Reality Ever After

By Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

Rosalie can't remember much about her life before she was ill. Her life in the Gorgon Hotel is the same every day.

But lately, Rosalie has started to dream, and the things she sees in her dreams are starting to make her think there is something very wrong at the Gorgon Hotel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tabitha Ormiston-Smith
• Release date: Oct 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463080382

Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

Tabitha Ormiston-Smith was born and continues to age. Dividing her time between her houses in Melbourne and the country, she is ably assisted in her editing business and her other endeavours by Ferret, the three-legged bandit.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

On Wednesdays, the doctor always came. The doctor was a dried-up, weaselly little man with hands as cold as ice, and Rosalie hated him. She hated the icy stethoscope pressed against her chest, and she hated having to stick out her tongue and say ‘ah’, and most of all she hated the way the doctor never spoke to her except to give an order. Turn over. Show me your tongue. Say ‘ah’. Anything else was addressed to Mrs Moberley, and even then he would never use Rosalie’s name. He referred to her only as ‘the child’.

The doctor had been coming for a very long time. Rosalie didn’t know exactly how long, but his visits seemed to stretch back in an unbroken vista almost forever. She knew she had not always been ill, as she knew she had not always lived in the gloomy old hotel, but whenever she tried to remember, it made her head hurt and lights flash before her eyes, and Mrs Moberley would come running in and make her take another dose of the red medicine. Then she would sleep for a long time, and when she woke up her mind would be even more fuzzy than usual. Rosalie hated the red medicine, and she hated the black, obliterating sleep it brought. Most of all, she hated the way she never dreamed at all when she had taken it. Rosalie cherished her dreams, even though she could never remember very much of them when she woke up. But sometimes there would be fragments – bright, golden sunshine, a big, black cat, a snatch of music.

Every day was the same in the hotel, the doctor’s visits punctuating each week with the regularity of a metronome. The mornings were the best, because then the chambermaid, Tosca, came to make up the bed and tidy the room. Rosalie loved Tosca – she loved everything about her – her smooth, brown skin, her laughing black eyes, the great cloud of hair that stood out around her head like a halo. Tosca was always smiling, always laughing about something; just to see her made Rosalie feel better.

Mrs Moberley didn’t like Tosca, and that was best of all, for when Tosca arrived, she nearly always left the room and stayed gone for some time. Rosalie was happier when Mrs Moberley wasn’t there. There was something about the iron-grey hair pulled ruthlessly into a stiff bun, and the blocky figure stuffed into the tight black dress, that always depressed Rosalie. She felt a bit guilty, because Mrs Moberley took care of her, but really, deep down, she disliked and resented her. She was the purveyor of the red medicine, the imposer of Lights Out At Seven.

Most of all, Mrs Moberley seemed to be dedicated to saying no to everything that Rosalie thought of for herself. Rosalie had wanted to open the window to let in the fresh air. (It was too cold and she might get a chill.) Rosalie had wanted to go for a walk. (It would overtire her.) And if Rosalie wanted to know anything, well that was just hopeless. From time to time she would try, asking how long she had been ill, where were her parents, why did they stay at the hotel, when was her mother coming, what was actually wrong with her. Mrs Moberley would pat her cheek and call her a ‘poor little mite’, but as to any information, Rosalie might as well not have bothered; if she persisted, she would be made to take a dose of the blue medicine, which wasn’t as bad as the red, but still made her feel all fuzzy and dim and not like herself. She seldom asked questions now.

Today was especially awful. Rosalie had woken early, rags and tags of her dream slipping away as she opened her eyes to grey light. The dream had been all warmth and golden light – she had a fleeing image of a sky-blue velvet dress, extravagantly trimmed in gold braid and creamy, cascading lace, softer than clouds. Had she worn the dress, or had someone else?

Mrs Moberley banged into the room, sudden as death. She never knocked, just slammed open the door and marched in. Rosalie was used to it; she didn’t even startle at the bang of the door hitting the wall. She just swung her feet out of bed, hoping that for once she’d be allowed to use the chamber pot in privacy.

