Elin lowered the booklet, biting her lip. “I do not really remember Mother,” she admitted to the dolls, shifting from the voice of authority to that of a small girl. “Only from the painting. But Papa said that she was a proper lady and that I will be like her if I am a good girl.” She turned her face upward and addressed the lace canopy above the bed. “I will try to be a good girl always, Mama, and not to… sow malevolence.”
She waited, as if expecting a response, and I could not bear it. Could not let her statement go unanswered. I stepped into the room, making enough noise to announce my presence, and Elin’s chin snapped back down.
“Hello, Elin,” I said softly. I looked around—at the soft light, at the porcelain figures on the chaise. “This was your mother’s room, wasn’t it.”
She had gone cold and quiet, the book now shut in her hands. “Yes, Stepmother.”
“It is hard to miss someone, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Stepmother,” she repeated, stonily.
“In missing someone, we keep a part of them alive within us, you know. I’m quite certain your mother would be very proud of you.”
“Please excuse me.” Taking the booklet with her, she made for the door. “I must go find my father.”
She left me in the room, alone, her useless porcelain dolls—skin cold, eyes blank—staring back at me from the chaise.
Much of my efforts with Elin, for weeks after, went the same.
Robert, for his part, was careful and polite but vaguely disappointed by the initial weeks of our marriage. He had not married for feminine company; he did not often visit my rooms. He had not married for domestic support; he had a household that ran itself—with a housekeeper that kept a firm eye across every detail. He had, I believed, hoped to offer Elin another feminine figure to sit amongst all the other dolls in her room: a mother.
But everything I knew about motherhood came from ushering Rosamund and Mathilde through each step of their lives. I knew every orientation of their hopes and failures. We were a unit of three. (Live, live, live, I had told Mathilde, but it was them who gave my life meaning.) After my initial overtures with Elin were rejected—and rejected again—I did not know how to begin anew with a girl of nearly eight years. I knew nothing of Elin’s hopes and dreams. She suffered by comparison to my feelings for my own girls. As I am sure I suffered bycomparison to whatever she felt for her own birth mother. But most critically: She did not want my mothering. And I did not know how to be an unwanted mother. I did not know how to grow love from infertile ground. It was unnatural for both of us.
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. (Hisbecomeshers.) His own papers decreed all other money—which there was somuch 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.
