Free Love by the Morning Star by Laura L. Sullivan

have all the laureled heads of England eating from our hands. Come, doesn’t the stage call you?” She grabbed Hannah in her strong arms and dipped her, as she had once dipped Otto.
    â€œEngland is our sanctuary,” Hannah said between giggles as she regained her balance, “and Starkers is where we must stay until it is safe to go home. You know you won’t be allowed to stay in the country without a job.”
    â€œI don’t know why you are putting up with it so calmly,
Liebchen
. You have an iron core of pride in you. All of you opera singers do, I think. It helps a little thing like you resonate up onstage.” She kissed her friend’s cheek. “But don’t let pride and stubbornness keep you from happiness. Seek out Lord Liripip. His wife is a fright, but he can’t be as bad as all that. Kneel at his feet, put your head in his lap, sigh prettily . . . believe me, it is a strategy women have been using with men for centuries, whatever their relation. Ah,
scheise
! I am to lay the napkins out for lunch. After the masters eat, we underlings get our nibble, so I will see you soon downstairs. Your frocks are over there, you poor thing. They’re worse than mine.”
    She clicked her heels, gave a martial bow, and marched down the narrow staircase.
    Alone, Hannah sat down gingerly on the dirt-colored blanket that served as a bedspread, half expecting dust to puff up around her. But no, it was perfectly clean, only so, so ugly. “It was
dyed
this color,” she murmured, patting the blanket as she would a pug puppy who couldn’t help being born unattractive. “If they were going to go to the trouble of dyeing it, why wouldn’t they make it scarlet, or plum, or anything other than dirt-colored?”
    Besides the bed there was a three-drawered dresser, a tipsy chair with an enamel coating that had worn off in places to reveal rusting wrought iron, a rag rug, a mirror just big enough to reflect one cheek, and for decoration, a mockery of a painting: a garish pink-cheeked servant in a crisp white apron and cap skipping through a pastoral landscape as if she’d never done a day’s work in her life.
    Two dresses hung from hooks on the wall.
    â€œThey’re not hideous at all,” she told herself gamely. Perhaps they had even been pretty, once. The blue floral one might have looked like Delft china . . . three or four owners ago. The pink floral gave a vague impression of spattered blood that had been scrubbed and scrubbed but had never quite come out.
    She stood and crossed the room—it took only a step—and opened the dresser. The top two drawers were empty. The bottom drawer had mouse droppings in it.
    â€œNo underthings,” she said to herself.
    Then she covered her face in her hands and, just for a moment, blotted out the whole horrid world.
    â€œI don’t care!” she insisted, throwing out her arms and baring herself to the truth again. “Let them hate me. Let them punish me. Here I was sent and here I stay until my parents come to England.” She looked again at the shoddy ugliness around her. “I wouldn’t care if they were poor. If this were all they had and they took me in with love, I swear I would never make a single squeak of complaint. But to live in a castle, and treat me like this . . .”
    She swallowed hard and knitted her dark brows. “There. That was my last bit of whining. I won’t complain. Not to the Liripips, not to the cook, not even to myself. And I’ll die before I ask them for new underthings. Why was I so stupid at the station? No, never mind, that’s only complaining about myself, and I’m not to complain anymore. Or talk to myself.”
    She made a motion of locking her mouth and throwing away the key. Then, since no one was watching and she could be as silly as she chose, she scrambled on the floor to pick up the imaginary key and slipped it into