The rest of the day, I am as light and free as a cloud. My first kiss fills me with euphoria and carries me away on the brisk autumn breeze. Though he is reluctant to part with me, Thorunn has to return to the palace for work, but promises that he will come see me as soon as he can get away, hopefully tomorrow. We part with another kiss that is as tender and chaste as our first.
At some later time, I will surely laugh at myself and how silly I am acting. After Thorunn is gone, I spend the rest of the afternoon in the palace gardens, drifting and daydreaming; I still cannot walk for long distances with my ankle, but there are plenty of picturesque tree swings and ivy-clad gazebos in which I can sit and kick my feet and sing gleefully to myself like a schoolgirl. I am in perfect bliss. Even if it is silly, I am determined to savor it as long as possible. For now, I can pretend that I have not a single worry in the world; that I am just a normal girl with a normal life; that my secret romance with a dashing foreigner could not possibly end in tragedy. One day he will whisk me away from this awful place and these awful people. One day we will sail away into the great blue sea and never look back. One day we will marry in a rainbow of wildflower-dyed ribbons and dance and drink and sing in the tundra’s summer festival, and I will never know fear again.
And then…I am thinking of my mother.
I don’t know why she comes to my mind so abruptly. By now the sun is setting, the same vivid orange as it sets in the crowded slums of Lavendel Road, and I swear I can smell the hearty stew of the community kitchen, and perhaps hear my mother’s humming in her room as she gets ready to leave the house. I miss her terribly, all of a sudden. And I wonder if she ever felt like this. No…I know she felt like this. Mama told me all kinds of stories about Edgar when I was a little girl, and as I grew up, I forgot so many of them, but one I recall with perfect clarity is how they met and fell in love.
They were young. Younger than I am now. Mama was a captured slave from a savage foreign tribe. She told me very little of her homeland except that they were a fishing village, perhaps where I inherited my love of the seas. By the time she was ten, she was working in the palace as a chimney sweep. She was always petite, able to shimmy through the narrowest of spaces—something she shared with my father, one year younger than she, and small for his age. And as such, they met by pure happenstance. Mama, ordered to dust in the rafters of the library, stumbled upon Edgar, curled up and crying in a tiny alcove. It was his little sanctuary, where he hid when he did not want to be found.
He was a lonely and friendless prince. She was a foreigner in a strange new land. They became the fastest of friends, and as they grew older, the dearest of lovers. Their first kiss, when she was fifteen and he fourteen, was shared in that same hiding place above the library.
I think of that story again. I wonder how Mama would tell it today, now that she knows how it ends. Would it be any different? I doubt it. She has managed what I cannot, and that is to ride the wave of the honeymoon phase indefinitely. I suppose her genuine love for Edgar also plays into it. Perhaps, impossibly, if you actually love someone, and are not just using them as a loophole in your regression story, you can continue thinking fondly of them forever.
Alas, I am not like my mother. By the time I return to my quarters, the giddy euphoria has passed, and I am more or less back to my usual cold, utilitarian self. To my great relief, my scar has faded back to a normal white. I mark it down as a sign. Before my date with Thorunn, I was in greater peril than I was now, but by securing his affections, I have restored the status quo. I feel a slight twinge of guilt at thinking of him in such a manner. He has been nothing but kind and genuine with me, yet I am using him as a pawn in a game he does not even know I am playing. But, as I said before, I am not like my mother. She is more than willing to lend kindness to the man who killed her. And I am not so righteous.
Oh, Thorunn, you beautiful fool. How easily my father wielded you as a blade in my last life. But now, you are mine to command.
I sleep soundly that night, and for the first time all week, I wake up early the next day feeling refreshed. I am even awake before the mailroom girls, so I take my sweet time getting ready in our shared washroom and head out to the gardens with my bookbag, a newspaper, and some snacks. Now that I have been to the palace gardens once, I have fallen in love with them and want to spend as much time there before they are buried in snow. It is warm again today, in that sort of surreal, exaggerated way that suggests it will be the last warm day in a very long time. I find a sunny spot close to my garden-level bedroom window, such that if I run out of books to read, I may simply reach down into my room and grab another from the bookshelf, without having to get up from my spot and go back inside. I feel quite ingenious for thinking of it. Granted, it is quite awkward to lay flat on the grass and reach inside the window, so I can only hope nobody walks by to see me do that.
I am not outside for long, however. I have just made it through the finance column of the newspaper when I hear voices nearby. Confused, I look around. Oddly, it sounds like the mailroom girls. But there is no one else outside except a gardener. Then I look up. Right above me, on the first floor, a window is cracked open. It is slightly too high up to look inside, but I know from its placement that it leads to the breakroom. The whistling of a teakettle tells me that the girls are probably making a small breakfast before their shift.
I am just about to return to my newspaper when I hear my name.
“Eloise?” says one of the mailroom girls. “Oh, she’s asleep. Her door is still closed.”
I freeze. From nine words, I gather three shreds of information: that they are talking about me, that they don’t want me to hear it, and that they do not know that I am sitting outside the breakroom window.
“I feel kind of bad for her,” says another girl. Or maybe it’s the same girl. Their voices are similar too, so I can’t really tell. “I mean, she’s just a kid. Barely of age. And now she has to deal with all of this.”
Another one snorts. “She knows what she’s doing.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I mean, just look at her. She’s wicked smart, it’s uncanny. Have you seen her toting around those newspapers? Laurie says she’s investing in quasicurrency, whatever that is.”
