Archive of Our Own ^beta

Cordelia had thought it would all be over when her mother suddenly wasn't there. She hadn't known any better, reaching hands, like wings, through the slats of bars toward a sky she could see but never reach. It was one more way of learning how sheltered—how ostracized—her mother had kept her all of her life. She still found herself anxious about her door being opened without warning. Or woke, sweating from nightmares where her mother had made her obedient forever for participating in what had happened. Sometimes, nothing could soothe away the certainty that she'd seen or heard Falada in the dark woods out of the corner of her eye.

Still, she was never less than grateful. Daily, in soft ways. Occasionally, at a fever pitch, for accidentally breaking a vase, ripping the hem of a dress during a walk—as though everything that had saved her might abandon her so easily, shatter to those same shards, snap against the weight of her (too hurt, too broken, too unnatural; too much Doom's daughter). While she could not miss the occasionally bewildered and helpless look in her direction from the Squire, Hester would harump (about the 'uselessness of men') and tell her it was no bother crying over spilled milk, that this was normal for children her age, growing into their arms and legs as geese did to their widening wingspans. (Not that Cordelia was crying; not that she cried still after those four and ten years.)

Though it had been more than once offered to still turn her out into society, Cordelia preferred the quiet and serenity of the Evermore Estate. Of stealing out across the land for long walks where she only needed to be back on time for dinner (and not because her being out of sight was suspiciously a secret in a world with none). She preferred Alice's gentle nudging in the morning and the evening, the soothing gentleness of her brush strokes, and her sharp, witty, accented advice. She preferred embroidery with Hester next to a fire, or trying not to smile as Lord Evermore smoothed Hester's feathers after she lost her tongue in a debate while Hester pretended she was still annoyed at him and that he might need to be sent packing for another decade (from his own house)—and they both knew she wasn't; wouldn't.

After the spareness of what her mother allowed her to have, no matter how much or how little they'd had while she was growing up, it was hard to feel comfortable with the easy way Hester and Richard were almost always instantly ready to support whatever she might need, or they, or Alice, might think would be suitable for her, or 'a girl her age.' At Christmas, that had been girl's day book, in the supple leather of her favorite color, with tooled twining vines around the edges. She'd been honored (and horrified), and she'd found it a twisted relief to write, in hard, angry letters finally, I HATE MY MOTHER, as she'd once so oft dreamed of doing. But it felt stale. Sour. When she put her fingers to the grooves her pen had dug, she found that it was not only hate she had for her mother still—which was even more confusing. So she started there with that, and first her first night, she ended with circling the line:

I don't know if I am happy, but I know I am closer to it than I've ever been before.

The first year blows away on the breeze, faster than anyone ever thinks it will with new guardians and new children and old loves, but their lives have all slotted together as though this is ever where they'd all meant to be. Dinners become a gregarious discussion between Lord Evermore, Hester, and Cordelia about her newest selected read and what she's learning from it. The Squire—serious, quiet Samuel; her step-father in marriage, in mourning—is there often; and Imogene comes to visit more than she had in years, adapted to the idea of helping Cordelia slowly rise from the shell of her harshly sequestered childhood. They are a merry band, even amid quiet, sparsely populated breakfasts and endless summer weeks that drag forever.

Cordelia doesn't miss it—the way the Squire's shoulders puff like a robin's breast, and even Hester stands a little straighter, eyes suspiciously blinking—the first time she calls them 'her family' to a merchant (without tripping, without looking back, without palpable anxiety) while torn between picking out a winter hat. She might have missed it if not for their shifts—they never could have.

The spring morning it happens, Cordelia wakes with a start in the dark. Confused. Muzzy. As though someone had just been calling her name. A whisper in her thoughts. Or on the night wind. The wind. But nary a bed curtain rustles, nor a step or voice sounds. Nothing of import happens until the afternoon when Richard comes back to the house, bearing the newest flock of goslings, several dozen little creeping, crawling, adventuresome little dears that Cordelia finds herself chasing after once he accidentally upends the basket in the house.

Her voice can be heard down the hallway as she spent the last hour before dinner coaxing the last three out from beneath the cabinet, murmuring soft words about how they'd much rather like a place of sunshine and breezes than these darkened corners. And miraculously, they listen, crawling out and all over her. Before the night is out, Hester dubs her ironically their newest 'Goosegirl' with feathers still in her hair and on her dress, her pride evident in Cordelia's love of them and longing to do her best by them, for them and the future.

Almost overnight, the goslings had adopted Cordelia as if she were their second mother, following her in an awkward, stumbling, skittering flock of fuzz and fluff. Hester took to training her about all that was needed when it came to raising a new herd of wild geese. It started simply, with feed and general instructions on what to make sure they were and weren't doing. How to note their health by their walking, swimming, and—as time passed—flying.

Cordelia bloomed in it, too, just like the hatchlings, shy and steady, across the stretching months of summer, and then fall. At first spooked by her once love for another animal who had betrayed her love and loyalty, then more and more certain, naming the geese as Hester never had and chasing after them with chiding and compliments. Taking long walks where they'd chosen to be on the grounds and sometimes eating her lunch in the easy solitude of their company. Growing into them, growing into herself—and, in that, without her knowing, out of someone else she should have never had to be.

At the end of her second year—and, as a whole, her sixteenth—it was decided that it was time to present Cordelia properly to the town. She was coming on seventeen shortly, and it was the proper time when these things were done, ma'am, Alice told her several times. Hester had been wise to bring it up months before the occasion, not as she'd told Samuel, for the choosing of dresses and locations, but for the slow turnout of Cordelia's adjustment to the first time they'd declared they'd do what Doom had held over her head so long as her only future.

