Chapter Five
After the messenger left, the entryway deflated around us, then inflated, and then deflated, the tapestries on the walls moving ever so slightly.
The house was breathing. Or it was us, heartbeats in our throats.
All the girls and I, posed on the staircase, gray and yellow and brown. And there, at the top, was Elin.
“Did you hear?” I looked her over. I had thought my daughters had presented appropriately, but Elin had hooked and secured herself into a chaste dress of the softest pink, each loop of lace in place, every tiny button carefully nestled through its fastening.
Tow-colored hair curled and styled. Waist cinched tight.
The picture of composure. In her hands, she held a small, worn booklet.
She nodded. “A ball.” Looking at the door as if it might swing open again, she added, in wonder: “And they invited me.”
“I don’t care what the messenger said.” I turned back to my daughters. “There was a mistake.”
“Mama—” Mathilde began, emphasizing the second syllable, but I held up a finger, insisting she stop.
“Let me think.”
Rosamund cried into her hands. “Why would she be invited and not the two of us? Mathilde has more years to her name.”
“All three of you are of genteel birth,” I agreed. “And not one of you is yet introduced to society.”
“Perhaps,” Elin ventured, allowing herself a modest smile, “it’s because the girls weren’t born in the house and don’t share my last name.
” She, who had never encountered a merit she did not like to expatiate on, held up the thin volume in her hands—a book on female virtue that rarely left her side.
“If there were a mistake, let us take some solace, for mistakes can be stepping stones to wisdom.”
We ignored her. “It has to be an accident,” Rosamund cried.
“Perhaps a clerical error—” Mathilde continued.
“Or they do not have proper records,” Rosamund interrupted.
“Which is what clerical error means.”
“An error is different than not having the records in the first place,” Rosamund countered.
“Let me think,” I repeated.
“You could write a letter,” Elin suggested. “One penned with grace and care—”
“A letter?” Mathilde laughed. “To the king?”
“If I could, I would gladly share my invitation,” Elin offered, “for the greatest treasures are those we share with others.”
“We can’t take your place.” Mathilde scowled at her. “They have your name.”
“And there’s two of us and one of you,” Rosamund cried.
“Girls—” I said.
Elin came down one step, looking back and forth at each of her stepsisters. “Gilded edges can be found on even the darkest of clouds—”
Rosamund shrieked: “That solves nothing!”
Elin began to quote her well-worn source, which she held aloft before her: “‘Despair is a common trap—’”
Mathilde twirled to face Elin, her movement quick with exasperation. “Elin, please—”
“‘For every vine with thorns there are roses—’”
“If you spout one more inconsequential maxim,” Mathilde erupted, “I will rip out your tongue and turn it into a paté!”
We all stilled, watching Elin, who had a habit of fainting under pressure. When she did not wobble, I clapped my hands. “Girls, be quiet.”
All three of them were already silent.
I looked at Rosie and Mathilde. “Go and make yourselves useful. Ready the press for apples. Or…” I waved my hands, wordless with aggravation. “Mend something!”
When they had left—long-faced, feet quickened by frustration— I lifted my skirts and began to climb the stairs toward my stepdaughter. “Elin—”
“Heavens!” She covered her mouth, looking down at my muddied feet.
I eyed her stonily.
“Your boots.” She spoke through her fingers. “Why, they’re soiled!”
“There was no time to change.”
“Our visitors might have seen.” The upper uncovered half of her face was a mask of concern—for her own propriety or mine, it was unclear.
“And they did not,” I stated sharply, losing patience.
Her brow furrowed. “But you yourself would say that comportment is the bedrock upon which one builds—”
I interrupted her, covering my shoes with a hasty flourish of my petticoat. “We do not all have the leisure of hours spent readying at the looking glass. It would do you well to consider that the semblance of virtue can prove as potent as its earnest practice.”
Her hand lowered. She opened her mouth, but before any words came out, I clucked and reached forward to finger her dress. “And all that effort for naught. I do not think the color suits you. You’re looking a little pink at the eyes.”
Her eyelashes fluttered. Clasping her book, clutching a bit too tightly, Elin nodded.
“Go on,” I instructed, jutting my chin toward the steps to her room.
After she’d gone upstairs, I felt, briefly, some regret for my tone. It quickly dissipated. When a girl’s innocence outlives its lifespan, it is only a burden to herself and those around her.
Outside, I moved hurriedly across the grass, toward the place I had left Lucy.
Rosie’s angst had been on the surface, but mine was thrumming through me, a kind of poison in my body.
I was offered one relief, at least: My falcon was in the oak at the back of the house, perched on an upper branch.
I put my hands on my hips and smiled at her.
“Come down, Luce,” I called. I tried our low-high-low whistle— a reverberance from my past.
She roused, raising her feathers, but did not move from the branch.
There are several ways to get a falcon down from a tree.
Special whistles and commands, a lure—meat or food—waved in a circular motion to catch her attention, or, if desperate, I could borrow another bird, one whose presence would compel movement.
