Taking Wing

Sabine’s Secret

The day after Christmas is the traditional day for giving Yuletide gifts. Isabel hurries to find Meg, who has agreed to come for a walk. They walk down to the river.

Once Isabel is sure no one is watching, she shyly presses a small parcel into Meg’s hands, insisting it is only a trifle. Meg unwraps the gift with such careful reverence that she might be handling something precious rather than paper and string. When she uncovers the sweetmeats inside, shaped like tiny pigs with curling string tails, she gasps with delight. Meg’s cheeks turn as pink as the little sugar pigs themselves. Isabel can tell by her flush that the gift has struck exactly right.

But the good feeling does not last long. Meg is soon called home to her family for the holidays. By New Year, word comes that she has fallen ill with quinsy and cannot return to her duties. Around the same time, Robert sails for the Indies, not due home again for months. With Robert gone and her friend laid up sick, Isabel notices that Aunt Elinor and Sabine have taken to murmuring together behind the parlor door in hushed, urgent voices. They break off the moment she draws near, shooing her away with obvious impatience. The atmosphere of the house shifts. Isabel feels shut out of some grown-up secret she is apparently too young and ignorant to be trusted with.

Bewildered and increasingly lonely, Isabel escapes into her imagination instead. She makes up long, rambling stories as she wanders, picturing a world where girls can do everything their brothers do, and more. In her stories they have fearless adventures with no one to scold them into behaving like proper ladies. Eager for any excuse to be outdoors and away from the whispering, she stays out walking one day far longer than she should. She catches a severe chill. For days afterward she is confined indoors, feeling nearly as imprisoned as one of the unlucky heroines in her stories. Alice nurses her back to health.

Alice’s remedy is not a pleasant one. She fills the kitchen with the heady fumes of peppermint, rosemary, and thyme, and ties a dried root into a piece of muslin. She pours boiling water from the kettle over the herbs in a bowl set on the hob. Then she makes Isabel lean over the steaming bowl and drapes a cloth over her head, creating a stifling little tent. She commands her to breathe deeply. Isabel takes one breath and chokes, protesting that it smells terrible. But Alice only asks whether she wants to be well for her tutor by the following day. Eager to say yes, Isabel obliges so fervently that she inhales far too much of the foul-smelling steam. Her nose and eyes begin to stream violently.

That night, tucking her into bed, Alice murmurs that she should sleep well, that all will be well by and by. Isabel catches a sad, almost pitying note in her voice, but she can’t figure out why Alice speaks to her this way.

Eventually the remedy does its work, and to Isabel’s relief, Alice pronounces her fully recovered and kisses her cheek. But the mystery in the house has not lifted. Passing the parlor, Isabel keeps overhearing Sabine and Aunt Elinor’s low, murmuring voices. Both of them scowl at her if she lingers too long nearby, as though guarding something she has no business knowing.

Isabel resumes her schooling gladly, if only to escape the strange, sour mood that has settled over the household. She finds that Meg, too, has recovered and returned to her chores, though her friend seems oddly flustered when Isabel catches her lighting the bedchamber fire.

Isabel’s lessons with Master Hart, her tutor, are far more to her liking. It is a joy to see him again after weeks apart. Peering through a peephole she breathes onto the frosty windowpane, she spots her tutor approaching, already absorbed in a book as he walks. His hair sticks out in every direction like the feathers of a baby jackdaw, because he has forgotten to comb it. She watches in dismay as he steps directly into the path of a cart. The carter shouts angrily, but Master Hart, still lost in his reading, strolls on completely unbothered.

Minutes later, Master Hart arrives in the schoolroom blowing on his cold hands. He beams with pleasure at the sight of her and asks whether she has had a merry Christmas and is feeling better. Isabel assures him she is. He confides that he is almost recovered from his own illness, then settles her to a Latin translation. Meanwhile, he pulls out a leather notebook to scribble down his own private thoughts and ideas. He has long hoped to become a playwright someday. For a long stretch, the only sounds in the room are the crackling fire and the scratching of their quills.

After Master Hart corrects her translation, they move on to their music lesson. He plays the lute beautifully. They sing “Greensleeves” together, one of his favorites, until Isabel is overtaken by a coughing fit. He scolds her gently, saying he never would have let her sing if he had known she was not fully recovered. But Isabel insists she wanted to sing, having missed their lessons so much.

Master Hart confesses he missed them, too, and asks whether she has read the Ovid he sent her. She praises the poetry eagerly, then hesitates, reluctant to seem ungrateful. When he presses her to go on, she admits that poets always seem to give their heroines such unhappy endings. It is exactly this kind of question that makes Isabel treasure her new tutor. Her old one, Master Strype, believed girls incapable of rational thought. But Master Hart always seems genuinely curious about what she thinks.

Musing over her complaint, Master Hart agrees that when a hero dies, it is always in the midst of some thrilling adventure. But a heroine is more likely to end up walled up in a convent, fatally bitten by a snake, or simply dead for love, like Dido. Isabel, seized by another coughing fit, manages to gasp out that girls in stories do nothing but pine, suffer, and wait to be rescued. She asks whether there are no strong, bold heroines at all.

