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Chapter Twenty-One
“Of marriage and domestic comforts you should banish every idea. A governess cannot expect offers from men of birth and fortune.”
Private Education: A Practical Plan for the Studies of Young Ladies.
Elizabeth Appleton. 1815.
Matilda scrunched her nose.
‘Love is full of anxious fears.’
Not in the least reassuring, and she discarded the poems of Ovid to flick through the pages of the next tome gathered to her side upon the library sofa.
‘Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.’
Pah, what did Samuel Johnson know?
Matilda had decided to while away the evening consulting the great names of literature in order to discover whether her feelings for Seth coincided with their stanzas and prose on love. Yet not one of them had endorsed her hypothesis, for it seemed each held a differing view – love could be fierce or gentle, jealous or trusting, selfish or altruistic, protective or unbound.
She eyed a leather-cased book of Plato. Now there was a man who surely knew himself and everything else, so she settled into the sofa cushions to begin somewhere in the middle.
‘Love is a grave mental disease.’
Oh, good grief, and she abandoned it to the stack upon the floor before reclining to twiddle her thumbs as night descended.
All day she’d waited for Seth to return from who knows where…and still she waited.
Matilda tugged out his note, wedged as a bookmark amongst the pages of Shakespeare – ‘The course of true love never did run smooth.’
Hah.
And she re-read Seth’s words.
Dearest Matilda,
Kian has some information. I shall be out for the morning.
Yours, Seth
Functional but not altogether informative. Incorrect as he’d not returned. But she appreciated the ‘Dearest’. And the ‘Yours’.
Indeed, at eight this morning, Matilda had greeted the day with vivid elation, full of promise and hope, but that note amid the breakfast toast had rather dampened her spirits, reminding her of Astwood’s shadow.
The daylight hours had been spent well enough in lessons with Chloe, but by six of the evening, they’d congregated in the kitchen where Betts and herself had glugged the master’s claret and they’d all dined upon his beef pie.
She reached for the last unread book by her side, to caress the leather spine of the keepsake that Seth had gifted her and–
Memories flickered. Of words… Words from this book that her father would recite before casting a soft glance upon Mother.
‘Why did I love her? …Because it was her; because it was me.’
And that was why no love was the same, for it was something intangible, deep in one’s own self that connected with another.
She wanted for nothing more than to witness Seth smile, to revel in that sonorous voice, to caress his Herculean body.
To be the recipient of his kindness, loyalty, devotion and protection.
To give him everything of herself. To care for him.
