Gwynn knows just what to do

“Meggie, what are you doing?”

Margaret closed the cabinet doors and sighed. So much for secrecy.

Gwynn flipped back the corner of her blanket and sat up. “What are you doing in my wardrobe?”

“I wasn’t looking for your love letters, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“That’s just as well, since I’ve never received any!”

That had been stupid. Gwynn wasn’t half-​awake and already Margaret had annoyed her by reminding her which of them had an actual love letter in her possession, even if only in Blocky’s blocky hand. The night was going from bad to worse.

“Just forget about it,” Margaret grumbled. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Oh, no, you are not!”

Gwynn thumped out of bed. Margaret’s head yelled “Move! move! move!” but she just stood there, shrinking down into herself, feeling stupid, stupid, stupid, yet a tiny bit relieved.

Gwynn stomped around the foot of the bed. “I want to know what you’re doing in my room. Are you playing a trick or is this just plain thievery? Are you pinning a sign to the back of my gown, or what?”

Margaret snorted and a frail smile started on her lips as she wondered what she would write. But then she wondered what was on the back of her own gown, and her smile died.

“I was looking for a belt,” she muttered.

“A belt! You have a hundred belts! What do you want with mine?”

Margaret grit her teeth. “Not that kind of belt, stupid.”

“Not—Oh! Oh! Oh, Meggie!”

Margaret pounded her fists against her hips and rolled her eyes. She knew it would be like this if Gwynn was involved. But at least she hadn’t had to say it.

“Spare me your ‘Oh, Meggies,’ please!”

“Oh, Meggie! You got your flowers!”

“Do not talk to me about flowers! I am bleeding out of my bottom. There is nothing flowery about it.”

“Your lady days, then. Oh, honey! When did it start? Just now?”

“I was just getting undressed for bed and I saw.”

Gwynn fluttered about, probably looking for an opportunity to give Margaret a hug. Margaret hunched her shoulders into a turtle-​like shell.

“Do you feel all right?” Gwynn asked, finally settling on rubbing Margaret’s arm. “Are you having your pains?”

Her pains. Margaret did not like that term at all. She did not want to be a possessor of pains.

“I am fine, I simply want to borrow a belt and go back to bed and sleep.”

Forever.

“Oh, Meggie!” Gwynn clasped her hands together and sighed. “You must allow me one last ‘Oh, Meggie!’ My little sister is a woman now!”

Margaret rolled her eyes. “I am the same girl I was yesterday, except now I am bleeding out of my privy parts. Forgive me if I do not get sentimental.”

Gwynn laughed. “You’re right, you’re right. You are just the same Margaret. Well, let’s see what we can do. It’s too bad it’s so late. We couldn’t wake Hetty…”

Gwynn padded towards the wardrobe, but Margaret stopped her with one cold word: “No!”

“What?”

“I don’t want Hetty to know. I don’t want anyone to know.”

“But… Meg…”

“You know now, and that’s enough. It isn’t as if I need Hetty for anything. For what? To tell me my body is going to blossom like some kind of petunia, and talk to me about special feelings and lying close together in the bed? I know all of that already. I had to explain some of that to you.”

Gwynn pouted, and her hair hung lank beside her face. “But Hetty doesn’t know you know all that. Oh, Meg, she’s going to be heartbroken when she learns you didn’t want to tell her…”

Margaret sighed. “I shall tell her eventually, just not now. She has too much to worry about with the baby coming.”

“But after the baby comes?”

Margaret waved her hand impatiently. “Yes, yes, after. Next time it starts, we shall pretend it’s the first time, and Hetty can tell me all about it.”

After Emma’s first time, several months had passed before she bled again. That would be summertime. In the summertime everyone would be thinking about Britamund’s baby, and that might give Margaret another reprieve. She wondered how long she could last.

“But…”

Gwynn, for once, was going to think practically. This was not Margaret’s lucky night.

“How can we hide it from her? Honey, there’ll be the pads. You can’t hide it from Leofgyth, and she’ll tell Hetty.”

Margaret frowned. Her idea seemed stupid now that she had to say it aloud. “Couldn’t I use rags and simply burn them?”

Gwynn wrinkled her nose.

“What? That’s what the common women do.”

“Yes, but they wash them. They don’t burn them.”

