Chapter 1. Marilyn

It was an era when boys barely past double digits were sent off to war and girls were sold to brothels. Children disappeared from the village one by one, and even as our family went hungry more often than not, my parents refused to send me away as a servant in some wealthy household. They kept me close, no matter what.

Summer and autumn were manageable enough, but winter always made putting food on the table feel impossible. During the hours my parents went out searching for any kind of work, I’d wander the barren, dried-out fields looking for fallen grain. One day, while walking with my eyes fixed on the ground, a large shadow fell across my vision.

“Where are you off to, little one?”

A well-fed-looking stranger spoke to me warmly. She wasn’t anyone from the village. Adults ground down by poverty rarely had any kindness to spare for useless children, and outside of my parents’ mouths, I’d never once heard myself called little one. Being called by my name was already a luxury. Usually I got golden-haired brat or girl.

That unfamiliar warmth put me on guard immediately.

“Home.”

“Where’s home? What’s your name?”

“Marilyn.”

“Marilyn! What a pretty name to match such a pretty face. How old are you?”

The relentless questions made my anxiety spike. Something felt wrong, like I shouldn’t stay a moment longer, but I couldn’t figure out what to do or how to move.

The woman must have caught the unease on my face, because she quickly pulled a few dried biscuits from her pocket and held them out. Even from several steps away, the rich, sweet smell hit me hard. The moment that scent reached my nose, my starving stomach took over from my brain. The woman holding those biscuits instantly became someone I desperately needed to impress.

She didn’t miss her chance. She coaxed me along in a soft voice, whispering that if I came with her, I could eat white bread, bacon, milk, every food I knew, until I was completely full.

If I’d been four or five years older, I would’ve known that kindness without a price doesn’t exist. But I was only twelve then, a fool who believed being full and happy was simply what people deserved, and that my current misery was a terrible injustice. Her words sounded like she was offering to give me back the happiness I was owed.

I would’ve grabbed her hand and followed her on the spot, if my father hadn’t appeared and chased her off with a string of curses.

After spitting in the direction the woman had gone, my father tucked me roughly under his arm and walked home at a fast clip. His body and breath were hot against me, but young as I was, I had no way of knowing whether that heat came from the fury of nearly losing his child forever, so I just felt miserable.

The bare trees blurring past my vision wavered, and something hot ran down my cheeks too. I cried because my father was angry, and I cried because my hunger had gone past pain and become something else entirely.

“Don’t cry, Marilyn.”

When I cried like that, my parents would spoon a few mouthfuls of thin porridge into my mouth to soothe me. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. You’ll only get hungrier. My father, back to being gentle, told me not to cry with a face that was itself on the verge of tears. I thought that was a little funny, so I broke into a goofy grin, and my mother pulled me into her arms and pressed her lips to the side of my head. The sigh of a voice against my ear was damp.

“Did you want a biscuit?”

“Yeah. The lady showed me some. They looked like they had molasses in them……”

“What else do you want to eat?”

At my mother’s question, everything I’d ever tasted tumbled out of my mouth: sausage, bacon, mince pie, honeyed milk, fish stuffed with herbs and roasted. Anything that wasn’t potatoes or thin grain porridge, I wanted, and every food I knew came pouring out. With each one, my mother’s face grew darker.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The apologies rang in my ears, though I didn’t quite understand what they were for, so I just kept shaking my head.

That night, the three of us slept curled tightly around each other. I was still hungry, but it didn’t feel sad. Nights like that passed, spring filled in what winter had torn away, and I grew a little older.

***

When I turned fourteen, I learned that the war making life so brutal was a civil war. Until then, war had meant monsters crawling out of some dark pit far away while gallant knights held them back, so the truth came as quite a shock.

Why would people who ought to be tilling fields point swords at each other? Splitting open a living person’s belly wouldn’t make bread and wine come out…… I kept turning it over in my mind while pulling weeds, but I couldn’t make sense of it, the same way I couldn’t understand how weeds I’d spent all day pulling would be back in full force the next morning like nothing had happened.

Fortunately, the civil war was said to be winding down. No wonder things had felt livable lately……

Living in the most remote corner of the countryside, that’s about as much as we felt of the war. Harvests we’d broken our backs over all season long stopped being stripped away as completely as before. Young men who’d left carrying weapons instead of farming tools started coming back. We stopped going to bed hungry, wore reasonably clean clothes, and found moments during the day to look at each other’s faces and smile.

It was around that time that I got called to the stone manor by the lake, the only decent building in the village besides the church, to serve as a companion to the young lady.

There was no grand reason I was chosen. I was relatively clean, from a respectable family, had a gentle temperament, and was close to her age. The fact that there wasn’t a single family of any standing anywhere nearby probably counted for something too.

It wasn’t that I was especially lucky. Several children from the village, boys and girls alike, had already been called up as the lady’s companion before me. But for some reason, a new one kept cycling through every week or so, whether they quit or got dismissed.

In any case, I scrubbed my hair and body in a hurry to match the lady’s impatient temperament, then put on the clothes I’d borrowed in advance. My own clothes had been worn so long they’d gone short, so my mother had found me a set that belonged to a boy. Specifically, the previous companion, Alex.

Alex and his parents had apparently gone all out and bought him a decent new outfit, but he’d come out of the manor crying after only two days. The clothes he’d never wear again, my mother bought for a bargain. My hair had recently been cut very short to prevent the head lice going around among the children, and with Alex’s clothes on top of that, I looked unmistakably like a boy, which stung a little.

Whatever I felt about it, my mother talked nonstop while getting me ready, worried I’d make some foolish mistake once I was there. She covered everything she could think of.

The most repeated piece of advice was to keep my mouth shut, which I privately thought was useless. From the moment I’d heard I’d been chosen as the lady’s companion, I’d been so nervous I hadn’t managed a single word anyway.

The person who came to fetch me was a middle-aged servant with a stern face. He loaded me onto a cart hitched to a donkey and told me today was the first day so he’d take me, but from here on I’d have to walk. The warning didn’t worry me much. The well-kept road lined with poplar trees led nowhere but the lake manor. I lay back in the cart and watched the light breaking through the leaves.

In the warm air, birds called to each other somewhere in the distance, and the leaves gleamed yellow in the sun. I watched the sky in fragments between the leaves, squinting when the light got too bright, opening my eyes again when a passing cloud cast shade. My blinking grew slower and slower, and with the creak of the wheels keeping time with the donkey’s plodding steps as a lullaby, I drifted off.

“Do you think you’re going to a friend’s house? How did you manage to fall asleep already?”

The servant sounded exasperated, but the hands that lifted me down from the cart weren’t rough. Even so, I jolted wide awake, because the sheer scale of the stone manor in front of me was overwhelming.

Everything in sight was enormous. The building, constructed in a grey that nearly passed for white, had windows as wide as my entire body. The columns holding up the top-floor terrace were so thick that even as a grown adult, throwing my arms around one, my hands would never meet. The carved statues of saints decorating the tops of the columns wore serene expressions, but their sheer size and the way they looked down from above created a quiet, pressing weight.