Breathe

Monique was desperate to escape the cosseted closeness and confinement of her life at home, her prim Aunt, stiff as her stays,constantly fussing over the neatness of her doilies, the plates and cups lined up just so, the regimented folds of laundry. A place for everything and everything in its place. She couldn't breathe. She gazed at the willow arching low outside the window, swaying freely in the breeze, it's branches sweeping sunlit dust motes through the air, so many fairies, here one minute, gone the next. There were secrets hidden here, something untrue at the heart of it but hidden just out of view. Did this confinement offer protection,security? Or was it a hiding place from the riches of the world beyond the chateau walls.
As a younger child she had ducked between the branches of the willow and truly believed she had entered a different world. Here she had guarded her treasures, a nest lined with feathers,  her mother's Wedgwood
 brooch, the tiny silver bell from her teething rattle. Her greatest treasure was the tooled pocket watch. It had once belonged to Father but it had been damaged somehow, in the accident maybe, and now nobody wanted it but her. She could see life in it still, she made it her own, dismantled the clock face with its intricate cogs and levers and set it into the bark of the tree as a sundial for her own universe to spin on. She had waited, a whole childhood it seemed, for the sun to come from the South and tell her all she needed to understand but it stubbornly stayed on its course through France, East to West and would not light up her dials.
Beyond the willow, the garden was a parade ground. Neatly trimmed yew and box sat at precise right angles and the grass was rolled to striped carpet perfection, not a weed in sight. This was not a garden where billowy dandelion clocks fluffed their Pom-poms or little girls skipped about collecting daisy chain flowers or searching for four leafed clovers in the sunshine. Rows and rows of white speckled plants stood to attention. Misbehaviour was not tolerated in any form by Aunt Sylvie and the flowers were instantly beheaded if they bloomed out of turn.
Monique curled a wisp of hair  from the braid at her shoulder round and round her finger and wondered if she should take the chance of doing something spontaneous, something frivolous, something just to please Aunt Sylvie. She could make cinnamon bread and place it at her Aunts kitchen table. It would still be warm when she returned from town and would make the kitchen smell so inviting. She wondered through to the cavernous kitchen with its enormous pine table , scrubbed and scarred from years of use and began to rummage about. She collected a large bowl from the dresser cupboard then brought flour, yeast, cinnamon, a little brown sugar and eggs from the pantry, some butter from the cold shelf, and quietly stirred the ancestral aromas clockwise. As she became engrossed in the task she found that she was calmed by it and she stirred in love and wanderlust in equal measures with the cinnamon which in turn allowed her mind to wander to the spice trails she thought she would like to follow.
   The door rattled sparking her from her reverie as leaves scampered down the corridors away from an unseen gust. The house drew its breath in anticipation of restriction. Aunt Sylvie was home. There would be not time to let imagination flow now, there was work to be done, a schedule to keep and the restrictions loosed just moments before were re asserted once more.