Chapter Eleven #2
Mathilde took another step forward, into the room. “Hello,” she said, thinking carefully about her words, and straining to make a good impression. “I am Mathilde. It is lovely to make your acquaintance.”
“You have so many wonderful things.” Rosie spun to take in the room once more.
Still, Elin had not turned. “Elin,” Robert called, again. “We have visitors. Come say hello to your papa.”
Because it was a direct order, she stood, and, without looking at us, went toward her father.
When she was near enough, she closed the distance between them with a quick run into his arms and buried her face into his chest. I firmed myself against a pulse of my own grief. Henry! I wanted to say his name aloud.
I had seen, when we walked through the great hall, a portrait of a woman I could only assume was Robert’s first wife.
The resemblance between the woman and the girl in front of me was striking: bodies so slender you had a sense of the bones beneath skin, hair so blond it was at risk of losing its color, and eyes so blue they managed to be both startled and startling at once.
It was difficult to decide if they—both mother and daughter—were stunningly beautiful or strange and unfamiliar.
Either way, it was difficult to stop looking at Elin.
When a proper amount of time had passed, I began to speak to my new stepdaughter. “Hello, Elin,” I said, softly. “My name is Etheldreda. I have been very much looking forward to meeting you. As have my two little girls, Rosamund and Mathilde.”
Still, she did not look at us, and instead began to sing a nameless tune into Robert’s chest. He chuckled and looked over. “She’s like this. Head in the clouds. She has the heart of an angel—you will see.”
She fit his description. The girl was light personified. Pale skin, white eyelashes; her color had evaporated. She’d float away if she were not anchored by her father’s arms.
“Elin, darling,” Robert continued, “perhaps you might choose a toy to share with each of the girls.”
Mathilde’s hand, still clasped in my own, jumped.
I heard, from Rosie, a quick intake of air.
There had been no new toys or gifts the past year.
Elin pushed back from her father’s arms, and for the first time, turned to face us with those startling eyes.
She opened her mouth. Her gaze flitted up to the ceiling, down to the floor, up once more, and then, in one smooth collapse, she fell, lifelessly, against her father.
I ran a few steps forward, dropping Mathilde’s hand, as she spun around in surprise. Rosie cried out. But Robert, cradling Elin fondly, quickly explained: She had only fainted. A harmless ailment. It happened often, and at random.
As the initial days passed, I had a chance to observe for myself.
When Elin was gently scolded by the housekeeper for opening her nursery windows and letting the rain warp the sill—Elin fainted.
When Mathilde, tentatively, shyly, asked if they might play together—Elin fainted.
When she learned that I, Robert’s new wife, would be taking her seat beside him at the dinner table—Elin fainted.
When Rosie found her unlatching the door to Lucy’s mews, and walking away with the opening ajar—Elin fainted.
When she was questioned after Mathilde’s wooden animal went missing and it was discovered in Elin’s room—Elin fainted.
She was but a child, acting against change and grief in childish ways. But it did not take long for me to come to my own conclusion. We don’t all draw our angels with the same hand.
The differences between my new husband and I quickly made themselves known.
Though I was out of black, my loss was still new and fresh.
In contrast, Robert’s first wife had passed years before.
Now he spoiled his daughter, lavishing her with gifts and ribbons, and more of those discomfiting dolls.
In return, Elin, his angel, his small fountain of girlish virtue, dined with the adults, had no friends her age, and was her father’s primary talking companion.
I believed in rules and had children who knew how to follow them.
Robert could not deprive Elin of a thing, for she had already been deprived of a mother.
Jealous was not the right word for what I felt.
Rather, Elin and her deceased mother were an unaccounted-for imbalance in my life, like I had calibrated the scales and then found extra weights on the table.
Elin’s mother had decorated Bramley Hall, and—though I tried to expunge her, the nice ghost—you could not enter a room without seeing all she touched.
She was there in each silk and brocade, the elaborate carvings in the stairwell, and the crest that marked the lintels.