But I welcomed a few minutes alone to turn over all that had happened that morning. I would wait.
I had no sooner settled on the idea when the back door opened and Alice emerged.
She made her way across the grass determinedly, stooping a bit as she chose her footing.
She carried a large bowl. Her body—tall and thin as a sapling—never looked like it could support her tasks, but like a tree that bends in the wind, she was never broken by them.
When she was close enough to be heard, she called: “You’ve lost your head for letting her stay up there alone.”
“I didn’t have a choice.” I was used to the housekeeper’s impertinence.
I did not pay Alice or Wenthelen. They shared living quarters—an echo of one man’s palm on another’s cheek; an arrangement that would not be tolerated by most households—and rather than taking one of the small dormer rooms intended for staff, they resided in a high-ceilinged chamber on the second floor.
Wenthelen decided what to cook and took pleasure in telling us what to do in the kitchen.
They often dined beside us. Given our peculiar understanding, they typically shared their sentiments unchecked.
I added: “She’ll come down on her own time. ”
“She doesn’t own your time, and we’ve got plenty to do.” Alice’s mien usually landed somewhere between pragmatic and severe. Just then, she was frowning at me.
“Do you own my time?”
“The apples aren’t going to pick themselves.”
If there was abundance of anything in our life, it was apples.
Someone had long ago planted Bramley’s grounds with hundreds of trees.
The initiative had become our folly: For a season of each year, we were wealthy in fruit.
We baked apples whole and into tarts and pies.
We turned them into sauce and cooked them into porridge.
We fermented them into the acidic cider that we drank through all the other seasons of the year.
But I was in no mood to think about the fruit—the many bushels that needed picking, then washing, then pressing, then more.
I kicked at the dirt. “Damn the apples.”
“M’lady,” Alice admonished.
“Damn the damn apples.” I turned away from the tree to look at the house again. “For once it would be nice to let them rot.”
“Then you won’t have my help come spring when the land is nothing but wasp-filled mush.” Alice saddled the bowl against her hip and used her free hand to point to Lucy. “Wenthelen said she caught a rabbit.” Raising her voice, she called: “Well done, Lucy!”
“I flushed it,” I said, mildly.
“Your toil was evenly distributed, then?”
“No less so than all our other work.” I nodded up at the tower keep, where Elin kept her chambers. “Even now, she’s up there with her feet raised when I’ve been asking her for days to help pick the fruit.”
“She pinks after even a single minute in the sun.” Alice’s sigh went soft. “Besides, her feet aren’t up. More likely she’s running herself ragged practicing her penmanship.”
I stared at Alice, incredulous. The woman worked inside and out.
She helped with our meager menagerie—a skinny horse named Arno and Lucy.
Wenthelen ran the kitchen and a small kitchen garden, in which we grew carrots and onions and herbs.
In the spring, we had beans and peas, and in the summer, there was lettuce and purslane.
Mathilde managed our accounts and books.
Rosamund had a tiny flock of scrubby chickens and gathered their eggs in the afternoon.
She applied herself to countless embroidery pieces—textiles Wenthelen would store and bring to the market to barter and sell for all we needed: wheat and milled grains and spices. And sugar.
Elin—well, that was my predicament.
Dedication to useless truisms had done little to prepare her for the lifelong reality of keeping oneself well fed, well shod, and warm through all the seasons of the year.
When all our lives had taken a turn, my daughters had learned to tie their skirts and roll up their sleeves.
But Elin—raised as a lady, both fawned over and buffered from the world—had been unwilling.
It wasn’t quite lassitude; she shirked chores to apply herself with diligence to the achievements that would mark her as accomplished.
Instead of adapting to her new circumstances, she had spent years waiting for them to change.
Dedicating herself to the markers of gentility: Instruments and language and translations.
Posture and poise and art. That bed linens also had to be washed and floors swept and wicks dipped into candle wax was of little matter.
My efforts to mold Elin from a child into a young woman in our situation had been like attempting to mold air.
“It is such salt,” I nearly spat, “that she is the one to go to the ball! Will she have Rosie make her a dress? Mathilde fashion her hair?”
Alice chose to ignore me and instead held out the bowl for my inspection. “For Lucy. She’s the one that caught the rabbit, after all.” She tilted the basin toward me. No part of the animal would go to waste.
“Come on, Lucy!” Alice called. To me, she said: “You can’t both be so stubborn.”
There was a flapping of wings and Lucy, not gently, not gracefully, came down to the bowl.
Alice, taking hold of the jesses, looked at me, eyebrow raised in triumph. “The little ladies may be invited yet.”
I shook my head. There were many reasons my daughters might not have received an invitation to the ball.
All manner of missteps, oversights, and accidents that could lead to a girl’s name being left off a list. But there was one reason—linked to a memory of gristle and blood and the musty smell of horse tack—that I knew, in the bone of my bones, was the cause.