“It’s like, fake money, I think?”
“Yeah, like this new magic gold. Supposedly. Anyway, that is not just a kid. That girl is on a mission.”
“Good for her, I’d say. I mean, it’s what I would do.”
“If you were secret royalty?”
“Well, yeah! I’d flaunt that shit. I’d climb that ladder. And she has a great cover story, nobody suspects the records clerk.”
“Does she actually know? Are we sure that she knows? Because she doesn’t act like it.”
“If she’s smart, she won’t act like she knows.”
“I think what Amber is asking is, ’are we absolutely sure that Eloise knowing stuff isn’t all our fault.’”
There is a long silence. The teakettle starts whistling again, then abruptly dies down.
“If it was our fault, Martha would have said something by now.”
“Yeah…”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“It’s not like we don’t shred stuff. Not like Lazy Laurie. I swear—you remember Thursday? The outgoing mail came early that day and Laurie got to it before we did. And Edgar’s letter was right there. Smack dab on the top, out in the open.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“You shredded it, right?”
“Of course I fucking shredded it. But anyone could have seen it.”
“Maybe Edgar put it there. He was in the office around that time, you know. He could’ve done it on purpose, just to piss us off.”
“He is not that smart.”
“You’d be surprised. He has to know we shred his letters.”
I have heard enough. And I don’t know how much time I have before the mailroom girls quit gossiping and head into work. I pack up my things as quickly and quietly as possible, so as not to alert them that I am just outside their window, then rush back inside.
There are a few shredding machines in the records department, but the most likely culprit is the one in the mailroom, where the three girls work and where outgoing letters would be processed. It is an ancient metal hand-crank shredder over a small wire basket. Fortunately, it does not seem to have been emptied recently, about half full. But the girls will certainly notice if they clock in and the shreds they were just talking about are miraculously gone.
I dump the basket in my bookbag. I will likely be picking paper scraps out of its crevices for weeks to come, but I don’t care. Time is of the essence. Then I get to work feeding my newspaper into the shredder. As soon as I grab hold of the hand-crank, I understand why Laurie is so lazy about it. The machine is ancient, its gears rusty and stiff, and turning the crank takes all of my effort. And it is loud. Can I grind multiple newspaper pages at once? I can, and it is a little faster, but takes much more strength. Faster just to do one at a time.
Down the hall, I hear a door close, and the distant murmur of women’s voices. Desperate, I jam the last newspaper page into the shredder, crank it to shreds, and glance at my handiwork. It won’t stand close scrutiny—the shreds are clearly of ashy-gray newsprint and not the bleach white parchment that most letters are written on—but it will have to do for now. Then I duck between two file cabinets and hold my breath.
“Hey,” one of the girls calls out. “Which one of you left the light on?”
I am sure I have been caught. But then, in a stroke of miraculous luck, she walks away, grumbling. I wait there, hunched in my hiding spot with a bookbag full of paper shreds, for what feels like hours as the girls mill about the mailroom. Once I hear all three of them chatting together, somewhere else deeper in the mailroom, I slip away. Then I run back to my room as fast as my ankle will allow.
A close one does not begin to describe what I just got away with. For a while I just slump to the ground and struggle to catch my breath. After I compose myself, I stand up to close the window. It will start getting hot without the cool breeze, but I cannot afford for the wind to whisk away what I went to such lengths to steal. Then I clear off my floor and dump out the contents of my bookbag.
The work is as long and dull and monotonous as a task could possibly be, but I am shaking with anxiety the whole time. The shredder has succeeded in its job of reducing paper into tiny, jagged confetti no more than an inch long and a quarter inch thick. At first glance, they are indistinguishable from each other. But there are small, delicate differences. Some are typed and others handwritten. Some are blue and others black ink. There is even some cardstock, which can be easily picked out because of its coarser texture. Some scraps are so mangled that they are illegible, or entirely blank on both sides, but I throw nothing away and simply set them aside. At first, I intend to sort the scraps by these categories, then try to piece together things in each category and find some consistencies, but very quickly I realize I can cut out that step altogether. Edgar’s handwriting is rather distinctive, even when shredded to quarter-inch strips; I recognize its sharp cursive slant from the memos I often deliver as a runner. And the scraps on which his writing is found are always on ruled paper.
This discovery speeds up the process by a miraculous degree. Instead of painstakingly turning over each scrap to find which side the text is printed off, I can simply scan either side for horizontal light blue lines. Once I have amassed a good amount, I do a quick pass through the lined scraps for any handwriting that might not be Edgar’s, but do not find any.
Now it is just a matter of aligning the scraps to each other. For this task, I move the scraps to my writing desk. It is like a very small and fragile puzzle, requiring the greatest precision—tweezers would be nice, or maybe a magnifying glass. I have neither of those at my disposal, so I just lean close and pinch the scraps between my fingernails. I am also acutely aware of my selection bias. If I am not careful, I could easily reorder Edgar’s letters into whatever I want them to say. I only match pieces with precisely the same pattern on their torn edges, and where the written script flows sensibly between scraps, so there are many holes and very few complete words. But by the time my eyes sting from the strain and my neck aches from bending over this puzzle, I have enough—just enough—to form part of a page.
My sweetest Imogen,
Everyday————————my darling dear
the ligh——f my lif— my on——rue love.
My princess,—orevermore.