Mirror Me (My Last Duchess )

I remember the first time that I felt the need to act on that second voice inside my head.

It was around their fifth year of marriage and the Duchess had been her usual flamboyant, trifling self and had decided to let us all in on a flattering comment thrown her way by Mr. Pandolf. Her laughter rose above the crowd gathered on the lawn, pearly and enticing in its nature. It had scraped my skin off with its cleanness, leaving flakes of flesh to be brushed off the bone, and I was one layer closer to that slick voice inside my head telling me that I was a thickheaded simpleton. Prior to that day I had never truly questioned what happened behind the closed doors of the Duke’s and the Duchess’ lives. It was obvious, after all. The two were wed and as such they fit the frame of whatever that entailed. However, our peers’ guffawing responses to the interaction between the Duchess and the painter on that overcast day had brought something fatal to my attention.

The duke was and still is possessive. My sister knew that and she had been egging him on that day for God knows what reason. She had spoken of it often, whenever she had paid us her regular monthly visits. We would sit and chat in my personal quarters, and many times I would find my toes curling up inside my socks as if to illustrate how my body was physically repelling the words I was hearing. How did she not see what she was doing? Was she that naïve? That immature? Were we, two sisters, that different?

The voice in my head changes sides once in a while. Sometimes it pities me, claps me with a hand on my shoulder in a show of comfort. At other times, it gives me the frown on the forehead that reads ‘I told you so’.

I don’t understand that. I was never told anything.

“Notice Neptune, though,” the Duke points out to us, his group of peers and their wives who have come by for a tour in his newly renovated gallery. My eyes are still fastened onto the painting of my sweetest sister, however, and I find it hard to tear them off the tainted canvas.

“A rarity,” the Duke adds. “Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.”

I was never a particularly righteous woman whose second nature was to abide by the manmade laws. I worked my way around those norms as best as I could and as much as my husband gave me leeway to. I was prejudiced, had done my fair share of misdeeds in the past and readily indulged in the luxuries of life. Who was I to pass up a good game of cards because the piano was free and in need of a woman’s hand? Nevertheless, I am a woman of my honor and my willingness to uphold that honor is bottomless if you step too close, regardless of the restrictions put upon me. The Duke knows to hold his distance. He always held me in higher regard than his wife, which was probably why he chose her and not me. Some men need a wife while others need a companion. My sister was a wife.

“Splendid,” Mr. Hammersmith muses next to my husband and I. “He did capture the purity of your late wife in that painting, did he not?”

“Yes, my wife was pure, indeed.”

For a moment, I clutch my husband’s arm tighter and his brow twitches as if in a silent reprimand. In a minute it’s going to come. One of them is going to mention it and the Duke will glance over at us as though he genuinely had forgotten the fact that we were his in-laws.

“Miss Winters,” Mr. Brown addresses me in a tone of voice that I have to brace myself against. “It must be a comfort indeed to be able to look upon such a lively representation of your dearest sister?”

Yes. There it is. The twitch of the Duke’s head as he sends a subtle look in our direction.

“We are both very enamored with the painting,” my husband answers for me, not because he doesn’t wish for me to hold my own conversation, but because he knows I am likely to say something inappropriate and that this will have unadvisable repercussions. I am inclined to tell him otherwise and will certainly do so later in the privacy of our own home.

And he will let me, of course, because he is no Duke with a taste for wrongdoings. Yes. We all know that the Duke is to blame, that he is soaked to the bone with the blood on his hands. That poses the real question, though, of whether the man realizes it himself or if he needs to be told.