11 October

Now that my first week has passed at the house of Igor Radcliffe, I have begun to understand the rhythm of my imprisonment. At the unholy hour of five, I am awoken for breakfast by another servant of the house, a totally lifeless woman of what could be fifty years or a hundred. She says nothing but "Ma'am" and "Sir" and has the worst habit of bowing her head so low to her chest, that her chin is affixed sternly to her own neck, making even this limited vocabulary muted and hardly intelligible.

Following this mess of a creature downstairs for food has its own pattern I've come to know without thinking on it. Once my door has been closed, I pat the handle for good luck and pray that it isn't opened by prying eyes when I'm not inside. Passing each of the grim portraits from my hall receives a solemn nod of understanding, and moving into the next hall warrants a suspicious look at each unfamiliar face. These ones do not watch over my bedroom, and thus, they cannot be trusted. As we spiral our way down the stairs, each of the skulls that leers at us, missing teeth or sporting curious holes in places there shouldn't be, gets tapped on the head. I don't know if my intention is to break them just to set something at odds in the doctor's house or merely too give myself something to do, but after the second day of treading down the stairs, I noticed skulls on the other side as well, and was at once obliged to tap these as well. The ancient servant gave me a glazed look of displeasure when she saw this, but as she was slow and ungainly in descending, the effort required to reprimand me or physically put a stop to it was too much for her to attempt.

Eventually, we reach the main floor again, where I stare at the very long, glistening teeth of the animals stretched out across the ground. I haven't as of yet noticed the presence of any living pets, and being so deprived, I decided upon names for the unfortunate predators on the floor. The bear reminded me of my mother's family, and thus I named him Pyotr. There was a familiar reddish tinge to his otherwise brown fur that could have put him quite comfortably in the chilled fields beside the Ural Mountains. How I wished I could be with his family! Not always prone to violence, my mother had told me, they could even play music with humans and paint and the like.

This poor bastard couldn't do much more than stare at me, so I vowed to one day remove him form the dusty house he'd been trapped in.

Permanently yowling, the wolf looked pitifully on next to his ursine companion. His name was harder for me to determine, but wolves always reminded me of the French, and so I called him Pierre. There was an eagle (or not - I was not terribly well-versed in the nature of birds, but his claws were powerful enough that he seemed to me worthy of being an eagle) which reminded me of those Southern sailor boys, and I called that one Phineas. I didn't have time from my limited passing of these fine men to the kitchen, and thus, the swan, panther, and elk remained nameless, but I resolved to think on it more later.

Once the residents had been acknowledged, I would follow the withered creature into the main hall, where I was instructed to stare into a mirror I'd missed on my first day and smooth myself over. As I hadn't been allowed to use the bathing room before this, my hair was often always a mess that found ways to make more tangles in sleep than if I had put it out in a storm. Forcing the bunch back and tying it with another unwilling strand, I developed a pattern of appearing for food looking as disgruntled and unfit for company as an urchin of the streets. This particular example was borrowed from the ever-romantic Atticus, who had sneered my way the first day I stumbled down, sleep-deprived and wholly unused to arising at this hour.

"My, my," he'd said when I initially threw myself into a chair, looking about for Evie. "Have the mounted animals conspired to come to life?"

"That's hardly a way to talk to a lady."

"Ah, but you are no lady. You are an ungrateful guest who I must make food for. You haven't even the decency to dress for our eyes, which, I must say, is no way for a lady to dress at all." Smirking at me, Atticus picked at his teeth with what I hoped was a clean match this time, waiting for me to fight back. I resolved instead to hit him the next time I could (or rather, encourage Evie to do it, as I didn't really have the strength or resolve to hit anyone).

When I ignored his taunting, he sat across the table from me and leaned forward. "Well? Has the urchin reached its limit of words?"

"You are a child," I sniffed, unable to resist talking back.

"Ha! It does speak." Satisfied he'd gotten a rise out of me, Atticus leaned back and grinned, his tongue moving the match up and down from behind his crooked teeth. How could such a foul brute find the nerve to insult me so, looking the way he did! Somehow resembling a railyard worker, he was covered in far too much filth to be allowed near a kitchen, and I feared for my food's quality. Without my protected friend beside me, what reason was there for my food to also remain untouched? This exchange, if you could guess it, also became a part of the daily ritual I partook in. Angrily fix my hair in the mirror, knowing it would be at least an hour before I could properly clean it; throw myself into my seat, squinting as the sunlight coughed its way past the house; throw a foul word back at Atticus, and eat as little as I could get away with.

After tasting dirt in my food for the third day in a row this morning, I spat what was gritting in my teeth out and glared at Atticus, who, for some reason unknown to myself, never had anything to do after preparing breakfast. I never saw his father this early, either, so I couldn't appeal to him for help in the quality of my meals.

"If I am a homeless orphan," I cried out, slamming my spoon down, "then what does that make you! You, who are always dirtier than a coal yard in the rain! Keep whatever you do in that cold kitchen out of my bowl!"

