Through And Through, Herself.

This is all the glory men speak of, hung upon this rotten scaffold, all the fleshly fairness for which wars are fought and for which cities are put to the torch and for which babes in arms are slaughtered. This is the ultimate sum of all human desire – the skull beneath the skin. Even for good, honest faces: her mother’s face with its smiling lines and approaching softness around the jaw; her father’s face, gray-bearded and gray with grief. The wrinkle-sunken face of an old man she had glimpsed from her window, who had passed by every day on his way to petition the Duke and walked home every night, dejected; the faces of infants, becoming sculpted and defined as the days and weeks run their course, minting little men and women out of lax plump shapelessness. Castiza has had some study of anatomy, has proceeded from the study of externals to the contemplation of that which sits beneath the familiar and the friendly surface.

Castiza runs the tip of her finger along the crest of the skull’s exposed teeth, burnished white like a mountain range at the tips but rotten at their bases. These have been polished by her brother’s kisses and nervous fondlings. God knew from whence he had the thing, when the rest of the woman lies in ashes; it’s for the sake of this relic that her brother has wasted away and made no effort to dredge the family out of its ruin. He has fallen in love with the relic and forgotten the woman.

She has let down her hair and the great mass of it falls from her shoulders like a curtain to cover the thing. She has little memory of what her brother’s beloved looked like, and has no knowledge of her living kin to make a guess from. (There are a few dark hairs clinging to the skull’s surface in places, brittle and broken, but either the poison or the grave may have tarnished them.) Herself, she is as blond as Carlo is, and will imagine what this skull looked like when life lived in it. Here were eyes, that once could see; here, a mouth that once could speak.

Are these what she died for, this woman who came to her untimely death before Castiza was old enough to know reason – was she killed for the sake of the fairness of her face? For the placid pleasures of her body? Beshrew such vain delights; there is nothing delightful about the possession of such a body, if the possession of it is accompanied by such grave care. Coming into beauty as one comes to womanhood is like inheriting a priceless jewel and yet owning no strongbox to keep it in, and so having little defense against any knave who might find it struck his fancy and endeavor theft. One might make a fierce show of resistance and preserve that treasure through much effort, but the goods can never be disposed of entirely; the struggle against sin may never cease. One cannot strip oneself entirely of one’s charms, not without setting to the task of self-murder. God loves those saints who make themselves ugly for chastity’s sake, who pluck out their pretty eyes or sprout beards on their pretty chins; she envies such women a little. Disclosed from her pleasant flesh, Gloriana might be reduced to her truest self, her essence – whether that is a spirit in Heaven, spouseless and sexless, or a skeleton in the earth, inert. The flesh itself is an encumbrance.

Castiza has had a little study of architecture as well. If other men saw the scaffolding beneath the polished front, saw the fragility of the thing that propped the whole artifice up, would they admire, or fear?

She has found herself with some knowledge of book-keeping and finance, taken from the same tutors who gave Carlo and Vindice their lessons, and is herself modest in her spending, perforce and by nature. Is it right that men should throw away such wealth, such treasure beyond counting and in such denominations (from the poorest penny to the riches of Croesus) to purchase for their use such miserable compoundings of flesh and bones and hair? And then, too, how sick it is that men and women alike gild the folly of their flesh by dignifying it and calling it perfect. They pierce the body and hang it with jewels; they rub it with the finest perfumes; they wrap it in brocade. No property is worth such expenditure. If men knew what such bodies were – women’s bodies forever bleeding, aching, stinking, swelling and dwindling like the phases of the moon, broken by ill-health and care – they would not hurry so to possess them. She wishes every man knew that he embraced a skeleton; how other women ever can forget it, she doesn’t know.

Women are not robbed of their chastity for loveliness’ sake alone. (She has made study of history, too.) In riot of wartime, neither the young nor the old are spared, lust consumes without regard for maturity nor degree nor sex and certainly without a care for beauty. Blind cruelty is the premise; beauty is the excuse.

At her dressing-table the skull makes for as good a glass as any other. Strip away Castiza’s flesh and they might be sisters; they are of a size.