Blood Worth Protagonist Background

“It’s not the leap that kills you, but the landing.”

Four years gone, and Bex still remembered the look upon Clara’s face when she’d uttered her father’s words.

No, not even upon her friend’s face. Upon the reflection of her friend’s face. That’s how it had always been with Clara, it seemed. Her memories of the girl weren’t of the classes they attended together at Miss Porter’s or even of the extravagant shopping days and decadent opera nights when they were in New York. No, whenever Bex thought about the dearest friend she ever had, it was at Clara’s family estate in Greenwich. It was a perfectly respectable vacation spot for two unchaperoned girls, with a dozen on staff at all times despite it being rarely visited by the family.

Perfectly respectable, but Bex rarely felt decent as she perched upon the foot of the bed and watched Clara’s reflection coat her mirror self in thick layers of cream and dyes.

That evening, for instance, Bex had already tended to Clara’s corset and helped her into a ridiculously lavish gown of burgundy chiffon and five types of black lace and so much fabric in the bust and sleeves Bex was sure she could have fit both their torsos within. It was far more appropriate for a winter gala than a quiet evening in the parlor of a London viscount, and yet Bex was the one being looked upon as though she’d grown a second head.

“Why ever would you say it like that?” Clara asked, setting down the gigantic puff she’d been using to powder her skin to a shade of white that bordered on deceased.

Bex considered that silently, questioning her diction, her cadence, even the propriety of warning her friend off from continuing this ridiculous affair. No, she’d spoken clearly and steadily, and New England may not have had so stringent of customs as Old England – or even the untamed yet conservative edge-of-the-world that was her father’s plot of land in Iowa – but it was absolutely unsuitable for Clara to have another affair with another foreign traveler, and Bex no longer wanted to be her confidante.

Clara grinned brightly. “It’s Look before you leap, not what you said!” she declared on a laugh. “You say the queerest things sometimes, I swear! I was just telling Lord Brigham that last night, how my dear friend Bex is forever saying...”

And then she was off on her umpteenth tale of her goings-on at the estate across the cove, and though Bex truly did hold Clara most dear and would forever be thankful that a well-bred heiress would take someone as peculiar and uncultured as Bex under her wing, she felt that urge again.

That urge. The urge to simply
Stand.
Up.
And.
Run.

Which was why she’d never wanted to go to finishing school in the first place. The proper life of the daughter of a father with his sort of wealth would never do for Bex, and a husband? Never. Too many things which could not be explained, too many odd impulses and queer habits and sparks in the night and bags of magic and phrases she said because her father said them and he wasn’t entirely of this world.

The bag of magic should have been the most inexplicable, but Clara never seemed to notice it. No, it was things like Left is ever right and Never trust a blind yellowworth that caught her attention.

“Would you like me to tell you about sex?” Clara said so suddenly that Bex couldn’t figure out if it even tied into the rest of Clara’s prattle or if it came out of thin air.

Bex’s eyes widened. She shifted uncomfortably at the edge of the bed and fussed with the thin, tasteful ribbon of lace at the cuff of her pale tea dress. She dearly wanted to say no, her father had a decent dairy farm and also a prize stallion frequently studded out, so Bex knew as much as she needed to about the basics of intercourse, but the look in the reflection of Clara’s green eyes told Bex it was better to let the girl go on.

“Well, it’s terribly frustrating in the beginning,” Clara said, “because of the game, you see.”

“Oh?” Bex said, unsure of how to be any less enthused without also being rude.

Clara nodded sagely. “No matter how much you’d like to have sex with the man, you can’t just out with it, you see? So you have to be very coy with it, and it’s very much in the eyes, and some men simply don’t understand what you’re saying with your eyes.”

Or they were uninterested, but Bex certainly could not have said that.

“But if they do understand, they’re very good at proclaiming the air is too heavy inside and we must step out to refresh. Or else they have some rare trinket they absolutely must show me, only it’s in their private office and it wouldn’t do for an unchaperoned lady to go there with them, oh but only for a moment it might be fine. You see what I’m saying?”

Unfortunately, but Bex only nodded with a weak sort of smile.

“And then it’s very lovely. Men have such big hands, you see? And they really enjoy touching all over, and some like to rub those big hands all over your dress and such, but others go right for the bosom.”

Clara had been with exactly three men, but Bex was not about to question how she could be such an expert about what some men liked and what others liked instead.

“They’re very clumsy about lady’s garments, but they’ll dig right in if they can, so I’ve taken to wearing gowns that suit such things.”
Bex would never have thought about it, but yes, Clara’s ridiculous dress and its many buttons down the front would be easier to handle than Bex’s own.

