Octavius and the Perfect Governess

Chapter 1-3

It took quite a while to dress, because Ned was the world’s worst lady’s maid. He wrestled with the stays for almost a quarter of an hour, then put the petticoat on back to front. The gown consisted of a long sarcenet slip with a shorter lace robe on top of that. Ned flatly refused to arrange the decorative ribbons at Octavius’s bosom or to help him fasten the silk stockings above his knees. Octavius hid his amusement. Oh, yes, Ned was never going to repeat this forfeit.

Lydia had provided several pretty ribbons, but after Ned had failed three times to thread them through Octavius’s ringlets, Dex stepped forward. His attempt at styling hair wasn’t sophisticated, but it was passable.

Finally, Octavius was fully dressed—and the oddest thing was that he actually felt undressed. His throat was bare. He had no high shirt-points, no snug, starched neckcloth. His upper chest was bare, too, as were his upper arms. But worst of all, he was wearing no drawers, and that made him feel uncomfortably naked. True, most women didn’t wear drawers and he was a woman tonight, but if his own drawers had fitted him he would have insisted on wearing them.

Octavius smoothed the gloves over his wrists and stared at himself in the mirror. He didn’t like what he saw. It didn’t just feel a little bit wrong, it felt a lot wrong. He wasn’t a woman. This wasn’t him. He didn’t have those soft, pouting lips or those rounded hips and that slender waist, and he most definitely did not have those full, ripe breasts.

Octavius smoothed the gloves again, trying not to let the others see how uncomfortable he was.

Ned nudged his older brother, Sextus. “He’s even prettier than you, Narcissus.”

Everybody laughed, and Sextus gave that reserved, coolly amused smile that he always gave when his brother called him Narcissus.

Octavius looked at them in the mirror, himself and Sextus, and it was true: he was prettier than Sextus.

Funny, Sextus’s smile no longer looked coolly amused. In fact, his expression, seen in the mirror, was the exact opposite of amused.

“Here.” Dex draped a silk shawl around Octavius’s shoulders. “And a fan. Ready?”

Octavius looked at himself in the mirror and felt the wrongness of the shape he was inhabiting. He took a deep breath and said, “Yes.”