Page 82 of His Arranged Duchess
“No. Thank you.”
He bowed and retreated wordlessly into the house, leaving Frances standing in the square of light thrown onto the gravel from the open door.
Frances waited for a full half an hour before venturing upstairs. She stripped off her gloves, bonnet, and shawl and left them piled up on a low table by the door. She wandered up and down the lower floors of the house, walking quickly through the dark, silent Great Hall, careful not to look at the closed door to the East Tower.
No wonder Lucien wants to avoid that place.
She closed her eyes. Now was not the time to think of Lucien.
Half an hour into her pacing, it occurred to her that the maids might go through her things and discover the writings, and some of her more unsavoury books. Buoyed by a jolt of panic, she went hurtling upstairs and found one of the maids about to lift her pillow and discover her own story underneath.
“That will do, thank you,” she ordered, faintly panicked.
The maids exchanged meaningful looks, then stared at the half-packed boxes of things. Frances smiled thinly and tried to appear calm.
“I’ll pack up the rest of it,” she added.
The maids bobbed curtsies and scurried out of the room, leaving Frances alone.
Many of her things had already been packed up, and the smaller pieces of furniture had already been moved. The fire still burned, flickering flames illuminating a ransacked room.
Her clothes were missing from her closet, the vanity table half-emptied.
It felt like somebody else’s room already.
I was only ever a guest,she thought dully.I just couldn’t accept it, I suppose.
One of her bedside table drawers was half-open, revealing the paper inside. There were endless sheets of discarded chapters for her book, notes, scribbles, even rough drawings of her characters. Pulling open the drawer properly, Frances took out handfuls of paper, crumpling them carelessly.
One sheet contained a rough sketch of her ‘Timon’, from the early days before he turned into Lucien. Eleanor stood beside him, turned half-away from the viewer, a parasol laid elegantly across her shoulder.
They aren’t real,Frances thought dizzily.None of this is real.
She snatched up both sketches, striding over to the fire. Without giving herself a moment to think twice, she tossed both sheets into the flames. The paper took a second or two to catch. Frances stared down at her characters, her own creations, and refused to let herself look away as the fire took them.
It was as if something broke loose inside her after that. She rushed to and from the bed and the fire, grabbing handfuls of paper and throwing them into the flames without even stopping to think of what they were. Notes, discarded pages, memorandums, all of it was reduced to ash in the space of minutes.
Last of all, when the drawer was empty, she picked up the book itself, the notebook in which her story was taking form. Some ofFrances’s frenzy faded away. She flicked idly through the pages, taking note of the places she had scribbled out whole sentences and paragraphs, or even torn away a full page. Several pages, even, when she decided that a chapter did not fit the storyline after all.
What was I thinking?She thought, almost hysterically.Who would have published this? Who would have read it? I’m just a stupid girl who lives with her head in the clouds. I suppose I believed he would have to love me, after all.
How wrong I was.
She walked slowly to the fire, holding out the book before her. The fire seemed to have grown in size and heat, probably after gorging itself on her words.
Only half of the book was full, and Frances had previously estimated that she required another twenty chapters to finish the story. Twenty chapters had not seemed very much, then.
One of the final paragraphs to date was a conversation between Eleanor and Timon. The pages before that were blank, as Frances had found herself unable to write the love scene between them. Not wanting to get stuck and lose her momentum, she’d moved on, planning to write the love scene later.
After I’d learned about it,she thought wryly, shaking her head at her own childishness.
Without meaning to, she began to read.
“We are none of us perfect, Eleanor,” Timon murmured, almost to himself, his naked skin brushing hers. “We admire marble statues and the paragons described in books, but that is not real. We must never lose sight of that.”
“Lose sight of what?” Eleanor laughed. She was still giddy and elated from their intimacy, and it seemed incredible to her that only empty sheets separated her from the man she loved most in the world, without even a layer of a linen shift between them.
Timon did not smile back. There was a furrow between his brow, some worry beginning to grow there. Eleanor longed to smooth it away.
