Elladora had fully expected to spend the evening in much the same way she had spent the day and dinner: namely in silent solitude. Phineas’ somewhat less than loquacious manners had rubbed off on her anew over the summer – during the brief instances he had left his study – and Ella would have been content to spend the evening deliberately ignoring the fact that she was being quite conspicuously avoided.

Footsteps above her made her ears prick up, though Ella expected the other woman to make a beeline for the kitchen – or possibly wherever it was that Ursula thought the kitchen was – before retreating to her room once more. She didn’t anticipate the door opening and her sister-in-law standing mutely for an unnervingly long pause.

Ursula did not look like herself.

The thought occurred before Ella knew entirely where it had come from but it was unquestionably true. There was something wrong.

“Is anything amiss with the child?”

She put her book aside and cast her eyes to the floor, half-expecting a trail of blood to be following Ursula in her wake, but there was nothing and her sister-in-law seemed far too calm, almost resigned.

“Tell me Ursula, I promise to do what I can to help.”

The proclamation of doom was so unexpected that Elladora was too shocked to react to the unexpected, and highly unorthodox, physical contact with anything other than instinctively pressing her hand to Ursula’s back to offer some modicum of comfort. It was not her forte.

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course you’re not going to die,” Ella said in assured tones. There was absolutely no reason to think Ursula was not long for this world after all – what on earth had gotten into the other woman to send her into such hysterics? Surely it couldn’t be the child? Birth was a risky endeavour but Ursula had successfully borne five children – some of them even legitimately – without any ill-effects beyond her waistline being a tad on the thicker side than it had been when she had wed Phineas.

“What in Merlin’s name makes you so sure this will be your end?”

Surely somebody hadn’t told her she was going to die? There were seers enough in their community – most of them utter charlatans in Ella’s opinion – but what manner of creature would tell an expectant mother that she would soon be dead and buried…even Elladora drew the line somewhere. And that line would be the cut across the neck of whoever had said such things to her sister-in-law.

Elladora sat and stared, her face stony, her posture rigid as ever as she tried to comprehend that utter insanity of what she was being told. Her sister-in-law, prone to fits of melodrama at the best of times, had really outdone herself in stakes of absurdity. True, she must be in genuine distress as Elladora could see in her sister-in-law’s eyes that as ridiculous as she was being she genuinely seemed to believe what she was saying.

But honestly – what did Ursula expect her to say?!

“A dream?” Elladora intoned impatiently. She might have known it would be something like this – for a solid moment Ursula had almost convinced her that whatever distress she was feeling was based in reality rather than ramblings. But once again she was to be disappointed by the other woman.

“Have you been at the laudanum again Ursula?” She asked with a sharp rise of her eyebrow, drumming her fingers on the spine of her book.

Childbearing had always struck Elladora as being more than a little bit parasitic so that particular sentiment seemed quite believable. She had imagined before how it must feel to have a child growing inside and had been unable to escape the image of something burrowing into her, draining the life from her to feed its hungry, greedy mouth.

Elladora shuddered anew at the thought and conceded that Ursula’s concerns may be more grounded in reality than she had originally thought. Perhaps after so many births Ursula was finally realising quite how unpleasant the whole thing really was? It would explain why it had haunted her dreams at least…

“I see no reason why this one should be different,” Ella said in as soft a voice as she had ever used with her sister-in-law, fingers twitching as she fought against her instinct to take Ursula’s hand before she ultimately lost that battle. Ursula’s fingers were cold against hers – perhaps she really was unwell and it had gone to her head?

“You’ve never suffered any ill-effects before and neither have your children. What has you so convinced this time will be different?”

“I would not have credited those women with the strength to survive a summer cold,” Elladora replied scathingly but with genuine feeling. They were weak, both in will and body, and when each pregnancy had been announced amongst the rest of society Elladora had began counting the days and been unsurprised when she was proven right – or, at least, that was what she had claimed after the fact. Being right was being right, it didn’t matter when she had formed the opinion.

“You have twice the strength of any of them. You are one of us Ursula and we are a breed apart.”

