Education #3
The food tastes as good as it looked. She forces herself to chew slowly, swallowing only when she’s certain she won’t choke.
Her uncle John watches her the whole time, measuring her motions with his eyes, taking note of her manners, and the deficiencies therein.
She’s midway through her plate when Miss Cottingsly returns with a fresh plate to set in front of him.
She, too, takes note of Floretta, the stiffness of her motions, the care with which she chews.
Meeting John’s eyes, she gives a small, approving nod, then pours him a fresh cup of coffee.
“That will be all, for now,” he says, and she bobs a curtsey before slipping from the room, leaving the pair of them alone.
Floretta’s breakfast is almost gone. She sits back in her chair as John begins to eat, watching him cut into his food with smoothly practiced motions. It’s not until he’s taken the first bites that he looks to her and tilts his head to the side, frowning.
“What am I to do with you?” he asks.
“Put me back where you found me?” she replies, hopefully.
And for a moment, she thinks he might: for a moment, she wonders if he might not realize his mistake and let her go.
It’s a long-enough moment to let the image of herself stepping out of his carriage like a queen blossom behind her eyes, her dream-self filled with the knowledge of far-off Boston, the sophistication of a girl who’s seen the city.
She could go home, but she would never be the same again. She has already been transformed.
“No,” he says, as the pause is ending. “I don’t think so.
But that was a good attempt at changing my mind.
You may make another tomorrow, if you’d like.
No more today. I won’t abide insurrection in my own home, and that means you’ll limit your attempts to influence my decisions. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes, sir,” says Floretta, meekly.
“There’s no need to sound as if you fear me,” he says.
“I can be your greatest ally, if only you’ll allow it.
Your mother’s mother was my sister, Margaret, and no finer flower of American womanhood has ever walked the world.
She chose to settle with her husband in the village where you were born, and nothing I could say would sway her.
After she died, I tried to bring your mother here to live out her days in safety and comfort.
She was no great beauty, you understand—whoever your father may have been, you take after him—but she was my flesh and blood, and there’s a power in that.
What belongs to you can be used against you, always, and I would prefer to guard my vulnerabilities. ”
Floretta blinks at him, mouth hanging slightly open in her bewilderment. The things he’s saying may make sense to him, but to her, they’re so much sound, words strung together in unnatural orders, like shining beads on a silver string.
“Close your mouth,” he snaps. “You look like a cow when you gape at me like that, and I’ll not have anyone saying that my household shelters a simpleton.”
Floretta closes her mouth with a snap.
“Miss Cottingsly will see to your new wardrobe today. I don’t want to see this dress again, or any of the others you brought with you from the woods. They’ll be burned as soon as you have something less offensive to the eye to wear in their stead.”
“But these are my dresses,” Floretta protests. “I don’t have anything else.”
“You will.” He pauses then, looking at her closely. “Did any of them belong to your mother? Are they sentimental in some way?”
“No,” she answers, speaking to the second question rather than the first—while one of them was her mother’s, she feels more sentiment toward the gifts from Father Clemence. She doesn’t have the feeling her uncle would care to hear that, or that he’s a man who trades much on sentiment.
“Then to the fire they go,” he says, pleased. “I’ll have a tutor hired for you by the end of the day. You’ll learn all the lessons you should have had thus far, and we’ll start your proper education as soon as I’m sure you’re ready for them. Do you have any questions for me?”
“I…” She stops. He’s already half-answered her most important question: he wanted her because she’s blood of his blood, and he wants to protect himself. This was never about her at all. Who she is doesn’t matter, maybe can’t matter, in the face of his incomprehensible concerns.
“I don’t think so,” she says, in a small voice. “I will miss my home, and the good father, but I’ll try to be a good ward for you. I’ll try my best not to bring shame upon your household.”
“I believe you will,” he says. “Are you ready to begin?”
She can’t answer. She can only nod.
The days that follow are among the hardest of Floretta’s life.
She sees her uncle only at meals—breakfast and dinner—where they sit alone in the great dining room, attended on by Miss Cottingsly and, more rarely, by Deborah, who comes and goes like a ghost, and doesn’t glow silver again.
Not in Uncle John’s presence, anyway; on occasion, in the upstairs halls, she flickers and shines, placing a finger to her lips to signal Floretta to silence when she sees the girl watching her.
It’s their secret, small and strange and somehow kept away from the man who rules both their lives, as surely as a storybook king might rule his kingdom.
She’s been there a week before her uncle raises the question of her name: “I don’t like it,” he says one night, over a dinner of roast chicken and vegetables.
“Your mother would never have chosen a French name for her only daughter. I’m not sure who did.
It makes you sound like a Canadian.” He says the word like it’s the direst of insults.
Floretta can only blink at him. “But it’s my name,” she protests. “It’s who I am.”
“You will change it,” he says. “By the end of the year, either you will find a name you can prefer, or I’ll choose one for you.
You’re young yet. When you’re grown, you’ll not remember Floretta Bearse in the slightest. You’ll be someone else, someone better and new, and that woman will carry you into your future. ”
Floretta doesn’t know how to answer that.
She has never even considered that names could change.
Oh, she knows that when she grows to adulthood and marries, she’ll take her husband’s name for her own, and some people have nicknames, ways to call for them more quickly, but their names remain the same beneath it all, fixed points around which their person can turn.
If a name can change so casually, will the person who carries it even be the same beneath?
Or is he speaking true when he says that she’ll be someone else?
She doesn’t know the answer. She isn’t sure she ever wants to. She looks at him with wide, bewildered eyes, waiting to hear what he says next.
“Your new name will be something more suited to this house. It will be elegant and fine and it will mark you as my own, and you will carry it proudly. Do you understand me?”
She doesn’t. “Yes, sir,” she says, and it’s a small lie, small enough that he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t count it.
Instead, he nods, and rises, leaving her alone at the table with the remains of her dinner in front of her.
She scrambles to rise in turn, pushing her chair back, so that she isn’t seated while he stands.
She’s still learning the rules, but she knows even now that sitting while he stands is not allowed.
“You’ll have riding lessons tomorrow,” he says curtly. “See to it that you sleep well tonight.”
Then he’s gone, striding out of the room, leaving her behind. She stares after him in silence, and when Miss Cottingsly comes to clear the dishes, she clears Floretta as well, shooing the child upstairs to her room.
Days pass. The memories of the wood and the village and the meadows fade.
Father Clemence sends word once a fortnight, and while Floretta is mostly forbidden his messages, she does manage to snatch a few of them from the postman, squirreling them away to read in private.
He writes of babies she will never know, harvests brought in without her, and people thriving in her absence.
The hole in his own life is apparent at first, but quickly closes and fades away, his world expanding to fill the gap she left behind when she was taken away.
Most of all, he writes of rain. It began raining when she left the village, it seems, and the fields are growing greener than they have in her lifetime.
Stomachs are full, tables are laden, and their small hamlet seems set to become the paradise he has always believed that it could be.
With her gone, everything is better. He doesn’t say so in so many words, but she can read what’s written, and she knows what’s really being said.
It stings and soothes in equal measure. She can’t be there to see them thriving, but they will survive even if she never once returns.
Like a princess in a storybook, she has been offered up as a sacrifice to something far greater than herself.