It was not to be, though, not today. As she used the pot, as she washed and dressed in one of the three grey woollen gowns that all looked the same, behind the screen that gave her battered washstand all the privacy she ever knew (it was on the far side of the room from the fireplace, and a persistent draught whistled around Rosalie’s ankles every day as she washed), Mrs Moberley flew round the big, empty room like a whirlwind, opening and shutting drawers and cupboards. Bang, bang, bang. It was even worse than usual.

‘What is it, Mrs Moberley?’ asked Rosalie, emerging from behind the screen to a scene of rather more turbulence than she liked in her bedroom in the early morning. Clothing hung messily from drawers, and the carved double doors of the wardrobe gaped open. It wasn’t like Mrs Moberley, who was usually obsessive about tidiness. ‘Have you lost something?’

‘I heard something in here. A scratching and a skittering. Rats, it must be rats.’

Rosalie couldn’t see why, in that case, she had needed to turn out the ivory box where she kept her few trinkets, or the drawer where her underclothing resided. Besides that, Mrs Moberley, she noticed, didn’t meet her eyes. Normally when she spoke to Rosalie, her watery, red-rimmed grey eyes bored uncomfortably into Rosalie’s, as if she were seeing to the back of her head.

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ she said.

‘Naturally not, dear, you were sleeping.’ She turned and pierced Rosalie with a gimlet stare, much more like her usual self. ‘Tell me, Rosalie, did you dream about anything in particular?’

Everything in Rosalie’s patient, compliant soul rose up against this new intrusion. ‘No, Mrs Moberley,’ she said, carefully keeping her eyes down. ‘I don’t think I had any dreams last night.’

***

She returned to the morning’s scene several times as she sat over her needlework. Mrs Moberley had allowed her to get up and sit in a chair today; some days she was made to stay in bed the whole time, and those days were weary indeed. She tried to be grateful as she set her careful stitches in the sampler. When finished, it would read ‘He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.’ Rosalie had been working at that sampler as long as she could remember. She hated it: hated its dull brown colours, hated the spiky, angular shapes around the border, and hated the motto, which she did not understand. But it was decreed that she spend the mornings working on it, and if she laid it aside for too long, Mrs Moberley would fuss and fume. She was supposed to have it finished by her tenth birthday, and that was next month. Rosalie didn’t understand why it needed to be finished by her birthday, but she was grateful, at least, to have the end in sight. She only hoped it wouldn’t be hung in her room when it was finished.

Mrs Moberley had settled, as was her habit, in front of the fire, and was stitching at a large, amorphous pile of grey cloth.

‘Mrs Moberley?’ asked Rosalie, threading her needle with another length of dun wool. ‘How long is it till my birthday?’

Mrs Moberley glanced up. ‘Oh, not long.’

It infuriated Rosalie when she did this, answered without answering. If you tried to get at a proper answer, you were ‘pestering’. There was no official punishment except disapproval, but Rosalie had noticed that whenever she had been judged to be pestering, something nasty happened: a section of her sampler would be judged not good enough and would have to be ripped out and done again, there would be rice pudding for supper, her wash water would be cold. She sighed and started on the ‘f’ in ‘future’.

The room was warmer than usual, and rather stuffy. Rosalie had given up asking for the window to be opened. Sometimes Tosca would open it for a few minutes while she swept and dusted and changed linens, if Mrs Moberley was out of the way, and Rosalie would lean out and gulp down huge, grateful lungfuls of the cool, misty air. It was always cool and misty; the weather never seemed to change in this place.

CHAPTER TWO

Rosalie was in trouble. Her plaits had, unaccountably, come undone during the night, and her fine, pale hair was a mass of tangles. She sat before the dressing-table, blinking back tears of pain as Mrs Moberley yanked the comb through the knots. It felt as though she was being plucked bald.

