All The Befores Chapter 1 YA Novel The Aristocrats
The ship is rocking heavy. The child, all of ten, gripping everything within her sight. She imagines the engines. How each gear works with its neighbor. A wave hit. She is on a smaller boat. One meant to be passing channels, not seas. One meant for cargo, not people. Yet here she is. A thing flung from one country to another. A father unheard of calling her home to a place she had never seen. Lucky. She is supposed to feel lucky. She had been told this in a tone reminding her she deserves none of it. None of the luck. None of the new last name. None of the new house she is being thrown into.
She is reprimanded when she frowns at leaving her family. The squat man who assures her he is of no relation tells her that an orphanage is not a family. She cannot find the words to argue with him. The members of the family change from day to day as children arrive and leave with train schedules and strangers. All luck of the draw. Coming together and scattering by the whims and fortunes of others.
The library at the orphanage was a sparse thing and one the children were welcome to, in theory. It was argued that the dirt that clings to orphans would damage the books for the next curious child. She had tried to argue that the pristine book would wait unopened forever. It was her first brush that many rules were not held up by logic. For the other children, she would liberate the fairytale books. Whispering of lowly servants turned princess or swan. Transformation, always a shocking thing. Always luck, fortune, and the fickleness of fate.
During her last visit, she grabbed her favorite book. It was long forgotten in a corner. It is in her trunk. She is terrified of what the salt water would do to its binding. Her fingers itch for the vellum pages. The diagrams, the calculations, the comfort of the numbers that have no interest in your thoughts. They are the sum of their own calculations. If anyone would have missed the book, she would not have found it with uninterrupted dust on the top. What could they do? Send for her back? Would she mind? Back to a narrow bed. Back to children who clung to her as safety. Back to chores she can do with such practice that her muscles worked as automata, allowing her mind the freedom of soaring. Allowing her the silence of the adults.
The boat pitches again. Her belly slams against the ship. She contemplates jumping into the grey waters to only have some control of where her body moves. A new name. A new country. A new home. A new family. A new set of expectations. She was told of other children. Twins about her own age. Having no actual birthdate, an assumption had to be made. The man who arranged the paperwork gave her a new birthday. He was certain that erasing her life and handing her a new date of birth was an answer to her unspoken prayers. She will share a birthday with her cousins who would be as brother and sister to her. Won’t that just be perfect? His voice dripped with a honey meant to seal over any of her opinions on the matter. A new birthday. She makes a list of all the new.
She is told of a father. A youngest son of an important man. No proper title but an embarrassment of a child when he had no wife. An embarrassment if anyone were to know that the child had been uncared for. The opinions of people she would never meet had uprooted and transplanted her. This father who died. Died with orders given. Could a father be so important that his ghost could still order her onto a ship and shape her entire life?
Just when the journey should stop, there is another ship, another carriage and, at the last leg of her trip, a cart as if she were hay. Her case under her feet, a landscape full of green. Something from one of the fairy stories she would have to read to the younger children who still shone with a hope that they were the long-lost child of someone important, who would claim them. The humor of it hits her hard in something of a yelp and a laugh that she hides with a false cough. She needn’t. The farmer tasked with her retrieval cares as much for her presence as he does for the hay in the cart.
The girl with no time or care for a fairy story finds herself in front of a castle. Two children squirming under a severe woman and an impeccable stick figure of a man are waiting. She is unloaded hard on the ground, her case springing open. The girl is attempting a curtesy and a gathering of her belongings ending up face first on the ground. The boy is all action, grabbing her book first. She sits up quick, her hand grasping for the book.
“Wild thing.” The woman stage whispers to the man. “The groom should have been asked to care for it. Children, this creature is your unfortunate cousin Miss Adeline” “
The boy sits next to her on the ground, glaring at his twin, who does the same dirtying her skirts. The three children stare at the gaping adults. Adeline trembles. The girls places her hand over Adeline’s.
“Get up. This is no way for a lady to behave. You, Victoria, should be an example for your cousin.” The governess’ mouth hardly moves, but her voice has points.
“In your last lesson, Miss you told me that when a guest has come, one must do everything one can to make that guest feel welcome and comfortable even if their manners seem strange.”
“I meant that for when you are courting. When you are to be seeing gentlemen.”
“That is not what you had said. I am only following your instructions Miss and as I am too young for gentlemen callers, I had no experience to draw upon but your own words.”
“On your feet, sir. You have no excuse.” The stick figure in a frayed coat had not moved his head but directed his voice at the young boy. The boy stands, reaching out a hand to his sister and to Adeline. The dusty children stand in front of the grownups. The twins flanking Adeline but standing a half step in front of her. “You young miss are fortunate the Lord and Lady had other matters to attend to.”
“You are not the Lord and Lady?” Adeline was tired of confusion, tired of being thrown, and tired of no true answers. A doll on the shelf to be placed at another’s whim.
“In this house, you will not speak until you are spoken to. I am Miss Oswald, the governess in charge of the young ladies of the house, which I have been informed that in the most irregular circumstances, you will join the nursery. You will not be joining our etiquette classes as you will have no need to come out in society. During the children’s lessons, you will help with the more gentile work of the house to earn your keep. While Miss Adeline is not your equal, children, we expect you to treat her with the civility expected of your birth and rank.This gentleman is Mr. Sharp. He is the young master Arthur’s tutor. This pile of lace and dirt is the young miss Victoria for our dear Queen.”
