CHAPTER SIX #3
"I'll not make peace with Mother, so you needn't try to send me back to her," the girl announced, crossing her arms over her chest. "And if you try, I'll fling myself from the town walls instead. I swear I will."
"I'd rather you didn't," Constance said mildly, rising from her chair and going to shut the door behind the new visitor.
Her unruffled tone would have given Isabel pause, if not for the clear indications that this girl was well-known to her.
A family member, almost certainly – a niece?
She thought Constance might have spoken of a niece at some point, but her head was so muddled with the past half-hour's events, she could hardly recall.
The girl's eyes were red, her lower lip jutting out in a furious pout. Constance's words appeared to have wrong-footed her momentarily - presumably she'd been hoping for impassioned pleas not to leap from the town walls - but she recovered herself within moments. "I mean it."
"I'm certain you do." Constance reached around her and shut the door.
"Margery, this is Isabel d'Eresby; she works with me in the shop.
Isabel, my niece, Margery." Isabel gathered enough of her wits to offer Margery a polite nod, though it was a futile gesture: Margery was not looking at her. "Now, what's this all about?"
Margery jutted her chin forward. "She's having the banns called next week."
Constance kept her composure well; if it weren't for Margery's presence, Isabel would have complimented her on it. Still, her mouth tightened momentarily, eyebrows drawing together before her expression smoothed back out. "She's spoken to the priest, then?"
"She says she's going to." Margery stamped her foot.
"She said she can't trust me to live cleanly -" Her chin wobbled.
"- so I must be wed or else I'll disgrace myself, but I won't disgrace myself, I've not done anything, and I'd rather be disgraced than do as she says.
She'd rather see me dead than happy, and if that's what she wants, I'll give it to her, I swear it. "
"Well, I'd rather not see you dead or disgraced," Constance said, "and I doubt your mother would either.
" She shot Isabel a glance, her expression almost amused: do you remember being this young?
it said. Isabel did not, but in spite of Margery's clear distress, she could not quite tamp down a sense of fond indulgence.
She had never been as Margery was now; but there had been a time, not terribly long ago, when she might have expected a similar outburst from Matthew.
"I don't care what she wants," Margery said, and if she recognized the contradiction in her arguments, it did not appear to give her pause.
"I want to be free, not tied to a witless dullard of a husband.
" She turned, appearing to realize belatedly that she and her aunt were not alone in the room as her eyes fell on Isabel. "Do you have a husband?"
Isabel blinked. "I - did. He died."
Margery's nostrils flared. "Lucky you."
"Margery, that's enough." Constance's voice was firm now. "You're in no state to speak rationally. Go into the kitchen and wash your face, you'll feel better once you do."
Margery glanced from Constance to Isabel and then back again; then, apparently concluding that she would find no allies in the room, she flounced off to the kitchen.
Her attempt at slamming the door behind her was thwarted, for it was too heavy for her to give it a hard enough push, but the screeching of it being scraped across the floor was still less than harmonious.
The silence once she'd gone was resounding. Isabel picked up her work and began to fold it. "Shall I go?" The idea of going back to Hilda's house was not an appealing one, but neither was intruding on a family matter that was none of her affair.
"Only if you wish to." Constance said. "If you'd rather stay, I can always talk to her in the kitchen. You needn't disrupt your work on our account."
Isabel paused, then set the cloth down on the table.
It was a reprieve, and she was glad of it: she ought to leave matters there.
And it was good, in a way, that Margery had interrupted them when she had, for their conversation had been moving into dangerous waters.
Still, she was grieved to lose Constance's company for the rest of the afternoon, even if she recognized that Margery's immediate need for comfort was greater than her own for companionship. "Will she be all right?"
"Oh, she'll be fine." Constance's smile was wry as she leaned against the table; but there was something shadowing her eyes. "This isn't the first time, and it won't be the last. She and her mother had been quarreling since she was old enough to hold a conversation."
