Chapter 3 #2
Emma bristled, embarrassment flaring. “Last night was—” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Ill-advised. Especially under our circumstances.”
Amélie’s smile softened. “It was magnificent. You have no idea how dull these dinners can be, how starved I am for true conversation.” Her eyes glinted with mischief. “You have given me much to anticipate.”
The compliment was so unexpected, so sincere, that Emma felt a blush rise to her cheeks. She ducked her head, focusing on the sand between her toes.
“Just like I anticipate stories of your travels. Where have you gone?” she asked, desperate to shift the subject.
“Yes. Paris, Florence, Vienna, St. Petersburg for a time. My late husband preferred the life of the expatriate. He collected houses the way some men collect mistresses. Though he collected those, too.”
Emma tried to imagine the duchesse as a young bride, trailing behind a much older man from city to city. It seemed both impossible and inevitable.
“Did you like it? The traveling?”
Amélie tilted her head, considering. “There is a freedom in being rootless. You can become anyone, or no one at all. But there are days when I long for stillness, for a place where I can leave my windows open and know I will be there to close them at night.” She glanced at Emma, a shadow of sadness passing over her features. “Does that make sense?”
Emma nodded. “It does.”
She meant it. More than she cared to admit.
“You sketch it very well,” Emma said, nodding toward the book.
A genuine smile, bright and breathtaking, transformed Amélie’s face. “Ah, but that is the artist’s eternal failure. One can only ever capture an echo of the real thing.” She picked up the sketchbook from a nearby rock. “Here. My humble echo.”
She ripped a page from the spine and held it out.
Emma, drawn by an irresistible curiosity, stepped closer to look.
The sketch was charcoal, a swirl of shadow and emerging light, and it was magnificent.
It captured not just the image, but the feeling of the morning—the solitude, the power, the immense, quiet hope of the dawn.
“It’s beautiful,” Emma breathed.
For a single, catastrophic moment, the back of Amélie’s knuckles brushed against the back of Emma’s hand.
The world stopped.
It was not a touch. It was a bolt of lightning.
A searing, brilliant shock that arced up Emma’s arm, slammed into her heart, and exploded behind her eyes.
Her breath hitched in a strangled gasp. The salt air, the sand, the rising sun—it all vanished, replaced by the white-hot awareness of that single point of contact.
Skin against skin.
She recoiled as if she’d touched a hot stove, stumbling back a step, her hand flying to her chest as if to contain a heart that was suddenly trying to batter its way out.
The easy peace of the morning shattered into a thousand glittering shards.
A blush, violent and furious, surged up her neck, burning her cheeks.
Shame, potent and suffocating, choked the air from her lungs.
She could not look at the duchesse. She stared at her own bare feet, at the dark, wet sand, at the grotesque evidence of her own monstrous nature.
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the relentless crash of the waves. It stretched for an eternity. When Emma finally forced her eyes upward, Amélie was watching her. The sketchbook was lowered. Her expression was unreadable, her dark eyes holding depths Emma could not fathom.
And then, she smiled.
It was a small thing, a mere curving of her lips. It was not mocking. It was not pitying. It was something far worse. It was knowing. It was a quiet, devastating acknowledgment that said, I see you.
I know.
“I—I should go back,” Emma stammered, the words a clumsy, broken rush. “My brother…the wedding. There are…things. Arrangements.”
She did not wait for a reply. She turned and fled, her bare feet pounding against the wet, packed sand of the shoreline.
She snatched her boots and stockings from the driftwood without breaking stride, clutching them to her chest like a shield.
She did not look back, but she felt those knowing eyes on her, a physical weight against her shoulders, every step of the way.
She ran from the sunrise, from the sea, from the terrifying, magnificent woman who had seen the secret she had sworn no one would ever know.
Through the drawing room marched an army of decorators, florists, and footmen waging a determined war against simplicity, armed with bolts of silk, cascades of flowers, and the unshakeable conviction that more was always more.
The air, already heavy with the scent of beeswax and lemon oil, was now thick with the funereal perfume of lilies and the cloying sweetness of a thousand roses. It was the scent of her brother’s gilded cage being constructed around him.
Emma was a reluctant soldier in this campaign.
In a futile attempt to be useful, to be less, she had been assigned the task of arranging flowers for the smaller tables. She stood before a regiment of buckets filled with blooms, her hands—more accustomed to the sturdy leather of reins—feeling oafish and clumsy among the delicate stems.