“We call her Queenie.” Arthur whispers in her ear.
“We call her no such thing. We call her Victoria, as there is only one Queen. You there, grab that case and burn everything in it. One can only imagine the things it contains. You will be placed in a bath and given some of the clothing the young miss has grown out of. You are a great deal smaller than her.” Arthur, still holding her book, places it under his arm as if he had brought it with him. As the governess and tutor turn, Victoria sticks out her tongue at them. The children fall in at a distance. The grown ups cannot fault them with disobedience but far enough that their voices do not carry.
“I have no doubt you are far above our equal, as you must have such stories that Arthur and I have never heard. An orphanage is that like David Copperfield? And a ship? By yourself? What an adventure. I have never been by myself anywhere, even in the garden Arthur is with me.”
“Queenie, breathe. Can’t you see Adeline is tired?”
“Ace. I like to be called Ace. It’s what the children at the orphanage called me.”
“Ace, for us, but you will have to grow use to Adeline around them. May I hold on to this for you until tomorrow? I am afraid of what the nurse will do to it if she finds it on you.” Ace nods but touches the spine. “I promise I won’t look. I’ll keep it safe for you. I will see you at teatime. That is when we take our meal. You will probably be presented to the parents after.”
She nods after him. Frightened of the large woman who traps her away from the twins, throwing her and scrubbing her as if she were only a trinket on a shelf. Ace focuses her mind from her body, wondering at the water coming from the faucet. She wonders at the source of the water. Of how it is heated. She allows herself to be dressed. She allows her hair to be combed and plaited. She allows herself to be placed in the middle of the children in front of two beautiful people who glance from their food for long enough that the man nods at her and the woman raises a brow. Ace looks closer at her. There is something to the slump of her shoulders beyond the shade of hair that echoes the twins. There is something to the squint of her eye when she looks at Ace. “Adeline?” Her voice is slow, careful.
Ace cannot find her voice and nods. Victoria stands closer, holding Ace’s vibrating shoulder. The woman looks to her husband’s face. “He named her Adeline.” The man will not look from his food.
“Take them away. I feel a need for my port.” The children are shuffled out.
“Mother’s name is Adeline.” Queenie whispers to Ace. “I had them agree to let you sleep in my bed. Will you tell me stories tonight?” Ace nods, looking over the girl’s face, marveling at how a young miss in a great house can remind her so much of the children new to the orphanage.
Arthur meets her the next day, jostling her on the way to his lessons. The book is under her arm. “I always keep my promises. I did not open it. If you like reading, I’ll show you a trick later.” Ace was only along his side for moments before she was swept up by the cook to begin her new set of chores.
Ace does not take long to adapt and fold into their world. She never regains her ability to maintain movement while setting her mind free, but that is only because there are so many things to learn. She had found the trick of invisibility. If the small things she is asked to accomplish in the kitchen could be accomplished quietly but slowly, she is left to her own devices and can find and easy way to slip out to the gardens, to hide in corners of the smithies, to shadow the cabinet makers apprentices, to watching world unfold in the meadows that crept towards the trees. The kitchens themselves were a place of great learning, practicing chemistry of acids and bases. The rise of yeast and dough. The applications of heat and steam. Ace absorbs the knowledge around her. At night, tucked in the nursery, she weaves tales for Victoria who curls tight against her.
This closeness to one who would not be leaving her took Ace by surprise. To know the rhythms of another as well as she knew her own. The petulant drop of Queenie’s lip if the Governess had been cruel. The quiet tempests and tempers stormed behind the girl’s eyes. The resoluteness to her spine when she raged. The softness she could show. The delight she took in tales of adventure. Ace would create palaces from air for Queenie and, in return, they had both gained a sister.
As Ace ran short on tales, she wove the things she had learned that day into her stories. The knight fooled into a cave by a dragon to find it had been a sorceress all along, using mirrors and steam to keep her privacy. The kingdom that won a battle by creating giant cakes decorated as cannons.
Arthur made good on his word. A thing he was habitual in. She allowed him to keep her book. She learned his bed was not inspected the way hers and Queenie’s were. It hardly mattered. He showed her the treasures of Aladdin’s cave. The house, if you knew where to knock or which acorn to press in the carving over the fireplace, could take you from one end of the house to the other. The passage to the library. That was a place of wonder. A place of stolen books hidden for her in corners. Arthur soon learned the books Ace would enjoy. Treaties on mechanics and chemistry thick and dusty would be placed right behind the corner of the door. She had tried once herself to go.
The library is a city whose landscapes are made of shelves, ladders, globes, and leather chairs that had given up their original shapes, sighing with any human body that would slump into them. She had stood gaping, twirling, and trying to absorb two lifetimes of information until Arthur grabbed her, forcing her to her knees behind the globe. As their knees hit the wooden floors, the master of the house steps in, his hound making a quick run for Ace’s ankles as the children disappear into the passageway.
