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 andtook 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.
CHAPTER SIX
After Henry spent a summer teaching me about the hawks, another year passed before I saw him again. Encouraged by sporadic letters, I waited for the day I’d see the Tremaine birds and flags once more. But the morning the Tremaines finally came, I missed the caravan marking their arrival. The birds were up, and the flags were out, but I’d spent hours struggling to finish my lessons, eyes returning and then returning again to the window in hopes of seeing a faraway falcon stooping in a high-speed dive.
Agatha watched over my shoulder as I repaired a set of my father’s stockings. Under normal circumstances, I could sew tiny and capable stitches. But I could not focus, distracted by the agony of the moment: the scratch of wool, the heat of the fire on a too-hot day, the prick of a needle, and the sense of time moving slowly, there, inside the hall, and quickly, outside, just beyond my reach, as the day slipped away. When I made mistakes, Agatha, back straight, would task me with ripping out my stitches and starting over, her own sewing needle hovering threateningly above my skin.
When we finished at long last, I rushed outside, sucking in thewarm, clean air and the smell of wild sage. Henry and I had agreed, via letter, to meet behind the mews whenever the Tremaines did arrive. I hurried along the back path, moving as fast as I could in my skirts. I was perspiring and out of breath.
But when I arrived, I saw he was not waiting for me as we had planned. I stood, uncertain. And I might have sat awhile, except I could hear his laughter. So I did what I had not done before, and ventured farther onto the grounds.
I saw him first. In our year apart, he had grown a whole head taller, widened across the shoulders, and, though it was unmistakably Henry, he was another person entirely. More than decorum stopped me short. At his side, there was a girl. Besides the gamekeepers, who were herding the animals into their pens, they were alone.
I often think it inaccurate when blond people are described as yellow-haired, but the girl’s braids were truly gold, like a drawing of what a young maiden was supposed to look like. She sat, perched on the stone wall of an empty pigpen, her boots hidden beneath the hem of her formal dress. Here is the picture I still return to: yellow against blue (her hair, the sky), red against white (her mouth, her teeth), bone against bone (my molars, grinding and clenched).
