The Tale of the Reluctant Heiress

Just a small story I was asked to put together by friends of mine (and the dynamic duo behind Silver Spoon Clothing) for their 2010 winter range... A lover of fairytales, recently bewitched by Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, and hugely inspired by a need to give Coppelia a second chance at adventure and real living, I jumped at the opporunity! So here is what they requested... A fairytale about a 70's-born reluctant heiress...

There was a time not so very long ago, when an aristocrat and his wife desired, of all things, a youth to call their. Unable to bear children, the wife's despair grew, until one day when the aristocrat put his artful hands to use and crafted for them a daughter of the finest porcelain. A face of rare translucent beauty, lashes delicate and black as soot, eyes wide for all to remember their innocence by, and there, lips to remain forever in full blossom.
      The aristocrat and his wife treasured their life-like porcelain beauty, and so lovely was she that they named her Greta. But our Greta would be no inventor's plaything. No, not this Greta, who would only stare at a point beyond her bedroom window, a magic mirror to an endless outside she might never know. Had she been able to cry, then tears would surely have escaped a pair of masterfully painted eyes. "You would break, and it would break our hearts," they told her, while the rest of the world was rocked by the sound of rolling stone and of the times that were a'changin'... Still she yearned, as dolls do, to be real.
     And yearn she did, like the pinioned butterfly, until the arrival of her seventeenth year when the hour finally cam to fulfill a doll's longing, and Greta awoke to the altering light of a nascent moon.
     Leaving behind the safety of the covers that had given no warmth, she beheld an illuminated reflection in the window's glass, and watched the strange chiaroscuro that danced beneath her pale visage. One bare porcelain foot after the next and Greta found that she had stepped through her magic mirror and into the bewitching hour, to go far, far away from the stately house of the aristocrat and his wife, to the secret garden of wilder hearts' desires... An enchanted place where dolls might be made flesh...
    When morning broke, all that was to be found of the couple's beloved Greta was but the single pearl of a family heirloom, suspended in the glass of a bedroom window.