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

4: The Reading Room

Margot awoke at dawn to find Effie standing over her with a calloused palm against her forehead.

"What are you doing, Effie?" Margot smiled, shrugging off her sweat-soaked bedshirt to prepare for a day of gardening. Then she remembered.

She had lost Kari. She had lost her mother's glass bead. Her face crumpled, and hot tears began to fall, faster than she could smear them away across burning cheeks.

Effie leapt away from the bed. "I'll get the mistress to fetch the doctor!" She hurried out of the room, slamming the door.

Not wanting to be late for her duties and suffer further humiliation from Blanche, Margot washed and dressed, all the time crying silently. No sooner had she entered the long room than Bertha shooed her back to bed, telling her that the mistress had sent for the doctor. Margot had no choice but to lie under her blanket and wait.

Vivid dreams flitted in and out of her mind, about Kari, about her father presenting her mother with a glass bead in the Old Park in Lago Maggiore, about Adi searching for tadpoles in the river by the jetty.

Margot was awoken by the doctor bustling into the room, Blanche watching pensively from the door as the doctor took Margot's temperature, measured her pulse, and then stated that she was in perfect health, if a little thin. On asking if Margot could recall anything that might have upset her, Blanche answered that Margot's main responsibilities lay in the gardens surrounding the house, most of which had been damaged badly in the storm.

The doctor praised Margot for taking her household duties to her soul, and then left with Blanche after recommending a day's bedrest. Lying alone with her thoughts hurt Margot more than crying during her chores. She tossed and turned, reminiscing about making love with Kari, and praying to The Great Swan that her mother and father would forgive her for losing the glass bead.

The aroma of lentil soup roused her from hours of fitful sleep. Effie burst into the room with a soup-filled bowl and a message that she was to dress because the mistress had a task for her in the reading room. Margot wept while she ate, and again while she dressed; the inconvenience of being ill and sending for the doctor must have invoked Blanche's anger, and some trial of humiliation was probably in store. In her delicate state, Margot wasn't sure that she could perform any tasks well whilst under Blanche's scrutiny in the reading room, let alone navigate a trap.

Blanche stood in the reading room, which had until recently been closed for the past six years. The tilt of her head beckoned Margot to the old lacquered writing desk in the secluded corner by the window.

Aside from the quiet purring of new crystal lights mounted on freshly-papered walls, little else in the room had changed since Margot's last visit as a twelve-year-old seeking a peaceful nook to read history books. Margot's heart heaved as she spied the oval table under which she and Adi would hide and giggle while her father read.

Blanche set down a pen and inkwell, and then pointed a slender finger at a stack of account books, a sheaf of scribbled notes on loose leaves of twine-tied paper, a list of invitations, envelopes and sealing wax. Margot moved towards the desk warily, her breathing stilted with fear, like a deer circling a trap in a forest. She had missed writing, and although it was presented as another chore, Blanche must have known that Margot enjoyed it. It appeared that Blanche was deliberately allowing Margot to do something that she liked, for a whole afternoon, with specific orders not to do any other work for an entire day.

Margot couldn't understand it. Could Blanche have taken pity on Margot when she'd seen her shuffling along the landing, bloodstained and deranged, the day before? By requesting that Margot perform writing duties, which evidently had been accumulating over the past month, it seemed that Blanche was offering a truce of sorts.