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A babe still nursing and another underfoot gains Indis the usual rote sympathy of her sewing circle, as if they have not had more children than two, just as quickly.
Perhaps they sense the delicate plight that Indis will not acknowledge: the strain of raising another woman’s child, still very young himself, and prone to tempers.
Indis is used to whispers, and more than whispers. During the War, her father was suspected to have Tory leanings. Now war may come again, and soon, and Indis is still too English by some counts.
But what am I to do about Feanor? she asks herself and asks God, praying in a church both like and unlike her own.
She cannot ask Finwe. He will protect her from disgruntled patriots—he is, after all, squarely one of their number—but he sees no rift, as she does, within their own home.
Finwe suggested, when they married, that they pretend as if Indis was the only mother Feanor had ever known.
“He is young, yet,” Finwe promised, his own eyes haunted with grief, even as he wooed her. “He will not remember—”
“Of course he will,” Indis answered. “He must.”
She said it like it was a noble impulse of her own, as if she had not already seen the way Feanor’s thin little body curled away from her reaching hands.
When he cried Mama, he did not cry for her.
Feanor is four on the first of June. Finwe cuts him a paper crown so intricate that it rivals Indis’s feeble attempts at real lacework. Feanor reigns at the head of the table for a day, his baby smile stretched wide.
Finwe hands out the presents and sweetmeats. Finarfin is a heavy, snuffling weight at Indis’s hip.
“Feanor,” Fingolfin mouths, still not quite sure yet of his r’s. He toddles up to Feanor’s chair with the wooden bear Indis entrusted to him, saying twice, for Feanor—as if her solemn eldest had to be told.
Blankets and dolls and blades of grass: he brought all to Feanor, always, since he could walk.
Feanor looks at him. A child’s gaze cannot be cold. Can it?
“No more babies,” Feanor says, and he pushes Fingolfin to the floor, a task easily accomplished with a firm hand, even if it causes the paper crown to slide down over his brow, blinding him.
She tries to say, I love you, as often as she says it to her own sons. She does try.
(Coddling them, her lady’s maid says. Children should be seen and not heard.
Have you seen them? Indis could ask—she is the mistress, she can say whatever she likes. Have you seen all of them?)
“If my father left you, he could still learn to be happy,” Feanor tells her one day, when they are alone. He is working sums on his slate.
He is ten years old.
Indis’s breath catches in her throat anyway. “What do you mean?”
“He did it before,” Feanor says, lifting his head. His smile is chalk-dust white. “I am the only one he has kept with him always.”
Finarfin is a happy boy. Fingolfin could be. And Feanor?
He is a child. You must not let yourself have the sort of anger with him that you would with a man.
Indis, as a girl, was docile.
We make enemies very easily, her father told her, when we are on the wrong side of war.
“He hates me, Mother.” Fingolfin is sixteen, and Feanor is eighteen this day, and Feanor is shut up in Finwe’s study laying forth his plans for apprenticeship with Aule. He has no cares for younger brothers, now or ever.
Fingolfin is face-down on his bedspread, crying into his pillows, though Indis pretends she does not see his tears.
Pretends, even as she smooths his thick dark hair with a gentle hand. Pretends, as she breaks her heart for the boy who is her eldest, but not the only eldest of this house.
“He does not hate you,” she whispers, and is terribly afraid that she lies.
Fingolfin spent many months discerning the best gift; at last a collection of leather-bound notebooks was procured, with the fastest-drying ink for sale imported from London. He saved his monthly dues from Finwe—Finwe called the provision of a dollar at the end of each week, dues, even to his sons—and bartered with the tradesman so skillfully that Indis thinks he shall have a promising career in his father’s business.
Feanor’s coach is rattling away to Boston, and the gift lies ungiven in Fingolfin’s room.
(They had a dreadful fight this morning, and that, Indis is sure, was not Fingolfin’s wish.)
Was it you? She wants to demand, sometimes, of the graceful ghost-woman hanging in the hall. Did you make him with this hatred in his heart?
There were those who whispered that Miriel Therinde had witch blood in her.
There are those who—
There are three boys who will become three men, and Indis must love all of them.
Finarfin’s forehead wrinkles. Then he grins. “Notebooks!” he cries. “This is grand, Fingolfin. Thank you very much, I shall write a biography of you.”
“Of me?” Fingolfin mutters, flushing darkly.
“Why, yes. You’re in the middle of the family, and that means you see everything.”
Indis kisses her youngest son atop his golden head. Then she smiles on her eldest.
Hers.
“You are very generous, my darling,” she murmurs.
Finwe is late to dinner because he is looking out the window towards the northeast road.
Love is many things, Indis reflects, as she finishes another round of netting her lace. In this family, it has been both weapon and woe. It has been a ballast; a blessing.
She wants badly to protect these child-hearts from the cruelty of—
The world? Or their own (half) blood?
Love is many things.
Indis decides that she cannot warn one son against loving another. That would be a dreadful thing.