Helen Duchamp

Helen's Journal
25 Jan

Its been over 100 years since England conquered France, and yet they still turn their noses up at anyone with a Gallic name. I've heard that they are going to move the Sphinx itself to Paris, and they still insist on looking down on us as if we were not their equals not that long ago. It should come as no surprise, given their feelings about us, that they gave my father but to sell me into indentured servitude on Rajah-4, or lose the family estate to the damned English.

My destination is some place called Kanda. Its a trading hub, apparently. I'll probably be working in some infernally hot warehouse shipping lumanuts back to the Windsors in Buckingham Palace. I will miss the gentle tumble of the Rhone as it snakes its way passed our estate, and all of my sweet and dear friends that have held me up at my weakest. My mother, oh my mother I will miss the most, surely. A child could not ask for a better angel to watch over them.

My father, however, I shall not miss. Every prick of my finger on a Rajan thorn will remind me of just how much more he values his lush grape fields and rose gardens over the freedom of his daughter.

My bags are packed, and passage booked. I'll be leaving on the HMS Cleopatra Cosmoliner tomorrow morning. I suspect, like many others, I'll never find my way back home, but rather be stuck in some dark corner of the mysterious off-world colony.

I looked at myself in my mother's mirror. Its dark chestnut frame almost invisible in the low light of dawn. My long, braided hair a dark, deep black, my skin that of porcelain. My bosom was large but not immodestly so, and my firm midriff and shapely behind more than made up for that deficiency. Perhaps that was another reason he wished me gone so quickly. My older sister Marjorie needed to be wed, but her suitor's kept inquiring about me upon meeting. It's not my fault she inherited poor Grandmother's unfortunate visage.

When I next write, a year will have passed. How different Old France will be, how much the same from my sleep to waking. In the blink of an eye for me, all those who care for me will have greaved my loss and moved on. I'll be celebrating my 20th and 21st birthdays together. I can barely comprehend it.

Enough then. Off to a deathlike dream I go.