Water overflowed the pot of the parlour palm I had been tending, watering can held fixed as I listened until the soil swam and dirty liquid spilled across the floor. I mopped it up with a cloth on my hands and knees.
I thought of Frieda Hässler, her arms and hands rough from spinning and scrubbing floors, her solitary, grief-marked life. My hands were as rough as hers, my arms as muscled. My grief as ever-present.
No amount of carding could smooth my tangled threads.
Who would ever wanther?
My stepsisters never meant any cruelty, but they managed it all the same.
Frieda had lost her brother to the Witch fifty years ago, and now he lived forever in prayers and nightmares.
I wondered then, what fate was worse.
Dead companion – or the ghost of a woman.
b
Autumn slipped towards winter and ill omens speckled the city: carefully laid woodpiles rotten through, fires dying in the grate, a litter of kittens born with milky, unseeing eyes, a girl slipped through half-formed ice and drowned.
It was less than a week now until the guests arrived, and all the bedrooms had been aired, fresh linens produced and flowers cut. The kitchens took in deliveries of beer and potatoes and flour and eggs and Riesling and vast wheels of cheese and sides of ham and even the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin sculpted from sugar. There was no safe refuge from the planning anywhere. In the mornings I went walking or put on my old skirts to work the apothecary garden outside the kitchens, tending lavender and sage and sorrel and mint while kitchen maids snipped great handfuls off with sharp scissors. When the weather was too bad, I kept to my room, reading and sorting through my geological collection. I borrowed polish and cloth from downstairs to work at each neglected piece of flint and basalt, limestone, dolomite and iron ore, taking the time to consider each in turn: the beauty in their harshness, the impossible compression of time into the palm of my hand. An infinite history that I could hold, and begin to understand.
Klara found me in my room kneeling amongst my samples, smudged glasses perched on the bridge of my nose.
‘Mother wants to see you,’ she said, casting an eye over my twill skirt and dirty fingernails.
‘Why?’
‘She’s upset. She says you’ve been rude.’
My brows furrowed. ‘When?’
Klara shrugged, ‘You’re always hiding with a book. And when you come in you don’t say hello properly.’
I washed my hands and found my stepmother alone in her solar, a bright room at the back of the house overlooking the lake. It had once been my mother’s, and she had filled it with books and replicas of Wallis and Millais paintings: Chatterton sprawled in death on one wall, Ophelia entwined with flowers as she sunk beneath the water on the other. Now the room had been repainted in a dull olive green and hung with placid pastoral scenes.
My stepmother directed me to a seat.
‘I apologise if I have offended you,’ I said. ‘I did not mean to.’
She folded her hands, lips pursed. ‘I have tried very hard to accommodate you, Mina, but you throw that in my face when you refuse to participate in this family. I suggest you think a little less highly of yourself. If you mean to spend the rest of your life unmarried and under my roof, then you need to change your ideas. Do you understand me?’
I swallowed and nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’
Was there a threat beneath those words? I remembered what Johanna had said. My stepmother had written to try and find me a place as a lady’s companion.
‘Your father has enough to worry about without you adding to it. He is under an immense deal of pressure that I am not sure you fully grasp.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
A spread of menu cards and seating charts covered her desk and I looked to them, feeling as lost as I did at the modiste or with the dancing master.
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
She knew it was a worthless offer as well as I did.
‘All I ask of you now is that you do not embarrass me or your father when our guests are here.’ She looked at my ink-stained cuffs and dowdy bun. ‘At least try to look presentable.’
My cheeks burned but I nodded.
