“We’re going to call on the Wallaces this morning, girls,” Victoria said as she bit daintily into her biscuit, gingerly dabbing with her napkin at the crumbs that had fallen onto her lip. “Mabel, wear your green chiffon and, Cecelia, your blue. Wear a brooch over the missing top button—that still hasn’t been mended.”
As she said this, she glared at me for the tiniest instant. It was true I hadn’t been able to replace that button yet, but I didn’t have any left.
“The Wallaces' second son, Roger, has returned from his tour and I want you to look your part. Every maiden in the village is after him, and I will not have my girls lose him to some shopkeeper’s daughter.”
“We can’t both marry him,” Mabel said sardonically as she placed a berry on her tongue, her pinky finger pointing out as if she were holding a teacup.
Victoria’s eyes bulged and her lips tightened into a thin line. She glowered at Mabel until she was forced to look her mother in the eye. And even then, Victoria didn’t look away until Mabel’s eyes fell back to her plate. Cecelia watched the whole exchange with satisfaction, seemingly proud of herself for having the sense not to be disrespectful to her mother. Even I was shocked that Mabel had been so bold. No one disrespected Victoria. I was slightly jealous that Mabel could get away with only a glare. I would have been locked in the cellar for days.
Once the three women were done eating, they pushed away from the table and left without saying a word, to me or to each other, as usual. I quickly cleared the table and then followed them up the stairs to help them fix their hair and get them dressed for their outing. As I pinned Cecelia’s brooch on, she smirked at me, obviously remembering Victoria’s not-so-subtle rebuke from breakfast. I pretended not to notice.
As I dressed Victoria, I noticed how easily the buttons fastened and that her shoulder blades stuck out slightly. It puzzled me, and I silently reminded myself to put extra butter on her biscuits the next morning. I also noticed that the seam was coming loose at her right shoulder. I wouldn’t have time to sew it and I was afraid of pointing it out to her, so I suggested she wear a shawl, without telling her the reason why.
Once the three women were dressed, combed, and braided, they left. I stood at the top of the stairs, reveling in the stillness. My fellow occupants were very rarely loud; in fact, there was an almost constant uncomfortable silence in the house, but when they were gone, the quiet was replaced with an unspeakable peace. It was the only time I could really breathe.
As soon as the door closed, I started humming tunelessly. Victoria hated music and expressly forbade me to sing. There were few things that reminded me more of Father than music, and I suspected it was the same for Victoria. Father had loved music and if he ever had a free moment, or needed one, he played his violin. He never needed any sheet music to read. He would simply wander from room to room, playing whatever his mood or surroundings inspired. He had played at parties we had held when I was a little girl, and for Victoria when he had brought her home to live with us. I didn’t know if Victoria hated music because she had never really loved my father and music irritated her because it forced her to remember him, or if she really had loved him and it brought her pain.
In the past, when Victoria and her daughters used to leave to go calling, or to town, I would immediately drop whatever I was doing to go play Father’s violin. It was in those times that I felt closer to him than any other. He had told me shortly before his death that I had a gift from God and that I must develop and cherish it. Father had taught me how to play from the time I could hold the bow in my tiny fingers. He would chuckle when I couldn’t reach all the strings and promised me that it would come in time.
Sometimes I would play happy tunes to accompany the hopping, chirping birds that fluttered around in the trees. Or I would play dark and somber songs as I watched storm clouds blanket the sky in gloom. Both were therapeutic and gratifying, even the more subdued melodies. In them I could let the melancholy escape through my fingers instead of letting it fester in my heart. The resonance of the violin sounded hauntingly like the cry of a human voice, even when I couldn’t let myself cry.
But six years ago, our situation had become dire. Victoria and her daughters had accumulated considerable debt at the various shops in town and after their many extravagant tours of other kingdoms and countries. Victoria had begun selling anything in the house that had any value to pay her debts. But I would not allow her to sell the violin. I would have rather starved to death than to watch it be sold. She had repeatedly demanded that I give it to her, but I had told her I didn’t know where it was. We both knew I was lying, but my resolve gave me courage. I had wrapped it in cloth and hidden it behind a barrel of potatoes in the cellar.
