Authors: Laura Powell
As I climbed the stairs to our dormitory, I started to wonder about the cost of heating and lighting the building, not to mention the army of domestic staff employed to look after it. It was time I got some financial know-how, I decided. Surely it was a good sign that Opis had told me it was a requirement of her job.
I felt a fizz of anticipation. Things were changing and I had a part to play. ‘I’m going to a party,’ I said aloud, as I stood in the empty dormitory.
Then I thought how the evening would be full of stern old men and pompous dowagers. Everyone there would be assessing my table manners and conversation, comparing my charm to Callisto’s. My high spirits evaporated.
I pulled off my headscarf. It was white silk, and worn draped over the hair and round the neck. When we were required to veil up, we drew one end across the lower face and pinned it to the other side. But I’d expected to be barefaced at a private dinner party. Among strangers, it would feel like nakedness.
I looked in the mirror and practised my smile. My face stared back, unconvinced.
Cally’s cheeks had the same rosy flush, her hair the same coppery-gold gleam, as the goddess in Titian’s painting. Her blue eyes glowed with holiness. Mine were washed-out grey. I was small and skinny. My hair was fine and dusty-fair, my skin pale as a ghost’s. Next to Cally, I was colourless.
I didn’t start off colourless. I was famous, in fact: the baby left on the temple’s steps as a gift for Artemis. There were only two handmaidens when I arrived, and they graduated to priestesses a couple of years later. In the beginning I was everyone’s pet, the cult’s lucky charm. But as I grew older my novelty wore off. Sometimes I was a nuisance, mostly I was a non-entity. I was always alone.
So I prayed to Artemis to send me a friend. I got Callisto instead.
According to gossip I overheard from the cleaners, Callisto’s mother was on the edge of celebrity, thanks to a bit of acting and some famous boyfriends – though which of these was responsible for Cally has never been clear. Following a stint in rehab, she’d gone public about putting her daughter in the temple to ‘give her a better life’.
Intrigued and excited, I watched the new handmaiden’s arrival from an archive store that overlooked Temple Square. I wasn’t the only one: word had spread, and a crowd had gathered.
Paparazzi sprang into action when a car swept into the square and a dainty little girl in a pink frock got out. She was followed by a woman in a very tight dress and dark glasses. Cameras whirred and clicked as the pair climbed the temple steps to where Opis was waiting to receive them. Mother and daughter embraced, the woman removing her glasses to brush away a single glistening tear. The girl turned to wave goodbye to the crowd. She was perfectly posed, perfectly adorable.
Her own tears came later. A whole tantrum’s worth of them, according to the whispers in the priestesses’ sitting room. When she finally came into the room we were to share, I saw that even red eyes and crying-blotches couldn’t obscure her prettiness.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m Aura.’
She regarded me silently. Then she reached over and gave my hair a yank, so hard I yelped. Tears of shock sprang into my eyes.
‘Ow! Why’d you do that?’
Callisto smiled. It was a smile I’d get to know very well over the years: satisfied, secretive, shining with righteousness.
‘Because the goddess told me to.’
The goddess told Callisto many things. On any given day, she might instruct her to take the last slice of cake, to blame me for a stained altar cloth or trip up the younger girls when they were noisy in the corridor. Whereas I’d been dumped on the temple steps like any old rubbish, she, Callisto, had been Chosen. Artemis had appeared to her in a dream and called her to the cult.
Her mother still visited, occasionally. Sometimes she was polished to a high-impact shine; sometimes she was dishevelled and her eyes didn’t focus properly. In the first year after Cally joined us, her mother made regular appearances in the press, gushing about her daughter, ‘Artemis’s Own Angel’, and the heart-rending sacrifice of giving her up.
The cult wasn’t above a bit of PR spin either. Last year, there was a special feature in the
Daily Mail
, complete with a soft-focus shot of Cally in ceremonial robes, gazing pensively out of a window. According to the journalist, our days were a merry round of ‘sacred rituals, charitable works and feminine accomplishments’. Cally and I, of course, had turned all these things into a competition.
