Wulfe N. Straat is back...with more of what you like!

Insert three ladies from a social-good network: two middle-aged, one relatively young. Add a young boy with whom they're charged. This scene is called: Dame Pauvrelieu's Mind.

Forcing herself to breathe more easily, fixing the triumvirate’s purpose above her own embarrassment, Dame Pauvrelieu laid her right elbow on the table as declaration that, even under such circumstances, she would do her best to uphold the principles of Les Dames de Seigneurie...in the same way she had, as a young girl of twelve, affirmed under oath that she would uphold the founding principles of Les Demoiselles, the auxiliary constituted that same year to promote character development and seigneurial training for young ladies of the noble born. Once her elbow was securely placed, enough to support the weight of her shoulders, she leaned forward and lowered her forearm towards Dame Rossignol who, sad and broken creature that she was, had been her best friend and confidante within Les Demoiselles; this same lovelorn spinster who, despite being just another twelve-year-old at the time, had taken the freshly scratched, flea-bitten, flannel-shirted daughter of a hard-drinking, back-stabbing, whip-wielding lord of a bleak and impoverished seigneurie and, in fairy-tale fashion, transformed her by age sixteen into a demoiselle suitable for marriage to the wealthy and influential Pauvrelieus. In the same fluid motion of fixing the heel of her palm and wrist against the tabletop, finding it sticky with syrup but otherwise easy enough to ignore, she tapped her fingers on the formica to gain her friend’s attention while, at the same time, letting her mind engage with the hopeless despair of a raggedy girl from the hinterlands, grubbing for tidbits of food in the slop fed the pigs, now comfortably settled for more than two decades in the ‘good life.’ Crediting Les Dames de Seigneurie for installing her ~ as she had been, a ragamuffin ~ within the warmth and comfort of the Rossignol household, she sighed with the weight of indebtedness owed the league, even as she acknowledged her greater debt to the Rossignols who, with their jovial cheer and expansive/expensive nurturing, had made all the more subtle changes in her character possible. "Rosa-Reine?" she said, using the same intimate tones of sisterhood she’d employed in the dark of night under quilted covers, with the eerie shadows of a flashlight across their two faces, with both of them flipping through the celebrity magazines that had become popular in Denga after the establishment of Les Demoiselles. "I think we’re done here, don’t you?" Opening her eyes wide for response (blinking twice), she waited. After a protracted silence ~ feeling ignored; feeling all the little things that had bothered her about her rich friend and, at a lower level of understanding, never been truly understood by her rich little friend; feeling it under her skin: ‘the rich little girl, the TRULY RICH little girl’ ~ Dame Pauvrelieu leaned her head back, far enough to suggest she was aggressing towards her friend, then nodded in perfect understanding, remembering her twelve-year-old friend as she had been in the stateroom, bruising her middle finger.

 

"A moment, please."

 

Dame Pauvrelieu shook her head, drawing herself out. Then, she drew in a breath, making sure it was naturally drawn, not hurried, not desperate. Once more, she eyed her friend, who had yet to move, yet to respond. Once more, she nodded, indicating by her eyes that she would take control of the moment if, within the moment, things were not quickly brought back to normal. As further inducement for Dame Rossignol to return to the ‘good works’ of the triumvirate, if only to protect her fragile reputation against the rumor of intoxication, Dame Pauvrelieu reared her hand up and galloped her fingers in air, threatening to bring them clopping onto the tabletop with the same forceful tempo as the piaffe, which was firmly imprinted on both their minds from their equestrian training in the arena. When she believed that her admonition hadn’t been noticed or that it had passed as bluff, she swiveled her wrist back and, pointing her nails down as final warning, struck. She waited then, past that solitary strike; and she watched with an eye that evaluated every protracted moment, needing to know whether that faraway look in Dame Rossignol’s eyes was the same she’d seen in Rosa-Reine’s eyes shipboard, just three days after they had been shipped off to the Lycée Armand-le-Grand for a continental finish.

 

"A moment, please."

 

Straightening her back, if somewhat too quickly, Dame Pauvrelieu swiveled at the hip to gaze down disapprovingly on the boy whose reflection, though full grown to a man, remained in Dame Rossignol’s eyes, seeing him now as more than just another flea-bitten ragamuffin for Les Dames de Seigneurie to deliver ‘new and newborn’ into a bright new future, seeing him now as a direct descendant of the same Colonel deFaux (once seen at the governor-general’s palace on an Easter afternoon) that they had ever after imagined with embarrassed heat and girlish squeals: under the sheets, at the stables, aboard ship, at the lycée and, most recently but without the same squeals of delight, in that very same kitchen whose table stuck so to her wrist. Tilting her head back once more, as much as snubbing the boy for being in her friend’s eyes, she turned back to Dame Rossignol. "No, Rosa-Reine. You can’t do this." She shook her head, as if to a child. "It’s not right." Realizing finally that she had failed to reach the depths of world in her friend’s eyes, whose dark pupils, even through the filter of rose-colored lenses, revealed too much of what was hateful in the world, she leaned her head back and, turning towards the two women at the door, called out in surrender, "Monique?"

Author's Note

Ignore the previous elements of the story that would have better introduced you to these characters. They're in other scenes of other chapters: my apologies. Otherwise, just read it as a fully paid tourist through the mind of another.