Chapter Text
Ellis had always known that he was different from the moment that his mother first put a dress on him. It was constricting, not freeing, and right away he had hated it. His mother would sigh and shake her head when he wailed about it, running outside to get the dress as dirty as possible by playing with the neighbors son, Joseph. Eventually she gave up and got him a pair of trousers and a white linen shirt, which delighted him immensely. He finally felt free.
For a while the servants whispered about the feral girl child that would run around the grounds in muddy shoes and boys clothes, chasing chickens and scooping up wildflowers for her mother. He was really too young to realize what he was, but it all came crashing down on him after his mother fell ill. She tried her best to get better, followed the instructions of the doctors that his father brought in, and dutifully prayed with him every night while his father argued with those same doctors just down the hall.
On her last night she gripped his hand, she was so weak, so pale. She focused on him with murky eyes, her straw blonde hair, which had become brittle and less vibrant as her illness had progressed, clung to her forehead. The last words she ever spoke to him were simply this, “If you had been a boy, we would have named you Ellis.” Then her hand went limp and he screamed for his father, who came running inside, but it was too late.
She was gone.
He remembered standing dutifully by her grave in an itchy black dress holding his father’s hand, her last words still echoing in his mind. “Ellis.” He whispered to himself once everyone else had gone, including his father, who had patted him on the head and went inside the house. He liked Ellis.
The next few years were full of him sneaking to Josephs house to watch his father try to tame wild horses, learning to make his own boys clothes, and learning to play cards with his father over dinner. His father didn’t seem to mind his boys clothes, he simply chuckled and patted him on the head as he always did when he wasn’t quite sure what to say. Things changed however, when he turned 13. His father came home beaming, almost giddy, and grabbed his hands and crouched down to his level to explain that he had met a woman in the next kingdom over, and that he planned to marry her.
Ellis nodded and encouraged it, after all he had seen what his mother’s death had done to him, how for awhile after she’d died that he’d avoided their room all together and slept in the guest room until the ache wasn’t as prominent. He only had one request of him, that he dress up “like a lady” to greet her. That she was proper and that his boys clothes simply wouldn’t do. It put a sour taste in his mouth but he forced a smile and nodded, he’d do anything for his father.
He stood in front of the house with his father on his right and the servants on the left. He was wearing a beautiful blue dress with swirling pink flowers on the skirt, a powder pink ribbon keeping his mop of golden hair out of his face. His father’s hand was on his shoulder and he tried hard not to stare down at his stockinged feet and shiny black shoes as a large carriage rolled up. Two gray horse stomped and stamped as his father stepped forward and opened the side door, reaching out his hand. From the darkness of the carriage a pale hand came out and took his, and a heeled foot stepped out onto the ground. His stepmother was tall, certainly taller than mother had been, with high cheek bones and black hair she kept pinned out of her face.
She looked down at him, her eyes dark and calculating, before reaching out a hand to shake his. He shook it lightly and she sniffed “I expected a stronger grip.”
From behind her there were the sounds of giggling and arguing, and two girls around his age stumbled out. They each had brown hair and their mother’s dark eyes, and one was holding a fluffy gray cat. They eyed him too, one of them whispering to the other which made her cackle with glee. “Girls!” Their mother said “Control yourself.” They straightened up immediately then they all brushed past him to get inside the house. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of them yet.
For the first week they were married she made the house lively with parties and afternoon teas, laughing the sort of laugh you would expect from a lady of much higher standing, and never without her crimson lip. He kept his boy clothes hidden away in a chest in his room, wearing the dresses that she provided for him even though they were puffy and full of ribbons. Sometimes, during the parties she hosted late at night, he would change into his trousers and linen shirt and climb down the swirling vines on the side of the house to run off into the glen, wandering in the tall grass and catching fire flies until the sun just barely began to creep over the trees.
The end of the second week was when disaster struck.
His father was leaving again and while his step sisters prattled about wanting lace and parasols and all kinds of things he sighed and nodded, writing them down on a piece of parchment. Once they were done he turned to him with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Is there anything you want Ella?”
He thought about it for a minute before answering “Bring me back the first branch that brushes over your shoulder when you leave.” His step sisters giggled at the request and even his stepmother seemed to roll her eyes but his father? His smile became more genuine and he leaned down to kiss his forehead. He ran down the road, ignoring the dust that got on his skirts, waving goodbye to him as he rode away. He stopped at the end of the road, breathless, hair in his face. He hoped that he would be back soon. He always missed him when he was gone.
They got the news two days later, there’d been a robbery on the road, his father had tried to defend a business partner and gotten shot. It was their neighbor, Joseph’s father, who told them. His voice was soft but stern, though his eyes swam with unshed tears for his dear friend. He had two things to give to them, a squashed box that contained delicate lace that his step sisters fussed over and whined about when they dug around and didn’t find parasols, and a branch which Ellis held in his hands and stared at until his stepmother told him to throw the dirty thing outside. He tucked it away behind the chicken coop.
After that his life changed.
The first change was watching the servants leave, dismissed by his stepmother because she claimed that they no longer had the funds to keep them on, though, privately, Ellis wondered what price one of the gaudy necklaces with the shining jewels that he’d seen his stepmother wear would fetch at the market. Surely enough to pay the servants through the month? He kept these musing to himself, hoping that by appearing to be the silent dutiful stepdaughter that his stepmother would simply leave him be. He was wrong.
She demanded that he give up the room that he’d had since infancy, the one with the green wallpaper and painted dragonflies dancing along the ceiling, because his step sisters needed a bigger space then the room they were sharing currently. When he asked where he’d be moved to she said the attic, as it would keep him away from all of their “noise.”
He had one hour to pick what he would take with him to the attic, with the understanding that what he didn’t take would go to his sisters. He stood in the middle of the room for a few minutes, staring at the bed his father had sat at the end of to tell him goodnight, the window where his mother had ushered him over to look, in awe, at a butterfly that had landed on the glass, the floor where he used to stack wooden blocks for giggling maids. In the end he only carried out three things.
The small wooden chest by his bed, the stuffed rabbit his mother had made for him, and his coveted book of fairy stories. He carried these things up the creaking stairs to the attic, which was wide and dusty and full of what his step mother had deemed “junk,” which were mostly his mother’s old things. He set his items down and dragged over an old green settee from the corner to sleep on, tossing a throw blanket over it. He laid there that night, hands folded on his chest, mice scampering around him, the sound of his step sisters footsteps running below, the ceiling creaking above him and wondered, idly, what his mother would’ve had to say about this situation.