The Governess's Room

Lyrics

Up from the first floor, leaving the hush of The Library behind.
The grand staircase turns once, twice. Cold marble under my hand.
Past The Portrait Hall, where the painted eyes measure the years. They don't see me.
I turn away from the open door of The Master Bedroom, a space whose gravity I will not feel today.
Here. This door, smaller than the others. Unmarked.
The air inside is thin, smelling of chalk dust and the ghost of lavender.
A narrow bed, an upright chair, a desk scarred with the ghosts of sums.
And on the dresser, a silver-backed hand-mirror, face down.
I pick it up. The silver is cold.
It doesn't show my face.
It shows a girl, maybe ten years old, her brow furrowed over a line of Virgil in 1912.
I tilt it, and see a boy's smudged cheek in 1928.
I turn it over, and see only the reflection of the ceiling, rippling, as if underwater.
A mirror that never learned her face, only the faces she was meant to form.
This room is a palimpsest of patience.
Beneath the scent of chalk is the faint iron tang of blood from a pricked finger in the mending basket of 1945, when this was just a spare room.
Beneath that, the residue of longing from a page turned in a geography book, a finger tracing the Amazon.
A life lived in the service of other lives.
A kingdom of one, overlooking the gardens she could not walk in until dusk.
The lavender from a small, brittle sachet on the pillow. I lift it.
The scent has the exact, cold metallic weight of the room key in her pocket.
A weight she carried all day. The smell of being locked in, the smell of being the one who locks the door.
I look in the mirror again.
It doesn't show the children now.
It shows the room, this room, containing a smaller version of itself.
And in that smaller room, another desk, another mirror.
And in that mirror, a pinprick of light that is also a door.
A catalogue of confinements, each one containing the next.
I place it face down again, just as I found it.
Did you ever see yourself in its surface?
Or did you learn, finally, to not even look?
The dust settles. The quiet answers.