I was fourteen years old. I stood in the drawing room, polishing one of the few candelabras we had left, when Victoria had gone with Mabel and Cecelia to town. I listened for the door to close and then waited for a few minutes. Once I was sure that they had gone, I dashed to the cellar, threw open the doors, climbed down the ladder, and pulled my carefully wrapped violin out from behind the potatoes. I didn’t know how long everyone would be gone, but I only needed time to play one song—Father’s favorite.
I glanced up to the open doors of the cellar to make sure I was alone. I tightened the bow and tuned the violin strings. Father had said I had perfect pitch. I smiled as I remembered the confidence he always had in me. I placed the violin securely under my chin. It had always felt like it had been molded perfectly to fit me.
I glided the bow over the strings and felt the comforting reverberations against my fingers, down my arms, and through my body. As soon as I played the first notes, the tears flowed—and not because my hands stung with the pain of my most recent whipping, but because I could hear my father’s voice with every note. I closed my eyes, having played the melody a hundred times. I felt my tears splash onto the violin but kept playing, grateful for this rare opportunity to remember my father with no interruptions or judgments.
I let the last note linger in the air, like a soft keening in the otherwise silent cellar. I slowly lowered my bow and let the quiet envelope me. I let the last tears fall and sighed as I felt the familiar peace pervade my soul and the weight lift off my shoulders.
I never felt alone when I played the violin, but at this particular moment, I felt even less alone. Uneasily less alone. Dreadfully less alone. Like someone was standing right behind me. As soon as I thought it, I knew it was true. I closed my eyes and shivered as the fear turned my blood to ice. I willed my eyes to open and forced myself to turn and face the cold blue eyes I dreaded most staring at me.
The most frightening thing about those eyes was that they didn’t look angry. They looked empty. It looked as if she had politely listened to my song and now that it was over, she simply had no opinion of it.
After staring at me for a moment, Victoria had turned away from me, climbed up the ladder, and locked the cellar doors behind her without a word, without even demanding that I give her the violin. But I knew that didn’t mean it was over. Her silence was a sure sign that there would be a consequence and that it would be far worse than any whipping.
I listened until her footsteps faded to silence above me. A part of me knew it was useless, but I groped in the darkness and wrapped the violin back in its cloth and put it back behind the potatoes. She left me there for the rest of the day and through the night.
The next day when Victoria came down into the cellar, I stood motionless as she searched for the violin, praying she wouldn’t find it. My heart stopped in my chest when I saw her reach behind the potatoes and retrieve the violin. With an agonized cry, I grabbed for it and for one wild moment I imagined smashing it to pieces before she could use it for something as vile as paying off her debts. She pried it out of my fingers and climbed up the cellar ladder. I ran after her, grabbing the ends of her skirts, screaming and crying. She kicked me back and locked the door behind her and I spent another day in the darkness.
Vic
toria went to town, sold the violin, paid off their debts, and even had some money left over to buy her girls new dresses. To me, it felt like blasphemy and it cut to my soul.
I was finally let out of the cellar so that I could make them dinner. When it was dark, and everyone else was in bed, I had escaped out the back door and had run to the wig shop in town. The wigmaker was just locking her doors when I stopped her.
“Please, ma’am. Will you please cut my hair? I need to earn some money to buy back my violin.” I blurted out breathlessly.
“Cut your hair?” she had said. “You’re too young to be worrying about such things as money, child. Now run along home.” She seemed confused, understandably, that the daughter of the late Henry Blakeley had come begging for such a thing.
I pleaded with her again, knowing it was hopeless and that the more she knew about our desperate situation, the more Victoria would punish me. Once I had that realization, I immediately stopped my pitiful begging and resigned myself to the fact that my father’s violin was gone. I had been forbidden to ever reveal that we had become almost destitute or to ever ask anyone for help, and Victoria would not tolerate my betrayal. If Victoria ever learned of this, the consequences would be severe.
