Shattered

Sun dances on my eyelids, and I don't want to open my eyes. Birdsong lulls me to a drifty sort of space, softly, slowly. I give a soft smile as I-

“BAM!!!” My door swings open and my eyes are peeled open by a five-year-old sitting on my chest. Soft yellow curls fall on my cheeks and tickle my nose. I hide my face in my hands to avoid any more little-sister-harassment while I peek through my fingers at the clock. The hands point to eight in the morning and I sigh.

“Listen, little lady! I say as I tap my sister's nose, You've made me lose precious beauty sleep here, and you better scurry your sorry butt out of my room before I call Mildrid in here!” She giggles to herself but hops off the bed anyway, realizing I'm serious. I sit as patiently as possible, staring at my bed’s canopy, my silk sheets, and my flowing curtain, studying the intricate detail of the carved mahogany desks and armchairs. 

Soon Mildrid comes with pressed clothes and an extravagant breakfast of cucumber sandwiches and cheese. After I don an emerald dress, I lean on the window sill to peer onto acres of manicured garden lawn, a breeze tosses my straw-colored hair and I breathe in the fresh morning air. How lucky am I to live like this. 

As soon as I reach the last stairs to the kitchen I almost die as a small child with a mop of curly blonde hair dressed in a poofy hot pink dress slams into my back like a battering ram and sends me skidding on my knees across marble tiles. 

As I check my legs for bruises Mildred comes from the kitchen wiping crumbs off the embroidered Raine family seal on her apron.

 “Good morning Miss Adelaide,” she curtseys to me “Good morning Miss Anne,” she says to the ball of giggling curls sitting on the floor. “Your mother has left on incredibly private business… again…” she looks at her palms nervously, then back at me, “but she has asked that you spend some quality time with your sister before she returns tomorrow afternoon. She smiles at me hopefully, and promptly turns on her heel and walks back through the door, punctuating the end of her announcement.

 I’m just barely able to keep in a groan as I roll my eyes. That is so like mother, to be a total control freak even when she’s not here. My eyes land on Anne looking up at me as she  tugs on my sleeve and calls up to me;

“Tag! Tag!”

Before I have time to weigh the risks of ruining my dress, (Mother is a stickler for our clothing conditions), I am running through the estate gardens while thorns tug at my skirts and mud stains the hem. Anne shrieks with joy as the rabbits hop around her. She dashes through an archway into the main hall and up the marble stairs, I laugh and run after her. I’m having so much fun I forget to plan an apology to the maids for tracking mud through the house. I reach the third landing just in time to see Anne’s little feet disappear into the ceiling.

At first I’m panicking, I’ve just lost my little sister to my apparently murderous house! But the longer I stand on the landing, the more the dark hallway begins to come into focus. A wooden ladder seems to materialize in the grainy shadows and it feels as if I’m being pulled torwards the rotting wooden steps. One foot after the other, I climb higher from the shiny, polished floorboards as my head begins to rise above dulled, dusty ones. I sloppily braid my hair to keep it away from the thick layers of dust all around me. 

Anne is sitting on the floor, laughing her little head off as she flicks a lantern switch back and forth, illuminating the piles and piles of bits and bobs stacked around us. There are guitars and typewriters, mannequins and paintings, all haphazardly stuffed into where ever they could possibly fit. I slowly make my way across the creaky floorboards, sighing with relief every time a plank doesn’t give way beneath me. As Anne shrieks over a wooden box of jacks, I wipe the dust off a rusty phonograph with a handkerchief. 

As I hold the record player in my hands, Anne’s hands smack a shelf and a wooden box falls off the top. It is beautifully engraved with music notes deep into the softwood, an iron clasp reveals small records, smoothed with time, I placed the record under the phonograph’s needle and watch the disk spin as if carving the sounds out of the disk, like a miner chipping free air from behind the rocks. A small, eared paper sticks out from between the seam of the box’s velvet bottom.