“Well, couldn’t you pretend they’re yours?”

Gwynn looked like she was going to cry. “I just finished mine, a week ago. And I won’t have it again till the end of the month.”

“So say you had it twice this month.”

“But then Hetty will think I’m ill!”

“No, she won’t! Em sometimes has hers twice.”

Margaret did not even know whether this was true, but she was growing desperate. She crossed her legs and squirmed as if she had to pee.

“Hurry up! I can’t just—stand here!”

She had only meant to get Gwynn moving, but she frightened even herself with the thought that she might be… dripping. This was awful. Her voice caught, and she almost sobbed.

Gwynn’s voice softened. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. Here.”

She folded a washcloth and laid it on her nightstand, beside her washbasin. She gave the cloth a gentle pat.

“Take off your nightgown and clean yourself up if you need to. I won’t look. I shall lay out a belt and pad for you.”

Gwynn could be silly and exasperating much of the time, but when she tried to be soothing, she was warm milk and honey. Margaret wished she knew how to be like that.

Sniffling, Margaret pulled her nightgown off over her head and then, warily, inspected the insides of her thighs. In her room she had already wiped up the first brownish smears, and so far they hadn’t come back.

But there was not much she could do about the hair down there. Plucking it would only make it grow back darker. It was still nothing like Gwynn’s dark puff, so thick and curly that it stood out above her skin. It was more like the fuzz on Baby-Flann’s head. But with her raven coloring, Margaret was already more darkly flocked than Emma. This was not a contest she wanted to win.

Gwynn closed the wardrobe door and stepped around Margaret, carrying a tinkling belt and a pad.

“I hope the belt fits you,” she said, smiling. “I’m so fat.”

Margaret sighed. “You are not fat. You are curvy.”

If she were to write a sign for Gwynn, that was what it would say, to save herself from repeating it every day. But she would pin it to the front of Gwynn’s gown, upside-​down, so Gwynn would read it every time she looked down to inspect her hips.

“I’m not curvy, I’m just lumpy,” Gwynn said. Her smile was now more sickly-​sweet honey than soothing milk. “You’re so lovely and slender.”

“I am skinny as a twig!”

Gwynn ignored her and launched straight into her lesson. “So, first you hook one end of the pad onto the back like this.”

Margaret eyed the contraption warily.

“Then you put on the belt, not too tight, and bring the pad up between your legs and hook it in the front. Then you tighten the belt as much as you need to to hold the pad snug.”

Gwynn held it out. Margaret did not move. She knew she had to do it, but she could not move. It was so awful.

Gwynn softened into real gentleness again. “Let me show you.”

She wrapped the belt around Margaret’s waist in a motion that was almost a hug. But when she stooped to buckle it in the front, something seemed to distract her eyes.

“Quit looking at my chest.”

Gwynn giggled.

“There is nothing to see on my chest.”

Gwynn hummed a few notes from a silly, tuneless song. “Skinny as a twig with two buds on it!” she said slyly.

“Oh, no you don’t! Flowers and buds and petunias—I am a girl, not a garden!”

“My little sister got her petunias!” Gwynn taunted, singing softly with her pretty voice. She pulled the pad up between Margaret’s legs.

“Don’t you dare call it that. I will throttle you if you start calling it that.”

“I must ask Conrad how to say ‘petunia’ in French. He will like it so much better as a name for you than Marguerite.”

“Don’t—you—dare!”

“There!” Gwynn straightened the tiny silver buckle and stepped back. “You can put your nightgown back on.”

Margaret was stunned. She was wearing the thing.

Gwynn picked her nightgown up off the floor, brushed it off, and handed it back to her. She could have pulled it on over Margaret’s head herself, and Margaret would have obediently stuck her hands through the arms. Fortunately Margaret had just enough of her wits left about her to do it herself.

When her head popped through the neck hole, she saw Gwynn smiling a little sadly on her again. “My little sister. You’re only eleven!”

“I’m practically twelve. Em was a lot younger when she got hers.”

“But I was twelve.”

“Barely!”

“Still.”

Margaret sighed. This was certainly not a contest she wanted to win. She had not even wanted to participate.

“And you already had a marriage proposal,” Gwynn said.

