You shut us up in that great house like misbehaving children in a nursery. Every shutter was closed, ensconcing us in a world of eternal night. You added locks to all the windows and doors, claiming that they were to keep out the superstitious peasants, but they locked from the inside, and you carried the key around with you at all times.
Magdalena lapsed into melancholy and took to spending long intervals in her room alone, languishing under silk sheets and refusing food for days at a time. I wandered the halls during the days, sleepless as a mad woman from a Gothic novel. Alexi, for his part, railed. He became prone to fits of rage that reminded me so much of you that my chest hurt, bursting into shouts or slamming his hands against the locked door at the slightest provocation. It was never directed at us girls, always at you, at his circumstances, but I still ached for him. I wanted to spirit him away from your corrosive influence, nurse his heart back to health somewhere where the doors were always open and no one ever raised their voices except in mirth.
As the days wore on, my hopes seemed more like flights of fancy. We were entirely alone out in the country without any reprieve from your tyrannical chaperonage, and the villagers around us were suspicious gossips. None of them would help us, I was sure. They would sooner bind us hand and foot and offer us up to the parish priest as devils in need of exorcisms. Word travelled fast in small villages, and it was common knowledge that the strange disappearances of unattended maidens had only happened after we moved in.
I chafed against the rustic meals, all the more sick with the knowledge that I was dining on innocents. They were peasant girls, just as I had been a peasant girl once, open-hearted and trusting. You strictly forbade me from any of my avenging tendencies and did all the hunting for us, leaving us alone in the house for long stretches of time. I wondered if withholding yourself for those hours was another kind of punishment. You would think we would be happy to be rid of you, but we had been weaned on you like children on mother’s milk, and we were always just as relieved to see you come home as we were to see you ride off. You had debased us all over time, as slow as dripping water wearing a hole in stone. We couldn’t abide you, but we couldn’t live without you.
“He’s like a sickness,” Alexi said, lying close besides me on Magdalena’s lace-trimmed bed. She was having one of her good days, when she was awake for most of the night and bright-eyed.
“How so?” I asked, my fingers latticed over my belly.
“Being around him is like burning up with fever. I know I’m not well, but I’m too delirious to do anything. What medicine is there for that sort of thing?”
“A bracing walk through the cold,” Magdalena murmured. “And patience. Fevers have to burn themselves out.”
“But he won’t,” Alexi said, his voice a hoarse whisper. I didn’t know if he was furious or on the brink of tears. Both, probably. “He just goes on burning. And I can’t look away.”
“Tell him so yourself,” I ventured, even though I knew that none of us were so brave. “Maybe he’ll take it in stride.”
Alexi gave me a withering glance. “After you, dear sister. What did you call him last week? A despot? I’m sure he’d love to hear that.”
I laid there in silence for a long while, turning the treacherous beginnings of a plan over in my mind. It was only an inkling of a thing then, hazy and indistinct. But for the first time in a long time, I supposed that there was something to be done about our situation. About you.
I tucked the idea away in a dark recess of my mind and let it ferment.
Alexi fell back on old habits and took to stealing. He would secret away tiny baubles or bits of silverware in his pockets, hiding it away in his room for some uncertain future. I pretended not to see him, of course. I supposed I shouldn’t deny him whatever simple outlet for rebellion he had, especially since you kept him on such a tight leash in those days. You trotted him out to perform for us every fortnight, encouraging him to learn new monologues and scenes to entertain with. I suspect you hoped to keep his mind diverted and his hands busy, but he resented the lack of a true audience, the loss of the camaraderie of a band of players.
When he complained, you plied him with kisses or wine, or shouted at him so ferociously the rafters shook. You even seemed jealous when he took refuge with us girls, locking himself away in Magdalena’s room to cry into her silk pillowcases and demand that I do something, anything to fix your beastly behavior. You were content to share Alexi with us so long as he remained soundly in your thrall. When he started to wander out of your grasp, you tightened your grip so much he could scarcely breathe.