Ballet and Violin

“Have you heard about that monstrous contraption the Bernards built? One look at it makes me dizzy and sick to my stomach. I'd sooner die of boredom riding in a carriage.”

The voice of Aunt Audrey, who had come to see her father about five days ago, played back in Dolores's mind. Half a year earlier, a scholarly journal had printed an account of the Bernard family—who ran Montgore, a paper manufacturer—conducting an experiment in which they flew into the sky in a heated balloon, and this had been Aunt Audrey's indignant condemnation of it. Or had it been six days ago?

In truth, the exact timing hardly mattered.

The table, far too fine for the likes of their household, had one leg that creaked, and the candlestick standing cold upon it was caked in layers of hardened wax. On the table sat soup sickeningly heavy with onion, bread that was neither hard nor soft, and eggs fried in oil.

Her father sat at the head, her two younger siblings across from him. Though nothing about this morning differed from any other, the reason Dolores found herself thinking of Aunt Audrey was that her father—Count Simon Artois—wore precisely the same color as the grimy black apron Aunt Audrey had been wearing that day.

“If this isn't the end of days, then what on earth could be?”

He might as well have said it a touch more comically.

Her father, a living monument to pedantry who claimed his molars ached if he couldn't read the very same newspaper at the very same hour every morning, had worked himself into a state of agitation before the meal had even begun.

“To think Marquis Grinda gave testimony this absurd—this is, this is, something has gone terribly wrong!”

“…….”

“Those lowborn wretches coveting Lenoir conspired together to slander Prince Adrien, that's what this is…! The principles and rights they prattle on about are, in the end, more farfetched than men flying into the sky—and they can't even see that! Ah!”

Dolores, powerless against her father's violence, watched in real time as the crumpled Romerto Journal—one of Beloff's three great newspapers—completed its high-speed flight through the air and landed upon the frayed carpet.

It wasn't difficult to guess what article had enraged Simon. It was splashed across the first page, bold as brass.

Had it been around this time last year that the First Prince of Beloff relinquished his claim to crown prince and departed? Marquis Hardy de Perpeng, lord of the Orche region who had died the year before that, had turned Beloff society on its head with the claim that Prince Adrien had been colluding with foreign powers.

Marquis Grinda, a stalwart of the orthodox Lion Party, had been the man who believed in and trusted the First Prince to the very last, and he had fiercely attacked Marquis de Perpeng for it.

That it had come to this was enough to crush the hopes of people like her father, who still clung to the belief that the First Prince would one day return.

“Agitation is bad for your heart. Ever since you collapsed last year, the physician said you mustn't excite yourself, remember?”

“All men of passionate heart are bound to be outraged—outrage is exactly what is called for!”

Yes, yes. Dolores replied absently and rose to gather up the newspaper. She had meant only to hand it back to her father, but a glance at the contents made her heart sink. Page after page after that held nothing that would gladden him either.

There was a piece about the wife of a certain lord who had gambled away a portion of the family fortune before her husband's death, and talk of the Bonel family, who had lately succeeded in buying a title so outrageous it defied belief. They had made no secret of their new nobility, it was said—hoisting one another on shoulders in celebration and throwing a champagne party of staggering scale.

Neither article looked like good news, but it was the latter above all that her father despised them for.

“What are you standing there reading for?”

Startled into awareness by her father's beckoning hand, Dolores surrendered the paper.

“There's another article about the Bonels. I don't suppose they have any shame at all.”

“It would be a mercy if shame were all they lacked. They've ended up like this because someone was fool enough to accept their money. Idiotic Beloffians, the lot of them….”

Ah—a mistake. With that one remark, she had launched her father into one of his marathon speeches.

Her father had a tendency to dig obsessively into political situations that had nothing at all to do with the Bonels. He even believed there existed some particular faction scheming to bring down Beloff itself.

Uncle Rudolf summed up such tendencies in a single phrase: “The man's caught the political sickness.”

“Even weeds would be of more use than those people. I cannot fathom why the royal family fails to understand that standing idle while parvenus rampage without restraint is the true problem.”

Dolores caught the eye of Anaïs, who sat across the table propping her chin on one hand, boredom written across her face.

Anaïs was haughty to a degree matched only by how clever she was for her age, and whenever their father launched into talk like this she scarcely listened at all. Her attention had already migrated to the pepper shaker.

“It's a problem too, this obsession with academies and the like—useless private tutoring, all of it, without the first notion of what truly ought to be learned….”

“Quite a problem, yes. Never mind that we have an academy student of our own in this house.”

Anaïs reached her hand toward the pepper shaker—and fell straight into Pablo's mischievous watch.

