Chapter 2 #2
“Well, I am. I know that I am, and I’ve got to try, at least. I’ll be eighteen soon, and I want to go.”
“Now, listen—”
“I can stay at the flat in Castleton, can’t I?
It’s not such a far distance away from the theatres, just a ferry ride over.
And there’s Mrs. Harris. She’s still on as housekeeper, isn’t she?
She can find me a cook and a maid or a companion, what have you.
It’ll be absolutely proper, I swear. I’ll never be alone. ”
“Bien s?r,” said Charles, placing his napkin on the table, “you won’t be alone, because you won’t be there.”
“Papa!”
“You cannot possibly imagine that I might send my daughter halfway around the world to play-act on Broadway.” He slapped a hand hard against the table, an echoing clap; the wrens flitted in the trees. “?’est ridicule.”
Suddenly, everyone was speaking over each other in French.
“To travel across the ocean to chase a dream,” Papa was saying, shaking his head. “A fantasy—”
Alfred was leaning forward, trying to cut in. “If she gets to go, then I—”
“All dreams are fantasy,” Marguerite snapped, “until they are reality.”
Inez put down her spoon. “What if, instead—”
“Nonsense!” Papa’s cheeks were turning red. “It’s unthinkable.”
“You can’t keep me here forever. I can’t stay in this cage forever!”
“Cage? You think our home is a cage?”
“If I am trapped here, unable to leave, unable to be who I want to be—then, yes!”
Maman touched her napkin to a corner of her lips and gave a delicate cough; it was enough to silence the table.
“Actually,” she murmured, “I don’t believe the notion is entirely unthinkable.”
Everyone stared.
“I’ve been pondering it anyway,” she said, switching back to English. “Marguerite is correct. She can’t stay here forever. She’s nearly of age, and there are scant eligible gentlemen lingering nearby.”
Marguerite looked ferocious. “I have no interest in—”
But Pauline only lifted a finger. “And so I’ve been thinking of renting something rather more central to the city—Bloomsbury, or South Kensington.
A pied-à-terre, small but respectable. A hired chaperone, perhaps, for when I cannot be there.
Marguerite is not the only one who cannot spend the rest of her days here.
Inez is in need of a maestro to tutor her.
She’s grown far beyond anything I or this place could offer her. ”
Charles appeared flummoxed. “My dear …”
“Not Broadway, but the West End. I seem to recall that Enid Barrymore has a nephew managing one of the theatres there. I’ll write her for an introduction.
” Marguerite drew in a quick, happy breath, but Maman wasn’t finished.
“On the condition that you’ll also attend any social events I deem suitable.
Both of you, and no excuses. You’ll be together, mind each other, and endure frequent visits from your beloved parents.
Any hint of rebellion and we’ll yank you right back here in shackles and chains, and you can live in this cage forever, slowly turning into mad spinsters who only venture out to howl at the moon. Yes?”
“I’d really prefer—” Inez began, alarmed.
“Yes!” interrupted Marguerite. Beneath the table, she seized Inez’s hand—her bowing hand—and squeezed so hard it hurt.
“Yes,” Inez agreed after a moment, much more softly. Her hand was released.
One of the wrens hopped down to a lower branch of a pomegranate tree to offer a single, treble note. Inez lifted her spoon again, but her fingers ached, and the trifle had lost its flavor.
LATER THAT NIGHT, after Winter Queen had settled into darkness and slumber, the rain began to fall, and Inez lay reading in her bed by lamplight.
It was a slim volume of poems, or sonnets, or something.
The words didn’t matter; she wasn’t really even reading it.
She was supine beneath her flowered duvet, staring blindly up at the ceiling, tasting the damp night air as the shadows rippled and the rain pattered, and the thought circling round and round through her head, destroying her peace, was, No, no, I can’t.
I can’t go into the city. I can’t live there. I can’t study there, I can’t be there, alone or nearly alone, I can’t, I can’t …
She knew it was unreasonable, this simmering panic that twisted her stomach and seared her lungs.
