#op.a

[scvereignty]

ADELAIDE WINDSOR in VINTAGE CHANEL

ft. stéphane rolland cape.

winter-black, icy loveliness. 

[scvereignty]

ADELAIDE WINDSOR & HER BOYS.

or, the four who never broke her heart (and one who did) with @dsappointments, @aglyndwr, @brcknboy, & @goldenbov.

❝ things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. she was the queen who finished out the suit of dark jacks, dark king, and joker. ❞

— they were her boys, all of them. disjointed as they alll were, an amalgamation of imperious delinquency and broad shoulders, she fit in with them flawlessly, somehow miraculously. despite their raucous, boyish nature and her own sylphishness, she had ingratiated herself in the clan from a young age, as if she had never given a second thought to a separation that might have been borne due to gender. they had been raised originally to treat the youngest and only girl of the brood with caution, with echoes of careful with adelaide carried through the lawn when the boys started roughhousing, but it had quickly become clear she would have no part of isolation from their play. like a vase with a glass-sharp shard hidden on the inside, she was not the breakable creature their mothers and nannies imagined her to be. the boys were the first to learn this. when she was six, she had campaigned and lobbied to join their wrestling tournament until they had relented away from the governess’s ears, unwilling to be reprimanded. she had been too slight to make an impact for much of the game, but it was to everyone’s great surprise when she climbed onto silas’s back in the midst of a group brawl and refused to let go. a casualty of war, she had only been knocked off only when a sharp elbow had flown incidentally into her dainty face, and the whole group band had paused while james pulled everyone apart in distress to find her little form among the madness.

-- she emerged with a bloody nose, and grinned through the snot, triumphant. she would later spit a tooth - which had not been noticeably loose beforehand - into her father’s hand before bedtime. no tears escaped her that evening. it was from then that be careful with adelaide slowly morphed from a warning to the windsor-glyndwr boys to a mirthful, cautionary suggestion they threw at peers and potential suitors that attempted to hang around her. careful around adelaide, rhys would smirk, watching a new acquaintance eye her from a distance as the rest swallowed their amusement. she’s got teeth.

as she grew older and was splinted into the shape of a woman and a princess, forced to abandon participation in play-fighting and wrestling, still she chose to watch on with them rather than stand with the adults. easy as it would have been for her to mingle with the parents and associates who so adored her, instead she would drag a dirty lawn chair to the sidelines of their rugby game, plastic legs right up against the line, close enough to be knocked over or covered with mud simply by proximity. she never cared. there she would sit, wearing arthur’s discarded tweed blazer and smoking a pilfered cigar, calling out the score to their match and at times purposefully mishandling the numbers for the amusement of hearing them all yell back at her. singular a creature as she was, she longed totally to be surrounded by them, and could be possessed by few others that were not this wriggling, grass-stained knot of boyish brothers and cousins.

 in turn, there was something quietly fierce about her love for them all, a protective nature that could have only been fostered from years of being purposefully known and looked after. each boy was unique to themselves, no two selves alike despite similar features, and she carried a candle for every one -- passing through their individual rooms in her heart each night as if to dust and keep them pristine.

she was their’s. and they were hers, each and every one --

RHYS, whom she had clung to in youth more than then all the rest. despite three of her brothers being closer age-mates, adelaide was struck with the conviction that as the youngest of their respective clans, they were meant to be together. it was a conviction of a terrifying zeal, so much so that on an occasion in which their mothers attempted to separate her from him in the middle of a garden party, they were promptly bit, milk-coloured baby teeth leaving imprints in their flesh. perhaps the act of defiance had ingratiated her to him, for he had laughed and let her sit on his knee during the luncheon, not so much as blinking when she had spilled jam on his sleeve. as they had grown older, it came to pass that they would accompany one another to events and important affairs; they became an established pair, standing straight-backed at the side of the room and whispering quips and half-snide observatory comments back and forth. when trauma and tragedy held their respective hands over rhys and adelaide’s throats, it came to pass that they would begin to separate. but the young often know things the grown are blind to -- a soul-similarity, a needing to be together -- and it should be said that when grief laid its body over them, they buckled in the same places. distanced they were, but never different.

ARTHUR, golden arthur, with whom it could be said she shared the greatest understanding. the elder to his brother, it had not been arthur that adelaide had gravitated towards in kinship in her youth, but mutual interest would dictate their repeated proximity in later years. it was with him that she was most predisposed to loss, both on the polo field and in her carefully crafted facade. unlike with her eldest brother, who saw only golden potential in little adelaide, arthur had long held the keen-eyed ability to decipher her where she stood. it was a skill she shared when looking at him, and though neither were of a disposition prone to rows, it was between them that the most disagreements arose. with the others, one could pretend everything was legible and unaltered, but this uncanny connection meant lies had no domain here. and yet she remained in a perpetual state of gratitude towards him, her lovely arthur, who stood by her as a flickering gold-warm light in the sky -- the other half her matching set. 

ELIJAH, who sprawled with her in disarray on oxford’s lawn, two disassembled music triangles interlocking together at various angles. the most delicate of the brood, there was something about them that implied a kind of twinship, despite the difference of hair colour and shape of face -- one flaxen and soft, the other dark and sharp. when they rested on each other on a lawn bench discussing poetry and vanini’s intellectual liberatism, elijah leaned back on adelaide’s twiggy thigh for support as she groomed the shoulder of his blazer for line. one could have imagined, with ease, they had been borne on the same day and had never before endured separation. no more than a year apart, perhaps it was the closeness in age that dictated as much from them, but likely it was something greater. delicate as the two were, they should not have been underestimated, for they were undoubtedly the shrikes of the family -- slight and small birds that, while appearing harmless, would spear what was necessary on a thorn if it meant feeding the other.

SILAS, most dissimilar to her of all, she spent the most time analyzing him. with his wild disposition and buoyant spirit unencumbered by the weight of all the strange and wonderful things that held her. adelaide had spent whole evenings scrutinizing his face, looking to trace the lines of his profile the way a fortune teller does marks a palm in at attempt to identify with her brother. that she could not always understand him bothered adelaide, and sent her into fits of self-reflection or focused observation as she attempted to make sense of it. perhaps because he was the next-eldest after james, he had always seemed his foil; so when their oldest brother demanded the world treat adelaide with gloves, silas had been the first to discard them. this had both angered and amazed her in equal measures. and yet still, she found herself often thinking of the day she had returned home from boarding school, only to be caught by silas smoking a clove cigarette by the garden shed. she had immediately begun to plead for him not to tell, extinguishing the incriminating thing and tears springing to her eyes. instead of answering he had merely reached into his back pocket, produced a package of sterlings and lit up next to her, offering a replacement for the one she had crushed under heel. they had smoked in silence. that was, adelaide had often felt, who they were -- disparate at the bone, but the quiet last stand in each other’s corner.

& of course, there was JAMES. he was, to her, the king of them all -- a paragon of virtue among men. if he had ever done wrong, she did not see it, and whether that was symptomatic of their love, or a carefully contrived act from a brother who would not see his image tarnished in her eyes, it could not be said. he eclipsed all others that stood before him from the time she was born, as much a father and hero as a brother figure, and in his early death, he would ruin everyone else for her for the remainder of her life. in her heart he was sainted, and those that reproached this holy image would find themselves at odds with her indefinitely. he had been her first heartbreak. and then there had been another, unrelated one. but there were four other men, each with a hand on her heart, pressing on it tenderly until it learned how to beat again.

— THEY WERE HER BOYS, all of them. she had belonged to them all her life, in ways that she could never to anyone else. and that was how it would remain: adelaide and her brood of grand, raucuous, noble princes.