If I had been smiling, I soon stopped. In the absence of a will I inherited my father’s remaining fortune, which had belonged first to my mother, and should have belonged to me. But, as I was not yet of age, my circumstances changed very little except that my guardianship transferred from one bad man to another.
John Gravely was the second-oldest brother, and the second-meanest. I thought I might at least survive him, but slowly I became aware that he was watching me more closely than he used to. He studied me as if I were a difficult equation that needed solving. He asked me twice when my birthday was, and drummed his fingers restlessly on the table each time I answered.
That night I counted on my fingers and realized I would turn eighteen in twenty-three days. And on that date my money would be my own, and my uncles would have nothing but a few failing mines, a filthy birdcage, and a wealthy niece who no longer belonged to them. I was a songbird in a den of foxes, and they were so hungry.
I thought he might poison me, or drown me. I thought he might lock me away until I signed everything over to him and his brother, or have me shipped off to an asylum. He wouldn’t even have had to bribe the physicians; I was quite unwell by then. I chewed at my own lips until they scabbed. I never brushed my hair. I no longer sang to the little black birds, but only spoke to them in hoarse, mad whispers. I slept and slept, because even nightmares were preferable to reality.
My uncle John did not poison me or lock me up. He came to a different solution, one which I berated myself for failing to anticipate. It was, after all, the same solution that occurred to my father when he met my mother. He was a poor man and a bad one, and she was a wealthy woman and a weak one; what could be easier, or more obvious?
But, at seventeen, I must still have possessed some childish, idiot faith in the rules of society. Yes, they were bad men. Yes, I had heard the weeping from the mines and seen my uncles return from the cabins late at night. But that was different, that was allowed. I was a young white woman of good breeding, and I still believed there were some lines they would not cross.
So when my uncle John summoned me to breakfast one morning and told me I was not to call him Uncle any longer, I didn’t understand. He picked up my left hand and shoved a cheap tin ring on my second-smallest finger, and I still didn’t understand. I felt heavy and strange, as if I was sleeping. I looked at my uncle Robert, the youngest and least cruel of the Gravely men, and saw the look of faint disgust on his face, and only then did I understand.
Our engagement was announced in three separate papers. My name was listed differently in each one. Eleanor Grand, Eleanor Gallows, Eleanor Gaunt. Perhaps my uncles thought it would help people convince themselves they’d heard my name wrong. That girl was never a Gravely, they could tell themselves.She must have been a foundling, an orphan, some stranger we let into our midst.
Because that’s what they did, of course. They didn’t march up to our big white house and drag my uncle John into the streets. They didn’t damn him or castigate him or even take away his place in the first pew at church. They simply told themselves a different story, one that was easier to believe because they’d heard it before: Once there was a bad woman who ruined a good man. Once there was a witch who cursed a village. Once there was an odd, ugly girl whom everyone hated, because it was safe to hate her.
I kept waiting for someone to object, but the most I got was a pitying glance from the neighbors’ maid, an awkward grimace from my uncle Robert. Everyone else drew away from me, like hands from a hot coal. They averted their eyes from evil and, in so doing, became complicit in it. I watched my uncles’ sin spread over the town like night falling, and finally understood that no one was going to save me.
So, on the morning of my wedding, I took my father’s birdcage into the woods behind Gravely Manor and opened the door. A rush of iridescent feathers and clever black eyes, a few piercing trills, and they were gone. I didn’t know if they’d survive out in the wild, but I’d grown too fond of them to leave them alone with my uncles.
I chose two stones, smooth and heavy, and slipped them into my skirt pockets. Then I walked down to the riverside.
I would have done it, if I hadn’t met the boatman. A hare, I called him later, because he had a sly, sideways manner of regarding a person. He stopped me, and then he listened to me, and then he gave me an even greater gift: he told me how my father died. He told me Hell was real, and so were its demons.
I did not walk into the river that day, after all. I went back to the big white house on the hill and let them dress me in white lace and ribbons. I let my uncle Robert walk me down the aisle of the empty church. I could not make myself say the words, but I let my new husband kiss me, his lips damp and thin.