Chapter 1
Marguerite,
Forgive me.
It’s been so hot these latter days. Sweltering, rancid, the sky bleached near to white like an old dog bone, the grass in Central Park faded to straw.
I can tell that, while I was gone, my housekeeper did her best to salvage the bougainvilleas in their urns lining the balcony, but poor things.
Early spring they promised a verdant bramble.
I’ve come back to my apartment to find that even they have been sacrificed to the heat, pink leaves dried to dust, their tender edges crisped and dead.
Forgive me. I did not mean to dwell on the morose.
At night—oh, especially at night, when I’m abed and I hang, suspended, between my dreams—I take a deep breath of this stinking Manhattan air, and all I smell is the cool salt wind off the Celtic Sea.
Isn’t that funny, sissy?
MEDMENHAM, ENGLAND
Most locals claimed that the misty, leafy estate known as Winter Queen was named after Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who might—or might not—have spent three snow bound nights in its manor house, and who might—or might not—have found three snowbound nights of respite from her mad husband, King George, in the warm arms of an unnamed courtier. Or perhaps a stable lad.
Nonsense, said others. The house and land were actually named for the fairy queen said to dwell in the surrounding woods, Mab or Old Moss or Gloriana, depending on who was telling the tale, and how many pints they’d enjoyed before starting in.
Whatever its origin, Winter Queen was indeed an impressive mess of a place, close enough to a wide bend of the Thames to attract errant seabirds blown inland, far enough to barely glimpse its ribbon of silver from the tallest hill.
The original manor house was small, mysterious, and Tudor, cupped by trees and surrounded by deep purple bellflowers.
Stained-glass windows sliced through dark-paneled rooms, so many windows that on bright days the house’s walls and floors were bejeweled with color.
Subsequent owners kept the glass but expanded the rooms, generation by generation, adding two wings of gilt and marble, a conservatory.
A library. A koi pond, also surrounded by bell-flowers.
By the time Charles Jolivet and his wife, Pauline, purchased the estate, the eldest fish in the pond were nearly thirty years old, and the imported turtles nestled along the shore much older.
The scent of ageless grandeur, the whiff of royalty that still lingered in the manor’s corners and crevices, suited Pauline quite well.
She was tall, almost too tall for a man’s comfort, but handsome Charles never minded, so neither did she.
Pauline had a blue-blooded inheritance and a flair for the piano, chestnut hair and an aristocratic nose.
Yet her eyes were warm and brown, and her laughter so infectious she’d had her choice of suitors.
Both she and Charles were native Parisians; Pauline was fond of mentioning to her guests that her great-grandmother was the only one in her family to survive the Revolution’s guillotine.
But France was not meant to contain them.
Utilizing Pauline’s lofty connections and his own grit, Charles proved a singular success as a businessman, so even though they had first met as teens, giddy in Paris, now as a married couple they owned vineyards in Provence, a flat in New York, and, of course, Winter Queen, the home where they had decided, mutually, to raise their three children.
Alfred, the youngest, blond, stubborn, and adventurous.
Inez, the middle child, blue-eyed, a dreamer who heard music in the woods no one else could, and who could replay it by memory (for the unbelieving) on her violin.
And Marguerite, the eldest, who had inherited her mother’s glossy chestnut hair and vivacious laugh, but also an enthusiasm for independence and creativity that surpassed even Pauline’s.
Her spirit was not so much wild as it was genuinely unchained to convention.
Of the three younger Jolivets, she was the natural leader.
Even before she’d mastered her alphabet, Marguerite invented feral dances and rambling plays, persuading her siblings to perform alongside her for their parents and the nanny and footmen and maids.
In her plays, she was nearly always a princess, with Inez as her faithful handmaiden, which left Alfred (once he was old enough) to perform the role of either dragon or knight.
He much preferred to be a dragon, roaring and stomping.
So Pauline and Charles sat through a good many nursery performances about princesses slaying dragons, with Inez kneeling in terror—or awe, or joy—in the background.
It was an enchanted life for a child, even if the locals muttered under their breath about how bohemian the Jolivets were, with their Continental ways and rambunctious children tearing through the pastures and forests.