A few weeks after our arrival, I was wandering the hallways, familiarizing myself with my new home, when I came to a stop in front of my predecessor’s bedchambers.
I had already discovered, during previous meanderings, that the room had been left untouched.
Half-full bottles of oil and perfumes sat on a polished vanity.
Vases decorated the bedside tables. Heavy curtains muted the light from the oversized window and contrasted with a delicate lace canopy hung over the bed.
Through the open archway to the dressing room, I could see the graceful specters of outdated dresses.
I had paused to marvel at these details—a pair of silk dressing slippers still awaited their mistress at the side of the bed—before realizing someone was in the room. Elin stood in front of a row of dolls she’d placed on a chaise that faced the window.
“Look, ladies,” she instructed. The dolls were her pupils.
“This is where my mother painted.” She gestured toward an empty easel and stool across the room.
“Papa says a woman is capable of never-ending accomplishments. She must think of herself not as a piece of art to be finished, but an ongoing project.”
She went over to the mantel, where a small selection of volumes were wedged between bookends.
“And here are her books. A lady must be learned and well read.” Selecting a thin booklet, she opened it, paged through, and sounded out the words: “‘Let every young woman aspire to high degrees of purity, excellence, and unsullied virtue. Since mothers are never mothers until they have become daughters—and mothers are the ones to go on to raise sons—let us presume that the education and instruction of daughters is the responsibility not just of the daughter herself, but society as a whole. Such a charge is … indubitably’”—she slowed, struggling with the word, before picking up her pace once more—“‘paramount, as mothers, in their omnipotent influence, may sow the seeds of malevolence with as much fervor as they sow good. Hence, the inculcation of virtue becomes an endeavor of the utmost gravity in the education of all of the world’s daughters.’”
Elin lowered the booklet, biting her lip.
“I do not really remember Mother,” she admitted to the dolls, shifting from the voice of authority to that of a small girl.
“Only from the painting. But Papa said that she was a proper lady and that I will be like her if I am a good girl.” She turned her face upward and addressed the lace canopy above the bed.
“I will try to be a good girl always, Mama, and not to … sow malevolence.”
She waited, as if expecting a response, and I could not bear it. Could not let her statement go unanswered. I stepped into the room, making enough noise to announce my presence, and Elin’s chin snapped back down.
“Hello, Elin,” I said softly. I looked around—at the soft light, at the porcelain figures on the chaise. “This was your mother’s room, wasn’t it.”
She had gone cold and quiet, the book now shut in her hands. “Yes, Stepmother.”
“It is hard to miss someone, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Stepmother,” she repeated, stonily.
“In missing someone, we keep a part of them alive within us, you know. I’m quite certain your mother would be very proud of you.”
“Please excuse me.” Taking the booklet with her, she made for the door. “I must go find my father.”
She left me in the room, alone, her useless porcelain dolls—skin cold, eyes blank—staring back at me from the chaise.
Much of my efforts with Elin, for weeks after, went the same.
Robert, for his part, was careful and polite but vaguely disappointed by the initial weeks of our marriage.
He had not married for feminine company; he did not often visit my rooms. He had not married for domestic support; he had a household that ran itself—with a housekeeper that kept a firm eye across every detail.
He had, I believed, hoped to offer Elin another feminine figure to sit amongst all the other dolls in her room: a mother.
But everything I knew about motherhood came from ushering Rosamund and Mathilde through each step of their lives.
I knew every orientation of their hopes and failures.
We were a unit of three. (Live, live, live, I had told Mathilde, but it was them who gave my life meaning.) After my initial overtures with Elin were rejected—and rejected again—I did not know how to begin anew with a girl of nearly eight years.
I knew nothing of Elin’s hopes and dreams. She suffered by comparison to my feelings for my own girls.
As I am sure I suffered by comparison to whatever she felt for her own birth mother.
But most critically: She did not want my mothering.
And I did not know how to be an unwanted mother.
I did not know how to grow love from infertile ground. It was unnatural for both of us.