“Forgive me,” he said, taking a step back. “But what is there to quarrel about?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Wenthelen was in the garden, crushing apples with our small hand-cranked mill. “Alice is putting Lucy in her mews,” I told her, nodding at the basket of fruit by her feet. “Are those the ones we picked last week?”
Cider apples must mellow for several days to develop their sugars. Picking one, I took a bite to check its sweetness. Throughout the season we’d be mashing them into pomace, pressing the grinds over clean straw, and then filtering the juice into barrels for fermentation. Wenthelen, who had overseen enough presses to ignore my question, didn’t respond. She paused the revolution of the mill to lay a hand on her chest. “Poor girls, missing the party. But—Elin!—can you imagine—one of ours, married to a prince?”
I took another bite of apple. “No one is marrying anyone.”
“A popular thought,” she replied, snorting.
Then I heard it: loud, racking sobs—muffled but distinct. I looked up, peering at the open windows of the hall. “Rosamund.”
Wenthelen nodded, not quite meeting my eye.
I sighed, wiping sticky juice from my chin. “Has she been at it this whole time?”
“Might want to let her lose a little steam.” Wenthelen resumed her cranking. “The girl has nothing to think about but bows and balls. If you’d let her come to the market with me, take some commissions—”
“I do not think that wise.”
“She’s so talented,” she insisted.
“No—”
“And she wants to come—”
“She is not a tradeswoman!” I exclaimed, harshly. Softening, I added: “She cannot appear to be one.”
Wenthelen stopped milling for a short moment, and then began again with renewed vigor. “I tried to bring Elin some oat cake. But she refused.”
I sighed. “Does no one have the ability to pull themselves upright?”
“She’s so slight.”
“I can’t force the girl to eat.”
“She needs a bit of color in her cheeks! She’s upset.”
“About getting invited to a ball?”
I had once heard a sculptor compare his children to marble. He said, like stone, their future shape lingers inside of them, waiting to be revealed. But I believed that children were paintings as much as they were sculptures. You shepherded them along from blank canvas: guiding and cajoling and teaching and begging and reprimanding and instructing and demanding, pushing and prodding the finished art into a picture of your own making. A stone is just a stone until someone appears with a chisel. I felt all of Rosie’s and Mathilde’s mistakes and missteps, their faults and flaws, as if they were my own.
Elin’s, though, were another matter altogether.
If she didn’t want to eat, that was her decision. I didn’t feel inclined to serve her warm biscuits on a silver platter and stand by to ensure she chewed and swallowed.
But Wenthelen—who had known the girl since she was born—swelled, readying her arguments.
“I’ll talk to her.” I sighed, and tossed the rest of my apple into the mill.
By her own choice, Elin’s personal chambers were in the tower keep, the oldest part of the house where the walls were three feet thick and years of wear had polished the sloped stone floor shiny and smooth. The staircase, which turned around on itself, had a low ceiling that forced me to hunch. Elin was shorter than the rest of us, but I am sure there were other reasons she chose to sleep in that room; the tight, round turret was designed to be a last defense in a siege. It is challenging to fight your way up a set of steps; a person could retreat there in hopes of defending themselves.
I had not come up in some time. “Elin?” I called out as I rounded the corner.
She—no longer in pink, but every bit as fastened and cinched as a trussed tenderloin—sat at a small table, translating poems. In front of her, one of the deep-set windows framed clouds and sky. What her room might have lacked in light and ambience, it gained in view: It was the only place in the house where, on a clear day, you could see the castle in the distance, the pinpricks of its towers rising above the canopy of trees that surrounded us.
“May I come in?” Without waiting for a response, I went across to her bed and perched on its edge.