One notorious story concerned the time the family had stopped by the Ruby Rabbit for supper.
When six-year-old Marguerite had been offered a serving of the pub’s famous cod and chips, perfectly golden and steaming hot, she’d turned up her nose and declined the plate, haughtily demanding pot-au-feu instead.
As the years passed, Marguerite heard echoes of the tale but honestly had no memory of it.
The truth was, she adored fish and chips; she adored her English life and couldn’t imagine that she’d ever disparage either.
But, of course, she also loved France and the long, supple rows of grapevines composing their vineyards, the acres of fragrant soil and ancient crush houses scented of green and yeast. She loved New York, too, where she had been born.
Their flat in Castleton was nice enough, but going into the city, walking along the streets and lanes of Manhattan, felt like visiting another world, under another sun, everything scintillating and glamorous and diamond-bright.
Broadway, with its luminous lights and theatres looming tall as castles, was especially enthralling.
One the best evenings of her life was when her parents took her to see The Shop Girl at Palmer’s Theater for her ninth birthday, and on that night, Marguerite’s dreams swelled beyond the boundary of herself and overflowed.
She didn’t have to pretend to be only a princess.
On a real stage, in front of a real audience, under flattering hot Fresnel lanterns, she could be anyone she wished.
THERE WERE OTHER luminous lights dotting her life, although it took her a while to realize it.
Friends of her parents, men and women who moved through the parlors of Winter Queen with an almost uncannily similar elegance: ebony tailcoats, cravats pinned with rubies or pearls; silk dresses with hems that hissed along the floor or layers that rippled along the air; low heels, satin gloves, cultured voices.
There were formal dinners the children were not invited to, confined as they were to the nursery on the top floor.
(Someday, Maman promised, when pressed by her eldest.) There were entertainments they were sometimes invited to, piano recitals by Pauline, arias sung by opera singers, lectures about oil painting or fan-making or botany.
Once there came a rough bearded man who gave a talk about the perils of his voyage to the Antarctic and back.
For a full three months afterward, Alfred insisted he was striking out soon to see it for himself, if only Mother and Father would lend him a ship.
Yet, by and large, these guests were simply sir or ma’am to the children, or monsieur or madam, or signor or signora. For years, very few really stood out, not even to the observant Marguerite. But one evening …
She was ten, and it was green April in Medmenham.
The early, tender days of spring, when the cold fist of winter had finally loosened enough to allow yellow cowslips and delicate bluebells to uncurl from the earth, and the trees in the woods sparkled with rain instead of snow.
Up in the nursery, Marguerite had been restless in her bed, her quilts pushed into a lump by her feet.
Mother and Father were having another of their long, laughing dinner parties, and even through the floorboards, the company tonight seemed especially boisterous.
Both Inez and Alfred slept soundly, but Marguerite felt a prickling along her skin, a dryness to her eyes. She could not relax; she could not sleep. She sat up, shoved her feet into her slippers, found her robe, and crept out of the room.
She knew from experience how effortless it would be to ease open the connecting door of the library to the west drawing room, where most of Winter Queen’s guests lingered over sherry and cigars after dinner.
How she could press her face against the seam of the opening—staying low, staying invisible—and observe the glitter of her parents’ grand affairs.
She found her way on silent feet, freezing when she heard servants nearby, pressing back into the shadows.
The manor was old, and she was young, but she’d already memorized its quirks, which stairsteps would creak no matter how lightly she trod; which corridors were dark or bright; the tucked-away nooks where maids would pause to gossip in whispers.
The rhythms of the manor house were as familiar to Marguerite as her own pulse.
Tonight, the library was illumed, but only barely.
An elderly fire burned in the hearth, tarnished light dancing along the bared teeth and scales of the wyverns carved into the mantlepiece.
The tapers lining the chandelier above her were pale slender ghosts, but a pair of oil lamps with cut-glass bases had been lit in two corners, spreading a soft glow.
She lingered at the hallway entrance, listening, but heard nothing beyond the sounds of the soirée bubbling on in the drawing room, still a chamber away.