Page 6 of The Lord who Captured Her Innocent Heart
“I don’t suppose I could see one of his letters?” she asked, tilting her head. “Just so I can get a sense for where your head was during this time. It must have felt absolutely delirious.”
Tatiana’s laugh burst forth, a vibrant one, almost song-like. She rushed towards her bedroom, disappearing down the shadow of the hall, only to return with a mighty box of wrinkled pages. Ella’s own box of letters from Frederick was on the corner of her desk, something she gazed at frequently, longingly. She’d been astounded at the beauty of his prose from a young age, noting that his stories often verged on poetry.
Tatiana began to draw out the pages, one by one, chatting about each individually, in a way that showed Ella that Tatiana hadn’t read the letters as closely as, say, Ella might have (had she been on the receiving end).
“In this one, he talks about how he remembers the dress I wore at last year’s ball. You remember the one? The one where you –”
“Yes. The one where I ripped it.” Ella sighed. “I wonder which dress he’s describing. Yours or mine?”
Tatiana giggled. “It’s anyone’s guess, I suppose. But his letter proves that no one was ever the wiser about what we did. Clever girl, you are. Oh, and in this one – he talks about the first time he realised he was in love with me. He says I was no more than twenty years old, and he heard me laughing from the garden. He says here–” She lifted the page, allowing her eyes to race over it. “Ah, yes. He says here that he knew he wanted to make me laugh like that the rest of my life. Isn’t that marvellous?”
It was. Ella felt woozy, quite sure she could fall to the ground, whack her head against the floor and lay there for the rest of eternity. Tatiana pressed the letter against her heart, closing her eyes. Her face was serene. Ella took this brief moment of her sister’s blindness to reach across, draw one of the other letters towards her, and hide it under her pillow. She bounced slightly as she did it, pretending to readjust her legs beneath her. Tatiana was none the wiser.
“Well, darling …” Tatiana sighed, stretching her arms above her head. “I suppose I better get to bed. You know what it’s like. All the adrenaline has really gone to my head.”
Tatiana dropped forward, dotting a kiss atop Ella’s forehead. “Good night, darling sister. May flights of angels bid thee to thy rest.”
The Shakespeare hung in the air between them for a long, solemn moment. But then, Tatiana reared back, spinning away. Ella watched as Tatiana hopped across the floorboards, which creaked a bit beneath her, before disappearing once more.
Then, Ella cast herself towards her pillow and drew the perfect letter up from the mattress, gazing at Frederick’s words. She longed to live inside them, to seek refuge in them. She knew his penmanship with an intimacy she couldn’t describe. The way he curled his l’s; the way he crossed his t’s with such an urgency, as though he was drawing a gash through the letter. It was infectious.
“Dearest Tatiana,
As I toil away in the library, day after day, I feel more in line with my wants, my needs. Perhaps this life of education and the mind, as you call it, isn’t the quintessential reality for me. Perhaps I should live louder, as you do – screaming out at the tops of my lungs for some sort of respect from the globe. Perhaps that would allow me to sleep more, perhaps like a baby who hasn’t yet learned about the wretchedness of being alive, and what heartache it can bring.”
To compare, Ella erupted from her bed and reached for her box of letters from Frederick. She unfolded one of the more recent ones, placing it next to the one for Tatiana and poring over it. Her heart bubbled in her throat.
“Ella,
“You would adore it here. Every morning we rise early, and we sit with our texts, our own thoughts, writing notes to ourselves as though creativity and education are the only two things in life. I’ve been averaging a book every two days, or so, and my head brims with countless thoughts, ones I would adore to share with you. I cannot wait to return to London, for London is the place in which I feel most myself, most alive. Perhaps I can bring all the knowledge I’ve garnered here and lend greater fulfillment to my life in London. Perhaps you can help me, too.”
Ella sighed, reading this again. When she’d first read it, she’d felt it to be a kind of statement of his adoration for her. It seemed that he couldn’t wait to join worlds with her, to ensure that both of them continued on their quest for knowledge.
Now, she read it with different eyes, recognising that Frederick’s words for her sister sizzled, were cast like lightning across the page. She dropped back on the mattress, huffing, staring at the ceiling. The candle upon her nightstand had melted to the very bottom, making wax ooze onto the wood.
It simply wasn’t right. Frederick hadn’t been bored over in Bristol. As he’d told Ella, he was brimming with life and new possibilities, not hankering to come home and giggle with Tatiana.
It was as though they knew two very different Fredericks. But Ella felt sure that SHE knew the real one, not Tatiana.
These thoughts stirred within her as she cast herself into slumber, dropping out of the world for a few hours, her inner mind praying for some kind of release. She had a sense that that relief would never come.
Chapter 4
Ella ordinarily awoke early, eager to embark on a day of reading or writing or never-ending thought. When she blinked awake just after six, however, she did so with a heavy heart, feeling as though a rock had lodged itself atop her chest, making it almost impossible for her to breathe. Immediately, memory of the previous day came back to her. The man of her life; the man of her dreams. He belonged to her sister now. And there was very little she could do about it.
Tatiana wouldn’t awake for several more hours, which was something Ella was suddenly grateful for, for it meant she could avoid a bit of time before she was forced to dive through the intricacies of Tatiana’s emotions, listen to her blare that she was so grateful she “finally understood her true feelings” for Frederick. Of course, the sister who could have had anyone – anyone on the planet – had decided upon Frederick. It felt like the most wretched luck.
Ella scrubbed her cheeks till they were flushed pink. She took special care to don a darker dress than normal, an almost “mourning” gown. Then, she ducked into the hallways, her book lodged beneath her armpit and meandered down the steps. If she was going to live her life alone, then she was going to do it just the way she always did: lost in a fictional world.
But when Ella reached her ordinary morning reading post, she realised that her mother and father had taken station there for the morning. Their voices rang out, bouncing from window to window. It was clear they were arguing, although the stakes of the argument were quite low.
“You can’t expect me to believe you really think your daughter, our eldest and beautiful daughter, would be content with a simple engagement affair,” her mother said, her voice tart. “You know these will be the happiest days of her life, and you want me to tell her that we need to keep expenses down?”
“Don’t be foolish,” her father scolded. “She’s got love in her eyes. She won’t notice what the menu is, one way or the other. Besides, isn’t she supposed to be in love? Lovers don’t care at all for food. Isn’t that the old saying?”
Ella stopped, frozen, listening as her parents exchanged angst-filled words, both of them certain that the other was incorrect in his or her assumptions.
“You can’t think I was terribly happy with the way our engagement party turned out,” her mother continued, taking what seemed, to Ella, an inappropriate route. “Your father was such a schemer, wanting to keep all his money to himself. You don’t wish to be like that, do you, Marvin?”
