Sarah's Roses, Book I: Roses of Blue

Chapter XIII

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Chapter XIII

“I suppose your first ball could be considered a success.”

I cringed as I sat with my aunt the next day as we were having our hour of sewing. Aunt Helen had not attended the ball; she did not feel strong enough to stay up so late with all the guests and had remained in her quarters. Now I had to sit and tell her, minute by minute what had happened and hear her comments on everything.

She paused for a moment and abruptly asked, “Did anyone compare you with…with Evelyn?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I tried to reply in a soft, nonchalant way, remembering what the two gentlemen had said about my aunt and my mother yesterday.

“Did a lot of people compare you with her?”

“I…uh…” I didn’t know how to answer.

“Tell me the honest truth, Sarah,” My aunt’s voice turned sharp.

“Yes, ma’am,” I looked down.

“Well, I expected as much,” She said in a crisp voice. “Evelyn was very popular on her coming out ball. If your mother loved anything, she loved balls, and even though she ran off only a few days before her seventeenth birthday, in that space of a less than a year she attended more balls than some people do in a lifetime.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Aunt Helen gave a shake of her head. “Evelyn was always up to endless mischief. She was nothing but trouble from the start; from the start mind you. I always knew she would come to no good and no good would come from her. She ran off from home, literally killed our mother, subjected the family name to endless gossip and then went ahead produced an illegitimate child before dying and leaving you on my hands.”

“Aunt Helen,” I pleaded with her. Why was she bringing all this up?

“I’m serious, Sarah. I hope you are grateful to your uncle and myself for taking you in.”

“I am very grateful, Aunt Helen; I am forever in your debt.”

“Even though you were popular at the ball, you must never forget that you are beneath the rest of your peers!”

“But why, Aunt, why must I be?” I didn’t understand why she was so intent on constantly putting me down.

“You are a disgrace, Sarah! Surely you understand that?”

“Do I really have to be?”

“You don’t have a choice. You were a disgrace from the start. You are your mother’s disgrace and now you are mine. I am ashamed of you, Sarah; ashamed of what you are and of what you always be. You are a product of sin.”

Her words cut me like a knife. Aunt Helen had never been very kind to me, but she had never gotten this insulting. What had come over her? Was it because of the success of my début? Was it because I was so much like her sister, whom I only recently discovered she had been terribly jealous of?

“Your mother always looked for trouble and she certainly always made it, but she was never there to clean up all the disasters created by her. Who always had to do the dirty work? It certainly wasn’t Evelyn. We have created a lie to keep the family name safe, but it is a lie, Sarah. A lie. And a lie will never cover up who you really are. No amount of false stories can save that which is already tarnished. You, Sarah, are my lifelong shame.”