Fatigue
by Amber Averay
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Be careful what you wish for.
That’s our family’s motto. It dates back centuries, to when my many times great-aunt Chrystabelle was a child. Back then our family had money, were landowners with a huge manor on a vast property. They made their money from sheep, providing wool and meat to multiple counties and becoming affluent very quickly. There was a barony bestowed upon Chrystabelle’s grandfather, and their status soared – as did their wealth.
As the only surviving daughter of the second baron, Crystabelle was horribly spoilt. She had five older brothers and four younger, and three sisters in the grave. As daughters were valuable currency on the nobility’s marriage market, she was nurtured and tutored and treated as if she were a princess, that her father might get the best value when it came time to spend his female coin.
Yet Chrystabelle wanted to be more than just a bargaining chip for her father. She wanted something for herself. She’d been taught to dance by an expert, the royal choreographer no less, but he was frustrated by her lack of stamina. She excelled at most everything put to her, except things of a physical nature: horse riding, dancing, hunting – she tired so easily that her parents brought in medical experts to examine her and somehow cure her of such lethargy. Her brothers – robust, rowdy, athletic, energetic – were convinced it was simply because she was afflicted by something irreversible: femininity. Her mother despaired she refused to apply herself, and pushed her further. Her father, the baron, doted on his only girl and praised her beauty and intelligence and comportment while subtly looking for ways to cure her apathy.
Little did they know that at night she would creep past her sleeping lady’s maid, slip from her bedchamber, and sneak down to the grand ballroom where she would practise the steps taught by her instructor. She tired easily, but sought to push through – some mornings found her slumped on the ballroom floor, exhausted, breath raspy, bruises smudged beneath her pale eyes. She would be carried to her bedchamber, the doctor summoned, and the inevitable treatments begun again. Nobody seemed to realise that the bleeding, purging, and fasting did more damage than good, and such practises were repeated often in the mistaken belief they helped the patient.
So Chrystabelle turned her hopes to the Lord, joining her family in Mass and praying for the stamina to do all that was desired of her, all that she wished to do. But all her entreaties to God, her pleas, bargains, negotiations, and desperate threats were ignored, and poor Chrystabelle became disillusioned with religion and its absent God.
One day, wearied by her walk up the grand stairs to her bedchamber, weakened by the cold seeping through the castle’s stone walls, she fell weeping to her bed and begged for somebody, anybody, to listen to her. To help her. ‘I wish I had the enviable endurance to dance without end!’ she sobbed, burying her face in the pillow and expelling her heartache into the damp folds.
When her lady’s maid arrived at her bedchamber door shortly thereafter, she heard a man’s deep voice resonating through the thick wooden panel and, heart thundering in her throat at the disgrace such private intimacy would bring to the family, she flung the door open – to find the chamber empty. There was no sign of Chrystabelle or her male visitor, save for slightly rumpled bedsheets and the reek of brimstone.
Despite the alarm being raised instantly, despite efforts of the entire county and the baron’s soldiers and members of the king’s army loaned by the sovereign to search for the missing girl, no trace of Chrystabelle was ever found. Her rooms were left untouched, sealed off, never to be accessed again, as rumours swirled that she had turned from her Lord and entertained the advances of the Devil. Her chamber was tainted – and so, by association, were her family. Their fortune dwindled, their status declined, and they were shunned by all. Their servants fled in the dead of night, taking anything of worth they could carry, seeking employment elsewhere.
Yet in the depths of the night music could be heard spilling its haunting tune from Chrystabelle’s sealed rooms, and shadows flitted in the crack beneath the door. A slender silhouette, matching Chrystabelle’s slight form, could be viewed through the tinted windows swaying and whirling, while a dark cloud puddled to one side of her chamber. It is said, even to this day, that she continues her eternal dance for the devil, never succumbing to fatigue or despair, just fulfilling her bargain with him by dancing for his enjoyment. Endlessly dancing…
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