A gentle scratch on the door heralded Tosca, her round, dark face wreathed in smiles, her arms full of fresh linen. Mrs Moberley grunted and threw down the comb.

‘Here, girl,’ she snapped. ‘Attend to the child’s hair. I’ve better things to do.’ She stomped out, brushing rudely past the maid.

‘There now,’ said Tosca, drawing up a chair to sit behind Rosalie. Her glowing face came into view in the mirror. ‘Don’t you worry, we’ll have it all nice in no time.’ She started on a section, holding the hair in one hand and working on the very ends. ‘You need some patience with hair like this. Look how I do it; see, the bottom’s already clear. You work upwards a little bit at a time, see that?’

It was, indeed, marvellous to Rosalie how a thing so painful and difficult could be rendered both painless and easy. She watched Tosca in the glass. The round, smiling face and smoothly glowing brown skin formed a sad contrast to her own sharp features and pallid complexion. Even her eyes were pale, she thought sadly. Pale blue eyes, pale yellow hair… even her skin was almost white.

‘Cheer up, Rosie!’ said Tosca, shifting her chair around and starting on the other side. ‘It’s almost done.’

‘I’m so ugly.’

‘You’re not!’ The sharp tone made Rosalie’s eyes flick up in surprise. Tosca looked, well, almost angry, her full lips compressed into a hard line. She seemed to be struggling not to say something. Several time she opened her mouth and shut it again, her hands meanwhile working steadily and gently at the tangles. At last she spoke, her tone once more gentle.

‘You are – you were, the most beautiful girl in the kingdom. As is only fitting, considering who you – well, never mind that.’

‘What do you mean? Who I am? Who am I then?’

‘I don’t know, dearie. Forgot what I was going to say.’ She continued imperturbably smoothing out the tangles. Moving steadily upward, she had almost reached Rosalie’s temple.

‘Is it to do with being ill? Will I look nice again when I get better?’ Rosalie imagined a secret illness sucking all the colour out of a person until they were bleached and pale. ‘Is that why Mrs Moberley and the doctor are pale, too? Are they sick too?’

Tosca sighed, a vast, heavy sigh. ‘No, child, they aren’t sick. They’re the way they are, that’s all. There!’ she finished, running the comb all the way from Rosalie’s crown to the very ends, which came almost to her waist. ‘All finished! You’ll remember how to do that another time.’ She gathered up one side and started to weave a braid. ‘I bet Mrs Moberley didn’t expect me to be so quick. She won’t be back for a while. I’ll just finish this and then I’ll bring you a little treat, that will cheer you up.’

She was back inside ten minutes, with a tall cup that steamed and gave off a rich, tantalising aroma. ‘There now, you drink that up while I do your room. It’ll put heart into you.’ And she was away to throw open the window and change the bed before Rosalie could stammer out her thanks.

The drink was warm and brown and the taste was like nothing Rosalie could ever remember. It was rich and smooth and sweet, but with a hint of underlying bitterness that was just enough to give it strength. As she sipped the wonderful stuff, Rosalie felt her spirits lift in spite of herself. It was almost as if the drink were a kind of medicine, an opposite kind to the ones Mrs Moberley was always making her take.

‘What is this, Tosca? It’s wonderful.’

‘That’s chocolate, child. Your favourite. You used to have it every morning with your breakfast.’

‘Before I got sick?’

Another sigh. ‘Yes, before you got sick.’

‘Why don’t I have it now?’

The sounds of bustling intensified. ‘I don’t know, child. Now, I must get on.’ She gathered up the used linens and was about to take the empty cup when Mrs Moberley burst into the room, slamming the door open as if she had a grudge against it. They were caught in a tableau, the maid, one arm full of snowy linens, the other hand extended to take the cup which Rosalie, still seated at her dressing table, was holding out. Rosalie felt a twinge of fear when she saw her guardian’s expression, but they hadn’t been doing anything wrong. Had they?

‘What,’ thundered Mrs Moberley in awful tones, ‘is THAT?’ An accusing finger pointed at the cup.

