Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
“You of all people should know there is nothing”—Mathilde gritted her teeth, each word ground out and carefully measured—“protective about marriage!” She inhaled.
Slowed down. “All your talk of our futures, Mama, but what about what is in front of you? Look around! The roof has fallen in. You’ve confined us to a prison of performance.
You choose a false kind of safety for us again and again. And then take freedom for yourself!”
“I am not free!” I cried. “I have worked every waking hour of every day for you.”
“You go out into the woods with Lucy and cover yourself in dirt. You have the freedom to decide what you do with your days, even if it is just gathering firewood. You oversee your own life, and we do not.”
“Lucy.” I raised a hand to my throat. For after my sleepless night and my rush to the palace, I had forgotten to feed her that morning. I spun away, leaving my daughters huffing behind me on the front steps, needing to pacify, and return to, a hungry falcon—a monster of my own making.
Lucy was not the bird I knew. Hungry beyond reason, she had become a dark-eyed murderer—a creature hell-bent on killing and killing alone.
Her talons held my fingers so rigidly I could feel her beating heart—her anger, her hostility—through her feet.
She stared at me, hackles raised, feral, waiting for me to untie her jesses.
The bird had always represented some wilder part of me—the part that wanted to get out, to break free.
Perhaps the part that felt more ruthless, more brutal, than I was supposed to be.
A part that I had neglected in recent weeks, a part I had tried to tamp down.
And as a result, Lucy was nervous and high-strung, head swiveling at each movement of the trees, each passing insect.
“I am sorry, Lucy,” I told her, though I also felt sorry for myself.
My daughters were furious with me for not pursuing Elin, for not righting some wrong that I had no capability of making decent.
But if I went after my stepdaughter, if I tried to put a stop to the wedding, I would curse my own flesh and blood.
I began to untie Lucy from the gauntlet.
The feathers on her chest rose and her toes went tight on the leather.
She bent down, swift, and pecked my arm: the spot of skin showing above the glove and below my sleeve.
I covered the wound—ripped, white flesh and the beginnings of blood—glaring at her in surprise.
But I’d dropped her jesses, and she was free, suddenly, uninterested in the gash or my face.
Pushing off the glove. Wings flapping. Except she did not go to her block, or toward the great oak, or to circle above.
She was moving farther downwind, floating, then gliding, flying away from me.
No one tells you how to mother. It is presumed to be buried within you, a deep, primordial instinct that awakens in your body—in your breast—when the time is right.
We mothers are expected to have that instinct.
Our intuition. Our supernatural understanding of our children’s habits and bodies and rhythms. You learn to trust your knowledge.
I thought I could trust my knowledge of Lucy.
I thought I knew each intimation of her head and chest, the feel of her flying weight, the subtle strength of her muscles.
But time affects our reading of that rhythm.
Like a clock, we lose our accuracy as years pass.
Fallibility squeezes in. I knew before Lucy left my sight.
I knew after those initial flaps. Something hitched inside of me, a small voice saying that the cadence was off.
I had read it all wrong. I had lost my way.
I was running, but I could not keep up with my bird. I looked around, wildly. She was not at the horizon. She was not in the trees. She was not anywhere. It was as if she’d found a tear in the sky and slipped through.
I moved madly through the foliage, whistling, calling for her.
The branches and leaves whipped against me.
Each lash felt like a reminder: Lucy, lost. Elin, fled on the wings of a broken prince.
Rosie, crestfallen. Mathilde, enraged. All of them, gone to me at once, in their own ways.
If I needed a sign, a moment of reckoning, I had found it.
Pursue Lucy, and I could not pursue Elin. Pursue Elin, and I was damning every hope and dream, potentially even the lives, of my most cherished girls. Hissing and spitting and hating me, but I cherished them still.
All of them.
Lucy, who I had let down.
Mathilde, who had only ever pushed me, in her own tireless way, to be better.
Rosie, who, until that day, had still looked at me with the clear eyes of a small girl.
