CHAPTER TWO
Before there were half-moons of dirt beneath my nails, there were jewels on my fingers. And before there were lines on my face, there was joy. But all of that was long ago. I’ve sold most of my jewels. There is, alas, no price on joy. But if joy were a commodity, I’d trade all I have—all that’s left of it—for my daughters. Rosie. Mathilde. (Here a few images come to mind: Twin braids. A freckle on a calf. Mathilde’s scar. The long shadows cast by a child’s eyelashes. Minute details that come to represent a whole being.)
My name is Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley. The man in the woods thought I, mud-spattered and soiled, was a peasant. I have been familiar with the loam of the earth since I was a girl, but he was wrong.
My father was a brewer—a respectable trade that was still far from gentility. Brewers make enough money that their daughters, and their dowries, might be considered for marriage with the landed class. But our village was small, with few gentlemen, and we socialized with the yeomanry and gentry alike, caught somewhere between the two worlds, capable in both, fully accepted by neither.
Our family manor was on the outskirts of the king’s territory, far from most of the nobility and the day-to-day machinations of court, its customs and norms. I grew up with little knowledge of those formalities, in a household of men. I passed most of my time in the kitchen, stealing rolls and tarts and apples; in the stables, feeding the same rolls and tarts and apples to the livestock; or outside, assisting the boys and the men.
As a brewer, my father spent his days busied by every manner of task—boiling wort, cleaning barrels, keeping records. He and my brother often involved themselves in the needs of the house and our land, stepping in to smith or woodwork. Both at the brewery and at home, I was allowed to observe or, less frequently, help. If something were to break or go wrong, instead of calling for a specialist, my father would first turn to his hands. Always, he said, you start with the tools you have. Through him, I learned how to manage a home and a cellar: how to salt or smoke a successful hunt’s bounty; how to prune a cherry tree; how to rack barrels without breaking your back; how to mix clay, soil, straw, and dung into daub and apply it across the stable’s wattles. When I wasn’t trailing after my father, I explored the woods around our home, put my hands and feet in the river, and made tiny pretend creatures from twigs and leaves. The days of my girlhood were dusty, dirty, sooty, and sweaty. Above all, they were happy.
On my twelfth birthday, a tutor named Agatha—a severe woman with pox scars and beautiful red hair who covered her smell of sour milk with a pungent lilac water—was hired to oversee my education: namely, to instill me with knowledge of the manners and etiquette that would be necessary for marriage. It was through Agatha, a bit belatedly, that I was taught the formalities and customs of genteel women, a counterbalance to my years spent shadowing my father.
I was also taught how many raps a knuckle can take before it bleeds. How fingers held too firmly on an arm, or a neck, will leave marks of a sickly yellow. How a forcefully articulated dressing-down—or an afternoon of forced repetition—could hurt the mind more than anypinch or punishment. But Agatha’s methods were effective, and I also learned how to hold and manipulate a fan to send messages, how to walk with a ladylike gait, and how to properly wield a spoon (scoop the food away from your body). I learned how to create and repair linens and manage a household and lead a dinner prayer. I learned to eat slowly, with small, refined bites, and to listen politely, and to lift my chin, and to speak softly. Because this was not part of my life from the very beginning, to this day, being a woman with a title can feel like a carapace that I inhabit.
I resisted the switch—from long days outdoors in the sun or the mist to long hours in the great hall learning table manners and the art of the curtsy—not because I feared Agatha or feared marriage, but because I missed the freedom of unplanned afternoons. I didn’t know to fear marriage: Marriage was just assumed. A duty and an inevitable future.
If I had paid close attention, I might have seen some of the warnings. Rosy-cheeked girls who wed and watched their skin turn gray. Women in our village who married men so far away we never saw them again. Swollen lips and bruised eyes—echoes of violence, as ancient as man himself—that made themselves known at the market and local taverns.
But the stories we passed on and murmured about were what happened to the girls who hadnotmarried. There were women who fell into ruin. Spinsters who lived at the mercy of unknown relatives. In my hamlet, an unwed maidservant was once discovered to be with child, and then, later, beaten to death by an unknown hand—purple at the belly, a thrashing meant to induce miscarriage—so that she could not, would not, name the father. A different year, a pregnant woman had wandered into our township. Alone and in labor. She could not walk. She crawled in the dirt. And no one helped her, for to help her would be to assume responsibility. The constable threw her convulsing body over the back of a horse and carted her to county lines. I’d once heard a story of a widow whose deceased husband left her and her daughternothing but the choice of prostitution. Both of their bodies were later found in the shallow stream where people did their washing, limbs bloody, faces forgotten, except where the daughter’s forehead had been branded with a hot iron. Each telling gruesome. Whispered about. But without a sense of surprise or horror: These instances were recounted and incanted as warning.
We women were born and bred to expect marriage, and it all happened when we were too young to know better. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen: so young a girl’s first breath was still a part of the earth’s atmosphere. So young you pinched your cheeks to make them pink, you strung flowers in your hair, you denuded daisies whispering of love, you believed in the power of the moon and in the twinkling of the stars as if all of nature and its tidal pulls would take care of you, so blind to the truth of what lay ahead.
I later came to realize: Nature was a system, not a nurturer. For every life, there was death; for every bit of laughter, there were tears. For every anguish, there was joy. For the broken bones and crushed eggshells, there were small miracles. For the predators, there was prey. For the herbivores, there were plants, and for the carnivores, there was meat, and every meal for every being caused some other living thing harm. Nature was balance.
