Masquerade ✔

Chapter 1

"You're going to the ball."

Clara looked up from her stitching at Araminta's words. "Of course I'm going," she replied, confused. "I'm always there to serve you, whatever you need."

"That's not what I meant." Araminta appeared from behind her changing screen, still dressed in her day clothes. "You're going as me."

Now Clara was really worried. She always suspected that living in the thin air of an airship manor made funny things happen to upper class minds, but now Araminta was proving that theory. "But you're the guest of honor," Clara explained slowly. "You have to go."

"No, I don't," Araminta said pointedly. "Everyone just has to think that I'm there. It doesn't actually matter who's behind the mask. Besides, we're the same size and have approximately the same eye and hair color, and you'll be in so much makeup no one will be able to tell the difference."

Clara couldn't believe what she was hearing. It was impossible. "Except of course we sound completely different, move completely different, and have a completely different set of social skills."

Araminta gave her maid a sharp look that immediately quieted Clara. Lady Araminta Llewellyn had a well-deserved reputation for dismissing her maids for the slightest of things, and Clara desperately needed to keep this job.

Unlike Araminta, Clara didn't live in a fancy airship manor.

"You're going in my place," Araminta said coldly, "or you'll no longer be employed with me. And as to the matter of our social differences, I know for a fact that you are quite capable of imitating the behaviors and mannerisms of my class."

Clara's cheeks tinged pink. It was a common game amongst household staff who lived on land to have fun impersonating the various lords and ladies they served. Clara didn't know how Araminta knew about their games, and she dared not ask.

"So sit," Araminta ordered. She pointed at the chair behind the vanity. "I would never do my own hair for a ball this important, so neither can you."

"You're doing my hair?" Clara repeated doubtfully as she sank into the cushion.

Araminta rolled her eyes, exasperated. "Well, I can't exactly call someone else in, now can I?"

Clara didn't respond and instead tried to sit as still as possible as Araminta tugged at her long, dark hair, curling, braiding, and pinning it up into a magnificent updo that seemed to defy gravity.

"You can do your own makeup," Araminta finally said, throwing down the brush and sauntering back behind her changing screen. "It's easier to do on yourself than hair is."

Clara didn't have enough experience to agree or disagree, but nevertheless she tentatively picked up a tube of foundation off of the vanity. "What are you going to be doing while I'm at the ball?" she asked cautiously. It hadn't escaped Clara's suspicion that Araminta might be playing a cruel prank and would burst in halfway through the event, exposing Clara as an imposter.

"None of your business," came the unsatisfying reply. "But as far as I'm concerned, Harrison and I are already arranged to be married, there's no point in going through the pomp and circumstance tonight. It won't change anything."

Harrison Norrington. The other guest of honor, the man whose family was hosting the ball, and a challenge that Clara had somehow not even thought of.

"How am I supposed to convince your soon to be fiancé that I'm you?" she questioned, grasping at anything that might get her out of this.