Chapter Eleven #3
My girls adapted a bit better. Rosie, who had been tearful and petulant when she learned of the prospect of a new home and new family, fell into the rhythms of Bramley Hall—the formal meals, the lady’s maids—with relish.
And Mathilde, who had accepted my decision with a steely determination to support it, seemed to draw, at least in part, some reassurance from the tightly held articulations of our new schedule.
Meals at set times. Each staff member with their own domain and role.
And though Elin never embraced their offers of friendship, the situation was not without corporeal pleasures.
We ate well. Each bath was drawn warm, and, that first winter, hot stones were placed between our sheets.
It was easy to accept this new life with our bodies, however reluctant our hearts.
I missed Henry—Henry!—but I recognized there was no way to go but forward. So I tried with Robert. I tried to overlook his blood-sausage lips, and I tried to get used to his soft hands, and I tried, again and again, to be useful to his daughter. I tried, also, to help him move on from his own loss.
A handful of months after I arrived at Bramley, I asked Robert to remove the portrait of his first wife from the hall. I understood—Henry!—the ties that bind one’s heart, but if we were to live together, we did not need those blue eyes watching every time we crossed the room.
The piece was hung high on the wall, above the mantel.
Robert did not want anyone else to touch the revered painting and went up the ladder himself.
I watched from the doorway: his blond head bobbing in front of his wife’s varnished face, hovering as if he meant to kiss her.
Gently, slowly, he took each side of the frame in his long fingers, his soft hands, and unhooked the art from the wall.
The shift in balance caused the ladder to sway.
A slight wobble. I saw, as if time slowed, Robert’s look of alarm.
He was within a foot of the mantel. He could have reached out and steadied himself, but he was holding the painting.
He glanced down at the floor, and back at the mantel, and then down at the floor once more.
I tried to tell him to drop the painting.
The fool. But time would not slow enough for me to get the words out, and all I managed was: “Robert!” It was a large room and I could not get there quickly enough.
The ladder pitched. Robert fell, soundlessly, and struck his head on the base of the stone hearth.
Still clutching the painting. Its frame now cracked.
In his indecision, he had saved neither himself nor the portrait.
After Robert’s fall, he spent two days in bed, face gray, until his death, which felt like the slow-motion snuffing of a candle.
A practical part of me reasoned I already owned the mourning clothes.
So, I was surprised by the grief, real grief, that rose when his eyes closed for the last time.
Another father, gone. What would the girls think of the world?
The picture we all beheld, finality, loss, blood, pain, was not inaccurate.
But I did not think our hearts were meant to reckon with such perceptions so frequently.
I couldn’t have realized that initial loss—Robert!—was only the beginning.
A few days after his death, Alice bid me into the study.
The testator had come. Once inside, she brought out a folio and explained: She was named executor in Robert’s will.
That a housekeeper was sorting my dead husband’s affairs felt no stranger to me than the fact of the dead husband itself. But my numbness soon gave way.
The testator—a phlegmatic man I had never seen before—told me what was obvious: that Robert had no male heirs.
He continued to explain that the law was that the estate would go to me.
(His becomes hers.) His own papers decreed all other money—which there was so much less of than I could have imagined—would go to Elin, to be marked in a trust and used only for her dowry.
“I don’t understand.” I pressed my fingertips to my temple. But I did understand, I just hoped it was not true. “None of the money is available for our use?”
Alice confirmed with a tight nod, eyes sympathetic.
“How will we run the estate? What will Elin live off of until she is able to make use of her dowry?” The questions continued in my head: To what extent was the situation intentional versus a task deferred?
To whom could I turn now? “Can Elin sign over the money? Could she contribute—could it be used toward the expense of raising her?”
“The money is not technically hers,” Alice explained.
The testator nodded. “Her dowry will go to her husband. She is your ward until that happens.”
“There’s something else,” Alice interjected.
The testator cleared his throat. “Lord Bramley has not paid taxes on the estate—the hall—for some good years. There are more unpaid taxes owed than it is worth. So, if you were to sell it, the taxes would be due, leaving you with debt. The house and the debt are one and the same.”
Alice said the number.
I did not blanch. By then, her serious face and somber tone had prepared me: I had been impoverished while Elin had been given a future.
In one move, Robert had tied me to his house and to his daughter: my ruin, her gain.
I exhaled, though it felt like there was no breath left in my chest. “I … see.”
“Yes, m’lady.” Alice slid a carefully folded handkerchief across the tabletop.
The title, I realized, meant so little. The house was an opulent weight that could only pull down. And I faced a graver issue: I had no means to take care of my girls.
My long wait outside the palace guardhouse was made all the more uncomfortable by my doubts. I was not certain my plan to gain entry would work. After all, I suspected my daughters had been left out of the messenger’s invitation intentionally. But I knew Sigrid would recognize the name I had given.
I walked up and down the walkway. Paused in the shade of a tree.
Sat on a stone bench. I looked at all the people I had passed earlier.
The lute player, likely hoping for employment, played his sad songs.
The pregnant girl continued to cry. The youth perpetually wrapped and unwrapped his bandages.
And the ladies-in-waiting—none alike yet all similar, continually replenishing themselves—waited by their very nature.
After an interminable amount of time, the guard, scab now picked fresh off his chin, approached me. “You can go in,” he said. “Follow the page.”
“You have something,” I told him, tapping my own chin. “Right there.”
I followed a bespectacled attendant along a cobblestone path, passing a series of silent, erect guards. When we entered the castle, we climbed a stone staircase and came to a long gallery, our footsteps echoing on the blue-and-white checkerboard floor.
The room was only half lit; every curtain on every east-facing window had been pulled shut. Walking at a pace that felt slower than natural, I passed gilt-framed painting after gilt-framed painting. The blank stares of nameless faces. A room of artificial eyes.
I came to a stop in front of an oversized family portrait.
The slight tilt of the head and the half-pursed smile of the woman at its center was unmistakable.
Sigrid still looked beautiful. But the lordliness in her expression was unnecessary.
The fur-trimmed robes and jeweled crown might have done that work for her.
I had seen a likeness of our king plenty of times before—kind-eyed and sharp-boned—but the two children who stood at his side were new to me.
The prince was as tall as his father, if not taller, for I did not think a royal portrait would depict any man standing above the king.
He had the same warm brown eyes, with a crop of his mother’s honey hair, as if an unseen hand had deigned to mix the best from each parent.
By contrast, the girl who stood on the opposite side was her mother in miniature.
Red lips and flaxen tresses. Blue eyes like looking into my own past: I could practically hear Sigrid beating her heels against the Tremaines’ rock wall.
We kept walking. Lady Tremaine—had it worked?
I had spent years wondering if Sigrid hated me, resented me, blamed me for her accident.
But seeing the likeness of her family, each clad in velvet and fur, and then following the attendant through the palace rooms, passing fabric-covered walls, oil paintings, and statues, high-backed chairs and inlaid-tile ceilings, through blue rooms, pink rooms, velvet rooms—each its own acidic bite of opulence—gliding past a thoughtless wealth of wealth, every jewel tone rendered in a color brighter than nature, it occurred to me: She had no reason to think about me at all.
When, at long last, the guard slowed ahead of a closed door, I felt a sense of relief. Nervously, I began to fidget with my gloves. They were uncomfortable—hot in the summer and not warm enough in the winter. The whole kingdom wore them because the queen did.
Gloves, after all, were a clever way to cover a missing finger.