The Ruins of Lace Read Online Free PDF

all those prized family treasures the little girl had caused to disappear.
    She dipped her hands into the trunk, and they came out clutching the lace cuffs. They were even more glorious, more magnificent than she had thought. A pattern of leaves and petals, intertwined with a filigree of scrollwork, repeating again and again and again. A circle that never ended, a pattern so finely detailed that it seemed to undulate across the fine mesh into which it had been woven. She ought to have put them back right then. If she had put them back right then, none of the misery that had followed would have happened.
    But she did not.
    After slipping them over her wrists, she closed her eyes and imagined those cuff-draped hands to be her beloved maman ’s. She wrapped her own arms around herself and pretended it was the embrace of her mother.
    Sois sage , be good, my sweet angel.
    It’s too much trouble to be good, Maman .
    But it’s only the good who marry well, ma chérie , the bad always get what they deserve.
    Then I shall be the most good girl who ever lived.
    If only you had lived, Maman !
    The little girl embraced herself one more time, and then she opened her eyes and made the sign of the cross. The lace swayed in the air, just as the bishop’s had. She swept her hands up and down, back and forth, watching it ripple, taking great satisfaction in the fact that it seemed to weigh nothing at all.
    Weightless.
    Spotless.
    Priceless.
    I wanted to lecture her. I wanted to plead with her. I wanted more than anything to beg her not to do it. If only I could have explained what would happen. But though my mouth was open, no sound issued forth. Though I tried to run to her, though I wanted to take her in my arms and spirit her away, my limbs would not move.
    Now, she pretended she was to marry. Pushing the cuffs farther up her arms, she smiled at a groom she would never have. She imagined marrying above her station, to a prince, perhaps. Or at least to a count. She glided across the room, chin held high, shoulders pushed excruciatingly far back. She curtseyed to the King and then to the Queen. She danced what she thought was a courante. But after a while, she tired of the game, and she ached with the rigid posture she decided marriage protocol required.
    Much better, perhaps, to marry Alexandre, whom she would not have to impress.
    She considered returning the cuffs to the chest and searching out her cousin. She even turned and started across the room. But then she stopped.
    I knew what would happen next. I did not want to watch it, but I could not close my eyes.
    What was it that possessed her? What sort of familiar spirit was it that told her if she held her arms out straight like posts and then rotated them, those cuffs would spin around her wrists faster than the miller’s wheel? And what made her note the lace, when set in motion, looked like the stream in the forest as it flowed over the rocks?
    Around and around and around.
    Faster and faster and faster.
    Until…One of them took flight.
    We both watched—she in astonishment, I in dread—as that cuff flew across the room and then skidded to a stop in the fireplace. There was no fire. There would be no fire until later that evening. But there had been fires. Any number of fires over the years had left the hearth a deep and sooty black. The girl approached that place, heart in her mouth, bent down, and plucked the cuff from the dingy gloom.
    It was…mostly clean. Except for an area at the edge upon which it had slid through the ashes. There, it had been soiled, the scrollwork thrown into dark relief.
    I watched the girl’s chin tremble and her face pucker as she thought of the maman who could neither comfort her nor right her mistakes. I also saw the moment when she realized it would do no good at all to cry. She had touched something that did not belong to her. She had gone where she was not supposed to go. Even her dear maman would have scolded her. She knew she must not be