The Coming of Spring
She was seeing everything new, this winter, as if the cold wind had scoured away the encrusted bitterness of twenty-five years. The sea glittered; the stones shone with frost; and her child would be born in the spring. All her spare moments were spent in sewing tiny gowns and shoes, sheets and quilts, defying even aunt Margot, who protested the excess.
"But you have baby's things already, laid away."
"I want it to have new," Marguerite said simply.
Of course there were things in storage, opulent stuff, worn by every Blanchard heir in his cradle, "But this is not a Blanchard," and Marguerite marvelled at how little it pained her to say it. She who clung so desperately to tradition, who stood so unmovingly on ceremony -- the thought of her baby's name, different from her own and her father's and her grandfather's, gave her no more than a moment's pang.
She had gone over names endlessly with Geoffrey, in letters and in his brief visits, sifting through every ancestor of hers and his and every friend and patron who might be honored.
"We ought to call him Geoffrey."
"Gods, darling. You wouldn't name a poor innocent after me, would you?"
"I like Geoffrey. But then I don't know what we should call him. And then it might be a girl--"
"Marguerite," he said, teasing her.
"Oh no! Not with aunt Margot and me already. A girl must be Cassilde."
"Why Cassilde?"
"It's the way we do things..."
"Cassilde this-that-and-the-other, I suppose."
"Cassilde Noemie," she said. "For your mother."
And he had gone quiet.
* * * * *
All her life she had hated this castle that had been her father's; hated its cold grey walls and its heavy doors, the dusty, antique hangings and the furniture in which no one was comfortable. But now it was hers and Geoffrey's, and Geoffrey insisted that it must be theirs. To which end he had no qualms about knocking out the odd wall, getting the roof mended at last, and bringing in all manner of new furnishings, selling off or giving away the old.
"O Gods. That was my great-great-grandmother's..."
"And I'll bet she hated the sight of it too."
What had once been her mother's private sitting room had been stripped to the bare walls, scoured, aired, and opened up to a broad balcony she had never even known was there. They had draped the walls in pale pink silk, brought in rosewood tables and cushioned divans, and made of it a bower that bore no trace of cold Estelle, that was Marguerite's alone. She sat there of an afternoon, alone or with her ladies, stitching Vetheuil lace to the edge of a silken bonnet, and thought of the fragrant things that could be grown on a seaward balcony come the spring.
"You could make a garden here, couldn't you, darling?"
"Not here. The exposure..."
"So we throw up a wall. There's no reason not to."
There was, she realized with bewilderment, no reason not to do any number of things; and she saw stony Ghaistwynn blossoming almost before her eyes.
"Really a wonderful old place. Here -- you can't look at those windows and tell me it's gloomy in here."
"Not now," she admitted.
The windows, unhindered by ponderous thirty-ninth-century sideboards, cast spears of light across the length of the floor, and gave to what had once been a dining hall the sober glory of a cathedral. The stairs, decently cleaned for the first time in a decade and lined with bright candlestands, glowed at night instead of glowering. Her own childhood rooms, once the massive bedroom door was taken off its hinges and replaced with a curtain of brocade, made a remarkably welcoming guest suite.
"Why, I should like sleeping here!"
And he had laughed. "That's the idea."
* * * * *
An end and a beginning. Marguerite mourned a little the passing of the Blanchard tradition; the elegant old names, the handed-down legends that had endured for centuries.
And yet they had not been so very admirable. For all their lamentably plebeian name and origin, she liked what Geoffrey had told her of his father's people; and his mother's, while foreign, were indisputably upstanding. She was glad to embrace them, putting her own behind her.
A new name, a new layette, a new home; and for the first time that she could remember, Marguerite was at peace.