Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo

refused to take it up. I guess Princess Sabine had a better ring to it than Princess Sharon. She expected her prince to arrive one day on a white stallion and star in her very own once-upon-a-time.
    She was often to be found standing in the doorway looking out for him.
    “Shall I pack your bags?” I’d say in passing, and then, once out of reach, I’d sing,
    Lavender blue, diddle daddle
    Lavender green,
    When he is king, diddle daddle
    You shan’t be queen.
    Like the nearest she’d get to royalty would be as maid-of all-work to Percy.
    Our Madge looked out for all of us, even Pa. One time at table, after he’d thrown up in the parlor after another of his “just the one pint” Friday nights out with “the lads,” she told him sharply, “You and I are going to have words-in private.”
    Such talk from a child to an adult was unheard of, as it was from a woman to a man. I couldn’ t believe her cheek and neither could he because he just nodded meekly. That was the day we realized she’d soon be an adult, a formidable one at that. As firstborn, Madge had no competition for four years, which should have turned her into a monster when baby Sharon came along, but she worshipped her little sister.
    She was known for the twinkle in her eyes, which never dulled even when she was exhausted from shearing sheep, or when I told her she’d likely end up an old spinster spending her days at a spinning wheel if she didn’ t go to the summer fayre on the estate and find herself a young fellow. Mam and Pa said they couldn’t afford a dowry, but the truth was they’d never let her go.
    I tried to get Madge’s twinkle into my own eyes, spending hours practicing in front of the looking glass, but it worked only if I slapped my cheek so hard it made me cry.
    No one had to tell Madge she’d have to take over running the house if Mam passed on. She never looked wistfully at the horizon or wore garlands in her hair, but spoke of “duty” and “responsibility” and being part of “God’s greater plan.”
    When I ranked them on a scale of one to ten for perfection, Madge was a nine and a half. I gave myself an eight. Sharon was a four and Alice got a one and three-quarters.
    Now, Mam was tall for a woman but she’d had the pox as a kid, which explained why she was often “a bit under the weather.” Her skin was pale and clung softly to her like the crepe de chine Mrs. Katharine Holme, the seamstress at Duddingley, made into gowns for the ladies “up there.” Mam wafted around slowly so that her movements flowed into each other with no beginning and no end-like a dance. I’d try to imitate her too, but my movements always ended abruptly.
    Everyone said the word for it was clumsy.
    Her hair was dead straight and hung to her waist like mine. It was what they called strawberry blonde (Strawberry? Blonde? Never did work that one out) and going prematurely gray underneath her starched linen bonnet.
    When Pa was out, we’d be sitting around embroidering a tablecloth for market and Mam’d tell us how one summer’ s evening after a day’s harvesting when she was marching impatiently toward womanhood, Lord Perceval Montague (she always used his full name) came up behind her on Lower Lane. The meadows were “bathed in summer’ golden glow” and as he drew aside she felt him rest a palm in the scoop of her back and his steamy breath whispered onto her neck that she’d become “a winsome lass” and had “a natural grace.”
    Mam said she felt “the butterflies” for the first and last time in her life, that her “spine tingled,” that she could have stayed and swum in his “come-hither eyes” forever, except that her grumpy, widowed father, Bob Woulbarowe, tugging their cow up ahead and cursing it, suddenly turned around and called her to heel, even though it could have got him into serious trouble with His Lordship.
    Granpa Woulbarowe kept her hidden inside their peat hovel in the wind-blown wilds for three months