“Two,” Margaret said miserably. She swayed her hips side to side, trying to get used to the feeling of the pad between her legs. It did not feel as scrunched up in there as she had imagined.

Gwynn breathed, “You… did?”

Margaret looked up. That had been stupid.

“Not a real marriage proposal,” she hastened to say. “I mean, not a proposal, really…”

“Who?”

“Only Conrad. He… when Father asked him to be his squire, he…”

“Conrad asked you to marry him?”

“No! It was more like… for my information. For my information, he told me that Father said he might ask for me when we’re grown. That’s all. He simply wanted me to know.”

Gwynn’s mouth hung open. “Does Conrad love you?”

“No! He was just giving me some information. And it wasn’t truly a marriage proposal from Blocky, either. It was a betrothal proposal. And Father said no, anyway. So strictly speaking I haven’t had any.”

Gwynn finally shut her mouth. “Nobody even tried to ask for me yet,” she said, shaking her head. “Domnall’s so in awe of Father he won’t even kiss me. I can’t believe he told Conrad he could ask for you…”

Margaret blinked back tears of frustration. Why did she have to beat Gwynn in everything? Kissing, and learning the truth about sex, and boys fighting over her, and marriage proposals, and love letters, and now starting her courses at an earlier age! Even getting Mother’s key when Gwynn was given nothing. And these were precisely the things Gwynn cared about—and precisely the things Margaret never even wanted! It was so unfair.

“Will you let me come live with you when you get married?” Gwynn asked.

“Will I what?”

“I know I should stay with Father and Hetty… but Hetty’s young, and they have younger children so they won’t be alone. And I shall never get married if I stay here,” she said miserably. “Domnall daren’t kiss me, Cedric isn’t allowed anywhere near me, and Father wouldn’t let me make even a polite reply to Young Aed, for a letter that was not even a love letter. I don’t think Father wants me to be married,” she concluded, pouting. “Ever.”

It was so unfair. Conrad was constantly scheming to get Margaret alone and kiss her, right beneath her father’s nose. Her father was making her write an answer to Cynan—for a letter that was a real love letter! And all Margaret wanted was to stay near her father and be his little girl forever.

For a moment she wanted to slap her sister. Then she realized that Gwynn hadn’t asked for things to be this way, any more than she had.

“Listen, can’t you see the difference between us?” Margaret asked. “Father has to stand guard over you because the young men are mad about you. Look at Domnall and Cedric and even Young Aed—now those are some worthy suitors. Whereas I—I have Conrad and Blocky vying for me. Possibly the two least romantic men ever born. Do you think Conrad ever sings pretty ballads for me like Domnall? No, he insults me in French and makes rude noises when I sit down. The most romantic thing he has ever done is plunk me down on a dusty barrel and tell me for my information that he might ask for me one day.”

Gwynn giggled.

“Father probably had to put the idea into his head, for otherwise he despaired of me ever finding a husband at all. And do you think that Blocky’s letter held even a tenth of the romance of Aed’s? Blocky wrote to me about his cat, Gwynn. His cat. He enclosed a letter from his grandmother. Whereas Aed…” She grabbed Gwynn by the arms and whispered the words that never failed to make her shiver: “At dawn!”

Gwynn closed her eyes and shivered.

“Even a man who only met you once can’t stop thinking about you weeks later, in the dead of night. Don’t worry, honey. You shall have plenty of romance in your life, just wait. You shall have so much that you’ll have to pick one man and get married, just to stop all the other men from hounding you. You will wish for a nice, block-​shaped man who writes to you about his cat!”

Gwynn laughed, and catching Margaret with her defenses down, she pulled her into a hug.

“You always know the best way to look at things!”

Margaret had always been of that opinion, but she was surprised to hear Gwynn say it. “I do?”

“Ninny-​nanny! I always feel better after talking things out with you. I’m so stupid.”

Gwynn made that little false laugh that often followed any criticism of herself. Margaret sighed and gave her a weary squeeze. The pad scrunched between her legs whenever she moved. This would take some getting used to.

“You’re not stupid, stupid,” she said. “You’re just sensitive. Sometimes you need practical me. And sometimes I need sensitive you.”

Gwynn shivered like a delighted puppy. “You do?”

“I’m glad I woke you up, anyway,” Margaret admitted. “You knew just what to do.”