The ensuing hour was dreadful. Tosca, after a barrage of abuse that had Rosalie almost fainting, was banished, weeping, to the kitchen. Rosalie herself was subjected to an interrogation of startling intensity, and then made to swallow a spoonful of something truly vile that she had never seen before. She’d thought the red medicine tasted bad, but this had her stomach heaving before the silvery-green spoonful, mercifully small, had slid all the way down her throat. ‘We must hope it can counteract the worst effects,’ Mrs Moberley said in tones of doom. She then drew all the blinds, plunging the room into almost total darkness, and ordered Rosalie back to bed, where she lay, trembling and clutching Minky. She was, she knew, much too old at nearly ten to be hanging on to a rag doll, but apart from her few trinkets, it was the only thing she had from her mother, and she treasured the ragged, grubby thing above everything else she owned.

Presently, the door reopened to admit the doctor, who advanced, twisting his hands together as if washing them, to stand at the foot of her bed. He seemed almost nervous, Rosalie thought, as if she might bite him. Hastily she shoved Minky deeper under the blankets. It wasn’t that Minky was forbidden, exactly, but she always tried to manage it so that Mrs Moberley never saw the old doll. The few times she had seen it, she had sniffed disapprovingly and muttered about it being unhygienic, and Rosalie hoped she had forgotten about it. Tosca always managed to keep it out of view when she was making the bed, and every night Rosalie would find it placed neatly under her pillow.

The doctor (she never knew his name) as usual ignored anything Rosalie said, made her stick out her tongue, and poked at her throat with dry, chilly hands. He left abruptly, and Rosalie could hear him conversing in low tones with Mrs Moberley outside her door. Their voices continued for a long time, Mrs Moberley’s occasionally rising in agitation. Then their footsteps died away and a deep quiet settled over the house. Rosalie lay in the gloom, clutching Minky and remembering the brief happiness of that marvellous drink. What had it been called? She didn’t suppose she’d ever be allowed to have it again.

She was startled into wakefulness as the door slammed open once more, and Mrs Moberley stamped into the room to stand towering over Rosalie’s bed.

‘Now listen, Rosalie,’ she began. ‘You’ve had a narrow escape, that’s if you have escaped. That stupid girl should have known better. But just in case she ever offers you anything like that again, you need to know that you are violently allergic to chocolate, and it could kill you. Yes, kill you,’ she repeated, shaking her finger. ‘Do you understand, Rosalie? Some things are not to be tampered with.’

CHAPTER THREE

When Rosalie woke the next morning, she itched all over. Pulling up the sleeves of her nightgown, she saw scarlet blotches all over her arms. Further investigation revealed the same disfiguring marks over her entire body, and when she rushed to the dressing table, the glass showed her that it was on her face, too. Mrs Moberley, storming in in her usual abrupt way, told her not to be such a little fool, and that she was lucky to have got off so lightly, and that she, Mrs Moberley, had had the right sort of medicine to counteract the worst effects of the chocolate, to which, she must always remember, she was violently, even fatally, allergic.

That was the beginning of a period marked by a new level of austerity. Rosalie’s diet, never exciting, was now limited to bread and milk and the very blandest of bland soups. Mrs Moberley watched like a hawk when Tosca brought her trays, sending back to the kitchen anything she deemed unsuitable. Rosalie nearly cried when a shiny red apple was rejected; she longed for the crunch and the crisp, tart flesh. The only fruit she saw now was stewed prunes every Friday, and she learned to dread mealtimes, and gradually, her appetite decreased, and she became listless, and prone to sudden tears.

The rash cleared up after a few days, and life resumed its monotony, one day blending seamlessly into the next. Rosalie had only one comfort.

She had started to dream, more vividly and with better recall than before. She guarded this knowledge sedulously, not even telling Tosca, lest Mrs Moberley be listening somewhere out of sight, dreading the reappearance of the red medicine. At odd moments during the day, when her guardian’s attention was not directly glaring upon her,