Chapter Text
The funny thing about belonging to a family of marked distinction was that, by and large, it was characterized by a decisive willingness to do as one was told.
If anyone had cared to ask Ophelia what she remembered most poignantly of her life up to that point it would not have been lavish parties, extravagant belongings, overzealous spending, or extraordinary holidays in the summer. No, it would have been – very simply – following the rules. Always, and without question.
Ophelia’s family might have had wealth enough to do whatever they pleased, but more often than not the entirety of her family tree had been kept in check in by one simple sentiment: “This is the way that things are done.”
As a child, Ophelia had gone through a phase of particular intrigue with this family tree of theirs and, simultaneously, the gardeners that her family kept in their employ.
With then still chubby fingers, she had routinely traced the lines of the impressive genealogical tree painted onto their grand foyer walls, stark white otherwise outside the gold and blush accents that always caught her eye first.
She would spend her afternoons beneath the rotunda, showered with sunlight through glass ceiling. Her oxford shoes on porcelain checkerboard flooring. Her curls barely bound by a pink bow and pristine skirts swirling about her calves. Echoes of her youngest brother Hector’s footsteps on the curling stone staircase. Her elder sister Agatha tutting at her for eschewing embroidery lessons or hiding from their piano tutor. The cries of the triplets as they had first entered the world, fussy and foreign.
This had been her childhood, shaded by the height of those before her, surrounded by those of them who were to come, shadowed by the expectations put upon her.
This infatuation had lasted until she had lost the last of her baby teeth and then her baby fat. Eventually Ophelia had realized that she would never grow tall enough to touch their earliest ancestor at the topmost point of the mural — Eulalia Gonde, wed some two hundred years ago to a man by the name of Andras, and the plethora of children resulting from their union.
Eulalia Gonde, this precocious matriarch of theirs, had envisioned a different future for her family and had made it so. She had begun by procuring one historical artifact through equal measure dedication and luck. She had made something of herself with it, and then a sum total of hundreds more just like it by the end of her life.
Eulalia had been different, hadn’t she? But now, through generations of carefully planned intra-familial marriages, they had all become the same. More and more so with each Gonde generation.
Before Ophelia’s realization, she would stand on tiptoe, her hand outstretched to trail beneath Artemisa, their eldest daughter, and then follow the various branches all the way down, until Ophelia reached her mother and her father. And there at the bottom, resolute proof of her very existence, was Ophelia.
For as long as Ophelia had been alive, the estate’s landscaping was tended to every Sunday. And every Sunday Ophelia made a point of watching the work being done. Lawn mowed in perfect lines. Flowerbeds weeded and watered. Bushes and trees pruned.
Perhaps the first evidence of Ophelia’s deviation was her perpetual sorrow over those damned trees. She hated them trimmed into perfect squares, level over the top, and equilateral at the sides. She hated too that the family tree she had so loved, and that she belonged to, was much the same. Among the family that she did know, none of them had strayed from the status quo.
As twilight set on Sunday evenings, Ophelia would scurry barefoot into the gardens to search for shorn sprigs missed and left behind. She had never found any.
During free study, she would play at the picture perfect daughter by diving further into their family history, searching for someone alike her. She had never found anyone.
If she was the first, would they snip her away too? Tidy the proof of her aberrance? Wipe the slate of her existence?
She thought of the branches beneath her mother and father, less one. Everything within her withered at the idea.
Everything within her withered too at the idea of remaining forever in this perpetual shape, perfectly shorn, ever-unbloomed.
There had never been a question in anyone else’s mind as to Ophelia’s future. She would attend Citaceleste. She would deal in history and historical artifacts and historic properties and all else pertaining therein. She would be betrothed to someone of her family’s choosing. She would carry on the Gonde name as all before her had.
But there had been a question in Ophelia’s mind. Many, in fact. At every turn. Why? Why Citaceleste? Why history? Why must she be betrothed? Why, why, why?
Agatha was the perfect example of what a Gonde daughter should be. Agatha was elegant, the picture of poise, with auburn hair that always seemed to fall perfectly and height enough to make her lithe but not over-tall. Agatha loved pretty things. She loved artwork and playing piano and afternoon tea. She was smart enough to excel in her studies but not so smart as to be bookish and odd. She was clever at socializing - if a bit too overzealous, in Ophelia’s opinion. And she was thrilled with her prospective match for a husband. She had enjoyed her time at Citaceleste and had come home with a whole host of new, supposed friends and acquaintances to line the rows of her personal address book. She couldn’t wait to have children. She couldn’t wait to fulfill everything that was expected of her.
Ophelia left much to be desired on all of these fronts. She was clumsy and her tawny curls had never obeyed anyone a day in her life. She didn’t care much for pretty things – save perhaps mirrors of some particularly exceptional note. She found artwork less interesting than the story behind it. She hated playing piano, she always stepped on her partners toes at dance lessons, and she never managed to stand out in a crowded room, always fading to the background like white noise amongst a symphony of music. She was owlish behind her round-rimmed glasses and swotty in her inscrutable intellect, according to her mother. It wasn’t that Ophelia was particularly studious – only, she was dogged when in pursuit of something specific. And the answers she often sought were often only found within books.
In all of these ways, Ophelia had always known that she was different. Unacceptable and inadequate. But she had also expected that these differences wouldn’t ever amount to any different outcome. There was only one way that things were done, and she was beholden to it, whether she liked it or not.
Except, when Ophelia was presented with a different path, and she could only balk at it in abject horror.
“I- I don’t understand. We always marry amongst ourselves. I- why-” Ophelia had taken to her horrible stammering habit, as she was prone to in moments of particular distress - much to her mother’s perpetual chagrin.
“You needn’t understand, dear.”
And that was both the long and short of it. This was the way that things were done.
She would be married to a foreigner as part of a purportedly indispensable business deal. A much older man, from a family completely in juxtaposition to her own. She had heard plenty about them. She had heard about their dealings in the trading of crass, brutal things. Fur, gunpowder, and in all of the talk she had been privy to, in opium and secrets as well. They were brutal and ostentatious, and most shockingly of all, they were decidedly new money.
Silverware continued to clatter quietly, drinks were refilled by waitstaff, serviettes rustled over laps. Ophelia’s siblings all sat silently, looking at her with some mixture of either pity or confusion. Her father refused to meet her gaze altogether. The world was suddenly moving in slow motion, too calm while it fell apart around her.
“May I be excused?”
She was required to sit very still for the long, unnecessary moments of her mother’s consideration, her clammy palms pressing hard against the soft linen fabric of her skirt.
“Of course, dear.”
The rest of the evening was all a blur as she scuffled her chair away from the overlarge oak table and walked herself as far as the dining room door, whereafter she ran all the way to her room, locking herself in and crying herself to sleep for the first time in her whole life outside of infancy.
Thereafter, she had seen only a blurry photograph of her fiancé, a name and date scribbled in too-perfect cursive, but she had never met him and knew nothing of him, only his family. In the end, she decided it didn’t matter one bit. She was never going to know him and never going to meet him, because she wasn’t going to marry him.