Once it was clear she would not succumb to any infant illness and provide a respite for her father’s soon-to-be stretched purse strings, it was straight out of the cradle and into the myriad jobs and chores required to keep their household running. She was a cousin of a cousin, or something of that sort, and relegated to the menial labor and landing on the short end of the stick educationally speaking.
As a youngster she was pale and sickly looking, and her wildly curly hair was often spoken of as a “mark of evil.” Doubly-so was her role as the eldest of a pair of twins, both of whom were cherubic with their Saxony blonde frills and apple-kissed cheeks, and both of whom would turn out to be tormentors cut from the same cloth. Thus she endured endless punishment at the hands of both her siblings and her cousins during her childhood, all of which was reciprocated without guilt.
She was often faulted for the wrongs committed by others, but others were often blamed for her wrongdoings, so while she could have grown up a mournful adolescent with a victim complex - God spared her at least this one disaster. Instead, Elsane’s teenager years were comprised entirely of puberty-induced vitriol that slowly hardened her heart and her mind to be as cold as ice and as tough a iron.
At the age of 19 she was betrothed to a young knight of similar age from West Lavington. He was a decent sort, although not particularly romantic, but they built a friendship during their courtship whenever his duties would take him through Willcott or if they ever bumped into each other in Up Avon. Naturally the whole relationship was doomed; he died at the hands of Saxons during a raid.
At the age of 21 she was betrothed to another knight from Tilshead, this one nearly six years her senior, who was neither interested in her nor in marriage at all. They met a total of two times for awkward conversation, and just as Elsane was beginning to dread a life among strangers of a taciturn nature, the knight was also killed in battle. Saxons, again.
The growing trend in these betrothals was the desire to send her far, far away from her “peacably cozy” (ha. ha.) Stapleford family.
The third betrothal was to one Sir Morlois “le Rouge” de Willcott, a man who had garnered himself a particularly nasty reputation but whose father wasn’t particularly arsed about the idea of Elsane “cursing” her previously betrothed into death. In fact, should that become Morlois’s lot, so much for the better. The marriage succeeded this third time around, and barely a year later she bore him a son. The child has so far managed to survive, though the parents are barely capable of refraining from murdering each other outright.
During the winter of 514, Morlois discovered that his wife (Elsane) and her sister (Maeve) had been feeding him ever-increasing doses of poison since the marriage, and as he closed in on death over the winter, he confronted them, murdered them, and then died himself of the poison.