The day of the dinner party, Opis decreed that Cally and I were to move out of the dormitory into a double room. The peace and quiet would help us prepare for our initiations next week. And so we’d been put back in the room we’d shared when Cally first joined the cult. Nothing had changed, from the two four-poster beds with tasselled canopies to the wardrobe the size of a small bathroom. It had been one of Cally’s favourite games to lock me in it before prayers.
Once we’d unpacked, it was time to get ready for the evening. I fingered last month’s shopping-day purchase: a pale green chiffon dress with a beaded bodice. But only priestesses got to wear their own clothes to private social functions; the rest of us used any excuse to get dressed up – Phoebe had even been known to wear a ballgown to Sunday lunch. I turned away from the chiffon and reached for a clean navy tunic and my special-occasion mantle with a border of embroidered peacock feathers.
‘Feeling nervous?’ Cally asked, smoothing down her veil.
‘No. Why do you say that?’
‘You’re doing that weird thing with your lower lip. Pulling it out. You always do it when you’re anxious. It’s kind of disgusting.’
I abruptly moved my hand from my mouth. Callisto, as ever, knew me far too well.
‘Poor Aura. I know how awkward you get on social occasions. Follow my lead, and you’ll be fine.’ Her voice was sugar with a dose of syrup. ‘You might as well start getting used to it.’
There were two reception rooms in the High Priestess’s Residence. The Silver Room housed the Titian, and the Gold adjoined the dining room at the back of the house. Cally and I entered the Gold Room together, side by side.
Opis had arranged for us to arrive last so that our entrance would have maximum impact. She glided over to greet us, wearing a low-cut black evening gown and the pearl headdress she used for parties. ‘How lovely to see you, my dears.’ She gave a conspiratorial smile. ‘Why don’t you show yourselves to our friends?’
Cally and I drew back our veils. It would be the first time members of the Trinovantum Council had seen our faces. Opis knew what she was doing – a dash of theatricality is part of what’s kept the cult going over the years. Silence fell.
Eyes front, shoulders back
, I told myself.
Don’t let them see you flinch.
Before the moment could go on too long, Opis drew us into the room and started making introductions. The most prominent guest was Lionel Winter, the head of the Trinovantum Council and the Lord Herne. He was a frequent visitor to the Sanctuary and was a handsome man, thin-lipped, with a high domed forehead and a sweep of silvery-blond hair. He was accompanying the Honoured Apollonia, who had been High Priestess before Opis. A doll-like woman in her mid sixties, she blinked at the gathering with faded blue eyes as if she couldn’t quite work out what she was doing there. Since her retirement she rarely visited the cult, and she seemed keen to keep her visit that evening to a minimum, slipping away soon after Cally and I arrived.
Of the other guests, I already knew the hawk-faced Lady Sudely, one of our major donors, and the shrivelled old council treasurer and his even more shrivelled wife. The two younger councillors with whom they were standing were the type Cally called chinless wonders, and who always pop up at this kind of event.
Gathered together, these people were even more than usually intimidating. Without the veil to hide my emotions, I could feel my face turning as wooden as a doll’s.
‘Let me introduce you to my nephew, Sebastian,’ said Winter as a tall young man turned from the fireplace.
It was King Brutus. He shook my and Cally’s hands, looking just as regal and bored as when he was riding in the parade. ‘Call me Seb.’
‘And I’m Scarlet,’ announced the girl next to him. She had a dishevelled crop of dark hair and glossy lips the same colour as her name. I could see Cally eyeing her dress disapprovingly. It was leopard print, skimpy yet expensive-looking, accessorised by towering black stilettos. She certainly wasn’t the usual kind of visitor to the cult. She must be the daughter of some big patron, I decided.