The wigmaker saw my desperation and her confusion melted away into pity, and once I recognized the pity on her face, I hated it. It only emphasized my powerlessness. I returned home in despair and cried myself to sleep on the blackened hearth.
Once Victoria sold the violin, I got a deeper glimpse at the callousness of her nature and I knew that she had no respect for things that were dear to me. My violin had been one of three treasured possessions of mine. Once I had lost that one, I had hidden away the other two out of Victoria’s clutches and even knowledge. She had never known about them before that time, and I was determined that she never would.
Without my violin to comfort me, I had started singing and it lightened my spirits like the violin had, though a bit less powerfully. Even if Victoria forbade me from singing, she didn’t have to know I still did when she couldn’t hear me.
Six years had passed since Victoria took my violin. Today when I looked around me and saw the empty coldness in my home where there had once been warmth and laughter, I could take a deep breath and hum quietly to myself and feel like I was inviting a trace of that happiness back in, even if it was just to my own heart. I hummed as I gathered the dirty laundry off the floors of the bedrooms, and I hummed as I bent over the washboard and scrubbed the dirty clothes and hung them to dry.
Returning to the kitchen, I got started on leaching the lye out of the ashes from the sugar maple branches I had burned so I could make soap, and was surprised and slightly dismayed that Victoria and her daughters were already home from calling on the Wallaces. They couldn’t have been gone for more than an hour or two.
There seemed to be a change in the air, and I walked out into the foyer where I had a view of the upstairs bedrooms. Mabel and Cecelia were excitedly running back and forth to each other’s rooms, chortling outrageously. Perhaps Roger Wallace had shown an interest in one of them, I thought hopefully.
“Ella.” I flinched at the sound of my name and spun around to face Victoria. She acted cool and composed, but beneath her calm demeanor, there was a sense of urgency. I noticed she still had her gloves on from when they had just gone out, and she was straightening her shawl.
“We are going to town.” That was all she said. This was her way of inviting me to come, without actually saying it. And I wasn’t invited because she enjoyed my company so much; it was because they needed someone to carry their things back home. If she hadn’t expected me to join them, they would have left without a word.
I rushed out to the garden to harvest whatever I could so I could trade the vegetables for things we needed. The dirt dug into my sore palms and made my eyes water. I quickly filled my basket with carrots, cabbages, and squash and hurried back into the house. I would have liked to change into something more suitable to wear to town instead of staying in my plain gray dress and dingy apron, but I had traded my last dress for the bucket of flour we had just finished.
I comforted myself with the thought that I still had a dress that was too beautiful to wear, too beautiful to touch, too beautiful to mention to anyone.
Chapter 3
THE WALK INTO TOWN WAS A LONG ONE. WHEN VICTORIA was getting rid of Father’s horses after his death, she realized it would be wise to keep one of them to pull the carriage. Old Gus. Unfortunately, last winter I had been forced to sell Old Gus in exchange for Lucy, the milk cow we now had. Our other cow had died and we needed the milk. Lucy was now one of the main reasons we were not starving to death, so I didn’t regret my decision to get the cow instead of keeping a horse just to pull us around. Horses were more expensive to feed anyway. That’s what I kept telling myself. In reality, it had broken my heart to get rid of the last horse Father had raised, but I had to do what needed to be done.
I had been thoroughly punished for making that decision without Victoria’s permission. I still had the scars on my back. But I had purposely done it secretly and had known there would be a drastic consequence. I knew it was the only way to save us and Victoria would never understand enough to see how necessary it was. Victoria did not, and did not want to, recognize how desperate our situation was. She especially did not want anyone else to know. To Victoria, the loss of Old Gus was a declaration to the world that we were poor, and she refused to accept any responsibility for making us that way.
