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Aline found out she was marrying a stranger when the servants filed into her workshop.
“I was working on that!” Aline blurted out, trying to pry a maid’s hands off a seascape.
The maid lowered her eyes. “Begging your pardon, Miss Charigot. Your father said these were all t’be packed for travel.”
Travel? She knew the family needed money – that Father’s investments hadn’t worked well, that the Writers had been embezzling from him. But to lose the mansion? Were they to move to the countryside?
How could she disguise herself as a boy and sneak into the Painters’ academy lectures if they moved to the countryside?
On the other side of the room, a butler was folding her paints into their travel case. Wrongness made her shudder. She’d rather have him pull a handful out of her hair than touch her-
“Don’t move the rags!” she yelled, running over to him. “That’s linseed oil – those are flammable, they need to dry flat – hey, don’t touch my brushes!” That last was to a very enthusiastic footman. He’d been packing them wrong and the bristles would have been hideously bent.
People in the one space she’d made for herself amongst finishing school and etiquette lessons and the constant reminders that no one could know a mere girl had the power to Paint, touching the one thing that was hers.
She wanted to weep.
She would not.
Father came in smoking a cigar, eyeing the proceedings with satisfaction.
“Father, what is the meaning of this? Are we to sell the house?”
“Such a thing won’t be necessary anymore, my girl,” he said, and patted her on the back. “I have found you a husband.”
Her body felt like cold water. “A husband,” she echoed.
“Yes. He’s from a very good family, but he’s never showed the least talent for Painting. Finally, your habits will be useful for something. Who knows, maybe you’ll even be a decent wife and mother once you’ve borne him a few sons. And maybe you can awaken some talent in him like a proper Muse.”
Her paintings, shown under a stranger’s name.
She’d be relegated to the role of Muse and model, forbidden to feel a brush in her hand ever again.
She wouldn’t be permitted to go to the Academy, but maybe (according to Father) her husband would let her read his notes. Father had said she would marry the youngest Dessendre boy, Renoir, as if that meant anything to her. Maybe she’d brushed past him once in her boys’ disguise. There were hundreds of boys at the Academy, and since she was careful to dress like a poor scholarship student, very few of them had ever given her a second look.
What would he think, the boy who had the desk next to her? He’d taken responsibility for her, assuming she was a youth much younger than him. On the first day, she’d fallen, dropping all of her books; he’d stopped to pick them up while everyone else had hurried past. But it wasn’t just that – he’d helped her improve as an artist.
“Do you think the Chroma would be less diluted if you focused more on the central figure in that scene?” peering over her shoulder.
Or “what if you didn’t paint the whole crowd behind the circus acrobat, and just blurred the background?”
He’d helped her boil her ideas down to the bare essentials, making them sharper, more focused. And she’d never be able to thank him for it. Even if she knew his name, her husband would never let her write to another man in secret.
The greatest insult of all was that when she looked under her mattress that night, after hours of fittings and tailorings and being prodded with pins, her secret last-resort bottle of laudanum was gone. Father had known she’d rather die than be sent off like a lamb to the slaughter, and denied her even that release.
With no one to tell her she was being unreasonable, Aline allowed herself to weep. She stayed up all night crying, but it didn’t matter. Her mother had been a Muse; there was nothing, even a night of tears, that could allow her to be un-beautiful.
From then on, she was kept prisoner in her rooms. No canvases she could escape into. Nothing sharp enough to ruin her face with. Her meals were brought up to her with every bite pre-cut like she was an invalid.
Once, just before dawn, she managed to climb down the rose trellis and disappear into the city streets. She was about to board a horse-drawn omnibus when a shout of “There she is!” rang out, and soon her father’s men were dragging her down.
He followed behind, approaching once she’d been wrestled to the ground. “Aline. These theatrics… really?”
“Kill me,” she spat in his face. “I would rather you drag a knife across my throat and use my blood as ink than sentence me to this fate.”
He looked very old and very tired, as if her brief dash to freedom had been years for him. “You always think killing yourself will fix things, don’t you.”
He would have let her keep her Canvases, he kept saying that day. At least some of them. At least the ones that didn't contain anything improper. Everything burned in a bonfire in the garden. Her oceans, her mountains, her cities filled with people who would never do this kind of thing to a young girl who just wanted to create. Though their torment was contained inside the painting, she could swear she heard a million helpless voices screaming as even water turned to fire.
"No - please, I'll do anything, just don't hurt them-" She ran towards the fire, but Father's valet tackled her as she screamed, yanking her arms behind her back. A stray ember singed her dress, her thigh. Afterwards, she wouldn't accept anything to soothe the ache. What was a sore patch of reddened skin compared to the quiet misery of never painting again, of losing everything she'd made.
And then it was a beautiful spring morning with a perfectly blue sky, and she was shepherded to her wedding the way she imagined the royals during the Revolution were brought to Madame Guillotine for their executions. Her hair, long and radiant and shining like a fresh stroke of carmine red. Her dress, pristine white and glittering with sequins, with stupid giant sleeves she couldn’t raise her arms in. Her face, rouged and made up, a servant holding her chin so she couldn’t squirm away.
Through her veil, everything blurred as she walked down the aisle. All she could tell was that her new husband was tall, that he stood very still.
Tears blurred the world even more before long-fingered hands lifted her veil.
“Please don’t cry,” a startlingly familiar voice murmured. “I know you didn’t want this, either.”
Renoir Dessendre, who’d never been able to produce a Painting for anyone on command.
Her friend, who had impeccable artistic technique, who she’d never seen bring anything to life.
The words fell out of Aline’s mouth: “It’s you.”
A solemn nod, as if he took her shock for disappointment. “I’m sorry, Aline. When your father came to the Painters’ Council… I know you never wanted to marry. But if I didn’t accept the offer, someone else would. And I couldn’t let any of them touch you. Or your work.”
Her work. "He burned them," she whispered, her burn throbbing like a reminder beneath her fine stockings. "All of them."
A trace of that familiar crooked smile - though sharp as the smell of paint thinner, and it didn't reach his eyes. "Then we'll make him pay."
For the first time since her workshop was ripped apart, since she’d learned of her fate to be led like a lamb to the slaughter, Aline felt like she could breathe.