And Elin. The pinnacle, perhaps, of my broken clock.
How I had resented her over the years. How I resented her, still.
I’d always thought: How different things might have been if she had accepted me from the beginning.
If she’d taken me as a flesh-and-blood mother instead of reaching to the cold pages of her book.
But when you accept a child as your own, you aren’t just accepting them, you also must create a new self to love them with.
I hadn’t been willing to change my rules and expectations for how she should be.
It was me who could have changed, and I hadn’t.
I paused, panting, when I could run no longer. Lucy still nowhere. The sky empty.
What would I do if it were Rosie whom Simeon had selected? How would that have changed my calculus? I imagined her fine freckles. I thought of the crescent shape of human teeth. I was certain, that if the roles had been swapped, I wouldn’t still be pondering.
The hypocrisy set me off in the opposite direction.
I reversed, stumbling back through the trees; the same branches and brush that had grabbed for me before now poked and prodded me forward.
Back through the dark leaves, over the mulch of the forest floor.
Back across the lawn, feet catching in the divots and gullies of the grass.
And, when I was close enough, I called as loud as I could for Alice to meet me in the front.
Arno was still tied up and I had not changed from my riding clothes. I began to work on undoing the knot on the hitching post. Alice appeared, concerned.
“I’m going after Elin,” I called. “And I’ll need some food. Grab what you can manage from the kitchens.”
Alice shook her head at me. “Arno’s ridden too much today already.”
“We’ll take our chances. Please, hurry, Alice!”
She left and returned with some hard rolls. I loaded as many as I could into my skirt, talking to her all the while. “Lucy is out. She flew away from me.”
“In the tree?”
I shook my head, unable to speak, my voice catching in my throat.
Alice frowned, understanding. A trained bird can escape to the wild and do fine.
But a bird with jesses was bound, one day, to get them caught or tangled in a bush or tree, to spend the last of their days caught, starved, or even upside down.
“Please,” I asked her, “make a lure, and go looking for her. See if you can get her down.” I felt a wave of desperation. “Do whatever it takes.”
Looking up, I saw that Rosie and Mathilde had come to an upstairs window.
We locked eyes. It was a long moment, a pane of watery glass between us.
They stood, shoulder to shoulder, watching me, their mother.
I was about to ride off into the afternoon, alone, with no direction, no plan, just an aimless, desperate desire to right the wrongs of the world and myself.
Alice took Arno’s reins from me and held them.
“Perhaps I’ll find them before nightfall,” I said, ruefully. I repositioned my habit, grasped the pommel, and used the stirrup to lift myself onto the horse.
Alice handed me the reins once more. “Perhaps. And perhaps you might check the village inns or find a room there yourself.”
Clicking, I gave Arno a little kick in his side. He took a step forward, then stopped once more. I tried again, and he did not respond at all.
“He’s too tired,” Alice called.
“Please, Arno,” I begged.
He would not budge. I cried out in frustration, patting the horse’s neck, and muttering encouragements. “I cannot give up now. Not now!” I cried.
But then Arno lifted his head and stepped forward. Not at my urging, but because there was another horse coming up the drive. A black one, with a shiny coat, twice the size of poor Arno. On its back sat Otto.
I dismounted and started walking down the drive.
“Where are you going?” Alice called.
“The same as before,” I called back.
Otto continued toward me, following the path through the apple trees. When we were close enough, I demanded: “Pull me up on your horse.”
He slowed, and offered his hand. “What of your things?”
“We do not have time.”
He had a large saddle. I climbed up to sit on the leather behind him, legs hanging off one side.
I was aware that my daughters, from their upstairs window, were probably watching.
Aware that Alice stood just up the drive, holding Arno’s reins.
Aware that, without a handrail or straps, I would need to put my hands on Otto himself.
He urged his horse in a semicircle, facing now back toward the iron gates. He clicked and we moved forward. I reached for him, his body, and held on. Rescuers and saviors, or, I feared, fools.