She knew that London was only another place of streets and lanes and horses and buildings and people, rather an expanded version of the village, or a compounded one.
It was smoke and palaces and cathedrals; it was the cacophony of millions of strangers, and how on earth was she to fit in there?
How was she going to breathe there, much less hear her music?
It seemed as impossible as going to live on the moon.
She blinked up at her ceiling, the cream-painted recesses, the heavy Tudor beams, and felt an ache in her heart so sharp it was like she’d been stabbed.
The door to her room opened. Marguerite slipped inside, dressed in a night rail of white lawn. She crossed silently to the bed and in the soft darkness, the hem flicked and flowed around her ankles; she might have been a ghost floating along the floor.
Inez turned her face away. Marguerite pulled back the duvet and crawled in beside her. Inez shifted to make room but still wouldn’t look at her.
Her sister turned on her side and inched closer, enough so that they had to share the same pillow, then flipped her hair over her shoulder to drape warm and wavy along Inez’s chest.
“Don’t hate me,” she whispered.
Inez said nothing, glaring at the ceiling.
“I have to do it,” Marguerite said, almost pleading. “I have to go, I’m meant to go. I’ve read so much and researched so much and hoped so much, I’m ready to burst. But I planned to go alone, I swear.”
Inez narrowed her eyes at the crossbeam above her, at the faint scar in the grain that always reminded her of an owl’s face.
Marguerite stroked a finger down her sister’s nose. “But this is going to be so much more fun. The two of us, together! We’re going to have such a grand time.”
Inez smacked her hand away. “You might. I won’t.”
“Maman was never going to let you hide away here forever. You know it’s true.”
“I certainly do not.”
“Darling, think about it. Our blood has been blue, from one side of the blanket or the other, for centuries and centuries. Likely as far back as Charlemagne and Camelot, as far as Maman is concerned. She wasn’t going to let all that glory end with us.
You’re her light and joy, but she was always going to land you in the king’s court proper. ”
“I don’t want to be in the king’s court! All I want is to—to stay here, and live here, and be happy here with my music. I don’t need diamonds or coronets. All I need …”
… is to be left alone, she almost said, but the words wouldn’t come.
Please, please, everyone just leave me alone.
Marguerite’s tone turned coaxing. “Isn’t it better to come away now with me, than to be sent away on your own in a year or so?”
“They won’t send me away! Papa would never.”
“Papa,” her sister said, “melts like butter in a frypan when Maman wants her way.”
And Inez knew that was true enough.
“Why did you have to drag me into it?” she moaned anyway.
“I didn’t! They did! It just turns out that you’re the key. The key to unlocking my future. I’m sorry, I truly am. But this will be good for both of us. You’ll see.”
What Inez did see then, with a terrible sinking clarity, was that Marguerite was right.
That her childhood here at Winter Queen had only been an enchantment, a prelude, no matter how fervently she wished otherwise.
In the end, it didn’t matter what she wanted, or what her parents’ plans for her might have been.
How she might have persuaded them to evolve.
She was as small as a raindrop against the tempest of Marguerite’s will.
“Maman’s light and joy,” she muttered, still upset anyway. “Hardly. That’s you.”
“Actually, I think it’s Alfred.”
“It’s definitely Alfred.”
Inez relented enough to allow a small smile. Marguerite rolled to her back and stretched her arms above her head.
“Well, she can have him, the stinky little darling. We are going to London, and I will act and you will compose, and we’ll be the most gorgeous creatures ever to walk the streets.”
“Walk the—”
“Grace the halls! Or trod the boards, or …”
“Carve our way?”
“Yes!” Marguerite laughed, that velvety laugh that could lure down the moon, stop the sun from rising and falling. “We’ll carve out our own destinies there, I’m sure of it. You and I together!”
“Together,” Inez echoed, capitulating as she always did, surrendering to her sister’s spell as she and everyone else always did.
After all, Marguerite was the princess. Inez, the handmaiden, could only follow her.