Despite Otto’s urgency, I did not mind the delay. Whatever waited for me at home was not something to relish. Rosie’s and Mathilde’s upturned faces. Elin, confused or still unaware. I did not know what information to share with the three of them, did not know how to share what I had learned, nor if sharing was the right thing to do in the first place.
But even this kind of hand-wringing felt false. Sigrid had put forth all in clear terms: No matter how I struggled, no matter which way I turned, the situation was fixed. We were mothers, both of us, and whether a parent of predator or prey, I understood the instinct. (Felt, even, the briefest flash of pity for her, balancing motherhood of both predator and prey, hunter and hunted.) I still wanted to protect myown. And in this case, it had been expressed to me that the best means of protection was to do nothing. Let your horse stop to eat clover. Let yourself sink into the saddle. Let your daughters—live, live, live!—stay afloat.
Still, doing nothing did little to abate my revulsion. All my dedication to—my rapturous optimism about—climbing the ladder had diminished. If these were the tools I had, I was better off without them. A part of me was still sayingbut.But—. But—.Even to myself, even in my own mind: I could not finish the sentence.
Rosie and Mathilde were waiting for me at the bottom of the drive. I clicked and urged Arno to hurry, to no avail, and when I was close enough, before I had a chance to dismount, the girls began to inform me of what had happened. They spoke quickly, talking over one another, but it did not take long to parse out their message: Simeon had come to the house, already, and left with Elin.
I had been half expecting it, but Rosie was shaking her head, disbelieving. “She knows better than to put her honor on the line.” My daughter was shocked. But I had always understood Elin’s virtue was just a stepping stone, a pathway to get what she was after.
“He said he wishes to have a private wedding,” Mathilde explained, frown deepening. “But he came alone, dressed in common clothes.”
“The only need for such subterfuge is if he does not intend to marry her!” Rosie cried.
“We did not know if we should tell her about—” Mathilde didn’t finish the sentence. The baby. Princess Hemma. Her outdated bit of half information. “We tried to talk to her, to talk her out of it, but she would not hear anything, would not be convinced otherwise—”
“If he does not marry her, she will have disgraced herself, going off with him.” Rosie clambered forward. “And that pollution will smudge the whole family! And without a dowry, without family reputation, we will become untouchable.”
I handed her the reins so I could dismount from Arno and then took them back in hand, pulling the tired horse so he could finish the last part of our journey up the driveway unburdened. “He will marry her,” I assured them.
My daughters were concerned with Elin’s reputability. But I knew more than they could ever understand: Sigrid needed Elin. She had sent Simeon to ensure they would be married. An elopement—or at least a forced change of atmosphere—would keep my stepdaughter away from those who might put a stop to the union. All was clear; even if weattemptedto interfere, Elin would remain within the golden cage of the castle walls and royal influence. It would only be us who were cast out.
Rosie wrinkled her nose. “What of the—the news?”
Her sister, more forcefully, demanded: “What did you learn?”
“Morwen’s gossip cannot be true,” Rosie insisted. “Surely you found out otherwise.”
I could not bring myself to look either of them in the eye. If they were to know all I had found out—how much worse things had turned out to be. How depraved the prince was. And I had urged them to Simeon’s side! The shame of this—the blindness of it—disgusted me. I gave another sharp tug on the reins in my hand, picking up my pace as Arno trailed behind. “It is true,” I said, without looking back at their faces.
I heard Rosie make a little noise, an effort at speaking. “Perhaps,” she said, at a loss for words, “perhaps… we are not giving his character enough credit. Perhaps the prince is doing it for his sister, and he will broach the subject with Elin and they will figure out this situation together.”
My sweet Rosie. I had tried to come to a similar conclusion myself.
Mathilde was flintier. “Elin deserves to know before marrying him.”
An unvoiced accusation. “Then you might have told her before they left,” I retorted.
“But you had not returned to verify the information!” Mathilde cried.
I listened to our shoes crunch in the gravel for long moments. Glancing back, I saw the girls exchange a look I could not decipher, some secret language of sisters designed to exclude me. Something in the look, something in Mathilde’s tone—some small finger of blame that laid the situation at my feet when I had only ever tried to help them—filled me with frustration. “How could you let her go with him!” I cried.
“We are not her chaperones.” Mathilde’s voice was cool.
I knew my anger was misdirected, but the choler in my chest felt unbearable. “But you could have used your heads.”
“He is her fiancé,” Mathilde said quietly. “You have tried at every opportunity to put us before him, and your schemes worked. If we had gone to her and jeopardized it all and been incorrect in our accusations, you would have been furious.”
“We were but following your suit,” Rosie agreed. “And you did everything to fan the flame of love in my breast and the moment he chose her, you swung right over, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The rest of us do not just… pivot quite so easily!”
I stared at them, wondering if part of Rosie’s anguish over the past few days had also been directed at me. I had spent so much time perfecting the little dollhouse of our existence, that I had forgotten about the dolls living in its rooms. There was hurt on Rosie’s face, but also a different kind of feeling—one that was adjacent, or tied, to disappointment. A child believes everything you say, everything you tell them, and there is a precise moment, you feel it exactingly, a little tap in your gut, when the belief snaps.
For her part, Mathilde looked furious. Perhaps after what we had both learned the day before, she had supposed I could take such information and turn it into a weapon with which to defend ourselves. Perhaps, after learning of Elin’s departure, she had expected me to cry out about dishonor, to leap back on the horse shouting that we had not a moment to lose. But I was familiar with loss. I knew the contours of its prowling, animal body. And I believed that perhaps if I were inert,lay down, did nothing, it might only sniff and pass. I had spent too many years building the dollhouse to give up on it now.
I stalked forward, hurrying up the drive, and, when I reached the top, looped Arno’s reins through the hitching post and gave the knot a hard tug. As my children came up behind me, I turned to them. “Enough, girls. Go inside.”
Mathilde put her hands on her hips. “You need to go get Elin.”
Rosie, halfway between the two of us, looked back and forth, and then, decisively, went to her sister’s side. “Yes, Mama. You cannot just let him take her! Not if the news about thebaby”—even alone in our driveway, even when it was just us, she whispered the word—“is true.”
