Chapter 1 #2
Marguerite crept forward; the air held its breath. Usually a draft or two snaked across the room, chilling her ankles, but tonight only the fire stirred, twisting and licking the logs piled behind the fender, orange embers flashing patterns along the charred wood.
The door to the drawing room was already cracked.
She fixed her attention on it, that chink of bright warmth that arrowed through the opening, her heart already swelling over the river of words and sultry laughter and perfume that washed over her, promising her someday-future, promising enlightenment—when someone spoke.
Someone behind her.
“Child?” said an unfamiliar voice, soft and deep.
Marguerite turned so swiftly she bumped the door. It began to swing closed. She only barely caught the knob in time to stop it from slamming shut.
A gentleman sat in the dark, away from the fire and the two lamps. He was in her father’s favorite wingchair, the one Papa used to read the papers early in the morning, when the sun shone through the windows and lit the room to brilliance.
Marguerite dipped a hasty curtsy. “Oh! I’m sorry! Please don’t tell—”
She was already scurrying back toward the safety of the hall, but the man in her father’s chair only lifted an open palm to her, somehow stopping her in place even though she was nowhere near him.
She stared at him warily.
“Never fear,” he said. A thin wash of starlight from the window beyond him brushed silver along his hair and beard. “I know full well what it’s like.”
“What what’s like?” she asked, still ready to bolt.
“To peer in from the outside. To be small and kept apart, when all you want is to be included.”
Marguerite straightened. She’d never had an adult speak to her so, as if she were grown too. As if someone so old might understand her heart.
“Well,” was all she said … but she inched a step closer.
Her eyes were adjusting to the night. The man had not moved, so it was easier now to pick out the precise leftward sweep of his gray hair, the trimmed beard and moustache that ended in waxed points.
The dull gleam of a watch chain that curved from one section of his coat to the other.
His legs were crossed at the ankle, and the buttons of his tailcoat were undone, revealing a sizable belly covered in a satin waistcoat.
She remembered the image of Saint Nicholas on a card Inez had given her last Christmas, one of him seated on a throne with his red coat open to show his big belly, smiling almost just as this gentleman was smiling at her now, so kind, and before she could stop herself, Marguerite blurted, “Are you Kris Kringle?”
For an instant, he seemed affronted—or maybe just surprised; his bushy eyebrows lifted, his eyes on hers. Then his smile deepened. “Why, child? Do I resemble Santa?”
“Yes,” she said, and added, “well, not your clothing, of course. But your beard, and your hair and face and”—she gestured to his torso, then hurried on. “He carries a gold pocket watch like yours, to keep time on Christmas Eve.”
“Indeed,” said the man.
“But,” she went on, working out the logic, “why would you be here now? It’s not even Christmas.”
“Must I disappear after Christmastime?”
She tilted her head, thinking about it. “No. But … you should go back to the North Pole, shouldn’t you? Isn’t that your home?”
He made a small sound, not quite a sigh. “I suppose it must be.”
Marguerite was ten, not six or seven or eight. In the cool hush of Winter Queen’s library, she came back to herself, a girl more grown for her age than not.
“You’re not him.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Oh.”
She waited, but the man added nothing more. She rubbed her left foot against her right ankle, stalling, then asked, “Who are you, then?”
He gave her another smile, but this one seemed weary. “No one nearly as important as Santa Claus, I’m afraid.”
“But you’re someone important.”
“Some would say not.”
“No,” she replied, impatient. “Maman and Papa don’t invite just anyone here, you know. You must be important to someone.”
He looked up at her, still weary, still smiling. “I suppose you’re right. I must be, mustn’t I?”
He held out a hand to her, and after a second, she stepped forward and accepted it in both of hers. His skin was chilled; his fingers curled lightly around hers.
She felt it then, his fatigue, the sorrow that weighted his bones. On instinct, she bent her head, pressed a swift kiss to his knuckles.
“Don’t be sad about it,” she commanded, looking up again. “Whatever it may be, don’t be so sad.”
“No,” the man said. He released her hands. This close to him, she could tell that his eyes were pale, his hair mostly silver, and the chain across his stomach more golden than the fire. “Thank you, dear. I won’t be. I’m not.”
For the rest of her life, Marguerite Lucile Jolivet would entertain her friends and the press with the tale of how she’d once informed the Prince of Wales that he must surely be important, and of how he had eventually, reluctantly, agreed.
THE POND HELD a particular fascination for Inez.
She would spend hours draped along its shore, her head bent and her long, honied hair sometimes brushing the water as she followed the languid, orange-red-white turns of the koi.
The pond wasn’t overly wide, but it was deep—well over twelve feet—dug that way, perhaps, to ensure the survival of the fish through the winter.
In the bitterest months, the surface would thicken into ice, and all the beautiful koi would sink into a stupor at the bottom, still breathing, but oh so barely.
Inez told everyone they were dreaming and then, one afternoon over tea in the nursery, wondered what fish would dream about.
