloff, word came that Marc had caught a virulent epidemic and died.

By the time the news reached them, they had already set foot on Beloff soil.

The money had already been paid in advance. Their coffers were empty.

Stranded with the rug pulled out from under them, they had no choice but to finish the emigration through an acquaintance of Marc's.

That proxy, apparently mistaking the Artois family for a pie fat enough to devour, extorted an outrageous profit from them before leaving them in this place and disappearing.

Are we really supposed to live here?

In Dolores's memory, their family back home had been comfortably well-off, so the plank house was something dreadfully, fundamentally wrong.

Her father ground his teeth and said:

"If you have a roof to lay your head under, you're in no position to complain."

The wrongness did not end there.

Immigrant nobles from the neighboring nations—Corten, Hennessy, Schallotte, Triabeul, and the like—received quite a varied range of treatment in exchange for what they brought with them.

Some were appointed to public office in Lenore; some received deeds to land and titles of right.

Others, of course, smashed headlong into the wall of reality: lives of quiet, unremarkable poverty.

Those from the tiny island of Victuria faced that wall of reality one hundred percent of the time.

The Bellegard Ministry of State, Beloff's central government, maintained a policy of goodwill toward nobles seeking asylum from neighboring regions—verifying the titles and stations they had held on the continent and granting them a measure of recognition. But those from Victuria were excluded from those benefits.

There was no Beloff embassy in Victuria, and because of that, there was no way to verify anyone's standing.

But Marc said it would be no problem at all.

In an instant, the entire family was reduced to what could only be called the lowest class of society.

Laughable lowborns—people who could no longer even be respected as nobility.

She remembered how her mother and father fought for days on end over whether they ought to return to their homeland.

She could no longer recall who had wished to stay, and who had wished to swallow the humiliation once more and go back to Victuria—but in the end, they decided to stay.

Her mother became a textile mender for the neighborhood. Dolores never learned exactly what her mother's work entailed, but she knew her mother left for and returned from a fabric shop each day.

Her father worked at a brick factory. It did not take long before she was watching him, worn down from hauling bricks all day long, drinking every night.

With both parents thrown into the struggle for a living, Dolores began her role as a second mother, caring for her two younger siblings.

She was seven years old.

Though the family fortune had collapsed in a heartbeat, her father was a responsible man, and her mother had the sort of personality that made friends easily.

While the family scraped by hand to mouth on whatever her father managed to bring home, her mother mended textiles and mingled with people.

And so it was neither the reward of her father's steady labor nor the wages of her mother's desperate mending that revived the House of Artois.

It was the connections born of her mother's sociable nature.

Poor as they had become, her father—prideful of having once been nobility—scarcely uttered a word outside the house. Her mother was different; she seemed to have forgotten her time in Victuria entirely.

"Come in, come in! If we don't mark an occasion like today, when would we ever gather like this?"

She invited people and accepted their invitations. She worked alongside them, sometimes introducing them to one another, sometimes being introduced, and little by little she widened the family's circle.

Now and then her father would clutch his pipe, pull a fearsome face, and erupt in fury at Dolores and the children because their mother was always out and about. Yet the moment their mother returned home, he went perfectly quiet.

Her mother's connections changed their lives. Connection after connection after connection, passed from hand to hand, at last reached the district investigator of Aquigneux, where the family lived.

Her mother laid bare the countless injustices and tragic suffering they had endured from the very moment they arrived in Beloff... and, truly astonishingly, the district investigator of Beloff came back having raised the dead.

Marc—the man who was supposed to be dead—was brought in under arrest.

No—how could—

What was it that tormented her father most on that day?

Was it the loss inflicted by Marc, who had sold off every family heirloom they owned? Or was it the betrayal of a man he had trusted?

Dolores thought she would never forget the look in her father's eyes as he fell into an endless, bottomless void.

Of the sum Marc had swindled from them, only a portion ever made its way back.

Yet even that portion amounted to several times everything they held, and so the Artois family was spared the depths of gutting poverty.

They escaped the tiny wooden house too—rotting, sagging, with insects crawling across the floor.

A respectable house with five sturdy brick-walled rooms was waiting for them.

The bricks that raised those walls were the fruit of the humiliation her father had endured as a brickworker. That was not her own opinion—her father said so himself.

"Every one of those bricks is a disgrace piled on my back."

But what mattered, all the same, was that their life had improved. Not having to worry about food to eat or clothes to wear put Dolores at ease.

Her mother still went out now and then to help with the mending work, but she also received invitations to neighborhood tea parties and salons, and came to share in the elegant culture of Aquigneux.

Those who wished to lift the family up would laughingly address them by the now-hollow title of Count.

On those evenings, her father's laughter—long vanished, as if swept away by the years—would come and go like a surge of homesickness that soaked the heart.

As was true of most people from Victuria, Dolores's parents placed tremendous value on education—though, admittedly, only for the eldest son charged with carrying on the family line.

Be that as it may, thanks to it, Dolores entered the elementary parochial school of Aquigneux in the role of Pablo's guardian. It was a small school with an enrollment of about forty.

She was eleven; Anaïs and Pablo were six and four.

Life at the parochial school was not easy for Dolores.

Having nothing in her that resonated with religion or any firm notions of the clergy, she found the Bible nothing but tedious.

Her interests diverged entirely from those of her schoolmates, who were mostly of the middling classes, and it was difficult to find a friend with whom she could share her heart honestly.

That Pablo had entered an educational institution at so young an age surely played its part too—most of her free periods were spent looking after him.

And yet Dolores counted the parochial school among her good memories for one reason and one reason only.

The Aquigneur Parochial School was an institution whose curriculum consisted chiefly of reading and writing the Bible, prayers, and history.

As with any organization tied to a religious body, its basic temperament was "quiet"—but there was one hour each week that refused to be.

"Dolores, have you ever worn pointe shoes?"

It was the hour when slender young girls were gathered together and taught ballet.

At the teacher's command, cane in hand, the little girls moved as if by some unspoken pact.

"Point your toes!"

Arms spread, knees gently bent—the demi-plié. Rising en pointe on the hard tips of pointe shoes, then spinning in place, fast and fierce—the pirouette...

Her father, who viewed dance through a lens altogether foreign to the sensibilities of the Beloff people, made it a subject Dolores could hardly even dream of attempting.

All she could do was watch through the window, losing track of time, as children her age leapt as lightly as butterflies and walked on their toes like porcelain dolls.

The movement Dolores loved most was en pointe.

With soft gestures like polishing a glass bead, she would slip on the flat-tipped pointe shoes and tie the ribbons snugly, as if cradling fresh cream—and then, as if she had never been shy at all, she found the courage to rise powerfully onto her toes.

Even standing there for a few seconds set her heart racing beyond all control. Her unripened young chest ached as it chased after every step of the dance.

A long tail gets caught, as the saying goes. It was the weekend she had come home.