Of Swans and Ravens 🏳️‍🌈 (wlw) [ON HIATUS]

3: The Storm

The sun rose earlier each day, and each night The Great Swan traced an arc across the cloudless sky. In the heat of the late spring evenings, the distant stars that lay in The Swan's broad wings seemed larger when they glittered, as she guided the Earth on its journey across the Celestial Lake.

Margot and Blanche had been avoiding each other for almost a month. To onlookers unaware of what had transpired between them, the two women always appeared to take spiralling circuits through the house and gardens such that they would inexplicably never meet.

Effie and Uma had been given more duties in the house while Margot was relegated to jobs in the scullery, gardens and outhouses. Rather than relieving the long-simmering tension between them, the distance from Blanche made Margot feel like a ghost as she wandered forlornly between jobs around the gardens and the hunting runs.

Margot's carefully maintained absence appeared to be helping Blanche, who fervently organised the reopening of long-unused wings of the house, and ordered fine suits in preparation for the Summer Ball, a week away. Margot had seen Otto and Effie's silhouettes in the windows as they scurried around the house after Blanche, to assist with the installation of elaborate new crystal lights, the hanging of new paintings, the redesign of the ornamental gardens, and plans to hire new servants during the summer. Blanche was preparing the house for a Royal visit.

Kept apart from her family, Margot's loneliness stretched out like the lengthening summer days. Familiar as she was with solitude since Blanche and Adi had left her side six years earlier, Margot still suffered the cold comfort of Kari's reassurance that her step-mother was a miserable hag and her sister a silly child, and that they would promptly come to their senses and beg Margot's forgiveness.

But Margot had not seen Kari since Madame Celine and Rose had visited the previous month. This wasn't unusual; during the summer months Kari often worked long hours at the farm and couldn't visit for weeks, relying on her cousins Ricco and Mina to make deliveries with the pony and cart to the nearby villages and noble houses.

But this month Margot's yearning for Kari felt like a lingering sickness that steadily weakened her. She couldn't steal a kiss from Kari as she worked, to carry her through the long days in the gardens. She couldn't run to the barn and throw her arms around Kari's neck and bemoan her isolation from her family. Margot would awake at dawn feeling light and happy, only to remember that she had seen neither Blanche nor Kari for weeks, and her mood would sink. She would remain in such a stupor all day, her mind floundering in a rut of worry about Kari's health.

One morning Margot arrived at the kitchen door to find the seamstress's boy with a delivery from Due Ponti. Uma would have normally taken delivery of clothes for Blanche or Adi, but she was busy elsewhere, and Margot was keen for an excuse to enter the house and catch a glimpse of her family, even if to be spurned by a withering look or a thrown slipper.

Cradling the soft package to her chest, she made her way up the staircase to Adi's dressing room. Blanche and Otto's voices droned out of the recently-reopened reading as she padded along the corridor, discussing the installation of yet more crystal lights. Margot knocked on the door to find Uma busily folding suits into the press, while Adi sat staring into the triptych mirror on the dressing table.

Adi prodded at the bridge of her nose as she peered into the glass. "Are my eyes too close together, Uma?"

"Your eyes are perfect, Miss Adelaide," replied Uma sagely from under an armful of linen.

When they noticed Margot they both turned, Adi glancing at her as if regarding a housefly that had inadvertently buzzed into the room from the corridor beyond.

"A package arrived," said Margot, as if to explain her very presence in the house. She crossed the room and placed it carefully onto the padded bench next to the window, Adi leaping towards it and tearing open the brown paper with an esurient expression. Uma continued folding with a resigned shake of the head, used to Adi's enthusiasm for new clothing.