Part 2-5

It all began with an envelope from Mrs. Kesslewood, who left it on the mantle for Mr. Kesslewood. The headstrong daughter, never having seen anything like it and without her mother in sight, opened it with every intent to put it back. But inside the envelope, a tear spotted letter told the truth of Mrs. Kesslewoods strifes as a tired wife of a husband too occupied with boat masts than child-rearing, and in a meager wealth that never came to bloom. At this point, Margot set down the letter and tried to process what that meant, got most of it and kept reading which only got worse the more she read. Having met a young man named Garret who, after running into one another on a summer’s eve, Mrs. Kesslewood had fallen in love and with Garret, they’d be sailing away for a honeymoon and living in a chocolate shop in Glenbaine.

Most children would dash off to their fathers with wet eyes and noses needing wiping, but Margot that summer read, unknown to anyone, nearly every romance novel in the library.

She read stories of brokenhearted lovers in moors. People drinking poisons to die in one another’s arms with the threat of severance. Some even threw themselves over cliffs, into seas not so unlike their own. Margot, rather than swooned or wishing to win a boy’s affection, vowed that kind of love nightmarish and real if it happened to their mother. More than once she woke in bed clutching her pillow so tight the stuffing had spilled out.

Sworn to secrecy with a cross over her heart, Margot, with her free-thinking mind, set upon a plan in three steps. First, she forged a series of letters from their mother proclaiming a distant relative wished to meet urgently and give an inheritance. A second letter that told of a horrible descending illness aboard the ship, and last, an eventual Captain’s letter giving condolences of her death, and losing her body overboard due to a kraken.

It was not the most restrained series of letters, but left little doubt of hope and gave closure, even if unsettling. Because Margot knew Mrs. Kesslewood in one way or another was never coming back. What was staying was the rest of her family that was better off with a grand lie, than to think themselves too hard to love.

And even if it was wrong, for a young girl her plans were quite clever. Because to make sure the letters weren’t without too much suspicion, she began the second step of her plan. She cracked open her jar of savings and paid a struggling actor, the one that played at the children’s shows, to deliver the letters, unknowing of what was in them and making sure to be somber each time he arrived. That this random man ended up traveling down to Glenbaine was pure luck, otherwise, he may have figured out the rouse and outed little Margot. But he didn’t, so the third step was in motion.

This one didn’t need any tricks or bribes, but something much harder to be accountable for: robbed of their mother, Margot herself decided to do all the work that would need to be done. And with it, she knew her childhood was to be tucked up on a high-up shelf and needed to be ignored like an old doll covered in dust.

Out of anyone, Margot seemed to grieve the worst, and all thought solely for her mother. They weren’t wrong either, but she mourned more for a life away from pruning hands in dishwater, and bones sore from scrubbing an endless pile of laundry. It’s then that Margot became not either kind of sibling at all, but something that doesn’t really have a name. It was motherly and watchful but with good deal less tattling. And despite her father’s begging and teacher’s inquiries, Margot stayed at home knowing the strain would exhaust their father into an early grave.

In the years that passed, the family knitted itself tightly around one another. Margot watched her siblings, each well-loved and properly schooled, live across Amberjack in a tough era when plenty of people fell between the cracks, unable to ever get their footing.

A provider for decades, Mr. Kesslewood found his once crafty hands too knobby to whittle wood. His shop grew a layer of dust, and no fresh boats crest the Lonely Sea stamped with the Kesslewood name. The cupboards grew sparser, but resourceful as ever Margot strummed up a plan. She recalled the shores of her childhood covered with seaweed, without a person to care if she harvested them.