Whenever we walked anywhere it was a blatant reminder to the other three of what I had done to them. On these occasions, Victoria glowered at me as if she would gladly relive my punishment, so I always trailed behind, avoiding her icy glare. Today, as I carried my full basket of vegetables on my bent arm, I noticed the holes in the basket and silently reminded myself to gather the cattail stalks at the pond so I could soak them and repair the holes.
Usually Victoria and her daughters walked in a line side by side, but today Victoria trailed behind her daughters, who walked ahead of her at a brisk pace, eager to spend money they didn’t have. But there was something else driving the girls forward. Their giggling had increased in pitch and frequency, and it was beginning to give me a dull headache behind my eyes. They were usually more whiny and grumpy than giggly, and I wasn’t sure which one I preferred at the moment.
I assumed we must be going to town because Roger Wallace was going to be there too. I never liked him much. I used to have to have dance lessons with him when we were children. After each lesson, while the adults were talking, he would throw mud at me and pull my braids. And as he grew, I didn’t think he improved much. But his family was very rich, and to Victoria, that was all that mattered.
In the distance, I heard the sound of wagon wheels approaching us from behind. Without turning around to see who it was, I walked closer to the edge of the dirt road to give the wagon more room. The wheels slowed as they reached me and then they came to a stop. I looked up just in time to see Charlie, Will’s horse. Charlie was fourteen years old and showed no signs of aging. His back was straight and his gait was smooth. His eyes were alert and friendly. Will took impeccable care of him.
Will had gotten Charlie from my father soon after Will came to work in our stables. Because Will had been such a hard worker and a quick learner, eager to do anything Father asked him to do, Father had rewarded Will’s hard work with a horse of his own.
I had watched from inside the house from the large second-story window that overlooked the stables and the pastures. I couldn’t hear what was being said between the two, but they stood close together, as they watched the gray, skinny-legged Charlie wobble around his pen next to his mother.
Father had reached out his hand to shake Will’s hand, as if they had just made an agreement. Will stuck out his hand, shook Father’s briefly, and then had thrown both of his arms around him. Father laughed and patted Will on the back and ruffled his hair.
I smiled at the s
weet memory. Father was always so willing to give, so ready to reward anyone for a job well done, so eager to show people how much he believed in them and their potential. It was the perfect memory to help me recall all the good things Father had done in his life, instead of focusing on how much things had changed since his death.
“Whoa, Charlie Horse!” Will called. He chuckled at himself. Will had named his horse Charlie so he could laugh every time he said the horse’s name. I laughed lightly with him. In so many ways, he was still like that ten-year-old boy in my memory.
I reached into my basket and grabbed a carrot. I placed it in my palm and held it out for Charlie. He breathed heavily out of his large nostrils as his lips flapped around and pulled the carrot into his mouth. It abruptly reminded me of how Cecelia ate her biscuits that morning and I pursed my lips tightly to keep from laughing. I patted Charlie on his smooth neck, thanking him for the little joke we just shared.
“May I offer you lovely ladies a ride?” Will knew that Victoria had no intention of accepting a ride from a lowly stable hand in a wagon, but he liked to mock her in any subtle way he could. I shook my head and grinned at his lighthearted audacity.
Victoria and her daughters turned and looked at Will with identical glares of loathing and distaste that were not lost on him. He only smiled even wider in return. He often found their haughtiness comical, especially when it was directed at him.
“Did you get off work early?” I asked, knowing that he would usually be working in the palace stables at this hour.
“Not exactly. I need to pick up some more oats for the horses.” He turned to the other three women. “So, do you want a quick ride into town, or would you rather enjoy the anticipation while you walk?” He chuckled again.
Victoria stunned us all when she replied with a curt, “Yes.”
Her yes was vague, but I knew her well enough to know that she wouldn’t have answered at all if she had chosen to walk. She would have just disregarded him without a word and walked away. Mabel and Cecelia turned to look at their mother with their mouths hanging wide open while Victoria ignored them.
Ella: A Novel Page 3