“You will clean this room,” I said quietly. “You will use soap. Scrub the floors. Sweep down the cobwebs. Scrub out the windows. Take that mattress away and bring me clean straw for this one.”
They looked at one another, back at me, challenging me to make them move. Aha. Well and a day.
“Else,” I smiled, “I will summon a dragon to eat you both.” I snapped my fingers and made fire dart at them so that they screamed. It was a fine, hard fire-flight, which told me I was in a time when magic flowed strong.
They had no more sense of how to clean a room than of how to fly. I kept coming back and making them do it over, getting a little angrier each time and they getting a little more frantic at the fire biting them. The whole house was evidence of their slipshod ways, theirs and Lydia’s. As for Lydia, she had gone upstairs to lie about on a disordered bed with her elder daughters and the twins, playing the lute (tunelessly) and singing (less melodiously than Grumpkin had used to howl) and talking of the future. I put on my cloak for a reconnaissance and overheard them from the hallway. Their plans seemed to consist of selling Wellingford and going to London to live on the fruits of that sale. For a moment I struggled with this idea, certain that Elladine was the heir if all the Wellingford brothers were dead. But, of course, she was not. Young Edward was the heir: the six-year-old monster whom I caught torturing a dog in the stables, and whose britches I set alight to teach him better manners. He looked nothing like Edward. Nothing at all. Edward, my poor sweet fish, taken twice on the same hook!
And where was Elladine? Over an indescribably bad dinner, I asked again for my “grandniece.”
“Poor Elladine,” Lydia murmured. “Such an unfortunate name to give a child. Not a Christian name, surely.”
“But where is she?”
“She goes off. On a horse, sometimes. Sometimes afoot. We’re never sure where she is. Poor child. First motherless, then fatherless, I’m sure she’ll be so glad to meet any kin at all.”
“You and Edward were married in … what year?” I asked.
“In the year of the second Death. Almost at once after Robert and Janet died,” she said, “together with Robert’s youngest brother and all their sons. Edward was the heir, and he felt he needed someone to help him maintain the estate. And, of course, I’d been left a widow and desperately needed someone to help me, as well. Four fatherless children to rear, with people dying everywhere, it is no pleasant Maytime to be alone in such circumstance, believe me. Edward most wanted someone to care for Ella. I told him I would maintain his daughter if he would maintain me. It was not a love match, precisely, though I was fond of Edward.”
Poor Edward. Destined always to be a husband of convenience. “How did you meet?”
“Janet was my cousin. I was visiting here when the plague struck. Oh, there were many visitors, then. Robert and Janet had taken in half the countryside who were homeless. I remember Janet going on and on about being unable to keep the place clean.”
Which is why the plague had struck Wellingford, I thought. Poor Janet. So charitable. Giving a home to the multitude, with all their fleas.
“Of the Wellingfords, only Edward and Ella were left alive when the dying paused for a time,” Lydia said, leading me into the next room as we heard the maids breaking crockery behind us. She went on to give me the details of the dying, with an unnecessary relish in the recounting, interrupting herself to say, “Ah, here she is!”
A ravishingly beautiful young woman came through the door. Sixteen or seventeen, perhaps. Wild dark hair. Wild dark eyes. A bruise on one cheek. Hands coarse and scratched and black around the nails.
“Elladine, this is your father’s Aunt Catherine,” Lydia said in a kindly tone, edged with some emotion I did not quite understand.
“What would she have here, madam? What’s left?” the girl asked insolently. It was the same tone in which Candy might have said “So?” or “Big deal!” in the twentieth.
Lydia flinched, giving me an apologetic glance. Discipline wasn’t Lydia’s forte either, poor thing. I had yet to find what Lydia’s forte was. Surely she must have had something to recommend her to Edward. Or was he so distraught at all the dying, he had grasped her as he, drowning, might have grasped at a straw? Ah well, if discipline was not her thing, neither were manners my daughter’s.
“Elly, my dear,” I said, kissing my child on her unwelcoming face. “I am your great-aunt, from Ylles, come to visit you.”
She gave me a look to tell me she did not care. Her face was Jaybee’s face, made feminine, made soft, but with broken glass beneath it. Her hand, as she pushed me away, was as hard as his had been. Elladine remained with us only so long as we held her in unwilling conversation, then departed as quickly as she might, and I stared after her, wondering what I could do to make this situation tenable.
I thought, her mouth is wide and sensual. She has hooded eyes. Her figure is as graceful and lithe as mine once was. Her breasts curve like the swell of a sail, and her cheeks are softly rose. She is beautiful, not as I was, but nonetheless, beautiful. I cannot tell if she is intelligent. She is hard as stone.
I wondered, how much of her hardness is my fault? How much of this iron rancor came from doing without a mother’s love?
There was no time to
