Chapter Text
They live in a new town, a new country, in a pretty white house with a wide and pretty garden and little Cosette is pretty and dark and sweet, lips like forget me nots, pearls in her mouth and sunshine in her eyes.
Papa is a sad Papa, even as he combs his fingers through her hair and dresses her in frilled petticoats and crowds her arms with beautiful, dull eyed dolls. The house is big, and white, and indeed very pretty, but on the inside it is made of dusty shadows and drawn curtains, and Papa prays in front of the mantel each morning and night, where there sits two candlesticks, regal and heavy in moonlight silver. Cosette doesn’t care for the candlesticks, but when Papa beholds them, his face is soft and weak and strange, and she doesn’t want to upset Papa, so instead she goes and plays in the sun that melts in buttery shades against her skin.
At the back of the garden, there is an assortment of ancient weeping willows, crouched over like a line of old washer women, dragging their branches like gnarled hands along in the water. For indeed there is water there, in the form a green pond, and she’s leant over it enough times to try to peer into it, but it’s dense and deep and she can never see the bottom. Scum collects in crusty bubbles that ripple and cling to its surface, and to her it smells odd, like a mix of tobacco and boot polish.
Sitting at the end of it is always a man. She thinks he looks younger then Papa, but she can’t be sure, for Papa is fair and good and handsome, even with the burgeoning of his wrinkles, but this man’s features are lugubrious and pallid, the bulge of his eyes shining and wild like a feral cats, his nose long and broad, his mouth spread out into a tortured line. She has never seen him smile, but she theorizes that his teeth would be white and sharp, like a tiger’s. His greying hair is a soggy slap around his thin face, his officer’s coat (she knows it’s an officer’s coat, and is quite proud of that fact; she found an image of the very same garment in her costume book, but when Papa saw it he started to shake and shake and shake and nothing she could do would stop him shuddering) is a monstrously soaking weight around his body. His flesh is a dead grey, and he smells like something rotting, but that could just be the damp in the trees.
She has never played near him, never shown him her dolls or dresses, never touched the mangled black of his coat (she doesn’t know why she thinks this, but she has always imagined it to be slimy and cool, like the scales of fish.) For a part, she had thought him a lifelike statue, much in the same vein as the bare marble women she had seen in history books, sculpted hair rippling down to cover the swell of their breasts. But he mutters to himself, words a garbled rush of nonsense, his jaw grinding with each wrestle of tongue and teeth.
She is afraid of him, afraid of his wet, warped little corner of her lovely garden. She leaves him alone, and sometimes, when she plays near the gates, his head is turned up and his eyes are on her. If she draws close, his attentions fix onto some unseeable distance. She never tells Papa of the man, and she doesn’t know why.
Sometimes she picks up her skirts and hikes around the trees to the front of the house. Around this idyllic home of fancies is an impregnable forest, thick and green and swollen with moisture, and the stink of earth makes her dizzy.
There is only one path that leads off from the tall, spiked gates of the great white house. It’s a thin pathway, graveled and uneven; rarely used, except for the lady.
Cosette calls her “The Lady” for she has little other name for the woman who wanders through the trees. A somewhat pathetic creature, wrapped in dirty linen and barefoot, ash blonde hair cut close to her head in matted clumps. Her skin is hued with a tint of wretched blue, her hands bony and her nails curved and sharp as incisors. Her eyes are round and staring, stamped with a savage hunger, and upon her lips she wears a crooked and humorless smile.
As she walks, her body undulates in uneasy sways, as if she is a clockwork doll that has been wound up too tight. Cosette can hardly stand the inspector, but the woman she can’t abate. She steals away into the house, lest the creature reach through the bars and claims her.
Inside the house she finds her Papa, warm and strong with arms like pillars, and beneath the flicker and spit of the candlestick’s shadow, his embrace is engulfing and far too close, and beneath the bend of his mighty back and the hot clasp of his hands and the odd brightness of his eyes, Cosette feels very small.