* Author : Marion Deeds

* Narrator : Abra Staffin-Wiebe

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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PodCastle 465: Never Truly Yours is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG-13

Never Truly Yours

By Marion Deeds

October 13, 1931

Dear Neville –

I remember you asked me once, darling, how I got my outrageous name. You were laughing, a highball glass in your hand, at the time — convinced, I’m sure, that I would have some witty story about a character from musical theater or a wager made and lost. Just as I know, when I’ve said to you that I’ve had a bad life and done terrible things, you probably pictured a humble mother — perhaps a seamstress — a gamekeeper father, or me betting too much at Baccarat and frequenting speakeasies.

Since I’ll never see you again I’ll give you the real story. I’m sitting before a cozy fire gazing out the French doors at the moonlit silver surf of the Atlantic, in the study of this seaside hotel, as I write. I’m wearing the emerald earrings you gave me, the ones you said matched my eyes. Is that picture too vivid? Does it contain too many clues? I guess not. After all, you wouldn’t search for someone like me, not even to regain some stolen trinket.

My name is outlandish, not like your sister’s, Eleanor. Are you surprised I knew that? But I knew so much more about you than you realized when we “accidentally” met at the Yacht Club. I knew her name. I knew that when your mother died Eleanor fled into a bottle, and when gin wouldn’t hide her from the pain any longer, into shimmershim, that seductive herb, all numbness and sparkle. I knew your father disinherited her, and you, Neville, ended up with the Ashrod fortune, including that lovely, valuable red gem called the Firedrake. That was the first thing I knew about you, and the only thing I cared about, because I’m a grifter, and I’ve been on the grift since I was twelve, or nine, depending on how I choose to count.

But the story of my name – let me get started.

My mother was one of those beaten-down blondes the British Isles produce in profusion. She grew up in a cultish sect of Protestantism. They hated magic so strongly that they didn’t speak of it at all, even to acknowledge its existence, keeping their members in a state of virulent ignorance. They loved the use of characteristics – which they called “virtues” — for girls’ names. When my mother and my sodden brute of a father came to America, before I’d even arrived, she’d borne four daughters; Patience, Temperance, Forbearance and Tolerance. She was already scraping the bottom of the “virtue” barrel.

They came here in 1905. As soon as they landed in New York, Erasmus Rather disappeared into the whiskey-tainted jungle of the Bowery, returning at night to demand his dinner and take the coins my mother earned as a laundress. We lived in a rickety tenement, the kind you might recognize from your own nighttime jaunts. When my father was sober enough to find work, he was a hod-carrier.

Have you guessed it already, dear? My weak, ignorant mother had a gift for word-magic. Worse, she was a back-hander. While I wouldn’t have minded the name “Charity” bestowed on me, given my mother’s gift—or curse — I think we can guess how my life would’ve turned out if she had chosen, God forbid, “Chastity.” Instead, believing for some reason that the names had to end in “ance,” when I came along in 1906, she chose Comeuppance. It’s barely a word, and isn’t a virtue at all,