Afterwards Elladora would dwell upon what she had said that day and what it truly meant. She had spoken quite without thinking – a rarity for her – but, for better or for worse, she had spoken from the heart and it would be utter cowardice to backtrack at this point. It would also be a lie and she had told enough of those in her days: to Ursula, to Iola, and even to Phineas at times. Her brother, excellent though she had always considered him to be, was an aloof man who didn’t suffer fools, academics, or anything in-between lightly. For four decades she had found him all things admirable, tried to emulate him where she could without seeming like a sycophant – he would hate her for it – and she had never before questioned him and yet…

Perhaps he really had treated Ursula poorly over the years? Elladora had always thought that the only way to be married was to never see one’s spouse but her view, she would concede, was fairly skewered. Whenever she had seen her brother with his wife they both invariably looked miserable and yet with only a few kind words Ursula’s entire being seemed to have lit up from the inside and any traces of this dream that had caused her such anxiety was suddenly gone from her lovely features. She looked, for the first time in what felt like years to Ella, almost happy and the fact that it was because of something she had said was not lost on Elladora.

Merlin, when had she become so soft? And, more importantly, why was Ursula the one who had brought it out in her? Her efforts towards making people happy were usually reserved for Evalina and Sirius – Phineas didn’t need her and she didn’t care about anybody else nearly enough: at least she hadn’t cared. Apparently Ursula had scaled the wall without her noticing.

“Of course I know,” Elladora replied with conspiratorial haughtiness, leaning a little closer. “Or else I would not have wasted my time to say it.”

There was a horrifying frozen moment between the second she had realised exactly what Ursula was doing and the moment her sister-in-law changed course at the last minute that Elladora couldn’t honestly say she hadn’t moved her own head slightly towards…whatever that had been. A hysterical moment clearly, on both their parts, but Elladora was flustered, a feeling she abhorred, and she blamed her lack of judgement, momentary though it had been entirely upon Ursula. She had spent a lifetime being careful and cautious – Ursula’s character was far from perfectly porcelain and Ella refused to allow the fissures to extend to her own.

“Don’t,” she murmured, letting go of Ursula’s hand immediately and feeling the ache in her fingers where her sister-in-law had been holding tighter than Elladora had noticed. Apparently it had not bothered her a moment ago but now she felt as though her entire being had been infected and even her usually chalk white cheeks had begun to colour as she mentally bounced between shock, indignation and… something else she didn’t care to acknowledge because it was incredibly distasteful and Elladora was having none of her brain’s sudden determination to betray her at every turn.

Turning her sharp eyes upon Ursula Elladora was struck by the deeply unsettling fact that her sister-in-law looked lovelier in a moment of dread than any person had a right to and her resolve, usually so reliable, faltered slightly. She reached up to push a loose curl behind Ursula’s ear, the gentle action quite at odds with her tone of voice, but Elladora had never been one to let her true feelings be known.

Assuming she could get a hold on what they actually were of course.

“I will not be one of your distractions, Ursula.”

Granite-like though she often was at times Elladora was not entirely immune to the other woman’s histrionics – she would not be here if she was, after all – so she allowed Ursula to take hold of her hand once again without too much resistance. There had never been much doubt in her mind as to why her brother had sought this particular match, and it had been an excellent one for Ursula too, but now Elladora began to see, with a clearer mind than she had any right to possess in that moment, why this marriage would be the ruin of both husband and wife.

It had been in front of her the entire time.

“Don’t I always forgive you?” Elladora replied, with the faintest twitch of a weak smile on her lips, quite surprised with how true her statement was. In their years together she had grown to care more than she would admit to and it was only now Elladora realised how many years she had thought of the them in this house being her and Ursula . Phineas probably didn’t know half of what Ursula had done, the times she had climbed out of vanishing cabinets, or taken Elladora to piercing establishments with no explanation as to where she had heard about them, or fallen into fits of crying because she couldn’t fit into a corset designed for a child – and it was all because he wasn’t here and had never intended to be.

He had practically found her a wife and left them to it.