Star's Crossing

25: Another Voice Silenced

When Mare was a girl, she was a wistful creature.

She remembered exploring the woods beyond the dusty road, and the shoal-lined beaches, and the great rolling pastures stretching evermore beneath an unequivocal sapphire sky. But in those early years, despite being well-read and more thoroughly educated than many generations of hapless, unlucky women before her, Mare was ill equipped to express her delight at the world beyond her house.

When she discovered her own aptitude for ink and parchment, it was as though a tight lock had been loosened, a door pressed open. She thought to tread with caution, as advised by her father over Homer and Austen by candlelight, late into holiday evenings, when he'd managed to wrest free of the mines up north, and still wore cold in the wrinkles of his coat.

"It is a great tragedy but an undeniable truth," he'd said once, fingers upon the well-worn cloth cover of The Iliad, as he sat at Mare's bedside. She was a child then, Matilde sound asleep across the room, her other sisters still beyond the walls and beneath the same roof. It was far past midnight, but Mare had lain awake, awaiting her father's Christmas return. Now he smiled at her warmly, though there was rue in his eyes. "The writer's life is no reality. Once the great and wealthy paved the way for the arts; once it was an honor to protect and promote the romantic arts. Now it is...not a priority. Now, I fear it is a pity."

Mare puzzled over this, still too young to consider challenging her father's edict, though that was what it felt like. Final. A dictation. A gentle, but firm, prohibition.

She'd continued in secret after these words, plumbing the depths of her own curiosity and cleverness, prodding at this metaphor or that, as she might a new and able and perhaps powerful limb. She spent more time in the woods, armed with her father's knapsack and a continually rejuvenating stash of books procured by him and Mrs. Watt and Alison.

Mare wended through the woods, season after season, year after year, mindfully averting her eyes and attentions when her sisters began to titter about courtship and marriage and this man or that. Soon enough they were gone; another voice silenced, another gaudy ceremony attended, another farewell without tears or the severing of long-hewn ligaments between pinkie fingers and tight-held embraces.

Matilde's was the only wedding Mare dreaded attending. Hers was the only gown she could not feign adulation for, and her husband was the only she did not allow herself to admire. She did not dislike him or avoid him, either. As with Matilde this last year Mare balanced on a knife's edge in their presence, careful to erect walls around herself and paint on the primmest, coldest of smiles.

This was a met demand: that the deeper embedded Mare became in her passion for writing, the more aware she became of her appearance and person in the public eye. She withdrew and deluded; she smoothed out her edges and smothered the luster in her eyes. She paid a great toll, but the price, she knew, was well worth her while.

For each year, Mare became a better writer. Each year her characters thickened and deepened, their skin textured, their minds labyrinthine. Her plots became quick and clever; tight or meandering; her stories read with blood and earth-heady perfume. She imagined the parchment itself, if held to her nose, would smell like murder or love or mourning.

But the better Mare became, the more apparent a reality in writing was. Could she not find a benefactor? A suitable husband, whose name she could write beneath? Could she not forge her way by her own pen?

Fate shone upon her when a writer wrote back that day, five years past. For the first time in her young life, a future felt tangible, a familiar conjured to life with muscle and ligament and blood and bone. Someone lived and breathed on the other side of her words. Someone loved them.