The estate had thirteen peacocks. Isabella knew because she'd counted them one afternoon when she was supposed to be practicing needlepoint with Eleanor. One of them screamed now from somewhere in the gardens, and she flinched at her desk, smudging the letter she was writing to no one in particular.
She wasn't sure why she kept writing letters she'd never send. Her grandmother said it was good practice. Her father said it showed she had a contemplative nature. The Countess—well. The Countess had opinions about everything Isabella did, and none of them were good.
The von Artenberg estate sprawled across three hundred acres of hill country, all ivy-choked walls and towers that belonged in a fairy tale. Isabella's mother had apparently said it looked like something from a storybook, back when she was alive to say things. Isabella didn't remember her. She'd died when Isabella was three, which seemed impossibly young to lose someone, though not young enough to escape the consequences of having been born at all.
Edward found her in the garden on a Thursday. She was ten. He was twelve, already tall and serious in a way that made adults nod approvingly. Isabella was arranging roses, the last good ones before frost came into a pattern that pleased her for reasons she couldn't articulate.
"You're out here again." Not a question. Edward didn't ask questions when he already knew the answers.
Isabella kept her eyes on the roses. Red, white, pink. She was trying to make a spiral. "Father said I could."
"He says a lot of things."
She looked up at that. Edward's face was doing something complicated, like he was working out a mathematics problem that irritated him. His eyes were green, like their father's. Isabella's were brown, like her mother's, like her grandmother's, like no one else in the main house.
"Mother doesn't want you playing with us." Eleanor, nine years old and already fluent in other people's rules, appeared from behind the hedgerow. Her curls bounced when she ran, golden and perfect. "She said."
"I'm not playing with you." Isabella heard how small her voice came out. "I'm just here."
"That's the problem," Edward muttered, but Eleanor was already tugging him away, back toward the house where Isabella wasn't quite forbidden but wasn't quite welcome either.
The roses looked garish suddenly, arranged in their careful spiral. Isabella scattered them with one hand and went to find her grandmother.
Her grandmother lived in the cottage at the edge of the property, far enough from the main house that the Countess could pretend she didn't exist. The cottage smelled like dried herbs and wood smoke and bread that was slightly burnt because her grandmother's eyesight wasn't what it used to be.
"Bella." Her grandmother didn't look up from the mortar and pestle. "You're early."
"Eleanor said—" Isabella stopped. Her grandmother had very specific opinions about Eleanor, none of which she voiced but all of which lived in the particular way she pressed her lips together.
"Eleanor says many things, so does her mother. Here." She pushed the mortar toward Isabella. "Grind this. Circular motions, steady pressure. Don't think about whatever you're thinking about."
Isabella ground the herbs. Rosemary and something else she didn't recognize yet. The rhythm helped. Her grandmother was right, she usually was and by the time the herbs were powder, Isabella's chest didn't hurt quite so much.
"Your mother," her grandmother said, apropos of nothing, "was terrible at grinding herbs too impatient. She'd go at it like she was attacking it."
Isabella's hands stilled. Her grandmother rarely mentioned her mother without prompting. "What else was she bad at?"
"Embroidery, lying, pretending not to love your father." Her grandmother took the mortar back, examined the powder, nodded.
"What she was good at really good at was knowing which plants would ease a fever and she made excellent bread, when she wasn't busy making terrible decisions about aristocrats."
"Grandmother."
"What? It's true. Love makes fools of us all, but some kinds of love make bigger fools than others." She started dividing the powder into small cloth pouches.
"Your mother knew what she was doing, falling for a man like that. Knew what it would cost her, did it anyway."
Isabella watched her grandmother's gnarled hands work.
"Do you think she regretted it?"
"You?" Her grandmother's head snapped up. "No, never you. Everything else, maybe, but not you."
The main house operated on rules Isabella learned through trial and error, mostly error. Dinner was at seven. She was expected to attend but not to speak unless spoken to. The Countess sat at one end of the table, her father at the other, and Isabella sat in the middle where she could feel the weight of the Countess's stare like a physical thing.
"You're slouching." The Countess's voice could cut glass.
Isabella straightened. She was fourteen now, old enough to know better, young enough to still make mistakes.
"And that dress is entirely inappropriate for the table. You look like a servant."
It was one of her nicer dresses. Isabella had picked it specifically because it had minimal trim and the Countess had once said though not to her that she preferred simplicity. There was no winning.
"Darling." Her father's voice was quiet. He was looking at his soup like it held the secrets of the universe. "Perhaps—"
"Perhaps what, Thomas? Perhaps we should simply allow your bastard to parade around as though she belongs here? To sit at this table as though she has any right?"
William snorted into his wine. He was sixteen and found most things amusing, especially when they weren't meant to be. Edward stared at his plate with the intensity of someone trying to be anywhere else. Eleanor examined her fingernails.
Isabella focused on her soup. Asparagus. She hated asparagus.
"She is still my daughter," her father said, but his voice had no spine to it. It never did, not when it mattered.
"That is precisely the problem."
Isabella excused herself before dessert. No one objected. In her room small, tucked away in a corner of the east wing where important guests wouldn't stumble upon her she wrote another letter to nobody.
Dear Mother,
Grandmother says you were bad at lying. I think I inherited that. Also your eyes and your hands and probably your talent for making terrible decisions, though I haven't had much chance to prove that last one yet.
The Countess called me a bastard at dinner again. Father did his usual thing where he says something weak and then gives up. I don't blame him. She's terrifying. You must have been very brave or very stupid to love him. Grandmother says both.
I'm learning about fevers now. How to break them, I mean. Willow bark and cool compresses and knowing when someone's just hot versus when they're in actual danger. It's nice, having something I'm good at. Something that's mine.
The roses are dead now. It's October. Everything's dead.
I wish I remembered you.
—Bella
By sixteen, Isabella spent most of her time at the cottage. Her grandmother taught her about compounds and poultices, about which mushrooms would kill you and which would cure you and how the difference was sometimes just a matter of dosage. She learned to set bones, though they'd only practiced on a chicken once when it broke its leg and her grandmother said waste not, want not.
"You have a feel for this," her grandmother said one afternoon. They were making a salve for burns. The head cook had gotten too close to the stove again. "Your mother had it too, though she never got the chance to develop it properly."
"Because of Father."
"Because of the world. Your father was just the mechanism." Her grandmother's hands moved steadily, mixing beeswax and calendula.
"The world doesn't like women like your mother. Like us. We're too smart, too useful, too unwilling to pretend we're something we're not. Your mother thought love might be enough. It wasn't."
"Is anything enough?"
Her grandmother looked at her then, really looked at her, and Isabella saw something in her face that might have been pride or might have been sorrow or might have been both. "Knowledge, skill, the ability to be necessary. Those are enough not for happiness, necessarily, but for survival. Sometimes survival is the best we can do."
The salve smelled like summer, like things growing instead of dying. Isabella poured it into small tins, her hands steady.
Outside, one of the peacocks screamed, inside, her grandmother hummed something that might have been a lullaby or might have been a work song. Isabella couldn't tell the difference anymore maybe there wasn't one.
"Teach me everything," Isabella said.
Her grandmother smiled. "I intend to."
In the main house, Eleanor was learning to paint watercolors. Edward was studying estate management. William was doing whatever William did, which mostly involved horses and drinking and avoiding responsibility.
In the cottage, Isabella was learning how to save lives.
It seemed like a fair trade.