"We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad."
“You can speak for yourself, I’m sure.”
But is Missy so wrong? Margarethe’s nails drum on the windowsill. She’s avoiding the sight of her maid, looking out onto the yard instead, the sprawl of rich grass, the garden. There are servants moving about out there, among the rows of plants. The summer growth has long since yellowed and withered in the changing weather, and the fall harvest has to be seen to, or so she’s been told by that John fellow her husband employs. Surely only madness could drive Margarethe to interest in such details as which plants to harvest and how to winter the pumpkins or store the potatoes or whatever it is.
Yet. It’s more than that. Deeper than that. Margarethe knows what madness means. Circularity. She pictures a woman in a madhouse pacing her cell, round and round about; pictures herself pacing this house, room to room to room.
Outside, Ella, bright and pretty in her blue frock, has appeared to help the servants. She stoops over the dirt with them, laughing and chatting. It doesn’t matter what Margarethe says to that girl. She simply won’t learn what’s proper for someone her age and station. It makes her company unbearable. And when there is no outdoors for Ella to occupy herself with, no fields for her to wander in, and none for the servants to tend; when the fall ends, and winter comes, and snow blankets them here–when snow shrouds Margarethe, in the dark in this house, with nothing, no one…
“Missy,” she says, and her voice is different. Purposeful. She’s had a thought. “What if we went away for the winter, hm?” Her hand now rests on the windowsill, motionless. “Somewhere far from this… Backwater.” She pictures some distant city, southerly and ornate. A townhouse rented there for her by Auguste, who has stayed behind, of course, perhaps even with Ella–must maintain his correspondence, can’t go running off when there’s work to be done, and the girl is so attached to her father. In a sunny place far from here, Margarethe, Anastasia, Drisella, and, of course, Lady Tremaine’s indispensable companion. Missy.
There is the faintest smile on Margarethe’s lips. “Somewhere warm.”
alice in wonderland. :: @mxstress.