To her surprise, Master Hart says he knows of one. If she promises not to try to speak, he will tell her the tale. Isabel pulls her chair close to the fire. He tells her the story of Nicolette, a Saracen slave girl so brave and resourceful that she manages to rescue her sweetheart, Aucassin, from the tower of the evil lord who imprisoned him. By the time the story ends, it is midday. Master Hart must hurry off to tutor some boys who live on the next street. Isabel lingers by the fire, warming her hands, unsettled and delighted all at once by the thought that girls might really have adventures after all. She wonders if her own wild dreams and imaginings might someday become real, too.

Her reverie is broken by Aunt Elinor, who bursts in demanding to know why Isabel is keeping everyone waiting. She looks unusually grand in a gown of buttercup yellow. She tsks at Isabel’s ink-stained hands and orders her to make herself respectable at once. Visitors are downstairs, guests Isabel had not even known to expect.

As Isabel runs to change, she recognizes Sir Edmund Glover’s booming voice drifting up from the parlor. She hopes his son Henry is with him. Henry has been a favorite of hers ever since visiting the Glovers’ house in Richmond as a small girl, when she embarrassed herself by eating too much syllabub and becoming ill. Henry kindly distracted her afterward with conjuring tricks, once pretending to pull a quail’s egg from her ear.

Isabel changes into a fresh crimson kirtle and slippers and hurries down. She finds the parlor crowded with far more people than she expected. Henry stands stiffly in a doublet so heavily embroidered with gold that it looks capable of standing up on its own. Alongside him are Sir Edmund, Mistress Glover, Sir Edmund’s elderly mother, and half a dozen other Glover relatives, all dressed as though for some splendid occasion.

Hope sits bewildered on Aunt Elinor’s knee, sucking her thumb in her best kirtle. Father beckons Isabel in proudly and announces to the room that she has been studying with her tutor, but no one is listening. Sabine has just entered behind her, wearing a new rose-colored wool dress embroidered with tiny flowers, her hair swept up beneath a cap of snowy white lace, blushing deeply as she curtsies.

Father draws Sabine to his left side and beckons Henry to his right. His voice suddenly takes on the strange formality of a churchman or a judge. He declares that Mother often spoke of the day their two families would be joined by affection and, in time, by the holy sacrament of marriage. He adds that this is a happy and solemn moment. Sabine, clearly rehearsed, haltingly recites her vow to marry Henry Glover if God wills and she lives, taking him for her only betrothed husband. Henry in turn declares he takes her as his only betrothed wife. The two exchange rings and clasp hands at Father’s urging, blushing and unsure what to do next. Then Sir Edmund booms at his son not to be so lukewarm and to kiss his future bride. The couple kisses, and the room erupts in laughter.

Isabel feels numb. She and Sabine have shared a bed every night since Isabel was four years old. Yet Sabine never once hinted that a betrothal was coming. When Aunt Elinor sniffs at her to congratulate the bride-to-be, Isabel dutifully wishes the couple a long and happy life. Then she asks Sabine under her breath whether Robert knew.

Sabine, still blushing, admits they told him before he left. So it was only Isabel they did not tell. Suddenly the pitying note in Alice’s voice, and Meg’s flustered manner over the fire-lighting, make painful sense. Everyone in the household, family and servants alike, knew of Sabine’s coming betrothal, except for Hope and Isabel. It was as though the two of them were merely silly little girls who did not count.

Isabel longs to burst into tears and flee the room. But she forces herself to be the good girl everyone expects. She teases Henry that she had secretly hoped to marry him herself ever since the quail’s egg trick, and assures Sabine truthfully that she will be the most beautiful bride there has ever been. She stands beside Aunt Elinor, nodding politely through Henry’s grandmother’s long story about the time he stole and ate an entire marigold tart at six years old. She smiles all the while, though she feels something has broken inside her.

The celebration stretches late into the night, and Isabel eventually excuses herself, claiming a headache. Much later, Sabine slips quietly into their shared chamber, undresses in the dark, and climbs into bed beside her. She whispers that she knows Isabel is upset and that she truly meant to tell her. But she feared looking foolish if the match had come to nothing, and Aunt Elinor had said so, too.

Isabel only turns over and hunches her back. Sabine chatters on nervously about how happy she is, how they are to marry in the spring, and how much there is to do. She adds that she would love Isabel’s help, since the two of them used to do everything together. A tear slides down Isabel’s cheek. She remembers perfectly well that it is Sabine who has forgotten. Sabine strokes her back gently and promises that once she and Henry are married, Isabel can come stay with them. She adds that Henry has even offered to keep a pony for her at their country house, and that she is not really leaving Isabel at all.

Isabel does not believe her. She thinks everyone leaves her in the end, first Mother, then Robert, and now Sabine. She is going to be left all alone.