“So oft times they’ll just lift the skirt up for the getting-to, you see? Because otherwise afterward they may have to bring in a maid to help with the redressing, and that’s terribly embarrassing.”

Of course.

“And did you know that they’ll put their fingers right in the lady’s place?”

Oh. Dear.

“It’s actually quite pleasant. There’s this spot just above it that, I swear to you, Bex, my toes curl up when it gets touched. I can’t even stop it from happening.”

Bex wasn’t sure how that could be a pleasant thing, but she could hardly argue.

“And then he’ll typically unbutton his trousers, and I tell you, I’ve never seen anything so queer in my life as a man’s doodle.”

And that was the moment Bex knew she could never live the rest of her days in Connecticut. Her eyes drifted slightly on the mirror, but only enough to see her own pale, wide-eyed, pretty but unexceptional and sweet Lord Jesus wide-eyed reflection, and then she had to remind herself to breathe because she was growing lightheaded. Which was somewhat alright, as she seemed to have lost part of Clara’s tale.

“...and sometimes you don’t feel much of anything. They do this bit of rutting, and then they may or may not make a bit of grunting noise – Lord Brigham sort of squeaks, actually – and then they get the silliest looks upon their faces.”

And that, of all things, was what Bex thought about now, four years past, as she stood between a cliff that was likely impossible on Earth – but this was the Votum Sandbox, an entire world which was as much a prison as was the suite she was usually kept in at Queen Eliza’s palace – and the bounty hunter who no longer endeavored to be silent as she pursued Bex through the woods. Once the two women had made eye contact, there’d been no point to anything but a foot race.

Bex didn’t think about that now. She didn’t think about her twenty-one years of happy memories of her early travels around the world paved by Britannia, her education on the coast of Long Island Sound, her father’s farm or her rickety little clap-board school house in Iowa. She didn’t think about how she would ever return to her father in the real world or even seek out her mother in this supposedly perfect Sandbox which was absolutely her definition of Hell. The thought of why she had been dragged here when the whole point of her father taking her to the real world as a babe was because bloodworths like her were banned from this Sandbox?

Nope, that thought wasn’t what held her at the edge of the cliff.

Prince Stephen’s doodle, and whatever noises and faces he made when said doodle was being utilized, that was what held her right here.

In this realm of Queen Victorias and chimney sweeps, Prince Stephen had thus far been unfailingly kind, polite, and gentle with Bex, his intentions never seeming anything less than pure. When they fastened, which was the silly word they used for marriage here, Bex would be Princess and then Queen, and Stephen would ever be Prince and her faithful servant. That was the lay of the land. He was also intelligent and pleasing to the eye.

And the idea of laying beside him or, worse, beneath him, left Bex with the urge to retch.

So she’d run. Again. As predictable now as Clara had been with her suitors. This was the first time she’d reached the cliff, though. She’d heard the churning in the water before, had recognized the turmoil in the previously placid river as a sign of something substantial on the horizon, but she could not have predicted this.

She couldn’t see the bottom. It was obscured by clouds below her, and even those were so far below. Of course there’d be a body of water, a continuation of the river or a great lake, maybe even an ocean but Bex smelled no salt.

This was the end – for the bounty hunter.

In her seven months in the Votum Sandbox, Bex had yet to hear a proper term for those such as the bounty hunter. The queen and the prince, the others like them and Bex, although none of them were quite like Bex, used the term unworthy in their most polite conversations. Offhandedly it was a lot of scabs and grunts and natches, which Bex thought meant natural, although they weren’t quite natural. Still, they were the closest thing the Sandbox had to regular, normal people.

Regular, normal people did not survive jumps off cliffs without bottoms. They also didn’t survive empty-handed returns to the greenworth queen.

Charles mewed piteously and pawed at her bag o’ plenty as though he was the meekest of kittens. Bex nearly opened the bag so that the great beast, a gift from an Indian raja who had seen in the tiger cub’s eyes the potential to be the companion for someone as worthy as Bex, could climb in. The bag would protect Charles, as it had for all of Bex’s stupidest decisions in the past.
If she leaped, the landing would kill neither her nor Charles. Maybe they’d find a way home or to another Sandbox where the bloodworthy were free.

“You’ll n’jumpa sget back, prinaes!” the bounty hunter yelled in that ridiculous tongue the unworthy mostly spoke in. It was nearly English, but mashed together from so many dialects and so slurred Bex had to guess at what any of them were saying.

The bounty hunter was telling her to come back instead of jumping.

If Bex jumped, the bounty hunter would die.

She took one last glance over the cliff and shook her head to Charles. She wanted to jump more than anything in this awful Sandbox, but she would not be responsible for this woman’s death.