She worked in a fugue, arranging sprays of greenery with the mechanical precision of someone not truly present. Her attention was only caught when a pair of maids, arms laden with sheaves of lilies, ducked into the room and set about filling the vases that lined the great marble mantelpiece.
“…said she once dined at the Russian court, and the tsar himself sent her a diamond brooch,” whispered one, her accent suggesting a kitchen in Cornwall and a lifelong diet of stories. “For what, do you suppose?”
“Don’t be thick,” hissed the other, eyes wide with the deliciousness of gossip. “For what the duchesse did to his son at the winter masquerade. They say she left him weeping in a corridor, and it took three men to pry her off.”
Both girls fell to a flurry of giggles and mock scandalized faces as they noticed Emma watching them.
She offered a wan smile, uncertain whether to encourage or scold. “Oh don’t mind me,” she said, by way of gentle encouragement. “I’m just trying not to crush the roses.”
The first maid curtsied, her face reddening. “Beg pardon, miss. Only, it’s just—well, that French lady, the Duchesse. She’s famous for it, isn’t she?”
Emma raised an eyebrow. “For crushing roses?”
This won a surprised snort from the second girl. “No, miss. For breaking ’earts and stirring up trouble. My cousin worked for her, once, in Paris. Swears she keeps a diary with every conquest, and that some of them…are not men.”
The thought of such a book sent a jolt through Emma’s belly, an involuntary tightening low and sharp. She imagined the duchesse’s careful, beautiful hands turning the pages, inscribing the names of lovers in a language of secrets.
The maids, emboldened, pressed on.
“They say she once challenged a bishop to a duel. With fencing foils.”
“And that she burned her wedding dress in the Place Vend?me, right after her husband died.”
“Do you think it’s true, miss? That she’s not partial to men at all?”
Emma’s hands trembled. She stabbed the stem of a rose into the arrangement with more force than was necessary. “I think it is none of our concern,” she said, her tone sharper than intended.
The maids sobered and scurried away, but the stories lingered in the air like a cloying smoke.
Emma forced herself to focus on her task, but the words circled in her mind, refusing to be dismissed.
She pictured the duchesse as a young bride, as a duelist, as a woman who might burn her own wedding gown simply for the pleasure of scandal.
She imagined Amélie’s smile—small, private, meant only for her—and felt a dangerous thrill run through her.
Women lovers.
She should have been horrified by the rumors, appalled by the implication that a woman might claim for herself what only men were permitted to desire.
Instead, she wanted more. She wanted every sordid detail, every whispered secret, every forbidden truth.
She was so caught up in her thoughts that she failed to notice Prudence’s entrance until her sister’s voice cut through the haze.
“Emma. You’re bleeding.”
Emma blinked. The world snapped back into focus. She looked down and saw a bead of crimson welling from the pad of her thumb, a perfect jewel against the white of the rose petals.
She pressed her thumb to her lips, tasting iron and shame.
Prudence watched her, a flicker of concern in her sharp hazel eyes. “Is everything all right?” she asked, her tone pointedly casual.
Emma nodded, unwilling to meet her most perceptive sister’s gaze. “Just careless,” she said. “The thorns are sharper than they look.”
Prudence was silent for a moment, then stepped closer, lowering her voice. “You seemed distracted. Has something happened?”
Emma thought of the dawn, of the sketchbook, of the touch that still burned on her skin. She thought of the stories, the possibilities, the terrifying freedom of being seen for exactly who she was.
She shook her head. “Nothing at all,” she said, arranging the roses with unnecessary vigor. “It’s only the wedding. It’s all rather…much.”
Prudence touched her arm, a brief, grounding gesture. “If you need a moment, take it. You’re no good to anyone faint from loss of blood.” Her words were light, but there was an understanding in them, an acknowledgement of Emma’s unrest.
Emma smiled, grateful. “I’ll manage.”
Prudence gave her a last, searching look, then swept from the room, already scolding a footman for tracking mud on the hall runner.
Left alone, Emma examined her thumb. The cut was shallow, but the blood had already stained the petal beneath it, a vivid scarlet bloom on a field of white. She stared at it, transfixed, until the stain began to spread.
She reached for a napkin to blot it, but stopped herself. She let the blood seep, let it mark the linen, let it stand as evidence—of pain, of longing, of a part of herself she could not, would not, deny.
Outside, the sound of the sea drifted through an open window, a persistent call to freedom.
Emma pressed her thumb to the tablecloth, leaving a perfect, crimson print.
Let them gossip, she thought. Let them talk. She was not afraid of thorns, or of bleeding.
She was only afraid of never feeling that spark again.