"How old is she now?" Isabel asked. She was no great hand at guessing ages, and Margery's relative height made it even more difficult than it might have been otherwise, but her countenance marked her as not much more than a child.
Too young to be worrying about marriage – except, of course, Isabel herself had when she herself had not yet outgrown her girlhood.
"Just turned fifteen," Constance said with a sigh.
"Her mother – well, you heard some of the story already.
My sister is set on seeing her wed soon, and the more Margery fights it, the more Matilda digs her heels in.
As I said, it's always been thus with them.
She comes to me because she knows I won't scold her, and Matilda comes to me because she knows I won't quarrel with her. " She shrugged. "As ever."
Before Isabel could reply, Margery emerged from the kitchen. Her eyes and nose were red, and her face looked well-scrubbed, but her scowl had at least diminished somewhat.
"Shall I go?" Isabel said again, this time to Margery.
Margery slumped down onto one of the stools. "I don't care."
Isabel exchanged a look with Constance, who made a sort of well, then gesture. Isabel took her needle back up and re-fastened her eyes on her work. The business of sewing, however, did nothing to stop up her ears, and so she heard every word of Constance and Margery's following conversation.
"All right," Constance said, sliding back onto the bench next to Isabel. She did keep a handsbreadth's distance between them, for which Isabel was both grateful (for the decorum's sake) and disappointed (for reasons she did not wish to reflect on.) "Tell me what's happened."
"I told you what happened," Margery said, her tone aggrieved. "Mother means to have the banns called, and I said I won't marry Simon even if she does call them, and she said I've no say in the matter so long as I'm acting like a child, and she said –"
"No," Constance said, with commendable patience. "You told me that part. What happened before that? Something must have made her decide to act now."
Isabel glanced up from under her eyelashes, and saw that Margery was chewing her lower lip in the manner of a child who'd just been caught at some mischief or other. "I don't know."
Constance said nothing. When Isabel glanced at her, she saw that she was sitting with her arms folded on the table, gazing steadily at Margery with one eyebrow quirked upwards. Isabel looked down so that neither of them would see her smile.
Margery broke first. "All right," she said with a huff.
"Last night Sarah had a sore stomach and she was sick all over herself, and Mother told me to give her a bath and wash her clothes.
I said, why didn't she do it, I was busy with the mending, and she said I'd be cleaning up after my own little ones soon enough, so I ought to be practicing anyhow.
So I told her I'd never have little ones of my own, and she said yes I would, when I was married, and I told her I wasn't going to be married, and she couldn't force me.
She said she could do as she liked, since I lived under her roof, and I ought to be more grateful since she and Father were at pains to bring me up well even though I only ever repaid them by being quarrelsome.
And I said I wouldn't live under her roof any longer if those were the conditions she meant to attach to it – to my living there – and I went out, and," She sounded more subdued now. "Stayed out – late."
Constance sucked in a breath. "How late?"
Isabel didn't even have to look to know Margery was squirming in her seat. "The bells were ringing Vigils when I went back."
Vigils was well after dark – after most people had retired for the night, in fact.
Any woman out at such hours would be assumed to be up to no good, especially by a mother already anxious about her daughter's future.
Isabel had never met Matilda, but she found herself in sudden sympathy with the woman.
She didn't know what she'd do if Walter ran out and didn't come back for hours.
"All right," Constance said gently. "And what happened next?"
"Everyone was asleep when I came back," Margery said.
"And I slept late this morning and no one woke me.
And then when I did get up, Mother said we were going to see the priest this afternoon, and I said no, and then we – quarreled again –" Isabel was quite certain that "quarreled again" was covering for a multitude of bitter things said on both sides, "- and I came here.
" She sniffled. "I wasn't doing anything last night.
I only walked around. She's no right to say I disgraced myself. "
"She doesn't know what you were doing," Constance pointed out. "And I'm sure she was frightened badly when you didn't come back until late. You said she was asleep when you did return?"
Another pause, which Isabel assumed encompassed further squirming on Margery's part. "She was – asleep when I came back. But she was sitting up at the table."