1850: Dowager of North Lodge
To Mallard House
At last! I had begun to think you would go to your grave in satin shackles. They will call you madder than March but I call it sense. What is a Duchess but a prisoner of fabric and form? You were never made to suffocate under brocade or to rustle about like a tent in the wind.
Let them bluster. The truth is this: the lodges have always been our queendom. Here, without Dukes hovering and heirs measuring our worth in sons, we are at liberty to rule in quieter, subtler ways. We keep our own courts, we command loyalty with purse and wit and we have no need to ape men’s battles to prove our strength.
So go, girl—go eastward with your hats and your milliner. Let them chase their own tails in the big house, bound by primogeniture’s chains. Every sister who slips free loosens the whole lattice. In time, perhaps the title itself will crack and fall away, like an old hoop-skirt left to rust.
From one so-called madwoman to another: may you never be brought back.
Your cousin in freedom, North Lodge
You are here: States of Grace > Biography