"Where does the lady wish her apples to come from, if not the trees in the field, where the dirt and the rain all are?"

"There... there's a field?" I was totally taken aback by the notion that there was open space anywhere near the house. Were we not surrounded by houses of similar sizes and shapes, blocked in completely by the walls and windows?

Seemingly pleased that he knew yet another thing I did not, Atticus stood and jerked his head. "Come on, then." I only needed to stare at him for a second before I was out of chair and chasing down the hope that either I wasn't being tricked, or that freedom really did lie close. As long as I could quit the house and find a safe place in the field, I could drag myself, and hopefully Evie, away to freedom. Perhaps we could pretend we had perished in the rain, and be free to escape the rude home of Radcliffe.

Atticus had longer legs than I by a good margin and was not afraid to use them. Considering he knew the house, and especially this area, I found it quite annoying that he walk so fast, but then, if he was telling the truth, I would concede to letting him have his moment of pride. Soon enough, however, I did catch up and find that in the back of the kitchen was a door that led to the wonderfully green, crisp grass of the outdoors. It smelled so fantastic, even through the bubbling of something rather spicey from the stoves. I leaned forward and inhaled, closing my eyes to suck in as much of the real world as I could. Even the light, that soft pastel of gray and blue that eased itself over the tops of other houses, was so natural and welcome compared to the muted and muffled colours I'd been allowed to see.

"How is this here," I asked, turning to look up at Atticus with a tear in my eye, more grateful than I would ever tell him that he had not been lying.

"We like to have our houses present a wall to outsiders," he answered, picking at the match with his dirty fingers. "Behind everything though, you'll find we have beautiful things as much as any other." To hear him say beautiful nearly made me laugh, but I tried to focus.

"And the apple trees?"

"There." He pointed to the right, where a cluster of trees trailed away over the horizon and lost themselves beside a small river. I could not be looking at a real scene. How was there room for a river here? Despite my wonder, I still sought some method of travel. Perhaps I could quit myself into the trees, and use some sort of lumber to drift off down the river. I would have to wait a very long time to enact that idea, however; the colder seasons were upon us, and I couldn't very well leave before it snowed unless I had visited this place myself. "And here, the garden. For the carrots our little urchin seems to like so much." Giving me a mischievous smile (could he really let no moments of happiness pass before injecting some obnoxious behaviour?), Atticus pushed open the door fully and pulled me by the elbow, giving me a closer view of what truly was a garden! Some semblance of familiarity at last greeted me, and filled me with so much emotion that I found myself on the ground, weeping at the sight of those very carrots. Life could indeed grow here! All was not lost, and I decided, so unladylike on the dirt, to obtain permission to help tend to this garden, if only for a touch of my abandoned in Dorset.

Disgusted and no doubt confused by my display, Atticus groaned and hoisted me up, patting down the clumps of grass that remained. "The idea wasn't to get any more homeless looking," he grumbled, guiding me inside and throwing me a cloth from the counter for my tears. "It's just a bed of stupid plants." My emotions found no sense in arguing with this, but continued to reduce me to sobs. Eventually taking something akin to pity on me, he led me upstairs to the washroom and nudged me inside.

"Go on, clean yourself up." He turned to leave, but I reached for his sleeve and pulled him back.

"Please," I wept, sniffling and trying not to look too messy, "when will I be able to see Evelyn? Is she even alright? I haven't heard anything from her since... since..." I burst out crying yet again, to which Atticus leaned back as far as my grip would allow and replied that he did not know anything of her current state.

"Your friend is likely already married at this point, no use in fretting about her. Not much reason to kill a newlywed, is there?"

"Already married?" I withheld a sneeze and settled instead for a sniffle. "How, is she not here right now?" At this, Atticus gave me an incredulous look.

"You really don't know?"

"Know what, you brute!" I made to swing at him, but he twisted my hand out of the way and scowled down.

"Our precious doctor has taken her back to Dorset for a brief ceremony, but that is all I know." He pushed me back slightly, towards the door. "Clean yourself up; crying won't return her any sooner and won't give you any more answers than either of us."

Abandoned once more, I indeed cleaned myself up, letting free all of the frustration and anger and confusion in my chest. Eventually making my way to the bath, I sank into the filling warm water and cried until the water turned pink, and I realised that my womanhood had settled upon me in a most unfortunate matter of timing. Even if I washed the last of the day off of myself, I hadn't the slightest idea of how to keep myself from bleeding all over the house. While I had been introduced to this messy aspect of maturing much later than my peers, I also found that I did not bleed nearly as frequently. It was, in all honesty, complacency that led to this panicked situation. What use was there in preparing for an event that hardly ever happened? At last feeling as though I had no other option, I called for Atticus once more and prayed that he did not laugh at me.

I was very foolish to think he wouldn't, but I at least obtained some cloth from him to aid my predicament, and it was with as much embarrassment as anyone could endure that I locked myself in my room for the remainder of the day.

Mortified and wishing for death, Winn

Winn

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