Pablo, home at leisure for the Sophino Academy holidays, behaved as though afflicted with some chronic condition that compelled him to dream up an entertaining prank at every waking moment.

Letting out a strange, dolphin-like squeal, Pablo snatched the pepper shaker away, and an inevitable scuffle broke out. Give it back.Make me. Dolores smacked both her siblings' legs under the table.

“Ow.”

“Ah.”

“Quiet! Quiet! Ana! Silence at the table!”

Her father bellowed. With the arrow of his wrath falling on her instead of Pablo, Anaïs's expression soured in an instant.

“In any case, the company you keep matters. Associating with greedy men clutching a few contemptible coins must never, ever be countenanced. Especially you, Pablo.”

“Can't I just be friendly with everyone? The more friends, the better.”

Their father's eyes narrowed to slits as he sprinkled salt over his fried eggs.

“No.”

“But—”

“Hah! Pablo! The reason you must graduate from Sophino Academy is to learn in advance the level of refinement practiced by the people you will meet there. It is most certainly not so you may fraternize with the rabble!”

And so, once more, her father's attention converged on 'Sophino.'

He had long taken pride in the fact that Pablo attended Sophino Academy—yet, Dolores sensed, he harbored an inferiority over it at the same time. That was how it seemed to her, anyway.

Only when Pablo, looking a little deflated, bowed his head and answered “Yes, Father,” did their father finally permit himself a satisfied smile.

Anaïs leaned slightly toward Dolores and murmured, as though to herself:

“I miss Uncle Rudolf so much I could die.”

It was true that in moments like these, Uncle Rudolf was the only one who could rescue them.

After finishing lunch, her father went out. He had an appointment, he said, to meet with people from the Platypus Party at an inn in town.

Her father considered it his personal duty to go about calling on the powerful and influential.

With their father gone, the house on a given afternoon became something akin to lawless territory.

The siblings who had behaved so demurely in his presence turned into unruly colts with their reins cut loose, paying no more mind to Dolores or Uncle Rudolf than to the furniture.

Today, Anaïs confessed—without any need to—that she had stolen and read Pablo's diary, and Pablo retaliated at once by hurling Anaïs's beloved doll into the fireplace.

Fortunately it was not yet the season for lighting the hearth, but the fireplace was still heaped with uncleared soot and cold ashes, and so Anaïs's doll was rescued in a truly pitiable state.

“Are you insane? I said, are you insane! Are you insane or not!”

“You read mine first! You came into my room first!”

“You're the one who left the door wide open, you idiot!”

“Waaahhhhh.”

The shrieking and shouting showed no sign of ending. A wild girl of seventeen and a boy of fifteen were a combination that made sharing one roof nearly impossible.

Leaving the ear-splitting din behind her, Dolores limped as she cleared the table. Usually Anaïs lent a hand bit by bit, but today there was little hope of that.

Dolores returned to her room.

In her second-floor room, where the light came in generously, a creaking old bed and nightstand stood at the center-right. Two drawers were placed along the window side, and to their left stood a bookshelf and a wardrobe with a broken handle.

Downstairs, the bickering of her two siblings still rattled on.

My head aches.

Hanging her cane on the wall, Dolores walked to the window, dragging her left leg slightly. She had perhaps overdone it; her weak left leg trembled at intervals. On days when the migraines came, the tremors came more often too.

Warm light slanted in across the windowsill. Though it was autumn, the light was like a blooming spring.

Lifting her heavier leg onto the chair and resting her chin on her knee, she gazed at the countless motes of dust dancing in the sunbeam.

The air inside the house was not cold in the least, yet her spine felt chilled. Perhaps because today, as always, her father's sharp contempt and loathing had been served alongside the meal like a garnish. She missed her mother, whose warmth ran deep beneath all her roughness.

Sweeping her ripened wheat-colored hair behind her ear, Dolores lifted her head.

Two picture frames, perched atop the bookshelf directly before her, reflected in her brilliant scarlet eyes.

The dust on those frames was as thick as the hours they had been ignored, and as distant as regret itself.

It was one of those tangled days, as though she had flung her mind out somewhere far beyond the house and left it there.

Time crawled with a spiteful slowness. In the end, to escape her own tedious imaginings, Dolores opened a book of someone else's invented world.

By反复 pouring her attention elsewhere, the ache in her knee gradually subsided as well. Somewhere in that while, the floor below had quietly gone still.

The pale white light filtering through the window slowly bled into scarlet. How much had she read?

Anaïs flung the door open and poked her head in.

“Busy? A letter came.”