It is a letter written in dark green ink, the edges were badly singed as if someone had thrown it in a fire, there were sooty finger prints near the bottom of the page indicating it had been taken out again, probably by a servant. It is written in sloppy handwriting, far from the script I’ve learned with my tutor. It reads;

Dear George, 

I would love to see you again soon, though mum would dread you fancy folks coming ‘round again on the account she hates cookin’ one of our farmin’ pigs. We're real close to them you know. The king came by for my pretty mother ‘gain tonight. They're to be wedded in a fortnight. What a royally fine step-pa he’ll be. I hope the moonlight is bright enough for our next encounter. I quite enjoy them. (Did I use that right? you’ll have to teach it to me ‘gain.)

-To another meeting, Claire Raine

Great Great Grandmother Claire? Why would she talk so commonly?, When has our family had a pig farm? What was going on?! The paper was torn in the corners and written on a thin kind of parchment. This letter was old, it wasn’t a joke, it was real. Another small piece of paper was attached to the first, the date marked this letter written exactly two weeks after the first. A fortnight I remembered, my Great, Great, Great Grandmother's second wedding day… apparently. The paper contained considerably less words than the first. 

Dear George,

My one connection to the life I had, we must never speak again, My new father has been killed by my mother, the culprit, I have inherited riches, but at a price, burn this note after you read this.

Goodbye My Love, Claire Raine

There were blotches at the end of each word, like my grandmother had someone telling her what each word meant as if she didn't know. 

I clutch the edges of the table, I feel like I'm about to fall, fall forever, and never stop. It feels like someone strung a fishing hook through my lungs and I'm being pulled down under the water faster and faster. The knotted walls of the attic seem to darken, closing in. 

I grab Anne and hoist her into my arms practically jumping out of the attic with the record box in my other hand.

I try my best to entertain Anne for the rest of the day, but my mind is somewhere else, My family never earned this place, our land, our clothes. We stole them, cheated, tricked. I want to throw up. I just can’t let this be anymore. We have so much money we could buy the world, but we don't deserve a single penny of it. 

That night I pack, I pack everything from my closet. Dresses I have and have had. I pack bags of gold. I pack everything that will fit in my cases. At the stroke of midnight, I call a coach and load my bags in the wagon, while I roll the coach out of sight of the house. 

The next morning with tired eyes I wait. I sit on the cold marble steps of the entrance hall as I hold a folded piece of paper in one hand, and a sleeping little sister in the other. A gold railing presses to my cheek as I tilt my head towards the wall. Rainbows in the light fly through stained glass windows and make new pictures in my eyes as my eyelids begin the close. 

As the sky begins to burn a fiery gold, the ornate hall doors swing open as my mother struts in. Servants and maids come from every door as if being pulled to her like wooden ducks on wheels all pulled by one sting. I stomp purposely into her path and wait for her to reach me. I’m not going to run after her. 

“Adelaide... what are you doing here?” Without waiting for an answer she turns on her heel, “Have you come to welcome me home? Yes, yes you shouldn’t have and all that, Antionette?” As a maid with curly brown hair rushes forward, I clutch my mother's shoulder and hold her back. 

“No.” I say firmly, “I did not come to say hello, I came to say goodbye.” I shoved the folded letters into her hand. She takes an uninterested glace at the writing and suddenly goes pale. Her perfect tan melts away like melting the chocolate off a malt ball, and her make-up creases unflatteringly. She seems fake. Like a perfect plastic doll that came out of the factory, but you only just noticed how odd the doll really looks when it's so perfect like that. 

“I’m leaving,” I say. I try to sound grown-up, but I’m shaking inside, “Forever, to live out my own life, and I’m taking Anne with me.”

“No daughter of mine talks back to me like that!!” She shreiks, her face flushing like fire in a kiln, flames licking white clay.

“I’m not your daughter anymore!” I say. Anne sticks out her tongue at our mother. 

Mother stands shocked, still, frightened. I've never seen her like this before, but I don't care. I’m not going to live a life I don't deserve. I want to work myself, In the city! This is the best decision I've ever made.  

I don’t look back as I walk through the threshold. But I do know my mother will regret the lies. Because it cost her her children. And I settle into the stagecoach I smile to myself. While the Moon ascends into the sky to lead me to my future.