Gothic Cotillion

(a piece of “sudden fiction” - 750 words)

She grew up in an Indiana town
Had a good lookin' mama who never was around
But she grew up tall and she grew up right
With them Indiana boys on an Indiana night - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

They'd had to skip the Haymaker's Dance, but Toby knew how to treat a girl, and took Elaine instead to their own private dancefloor deep in the Somerset woods. Her family was moneyed, distantly related to the duke of Somerset, and she was one of those girls about whom folk singers write. She who walked on the wild side, just once in her sweet little life; went home with the boy who took her for a ride, before she made a man a wife.

She allowed her beau to guide the dance, although his unstudied feet were less capable than hers of performing the social ritual of dance (at least as she understood it from years of social training among her peers). But he was handsome and kind, and that covered all. And for her part, she was beautiful and lovely.

They'd fallen in love at one of the Prince's Trust events at which she guested as a representative of her class and family, alongside her father, a man whose smile was sublimely condescending. A man about whom it was often said how down-to-earth and socially conscious he is, alongside photographs of him shaking hands with single mothers and day labourers.

His wife had been the victim of what used to be referred to as a nervous complaint, and in the age of social media simply wasn't referred to at all except in self-help platitudes, memetic images of indistinct landscapes with inspirational poetry scrawled across them. She had passed, and little more was said of her, although her "poor daughter" was sometimes referred to.

This was Elaine, and though she'd only met Toby briefly, something passed between them during their idle conversation that could be eradicated neither by time nor common sense, at least according to their sensibilities. 'Ellie, darling' called her father on approaching the two of them caught in conversation at one end of the town hall, just behind a pair of boards with job opportunities pinned to them, 'let's not fraternise too much.'

His eyes flicked up and down Toby in an appraising manner indicative of his class. He seemed to picture this hollow youth, in band tee and denim, pumping his inferior genetic load into his prized filly. 'Good luck, young man' was all he said, however, before herding Elaine towards a handler.

'Do you think he'd let you go?' said Toby a short time later, as they lay together in the place where they now danced, a clearing which once had hosted poachers and hunters.

'To the Haymaker's?' she'd replied, burying her face in his shoulder. 'I doubt it. He doesn't even like letting me out for treatment.'

In her father's defence, her ailment had been a serious one. She and Toby were inclined to forget it as they danced in the filtered moonbeams, his arm supporting her as she flopped against him, too beyond this world to truly partake in it.

The ailment had taken her just a week prior, but even in the modern age, the wealthy were skittish about such common things as madness and despair. The method of her parting at least afforded her the dignity of an open casket, which much relieved her family, who'd had to consent to a closed for her mother. 'This one at least knew how to die sensibly' an ageing great uncle had remarked, recalling the complete obliteration of his niece's face across the flagstones below her window, as if she had somehow engineered the effect so as to embarrass her nearest relations.

Her daughter had inherited her room as per some insane fancy that this would comfort the child, although iron latticework had been applied to the window. 'But not, unfortunately, to the medicine cabinet' observed one of the saucier wags of the funeral party.

Toby lay her gently on a bed of leaves. The air was not right for making love, he decided. There were certain things that he was willing to influence his lover towards as per his own desire, but he would not cross that line. Whatever her family thought of common boys like him, he was still a gentle man.

Maybe it would be that no one realised this essential truth. The corruption of her grave would be discovered, and even if he wasn't caught (he certainly didn't plan to be), a disgusting motivation would be presumed on the part of the corruptor. But he and Elaine would always know different, he in his beating heart and she in her still one.