The only being that defied the ancient standard—the standard ofme first,me only,I,I,me—was a mother. A mother, in the bones of her bones, was not in balance. She gave, without ending. She thought not as anIbut as aweand more often it wasyou,you,you,my darling,you. A mother protected, tipping scales, weighing odds, defying the system. And I did not have one.
I do not know if my parents had a happy marriage. My father did not like to talk about my mother, for talking about her brought pain, and he saw little purpose in discomfort. The pain, at least, told me he had loved her, though love, too, was something my father did not like to talk about.
I had three siblings. The first was a stillbirth. Two of us had survivedto adulthood. My mother died delivering the last of us, my younger brother, Joseph, who died himself before his first birthday. (Four children, two survive: Balance can be cruel.)
I was three when she passed, and sometimes I think I can remember her. Long fingers, holding my face, humming, dark hair, memories as shapeless as a dream itself. Is this so different from the twin braids, the freckle, the scar, the shadow of an eyelash that, when held together, represent my own children? I was never certain if I confused the recollections with the details I begged my older brother for, somehow twining his remembering with my own. My only tangible evidence was a necklace my mother had left behind—a cameo carved into shell that depicted her countenance. It felt fitting that all I had was her outline, as if her details were not meant for me. The little I knew about my mother was that shewasa mother, and it wasn’t until I had children of my own that I could understand and inhabit this, or truly feel any connection between the two of us.
I have wondered at the immeasurable ways my life would be different if she had lived longer. Perhaps I would have known more, when knowing would have been useful. Perhaps I would have expected some of the pain, some of the blood, that goes in hand with living. Perhaps what is hard in me, what can be cruel, would be softer. But I think, above all else, she might have stopped me from marrying so young. Or at least better prepared me.
A marriage can be violent, even if a man is not. By the time my daughters were grown, there were no men left in my house. Though we were not starving, we needed food. Though we lived in a grand hall, we were not well off. The scant means we did have—what I’d gotten from selling off furniture piece by piece, stripping the walls painting by painting, trading necklaces and brooches jewel by jewel—went toward maintaining the upright charade Agatha had drilled into me through bloodied knuckles and bruised arms: the appearance that all was well.
Once through the hedge, I could see the house, the orchard, the air itself was still asleep, as if I had imagined the morning—the death of the rabbit, the approaching carriage, the stranger in the wood. Frost covered the sundial at the center of the garden, and the outbuildings—the cellar and smokehouse—were half disguised in the fog. Approaching the grand and slumping hall from the back, the upper half-timbered floors looked gray in the weak sunlight. More whitewash was needed. My whole life had become a ruse like the house we lived in: grand and ornate on the exterior and crumbling, brick by brick, inside.
The first time I came to Bramley Hall, I had been stunned by the beautiful gate out front: intricate ironwork covered in curls and gold that emulated the delicate tendrils of a climbing vine. We went up along the gravel drive, through an orchard of fruit trees, and the house had come into sight: massive and pleasant, with exposed timbers in a diamond pattern. Multiple gables and intricately carved bargeboards. The main entrance—metal studded and carved—was so ornate that even the door’s hinges were decorative.
But the years had passed and what had felt luxurious and ornamental had become onerous and decrepit. The front gate had broken (rusted, permanently, to stay open) and the timbers were rotting. The roof leaked in three places. But the trees along the gravel were pruned (a skill I had thanks to my father) and the weeds were at bay (here, an image of Rosamund frowning at me, hands swimming in work gloves) and the chandeliers in the great hall gleamed (Mathilde, standing precariously on a stool). What skills we had were all applied to maintaining anywhere a guest might see.
Just as a scab protects a wound, I came to understand Agatha’s manners and lessons as layers of armor. They developed and hardened around me, holding me upright. I was constantly aware of the world’s expectations. They were the rules I lived by. Fitting in was survival.
So, I hid our circumstances from the world. The facade that all was well—that we had means, that we followed the rules, that we were well heeled and well mannered—offered a chance at a future for mydaughters. One that didn’t involve searching for game at sunrise or repairing stockings until they were composed of only repairs or shivering our way through winter for lack of wood. Marriage could be violent, but marrying them well was the only chance I had to spirit the girls up and away from what life had dealt us. It was the lesson from my father: You use the tools you have.
I stared up at the house, its mullioned windows opaque in the morning light, listening for the sounds of the carriage. There was no time to return Lucy to her mews. And I couldn’t answer the door with a bird on my arm.
“Will you wait for me?” I asked Lucy, removing her hood and gesturing to the oversized oak that grew in the middle of our lawn. She stared at me with a critical eye. You cannot abandon a raptor to the wild. Even the most well-trained falcon, imprinted since birth, might leave you.
But not if they were hungry. Not if they had a need for you to provide food. And, though Lucy had eaten, she didn’t feel as heavy as when her belly was full. Leaving her unattended was a risk I’d have to take if I wanted to see my daughters established. I already rose each morning to search for supper so we could use our little money for sugar and silk, and our tables could be laden with pastries and sweetmeats, and we could smile from behind clouds of sherbet-colored cloth whenever guests came over. One day, if I was successful, we could all be done with the risks and the pretending. With my whole soul, I wanted my family to find some stability in the world.
Nature keeps the world in balance. Security is not a probability. But my daughters had what I did not: a mother. The carriage was a tipping point. And I was determined to tip all in their favor.
With no time to take Lucy to the mews, I cast her feathered body toward the tree, murmuring instructions to stay until I could retrieve her. Then, she was gliding away, and there was nothing left to do but hurry inside.
CHAPTER THREE