Small talk was mostly confined to the festival and, as others joined us, the shocking episode with the snakes. Various people lamented the scandalous state of social services that meant that hordes of lunatics were free to wander the streets. Seb’s bravery in tackling the man was widely praised.
‘You must have been right at the centre of things,’ one of the chinless wonders said to me. ‘Any clues as to what the nutter was on about?’
I was pretty sure he was joking, but I could feel Opis’s eyes on me. ‘Uh, no. Not at all. I was just too, you know, shocked.’
‘Poor Aura’s always been highly strung,’ Cally said. She turned to me, a look of tender concern on her face. ‘I really thought you were going to pass out with fright.’
Before I could think of any sort of comeback, the conversation had moved on.
My best hope was that the attention would go to Cally’s head. She’d already had quite a lot of champagne. Maybe she’d become flighty, indiscreet. While Opis was distracted by Lady Sudely, I took the opportunity to slip out into the hall. I needed a moment to collect myself.
Click-clack-click
went the tap of toenails on polished wood. ‘Argos!’ I whispered. ‘What are you doing here?’ The wolfhound looked at me with mournful eyes. His tail wagged in apology.
Opis wouldn’t want him on the loose. As I looked around for the maid, Argos trotted off, nudging open the door to the Silver Room across the way. Muttering under my breath, I went to retrieve him.
Argos wasn’t alone. A stranger was standing in front of the Titian. He was unlikely to be a burglar, since he was dressed for dinner in white tie and tails. I tried to grab Argos’s collar and back away before we were spotted, but the dog wriggled free.
The unknown guest, however, barely glanced in our direction. His eyes were fixed on the painting as he began to speak.
‘
For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed by because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us . . .
’
For the second time in two days I stared at Actaeon’s agony, the goddess’s vengeful gleam. The words hummed through my body, almost as if I’d heard them before. The guest had recited the verse quite softly and unselfconsciously, as if he was talking to himself.
‘Sorry,’ he said abruptly, turning round. I saw he was younger than I’d thought at first, only a couple of years older than me. ‘I’m not usually so pretentious at parties. I’m Aiden. Which one are you?’
As if we were all interchangeable. I put a hand on Argos’s wiry grey head for reassurance. ‘I’m Aura. It’s nice to meet you.’ He might be rude, but I couldn’t afford to make a bad impression.
I’m used to being gawped at; it goes with the uniform. But of course a handmaiden unveiled is even more of a spectacle. Now that this Aiden person was giving me his full attention, he made no attempt to hide his curiosity. His look was bold, assessing, amused. I felt myself flush, though I didn’t lower my eyes.
His own appearance didn’t have much to recommend it. The suit was too small for his rangy frame and he’d pushed the sleeves back over his wrists. The cuffs didn’t look particularly clean, and nor did his thatch of shaggy hair. The face under it was thin and brown, with alert green eyes.
‘What was the poem you quoted?’ I asked.
‘It’s by Rilke. From the
Duino Elegies
. . . But I suppose you only know Greek and Latin stuff.’
‘Does that make me even more pretentious than you?’
Although he laughed, he looked slightly taken aback. He turned to study the painting again.
‘Makes you wonder why Artemis is still so popular. You have to admit she’s an almighty bitch.’
‘Maybe the fact that she’s flawed is part of her appeal.’ I was angry, but wasn’t going to give him any satisfaction by showing it. ‘The ancient Greek gods really were just like us. They made mistakes, held grudges, had favourites. Artemis is an immortal who understands what it’s like to be human.’
Aiden raised his eyebrows. ‘While her cult is an organisation that understands what it’s like to be divine. Praised, protected, showered with presents. And no questions asked.’
I’d never heard anyone speak about us in this way. I looked at him again, trying to work out what kind of person would say such things. I saw now that perhaps he was handsome, in an unkempt sort of way. The realisation unsettled me.
I lifted my chin. ‘Is that why you’ve come to dinner – you think we owe you some presents?’