Mine could have been a childhood without sorrow, one where I lacked for nothing, but fate had a different plan. I was born under a velvet canopy on my father’s estate, passed down over generations, which like my family itself bore the name Three Roses. The grounds were far from the city, overseen by a long line of fathers and sons with little interest in politics and who were therefore viewed as harmless by the outside world. The soil yielded good harvests and my father took good care of his tenants, wise enough to realize how much the appreciation of his subordinates benefited his affairs.
I came into this life seven years after my brother, Jonas, my only sibling. My mother, accustomed to the bustle and flair of the city and bored by her staid country life, had again begun to long for a baby. She was advanced in age and the risks were considerable, but my mother was a brave woman who knew her own mind. My birth was preceded by more than one miscarriage, which my mother took very hard. In order to taunt me, my brother related a private conversation on which he had eavesdropped, in which an elderly physician she consulted tried to dissuade my mother from bearing another child at her age, which he had previously assumed had already robbed her womb of fruitfulness. He offered her a variety of methods to end her pregnancy. She gave a derisive laugh and told him to go to hell. And when I arrived, some three weeks later than expected, it was at the cost of her life. Only once did I feel the warmth of a mother’s embrace, and of that moment I have no memory. Her arms grew cold around me.
The unfortunate circumstances of my birth indelibly marked the relationship between me and my father. He was at peace with the heir he already had, felt too old to raise an infant, and I assume that the sight of me was a constant reminder to him of how he had been robbed of the wife with whom he had planned to gild his ailing years. Perhaps he felt particularly shortchanged since I soon proved to be poorly suited for any of the skills he most valued. I never comfortably sat on horseback, I missed the easiest shots when hunting, the foil slipped from my hand as soon as it crossed my opponent’s steel, and my constitution often brought me down with a fever or cough that prevented my participation even when the will was there.
I was increasingly left in the care of my tutors, and when the day became a long line of duties and frustrations, I made the night my own. While the house slept, I left my bed. My mother’s portrait hung above the stairs, and it was said that we looked alike. Many times, I carefully pulled a stool across the floor in order to lift down the heavy mirror and place it under her portrait in order to more clearly see her face in mine, moving the low flame of the candle back and forth to allow the light to caress every likeness between us: the line of a chin, the roundness of a cheek, the curve of an eyebrow.
I had not yet turned eleven when my brother left us to begin his military career. My father took the loss of his companionship hard. They were close, and the time that my father had left after taking care of his business affairs, they had spent together either hunting or riding, or in marksmanship—all activities from which I was excluded on account of my age and incompetence. I don’t think I ever saw him smile again, except during one of my brother’s visits. On those occasions when we could not avoid each other’s company, I sensed in him a simmering rage at the hand he had been dealt. I went to great lengths to avoid meeting him in the hallways of Three Roses, and increasingly regarded him with fear. He began to seek his comfort in the wine cellar. From time to time he performed his fatherly duty by disciplining me when I had broken one of the rules of the house, and for a few days after the beating he could be milder than usual. For my part, I shed bitter tears, more from indignation than pain, and withdrew still further.
At Easter that year, my father invited friends, acquaintances, and the more well-to-do of the tenants on our estate to a feast, the first large celebration in years. During the preparations, I noticed for the first time in a long while a degree of enthusiasm in my father, but soon we received the message that Jonas’s regiment could not spare him, and the spark that had been lit in my father’s eyes was immediately extinguished. He likely wanted to cancel the whole thing, but the invitations had already gone out. During the festivities, he had soon drunk too much and the melancholy that grew with each glass of wine spread inexorably to the rest of the party.
Towards evening, dinner was served, the place beside my father left empty in memory of my mother. When I glanced towards him from a few seats down the table, I saw how a flush had begun to spread across his face and heard his speech becoming slurred. He rose unsteadily to give a toast to my mother, tears running down his beard. In the solemn silence that followed, I reached for my glass from the monogrammed service my mother had brought as part of her dowry and that was so rarely used, but misjudged the distance and knocked it over so the stem snapped. I grew quickly at that age and had had trouble judging the length of my arms and legs. My clumsiness was a source of irritation for my father, and I saw how his grief now transmuted into rage. Before I knew it, he was lifting me by the collar and delivering a barrage of blows. As soon as some guests who had jumped up were able to free me from his grasp, I ran sobbing from the room, curling up behind a bank of snow piled up on the colonnade, and made myself small and invisible when the servants came to look for me.
I lay there for a long time, crying, until I felt the presence of another. When I lifted my head, it was a girl, as pale as the snow and with hair as red as embers shining on a copper kettle. She stood calmly in the snow, which was starting to fall more heavily now, as if unaffected by the cold, although she had not bothered to wrap anything around her simple cotton dress. Without saying anything, she lifted her hand and I saw that she was carrying a glass exactly like the one I had broken. She held my gaze as she dropped it straight down on the flagstones, where the shards were lost among the fallen icicles. Such was our first meeting.
That celebration was the last event when my father managed to show even a glimmer of happiness. He allowed himself to sink ever deeper into melancholy.