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When she was three years old, Gaynor’s father gave her a bracelet. It was two thin leather cords, with seven glass beads; each was a motley of colors swirled around, no bead looking like the last. He showed her how to fasten it, pulling it tight and tucking the ends under, and how to loosen it, so as she grew the bracelet would grow with her.
She loved her father. He loved her mother. Gaynor wasn’t sure whom her mother loved.
When she was ten, her father died. A shipping accident. He’d been shepherding a cargo of wine across a stormy sea, and the Pintail had never made it to port. Gaynor had watched from behind the door while the insurance investigator talked to her mother. “One of the finest seamen we’ve ever seen,” he said. “Terribly sorry for your loss.”
“He was,” the investigator said, “fully insured.”
It was, perhaps, the happiest Gaynor had ever seen her mother, so she wept in secret until one night, she was caught, and her mother told her that she should never mourn the death of the man who’d never been there, the sea captain who’d been away for so long all the time, home four times a year.
He’d never really been hers, her mother said, so why should she mourn his absence?
While Gaynor tried to get her emotions under control, the insurance money ran the household. They were maintained in the manner to which they were accustomed – her mother’s words – but nothing permanent, nothing that could be truly Gaynor’s. “Investing,” her mother had said to her, “even in things you can hold, is for people who have money that will never run out.”
By the time she was thirteen the insurance money had run out. Gaynor’s mother was on the hunt. Her older sister, now fifteen, was assisting. This one or that one – some of the insurance money had always gone to biographies of local noble families, and Gaynor had never understood why until now – and they settled on Ashcroft. A minor lord with an estate and vineyard, at the outer reaches of the kingdom but still a landed, titled noble.
Gaynor’s mother happened to meet Lord Ashcroft at a gala. She’d put on her finest, demanded that both daughters help her look her best. Gaynor wasn’t invited; she never was. Her mother came back with the smile she’d had when the insurance investigator had visited, and that night, Gaynor gathered her things. Clothes were the only thing her mother had allowed her to buy that might last in the long term, and she hoarded them like gold. That and the bracelet; “worthless,” her mother had said, when she was appraising everything to see what they could sell.
Her mother became Lady Ashcroft the next month, and they moved into the Ashcroft manor. He had a daughter, Ella, a few years younger than Gaynor and tired around the eyes. Gaynor assumed it must be from all the crying; she said, once, “you know, she was never really yours; otherwise she would never have left you,” and Ella ran from the room. Gaynor was puzzled; wasn’t that what Gaynor’s mother had said to her, to calm her down?
Ella spent so much time with the sapling in the courtyard, so young Gaynor couldn’t even tell what it was. One day her mother let slip that Lord Ashcroft had planted it in memory of his dead wife. Gaynor touched the bracelet on her wrist and understood; it was one thing that was truly Ella’s.
But she grew to resent the house. When she was fourteen and Lord Ashcroft died – appendicitis, the doctor said, and grief – and her mother took over the household, Gaynor began lashing out. Despite her mother’s advice, despite her earlier understanding, Gaynor hated Ella because even though she’d lost her parents and her place in the household, everything still was right for Ella. She had all this magnificence around her, and the hazel tree, and it was all hers, the things she’d grown up with, the things she was used to. Gaynor wanted to go back to her house, the one she’d grown up in, the one with the little bedroom on the second floor where she could play with her dolls and pretend she was a princess. She wanted her father to walk in the door one day. She wanted things to be how they used to be.
At sixteen, she knew she would never be chosen at the Queen’s homecoming party. It was really a matchmaking party for the prince, the Queen’s only son, but Gaynor knew that her asshole sister, the one who had helped their mother catch Lord Ashcroft, was the one who would become the princess. At best, Gaynor herself would be living on a stipend, and she remembered what the insurance days were like.
She took a bite of a canapé and looked around. All this, she thought, and it belongs to the prince.
She barely noticed when the prince’s attention was distracted all night. That night she shoved her face into her pillow – soft, comfortable, inherited from Ella’s mother – and screamed at it for not truly being hers.
When the prince’s men came around, trying to find the wearer of the glass slipper that had been advertised across the kingdom, she nearly laughed. The slipper would never have fit Gaynor. It wasn’t hers. But she knew it wasn’t her sister’s either, and the attempt to get the shoe to fit, to wedge that great galumphing foot into it, was… almost comical.
When the shoe nipped her sister’s toes off, she couldn’t help it, and let out a titter; her mother shot her a vicious look as her sister screamed, and Gaynor knew there’d be hell to pay later, but the thought had flashed through her head: if the toes left you, they weren’t really yours, were they?
Ella’s engagement caught Gaynor by surprise, but she found herself nodding. “Good for her,” she said, and her mother slapped her across the cheek.
The restraining order was not a surprise. Ella was a princess now, and she could do as she wanted, and what she wanted was to punish Gaynor and her family. Gaynor’s laugh was bitter when she read the notice. Her mother had stolen the ladyship she bore, first like a mantle and now like a cross. You know the refrain, Mother, she thought. If your privileges can be taken from you…
Her older sister left one day, claiming she’d met someone by the docks. A seafaring man, like their father. Her mother swore. Gaynor just nodded. Back to the roots, back to home, back to something familiar; she understood the urge.
Now the burdens of the household were on her. After the failure to hire or find servants, she was the cook, the maid, the gardener, and she was good at none of it. Ella had always done these things; they were her work. Gaynor had never learned to do them. The house fell into disrepair, hunger, and cold.
After the worst of the winter passed, Gaynor gathered all of the jewelry she could carry into a muff and tucked it under her arm. The front doors creaked; they hadn’t been oiled since Ella left. But her mother, far in the upper floors, wouldn’t hear. She slipped away along the path, passing garden walls long since grown over, and hurried to town.
The sale of the jewelry kept her in rented hotel rooms and meals for a few months, but finally she wound up walking along a lonely street as the sun set. When she looked up, she found that she recognized it; the cobbles had been relaid, some of the walls rebuilt, but she knew this neighborhood, had lived here once.
Her house still stood, two stories, with light in the windows and smoke in the chimney. Someone else was living in her house.
She slumped against the gate. It had been a day or two since she’d eaten, and the water she’d had was from still pools along the road. She drew back her sleeve, and looked down. The leather was worn, the beads had lost their luster, but they were all still there, seven in a row, with their colors flowing and shimmering into each other.
“Gaynor?”
It was her father’s voice, and she smiled–