Alice, Hester, and Imogene repeatedly reminded her that she did not have to go to her first ball in search of a husband—not even a potential beau. This first was just like those first steps getting her feet wet at the shore of the sea they'd taken her to. It was to meet others, especially other young ladies her age, and widen her social circle just a little bit. Hester had just the people in mind who might be the warm, kind, and welcoming types to a girl who had never been raised among them since birth.

The second year had fallen away into the third seemingly much the way of snowflakes—first one, and then another, and a third, and then the flurry of it all. Cordelia's first ball had come and gone. Then a theatre performance with Hester and Richard. Cards were exchanged, and Cordelia was invited to afternoon teas and sewing circles on settees—all of which she was very quiet through, and in that, a bit of a wallflower, but Hester had that if the young Society Girls of her time were anything like Cordelia's more than half of them were ninny's with less than a pin or a penny to their brain.

No one had expected the way Cordelia drew certain people to her across the season—a ward girl from the far North with dark, haunted eyes who had recently lost her grandmother, distrustful of strangers and rounded savagely on a dance-caller with a butter knife when he'd come up too suddenly behind her without her seeing him first. Another, blonde and blue-eyed, who had commented just a little too tellingly on the set of table runners ruined beyond washing's manage, even while she stood there in silver with the fanciest glass slippers anyone had ever seen.

She collects them almost like goslings—their Goose-Girl, their child who wasn't her mother's child—a true sorceress born—but she's still something more. Safety emanates from her and quiet bravery, and she hands it out to these girls on unscarred but still trembling fingers. (A third girl with a golden ball that appeared near her no matter where she went by summer). In turn, they give her something else more precious than gold and more important than can be bought: affection, friendship. A circle that strengthened each other around and around.

In the second summer since the geese had stayed, Cordelia experienced her first goodbyes to the young flock of her no long quite so young geese. Wild bred, wild kept, and yet trained to throw good lines, to be good defenders, once more harkening into whispers among the rich about how they are good luck to keep in as guards against prowling strangers and unwanted house guests as much as magic.

Hadn't you heard, they whispered behind gloved hands and fans—about the piper a town over who had almost stolen a child into the street beyond their house gate by distracting the little dear with their playing until the guard goose of the house bit him in an unmentionable location?

That was where they sold the first few off in the spring, and now everyone positively had to have them.

Cordelia loved them fiercely and excelled at being their caretaker. She was an avid learner when it came to bloodlines, to managing through her first culling (more level-headed and hardy-hearted than had been expected, though she begged any of her first brood wouldn't be on their table at least as a meal). It would become even easier as the years went on, as she handled the lame and the strong as she learned how to love them in flight and let them go when it was time (no matter which path that required for each).

The fall of her seventeenth—almost eighteenth—year it happened. All of the adults watched with bemused expressions as their once ungainly foal suddenly refound what it was to be one all over again in the eyes of an earnest young man. He was the second youngest of a family of five; a good succession placement, said Hester, as he would choose neither for the family's breeding or banking line, as the eldest brother must, nor for the sake of showing off, as the youngest would undoubtedly do in a few years, needing to make a splash as the last. The Squire applauded him a neat enough hunter for one so young; not perfect at it, but no slouch in the saddle, certainly not with so many brothers to train him upright.

Hester had watched like a hawk, while Cordelia would only flush and stutter that she didn't understand the fuss. It was only that he had very kind eyes and a very soft voice, and he had apologized the first time he'd taken her hand unexpectedly, and she'd startled back, shoulders up. To that end, even more surprising was how he asked, calm and earnest, whether he could take her hand every time after that. That he never minded and never stopped asking first, even though she hadn't said no in weeks.

When their third Christmas came, Cordelia was asked if she would like her young Gentlemen to join them for a Christmas-After-Day Meal at the Squire's when the Strauss' would be over. She'd blushed and murmured if no one minded, and it had been settled. The men had gone out riding in the morning, and the dinner had been even nicer than the previous night's small family Christmas. There had been tea and desserts in the Blue Sitting Room for the women and brandy with cigars for the men in The Squire's Study, and they had all joined together to exchange small tokens afterward.

"He will make a good first True Love for our young friend here," Imogene declared, doling out cards after Cordelia had returned from seeing him off at the door, with Willard to oversee their private—but not too private—parting. Cordelia had blinked owlishly and shifted, curling in a little, saying, "I don't—he isn't—" and Imogene had "Tush-Tush"ed her. Still, Cordelia had been adamant, blinking and swallowing before she managed:

"He can't be my true love," she started nervously, biting at her lip and looking at her teacup. "I want to be my own true love, and it's okay if someone decides to love me—not that I'm saying he's said he—oh, dear, I'm knotting this up." Cordelia took another breath in, no one rushing her. "I hadn't had the chance to choose myself until coming here, staying here, and I would very much like to not—not—stop doing that. Whether I'm—um—married to someone and elsewhere, or I live here, or Evermore, a long time without that."

"Like Hester," she said with one brave little glance from her cup to the older woman.

And Hester thought she could not have been any prouder—or been handed any better present—if the girl were her own flesh and blood child, and Richard, understanding without a word, as always, squeezed her hand back gently before she realized she'd been squeezing his hand at all. (There were not, if anyone were to accuse it so, tears in her eyes as she did so. It was winter, and it did pain her knee ever so much when it was winter.)