Golden Arrow - Chapter 7

7. Cornflowers

When Eurus returned to his room, he noticed the vase on the bedside table. The blue cornflowers were arranged neatly in a simple, white ceramic jar.

Most of the flowers had been ruined when Psyche fell on the bouquet. When asked whether she wanted to replace them, she had silently shaken her head and stubbornly brought the crushed flowers back to the castle. Eurus thought it was just like Psyche to pick out the ones still intact and carefully arrange them.

Is gathering broken things her nature? That child—or rather, that woman.

“What a foolish woman…”

The muttered words carried the heat of the whiskey he had drunk for the first time in a while.

Since the age of six, Eurus had been drinking that whiskey—or rather, he had to drink it. The first time he had been beaten nearly to death by the troupe master, he had taken the liquor his mother had hidden and drank himself into a stupor. The bitterness of the liquid brought him a sleep that dulled the physical pain.

From that day on, Eurus began to steal liquor—from his mother, the troupe master, and the other performers. The boy spent much of his childhood in a haze, but no one paid him any mind. Not even his mother cared.

His mother, Elizabeta, was always pregnant. It was the result of taking any man into her arms. Of all the children conceived, only two had survived—Eurus and his younger brother Ian, who was six years his junior.

Elizabeta cared for no one but herself, and she routinely poured her resentment onto Eurus.

“If only you hadn’t been born!”

“You ruined my life. You’re nothing but a bastard child.”

Before giving birth to Eurus, his mother, Elizabeta, had been a beautiful and dazzling woman—so the troupe members said. She had been a popular actress who had swept through Lydon’s major theaters at a young age. Her portrayal of Juliet, in particular, had been so iconic that no one else dared challenge her legacy.

Just as actors and their roles were said to resemble one another, Elizabeta became a real-life Juliet. She fell in love with an impossible, transcendent romance. At the age of seventeen, she met Eurus’s father, Ares Cavendish.

Ares had loved the talented, beautiful actress, and Elizabeta had loved the young Duke with his wealth and power. She willingly became his mistress and bore him a child. Ares named his illegitimate son Eurus, but that was the extent of his generosity. The Cavendish name, which Elizabeta so desperately desired, was not passed down to her son.

Had she been content with that, it might have been enough. But like Juliet, Elizabeta sought to make her impossible love a reality. Unfortunately, love that requires effort loses its charm, and women who lose their charm are cast aside.

Ares Cavendish eventually bid Elizabeta farewell. Not long after, news of his engagement spread throughout Lydon. Upon hearing the news, Elizabeta stood at the imposing iron gates of the Devonshire mansion with her infant in her arms, waiting hopelessly for her former lover. It wasn’t until late at night that she finally saw him returning home in his carriage.

“Go back. I’ll make sure the child is raised by someone suitable.”

Hearing the words of her former lover, Elizabeta was overcome with humiliation. In a fit of spite, she joined a traveling troupe with the infant Eurus in tow. It was a troupe founded by the man who had once helped her become a star actress when she had nothing. There, Elizabeta began playing Juliet once again.

However, despite her hopes of fully reclaiming her fame, public interest in her had already waned. Instead of being remembered as an actress, she was now burdened with the labels of “someone’s mistress” and “someone’s mother.”

The public’s view of actors was always contradictory. They expected perfect separation between the actor and the role, yet clung to their illusions about the real-life person behind the role.

“What kind of Juliet is she? Doesn’t the theater have anyone else?”

“She’s lost her charm since she had a child.”

To make matters worse, the troupe itself was on the verge of collapse. Elizabeta sold the jewelry given to her by the Duke to help, but the money bled away quickly. Eventually, the troupe was forced to flee from Lydon’s central theaters, running from debt collectors to Scotlin, where they survived by performing as itinerants.

Juliet was dead. Far from making a comeback, Elizabeta could no longer land the role of a fresh, young heroine and soon became obsolete. Playing vulgar tavern wenches, conniving nurses, and dying patients, she no longer shone. Those roles became Elizabeta’s reality.

That time marked the practical end of her life. Elizabeta, yearning for the praise and enthusiasm she once received as the greatest actress and for the love and wealth she had as the Duke’s mistress, wasted her days on alcohol and drugs. No one liked her anymore.