“Juicy worms,” said Alfred.
“July,” said Marguerite.
“Their happiest selves,” said Pauline, hugging her younger daughter close. “They dream of waking up again in warmer waters, surrounded by all their friends, their husbands or wives.”
Marguerite looked up from the lukewarm crumpet she was smearing with jam; she respected Maman but didn’t feel it appropriate to let the comment pass. “Fish don’t have husbands or wives.”
Pauline smiled, reaching for her own crumpet.
“Don’t they? Many creatures find their partners and bond for life, much as we do.
Fish, swans, rabbits, snails—all of nature, all of hidden life—live nations apart from us.
It would be foolish to pretend they don’t have their own secret realms. So turns the glorious world. ”
“Mr. and Mrs. Fish!” said Alfred, and he fell into snorts of laughter.
THE AUTUMN OF the year that Marguerite would come to consider the end of her childhood arrived when she was fourteen.
Too old for the nursery any longer, so she had her own room, but still young enough to secretly miss the comradery of that stuffy attic chamber, the soft snores of her little sister and brother, the old familiar toys and apple-green curtains framing a view of the rose garden three stories below.
She’d kept a handful of her favorite dolls to sit on a shelf by her bureau, but the rest of the room was a harbinger of her future: gleaming furniture, crystal-prism lamps, dainty sparrows and wagtails hand-painted on butterscotch silk wallpaper, vases of fresh flowers.
And, most significantly, a wardrobe of dresses with hems falling past her ankles.
But living rooms apart didn’t mean living a roof apart, and Marguerite and Inez remained each other’s devoted companions, with Alfred tagging along as he liked.
On this fateful October day, the girls were returning from an early ramble through the woods.
Inez had discovered a fairy ring the day before and was eager to show it to her sister, to ask her opinion whether it could be the work of Gloriana or Old Moss.
“Neither,” Marguerite had announced, after squatting down to examine the circle of velvety gray toadstools. She shifted, and the leaves at her feet rustled and cracked. “This ring belongs to Mab, clear as could be. See how perfect it is? See how in the sunlight the caps turn to silver?”
“Yes,” agreed Inez, solemn.
“Well, that’s Mab, certainly. Well done! She wouldn’t reveal this to just anyone, you know. You must be special.”
“I do hear her music,” Inez replied. In the dappled light, her face was heart-shaped and serious, but her eyes shone brilliant, a deeper blue than the heavens.
Marguerite stood up again, dusting off her hands. “Perhaps later on, after supper, we can steal back and leave some bread and milk for her and her court. She’d like that.”
“Oh, yes, let’s!”
So they were walking back to Winter Queen, following an olden path lined with rosebay and witches’ butter, and emerald wood sorrel with broad, nodding leaves.
The days were sneaking by, shorter and shorter; even the nuthatches above them chattered about the cold.
It wouldn’t be long before the first snow.
Every step they took along that forest path released a spiced scent of fallen leaves, of cinnamon and frost and dirt.
Marguerite enjoyed that fragrance, the crunch of her boots against the earth, and when they left the woods behind them for the more formal grounds of Winter Queen, she lifted her face to the sky, to the sun, soaking up its meager warmth.
She was lost in that moment, breathing in, breathing out, when Inez gave a sharp inhale and jerked to a stop.
Marguerite turned. Her sister had transformed into a pillar of salt, just like Lot’s wife, pale and frozen.
“What is it?”
Inez lifted a hand to point ahead of them.
Marguerite turned back again.
They were near the koi pond, its dark waters throwing darts of light.
Flashes of orange and white churned beneath its surface, the fish agitated, moving fast despite the cold.
But above the koi, larger and very awful, was the shape of a person.
A man in a tattered jumper, his arms out, his legs bent at the knees to fade into the deep.
His hair—the color of silt, of the murky depths—swept lazily back and forth with the swish of the water.
He lay against a fall of rocks; a strand of algae had got caught near his temple, lifting and swaying.
His face was puffy, upturned, the color of the toadstools, swollen lips opened to a slit around his tongue, glazed eyes staring.
One of the koi rose up and nudged the man’s neck.
Marguerite spun back to Inez, clapped a hand over her eyes, and dragged her away, one step at a time.
“Don’t look! Do not look!”
But as they staggered past the pond, Marguerite herself couldn’t help but look, even though she didn’t want to, even though she knew it was a mistake.
Bloated flesh, sodden clothes, hungry koi. Dead eyes fixed upon the eternity of the midday sky.
She realized that she knew him. That the horror of his face still resembled the gardener’s son, known to drink and brawl as happily as he had tended the roses. A young man who whistled under his breath as he worked and always smelled of gin and sod.
She lowered her gaze again, still leading her sister, but it was too late. This particular mistake would sear itself in Marguerite’s memory like an ember burning through sheets of paper, creating its own particular scorch mark in her mind, slowly dimming and cooling, but never fully erased.