Read Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 for Free Online Page B

when they returned, feet stomping above.
    There was nowhere else to go, so I hid myself in a pile of bodies. And again they sang and drank. Plink of metal hitting the table. Coins falling between the cracks in the floor, landing like raindrops on our outstretched hands.
    "More dancing!” one of them cried. And down the stairs they came.
    * * * *
    I did not cry out, when your father took his knife. He thought they had missed one, and cursed his blindness. I did not cry out, when he took my ring. I had worn it so long that I had forgotten it. Cheap gold, dusty amethyst. A gift to my grandmother from her father. I had already lost it myself, dancing. When I came here it appeared on my finger. The only thing from there, from the world I tell you about, my son, the world I told you about. My proof, if not for anyone else.
    Thrown in a pile with the others, I watched him dance like a dervish. Like a barracuda attacking. Like an anemone, poisonous. Along with the pile of dead, waiting to be chosen, waiting for one last twirl around the fireplace, they did not know I had a special secretion on my skin. That I was impervious and would slip through their waving arms. Your father was the beauty of a thousand escapes, of months of silent journeys through darkened fields. Your father was the coldness of silver and the bite of a blade, the warmth of pain.
    If only I hadn't bled, they never would have known. Dancing around the room. I play the dead well, had the half-opened, unfocused eyes. My neck like a baby's, my feet dragging. I had not cried out when the knife bit into my finger, did not cry out when the table leg bit into my shin. They could not tell the difference, but for the thin trickle of blood on your father's back. They had danced with me, you see, and I was theirs. I was dead not dead. I would not say how I arrived. They might have sent me back.
    My husband, you never ask me if it was love, you never ask me if it was love. Or if it was blood. Or if it was my silence. Like bunnies sitting in the lawn, still, like a fawn, I was hiding. Did you know all along? Could you smell me, alive, in the basement? Does metal have a tang when wrapped around the living? When you crawl into my bed, you slide under the brocade, reach tentatively across. A continent. An island. Do you have islands here? I have told our son of islands, while he nods sagely. We speak in riddles, we speak in metaphors. Husband, I have learned your ways.
    * * * *
    One You Have Left
    The girl I lay against had beautiful red hair. Her eyes were open. In them I could see your father, I could see you beckoning behind him. The holes in her ears ragged. I will remember forever the way those bodies felt, cold and impervious, against mine. That my heat and ability to play dead were my only advantages. I can sit like an island, I can stare like the stars. My love and hate can burn like cold ash, finished, empty, still. Do not resurrect me outside of these walls. Do not come back to this house, with its silent dark halls, and covered portraits.
    Once you have gone I will tell your father the story of a poisoned dress.
    There was a woman who was scorned in love. She had followed her husband to a distant city, far from her people. She had maimed and killed to be with him. And when he left her for another, she made a poisoned dress of beaten gold. Alone, in her house, empty of servants, empty of children, empty of love, she put on the dress. And disappeared, leaving only the smoldering dress.
    The first gift that he gave me was a silver amulet, off the neck of a dead girl, but I did not understand this at the time. The same girl with the beautiful auburn hair. How was he to know that was the body I hid under, the neck I bit into when he took my finger? I do not tell him these things, but there were other poisoned dresses. An angry wife, spurned and burning jealous rage inside, pretended calm and kindness. She sent a beautiful dress, spun of the finest metals. The glint in the