metal connections. The lord could use lubricant himself.
She took the moment avoiding discovery as a sign that she was meant to flee. This was the spirit world giving her one last chance to leave whole. She knew that is what she should do, but Rose was not doing what she should this night. She was violating rules and the order of things. She was a peasant girl standing uninvited in the doorway of the lord of the land. She was teasing the world of royalty in their celebration. As they traded her life and body around like a thing that belonged to their fancy, she was forcing herself onto their world.
She pictured herself slipping into the ballroom. The lords and ladies would think she was one of them. They would dance her and spin her not knowing who she was. They would feed her their fine meats, pushing them past her lips letting their juices slid down her throat. They would touch and guide her with their hands like she was their fine lady instead of their dirty, servant girl.
***
*** Rose rejected her opportunity for escape and salvation. She entered and followed along the wall in the low light. The air inside was stale and smelled of sweaty bodies. She imagined the hot skin and musk of the lords and ladies. She pictured them stolen away to the woods with shafts out and dresses folded above their heads. Rose licked her lips. She expected the air inside the lord’s palace to be fresher like outside in the fields when the flowers were blooming wild for spring. The house had higher ceilings and broader passages than she had seen before and she expected it to be like the outside trapped within.
Rose peered around the corner and inhaled. The chandeliers were so high and large that she could not imagine how the candles were lit around their rim nor how the chains held them aloft. Tables that seemed larger than the trees if they were turned on end were lined with meats and casks of wine, but also displays of fruit that she had never seen in their land. She couldn’t picture how they had come to be here except on the wings of angels. They were built into artful sculptures on the tables that were barely touched. They were as beautiful as she imagined they were delicious.
She wanted to enter and just feed herself until she was sick. The lords and ladies danced or reclined around the room drinking and ignored the impossibly grand food.
The dresses were not of this world. The skirts were as large as palaces themselves as they spun on what must have been hundreds of skirts. Rose imagined they would have to wear them forever for all the time it would take them to shed them off. She began to wonder if that is why Thomas took the peasant girls to the woods instead.
Their hair was stacked upon their heads in golden curls that put the fruit sculptures to shame. Their bodies were pieces of art from head to hem.
Rose sighed and looked down at her own dress which indignantly showed the womanly curves of her body instead of the grand curves of the dresses of the noble ladies dancing. She would not blend in. They would never mistake her for one of them. Her eyes stung and she felt wildly foolish for ever thinking that she might. She would never walk among them or taste their fruit. She resolved herself to merely watch their dancing and spinning from the edge of the archway. That would be her reward for daring to venture this far.
She ran her fingers through her long, straight hair and imagined what the sculpted stack on her head would feel like.
Someone grabbed her by her hair from behind and pulled her backward away from the arch. She was bent backward to stare up at the angry face of a man in a powdered wig. She felt her breasts bunch up near the top of her dress as she moaned from the awkward angle of her body.