Mother Love
I'm sure I don't know why you're asking me about this. I was so young when she went away, after all, that I don't remember very much about her. Even when she was here, I was much closer to Daddy; I didn't get to see Mother very much. My nurse would bring me into her quarters before my bedtime; I would tell her about my day and she would let me kiss her. I don't remember her ever being unkind to me, but we weren't close.
Aunt Clytie says she never wanted children at all. Daddy would say, "Oh, now, Clytemnestra, that's not true; we've been very happy since Hermione was born, haven't we, my dear?" and then Mother would laugh and say Yes. I'm so glad that when Daddy went to war, he didn't send me to Mycenae to stay with Aunt Clytie; she wrote and said she would take me, but Daddy sent back that my uncle would be going too, and she had three little children and I would only be a burden.
Not so very much a burden! She would be my mother-in-law now, had she lived.
Daddy sent me instead to stay with my grandparents and my other aunt in the big palace at Sparta. Aunt Timandra was so much younger than Mother and Aunt Clytie; she can't have been out of her teens, I think. Of course I was nine or ten, so I thought she was perfectly glamorous. I loved watching her dress for dinner; she would let me take out the jewelry she wanted to wear, and sometimes she would put my hair up. As for my grandparents, I simply can't imagine better; they were as kind to me as if I were their own.
You must understand that the reason for Mother's going was never given out to me. I thought she had been sick well into my teens; I was shocked when I learnt the truth, of course. Daddy was the most wonderful man in the world, and I didn't know what Mother could have been thinking. Understandably, I refused to believe it at first, since I'd had it from a slave, and they will gossip, you know. The young ones are the worst; they live in the constant glow of everyone else's romance. Anyway, it upset me, and I was convinced that it wasn't true.
Well, Grammy put me straight right away. I must say, I was still a little upset; Mother and Daddy had always seemed the perfect couple to me, and when I was married to Neoptolemus, I wanted so badly to be like them. Of course, I'm not Mother, and Neoptolemus, I learned very quickly, was not Daddy—not even his own father, for that matter…
But that's neither here nor there. Anyway, I am convinced to this day that Paris must have drugged Mother or tricked her, because I simply cannot imagine her having left of her own free will. After all, she was a queen in her own right at Sparta, and she loved Daddy.
I don't know what went on at Troy—Neoptolemus used to say that I couldn't imagine—but I rather imagine they held her against her will. They must have. Poor Mother, captive in that huge citadel—even if it was a gilded prison, it was still a prison—and unable even to send word to Daddy! They must have had her watched. I am sure I would have had her watched, if I had been her jailer. She couldn't even smuggle a letter home to me; I'm sure she would have written, if only she could!
When I was nineteen and Mother and Daddy came home, it didn't matter anymore. Grandpa had died in the interim, but when the messenger came, Grammy said Oh my goodness and we went out to meet them in the courtyard. I remember embracing and kissing them, and how I cried because I was so happy; I told Daddy that this was the happiest day of my life.
It's the strangest thing, but I've never forgotten how unhappy Mother looked.