May 28th, 1816

Elsie sat in bed with her wooden lap desk, scratching her wool-covered leg rather than writing.  She often wordlessly complained about the texture of Jenny’s clothes like this.  After trying on a few of Elsie’s garments, Jenny could see why.  They may have been less resistant to the cold, but they were certainly lighter.

Sucking the tip of her quill, Elsie looked across the room at Jenny, who was busy pressing flowers into one of Elsie’s empty notebooks, and generally doing her best to avoid her mother and chores.  Normally the two would have been outside, but the torrential rain today made the cramped bedroom necessary.

“What’s another word for ‘precipice’?” Elsie asked.

Jenny frowned.  “I don’t know.  Why do you ask?”

“The Hag of Beara is standing on a precipice.”

“Oh.  Edge?”

Elsie made a face.  “I don’t know if that’s quite grand enough,” she sighed, drumming her fingers.

“Sorry.”

“No, you needn’t apologize!  I’m the one who can’t come up with the right word!  That’s the trouble with being a poet, you’re forever searching for the right word.  I spend half of my time word hunting!”

Jenny laughed.  “I’m sorry about that.”

“I told you,” said Elsie with a smile, “you needn’t be sorry.”  She paused to listen to the pleasing pattern of the rain, cocking her head, as if trying to shake out a memory.  “It’s the life I’ve chosen, so I must bear the consequences.”

Jenny sighed, leaning back to stare at the ceiling, at the small, dark smudges seeping in from the rain.  “I wish I knew what sort of life to choose.  Then again, I suppose I don’t really get to choose.  Maybe that makes things easier.”

Elsie stopped her finger-drumming, in rhythm with the rain, and dropped her quill in the other hand with a frown.  “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s the same as my sisters and mother.  I’ll get married to some scrawny boy and have a great big brood of children, whether I like it or not.”

Elsie rose from the bed and went to her cousin, still clutching her papers but not giving them much mind.  “But that isn’t what you want.”

“Well, no.  Of course not.”

“Then choose something else.”

“Easy for you to say.”  Jenny gave her cousin a half-hearted smile to show she was only half-serious.

“No, Jenny, it’s not easy for me to say.”  Elsie sat on the floor beside her.  “My expected fate is much the same as yours.  But that doesn’t mean I must simply yield to that destiny.  It just means I have to work not to.  Originality requires effort.”  She gave her cousin a pointed look, and crossed to the window.  Elsie traced her finger along one of the slivers of rain as it slunk down the window pane.  “People like us are not born under constellations, but unruly stars; we are destined to carve out new paths.  Our feet sink in the well-worn ones.”

Jenny gave a small grin.  She loved when Elsie fell into a ridiculously poetical mood.  “Alright then.  What path are you making for yourself?”

Elsie turned her head, thinking.  “I’ll be a poet,” she said, “like Shelley or Byron.  Maybe even Shakespeare, if I ever stop doubting myself.  And I’ll marry who I please, not someone chosen for me.”

“How bold,” Jenny mocked.  “Still tied down with a husband.”

“Not tied down if the man I choose lets me fly.”

“Happy searching, then.”

Elsie smiled knowingly to herself, a reaction which Jenny decided to disregard as Elsie just being odd.  It wasn’t as if there was anyone around for Elsie to be in a relationship with.

“What about you?” Elsie asked, after a pause.  “If you could do anything, what would you do?”

Now it was Jenny’s turn to bite her lip with consideration.  “That all depends on what’s possible.  When you say anything, how liberal are you with that?”

“Very.”

“Alright.  Then I’d go to Tirmanog.”

Elsie laughed and crossed her arms.  “What on earth is Tirmanog?”

“Not on earth,” Jenny corrected, waving a dried daisy for emphasis.  “It’s the fairy land.  It’s in all sorts of stories, and every bit magic, filled to the brim with all sorts of impossible creatures and monsters.  The sky’s always honey-pink, and even the grass tastes sweet.  And nothing’s ever dull there.  It’s home to leprechauns and tricksters, and they do a good job of keeping things lively.”

Elsie knelt beside her cousin, and sat, cross-legged.  The sparkle of imagining danced in her eyes.  “It sounds wonderful.  Like the sort of place you could stay forever.”

Jenny nodded grimly.  “You have to.  That’s the catch.  Time passes differently in Tirmanog—it’s a place of stories, and time never passes in stories like it does here.  Our world is much faster.  Everything’s always changing—but a story can stay the same for a hundred years.  So a day in Tirmanog is a hundred years on earth.  If you came back home after even a week there, all the years would catch up with you and you’d turn to dust.”

Elsie pressed her lips together tightly, and a crease formed at her brow.  “And you would still want to go there?”
“Oh, yes.  It’s worth it.”

“But what about your family?”

Jenny shrugged.  “They wouldn’t even notice I was gone.”

Elsie shifted, still frowning.  Jenny could tell that she didn’t believe her.  Jenny knew herself that it wasn’t the truth.  But it was much less complicated.

Her family did love her, and she loved them.  But they didn’t understand her.  Her siblings had always thought her odd, and her parents had never known what to do with her.  It was like Elsie said: what does a constellation do with an unruly star?

“Well, what about me?” Elsie asked.  “Would you leave me to go to Tirmanog?”

The rain seemed louder in the short silence.  “You could always come with me,” Jenny said, picking at her nails.

“What if I didn’t want to come?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”  Jenny smiled, but her brow was furrowed.

“Well…I have relationships, responsibilities, ties…”

Jenny scoffed.  “But none of that makes you happy, does it?”

Elsie blinked.  She stood and walked back towards the window, slowly.  Jenny was suddenly terrified that she’d said something awful.

“Sometimes it does,” said Elsie at last. “But that wouldn’t matter, not really, because that’s not always the point of things.”  She looked back at Jenny, poised and calm.  “’Happy’ is transient.  It’s too limiting a state; I don’t think that I would even want to be happy all the time.”

“Oh,” said Jenny.  “I would.”

Elsie gave a small, sardonic smile.  “Perhaps you’re better at happiness than I am.”

Jenny fiddled with a dehydrated daisy.  “I don’t think that,” she protested, twisting a spiky green leaf off its stem.  “Happy isn’t something you’re good or bad at.  It’s just something you are or aren’t.”

“Maybe,” said Elsie.  She looked back at the window, and Jenny could see her face reflected back in the fragile pane.   Elsie’s reflection rubbed her lips together.  “I’ve just always been dreadful at hanging on to it, I suppose.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re not good at it when you’ve got it.”

Elsie tucked one lank auburn curl behind her ear and nodded.  “I ought to get back to the poem,” she said, already returning to her bed.  She plopped down and set to sucking on her quill again, but with even less purpose this time.

Jenny nodded glumly.  She wished she could have given Elsie a better answer about what she wanted in life.  That she could at least aspire to something real.  “I still don’t know what I would really do,” she said, half to herself.  “If I could go or do whatever I wanted.”

Elsie looked up at her, and smiled.            

“Happy searching, then.”