Negative emotions such as hatred eventually settled on the weakest person. The young, helpless Eurus became the target of his mother’s, the troupe master’s, and the other performers’ violence and abuse. They never touched Ian, the younger son, as he had inherited the same hair color as the troupe master.

On Eurus’s tenth birthday, the troupe was raided by the police. Drunken and drug-addled performers were dragged to prison. Ironically, Eurus, the troupe’s most wretched member, was the only one elevated by the event. Someone in the police recognized Elizabeta as the Duke of Devonshire’s former mistress and discovered the boy who bore the Duke’s striking blue eyes.

When the news reached Ares Cavendish, he quietly arranged for Eurus to be released from jail. He then sent him to some rural location to be fed and sheltered. At the time, Eurus had been suffering from severe malnutrition.

Months later, when the Duke visited him in person, Eurus’s face was a mask of rage, defiance, and resentment. To his surprise, the Duke found the boy’s fierce gaze to be quite pleasing.

“So, you are Eurus.”

“…Who are you?”

Eurus had asked, though instinctively, he already knew the answer. His delicate features and blond hair had come from his mother, but the blue eyes staring back at him could belong to no one else. This man was his father.

“How do you want to live?”

“Like a bird.”

“A bird? Living off insects?”

“As it comes. Even birds live that way.” [1]

The Duke had laughed heartily. From then on, Eurus began receiving education from tutors handpicked by the Duke. As he had said, he absorbed everything he could—indiscriminately, like a bird. Two years later, he became an unofficial member of the Cavendish family. At just twelve years old, Eurus had already achieved half the success his mother had once so desperately sought.

Eurus’s childhood had been sealed away by his father, the Duke of Devonshire. The boy who had been beaten, who had lived in a drunken haze amidst the wandering troupe, ceased to exist. Soon, Eurus became the picture of a flawless nobleman—so perfect that he unsettled Deimos Cavendish, the undisputed heir of Devonshire.

Deimos, who had always been lacking, became even more sordid when Eurus appeared. Eurus, meanwhile, subtly stepped over his half-brother, rising ever higher.

The thing that stirred the memories Eurus had buried so deeply—memories he had even locked away from himself—was the vivid blue bouquet of cornflowers Psyche had been holding. In his hazy, beaten childhood, when everything was blurry and indistinct, that blue had been the only clear color he could remember.

He had never seen such a striking shade before then. The troupe members had said it was the color of an expensive dress dyed with the finest pigments. That gown’s brilliant hue was the first thing to paint his black-and-white world. It had been on the day he met a girl wearing a dress the color of cornflowers.

“Are you okay?”

“Does it hurt?”

It felt as though he could hear those words again.

“Mind your own business.”

Eurus muttered the words involuntarily. Those had been the first words he had spoken to that girl all those years ago.

I’m not okay. It hurts a lot.

That was what he had wanted to say. Watching the girl kneeling before him, her vivid blue dress stained with mud, its stiff fabric crumpled, Eurus had wanted to confess. I’m not okay, and I’m in pain.

But he hadn’t. It had been a child’s pride—an act of defiance from a boy who had just revealed his vulnerability to a precious, lovely girl he might remember for the rest of his life. And yet, despite his cold words, the girl had approached him even closer, crying harder than he had been.

On that cold night, her teardrops—like dew born from the black air—fell gently onto his wounds, soothing him. Perhaps it was then that Eurus had begun his first, innocent love. For the first time, the most ragged and lonely boy in the troupe had met someone who cried for him.

Her dark eyes had swelled and subsided with each sob. As he breathed in and out, his chest rose and fell sharply in time.

Her black hair carried a pleasant scent. It wasn’t like the harsh perfume his mother always wore. It was simply her scent—sweet, soft, warm, and ticklish. Despite his runny nose from crying, the fragrance invaded him like a flood that had burst its banks.

If scents could take form, Eurus thought, hers would look like the thin curls of smoke from one of his mother’s cigarettes. Her fragrance had swirled within him, slowly spreading into every corner of his being.

But what did it matter now? The moment his father, the Duke of Devonshire, sealed Eurus’s past with a lid and locked it tight, Eurus forgot about that part of his life, too.

He reached out and grabbed the vase holding the cornflowers. Then, without hesitation, he moved it out of sight, where it could no longer catch his eye.

***

[1] A slightly modified quote from Act 4, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”