Heiress

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. Everyone said I had my grandmother’s green eyes. I had grown up hearing it my entire life, first from my mother when she would tuck me into bed with a bedtime story. Then from my nurse, Mabel, after mother died. Mabel had more wrinkles than my taffeta dress after the day I slipped out of the garden and skipped lessons to go swimming in the family pond. In fact, it had been Mabel who caught me and took a switch to my bottom until I promised never to roam off the estate again. But the dress was never the same. Neither was I.

My eyes flicked across the cloudy surface of the ancient glass as she pulled a coarse brush through the snarls of my auburn hair. The girl in the mirror grimaced as the tangles were dealt with, one at a time. Though it was agony, I sat with a straight spine as I had been taught, staring straight ahead into those green eyes that had been passed from my grandmother to my mother, and now to me.

“May I go outside to play today, Mabel?” I asked. “Please,” I tacked on quickly.

The jerk of the brush stopped momentarily. I held my breath as she thought it over. The outside world was dangerous to women in positions of power. More than fifty years ago my grandmother had wandered out for an evening stroll and was not seen again, though her shawl was fished out of the lake the next day. When my mother died, I was not permitted to see her body, but was told she had fallen some great distance from the parapet above only to land in the moat below, her hat floating around the castle in a buoyant circle. But I was not my mother, nor my grandmother. As Mabel’s rules confined me to the castle grounds, I had to fight for each day I saw sunshine. I wished that my grandmother had not been the next lady in line for the castle when the last matriarch had died. I might be allowed to chase chickens in the square or milk cows with tender pet names. But instead I sat on the uncomfortable stool and allowed the only person I had left in the world to torture my scalp.

“Please Mabel,” I repeated. “Just for an hour or so.”

“Have you finished your German for the day?”

“Yes, Mabel.”

“And your French?”

“Yes.”

I maintained eye contact with my reflection, smiling to myself.

Liar.

My reflection had mouthed the word so quickly for a second I wondered if I had imagined it. Adrenaline flushed up my pale neck and fanned a rosy blush over my cheeks. The reflection smiled.

“Your face has gone red, little miss,” Mabel warned, “As it always does when you’re telling your Mabel a little, white lie. No outdoors until you finish your French.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but all the words on my tongue melted away into nothingness as I watched the reflection in the mirror put a single finger to her lips. I said nothing but rose from the velvet stool and walked to the ostentatious study to practice my French. Ostensibly.

Though the days passed, my impression of the mirror did not. It had frightened me with a magic I did not understand. I begged Mabel not to bring me in front of the antique mirror, but she insisted. My mother had sat upon this very stool, and my grandmother before her. Perhaps even the old matriarch before them. It was not my place to change the rules for the lady of the estate.

More like Mabel’s rules, I thought, lowering myself onto the stool.

She pried the ornate, silver brush out of the collection on the armoire. Instinctively, I braced for the drag of the bristles through my unruly hair as I tried to avoid eye contact with myself in the mirror.

“Your posture, dear.”

My shoulders were hunched, and I let out a long exhale as I draped them down my back, resting my gloved hands in my lap.

“Sorry, Mabel.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” she said, tutt-tutting under her breath. “Apologize to her.”

Mabel inclined her head at the mirror. I eyed Mabel cautiously.

She couldn’t be serious.

“Looks fade, miss, when we hunch our shoulders.”

I turned my gaze to the mirror and breathed out a sigh.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

Although I looked up for only a moment, the girl gazing back at me winked. As she smiled, her cheeks dimpled in exactly the way mine did when jam tart was served for dessert. Jaw set, I felt every muscle in my body go rigid as the girl turned her head. She was examining me.

“I need some air,” I said, rising from the stool.

“Nonsense,” Mabel said, her crinkled palm pushing me back down onto the seat. “We aren’t done.”

There was something in the quaver of Mabel’s tone that sent a thrill up my spine as I slid backward, resisting the force of strong hands now on my shoulders. Throwing a hand back to catch myself, I felt the lace of my glove press up against the surface of the cool glass before sliding through it like water.

Odd, I thought, My hand was actually wet…

Whipping my head around, I found myself face to face with a green-eyed girl whose pupils had narrowed into slits, her mouth an open cavern swallowing my hand whole. I watched with horror as my hand slid through the surface of the slick mirror. Even as I wrenched it back with a shriek, my glove lay discarded in the reflection. I held up my own bare hand, examining the naked fingertips.

“Oh dear, I thought we had more time,” Mabel was shaking her head slowly as though she had caught me in the gardens again. “You’re not as clever as your dear ancestors, are you, miss?”

Flinging my hands out at the nurse, I knocked the brush from her hand and she shrieked as though I had scalded her. Her eyes bugged out of their sockets and her lips crinkled around gums now dropping loose teeth that clattered to the floor.

Horrified, I swallowed and found Mabel’s wizened face withering before my eyes. She reached out as her eyes dried, sticking in their sockets before going even cloudier than the mirror. Her skin hung like loose rags rattling off trembling bones. She took one shambling step toward me as I turned to run and came face to face with my reflection.

My own reflection, once appearing so sinister was beckoning to me and I leaned into the cool wetness of the glass pane.

I fell through an unending blackness, before opening my eyes with a shudder. Coughing dust from my lungs, I felt a hand hit my back, hard.

“Breathe, love, breathe.”

My blood ran cold. I knew that voice. Mother.

“It’s okay, dear one.”

And that one. My grandmother caressed my cheek.

Peering up to stare into the despondent eyes of my mother and grandmother now clutching me to them, I took in their drenched forms. Then looked down at my own soaked clothing as my teeth began to chatter. Their things had been found in the nearby water...the mirror was not just a mirror. But a portal--and a prison. How many other women had been sacrificed as I just had been? Casting my eyes around, I saw the other forms of women's bodies slumped as far back as my eyes could see through the darkness. The old matriarch with the family crest emblazoned on her frock. I bit my lip, taking in the carnage of so many women who had been sealed out of sight.

“Don’t watch—” my mother warned, but it was too late.

I turned to see Mabel pulling rags from a trunk at the foot of the old bed. She jeered into the pit of the mirror, wrapping my grandmother’s shawl around her protruding shoulders. My mother’s hat perched on the white straw that had once been hair now falling out of her head. Finally, as she drew on my lace gloves, the pinkness began to return to her greying skin. It was as though she ripened in front of us. Her gaunt, bony figure rounded with the plumpness of youth once again.

I reached for her, but my fingers smashed into the glass; trapped.

Mabel sauntered up to the mirror and brushed back a lock of hair now beginning to grow back in, clumping in small grey tufts. She tutt-tutted to herself, pulling on her clothes for riding. Some habits transcended evil tendencies.

“There are other ways to make a lady of the estate,” Mabel whispered.

In my heart, I knew she would never stop terrorizing the women of the lands I had sworn to protect as the most recent lady of the land. She had but to go to the city center and decree my grandmother’s line ended for the next lady to present herself, as my grandmother had so many years ago…and the torture would continue. The scourge of the land would not cease.

Huddled in the darkness of the mirror, I clutched my mother and grandmother, kissing their cheeks.

“I can make this better,” I said quietly.

“Liar,” Mabel whispered, stuffing her second foot into a boot and turning on her heel to go.

Taking the hands of the only two women to have ever truly loved me, I braced myself. Sodden and sopping, I ran at the image of my nurse now wearing the youth of my life in front of me. I ran so hard and so fast I did not even feel the glass as my body made contact and it careened to the floor, crashing into a thousand shards of emptiness.