AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 8
True to his word, Peter sent several staff members from his own estate towards Jeffrey’s. In the early evening, a maid stretched crisp and clean sheets across his mattress, while another dusted the old wardrobe and adjusted the painting, once crooked on the wall. Jeffrey gathered one of his travel bags towards the far wall and crept through his various garments until he discovered his nightclothes.
As he undressed and donned them, he blinked out at an early-summer rain. The clouds billowed, grey and ominous, and folded themselves over the moor. As he turned towards his bed, the candlelight flickered across the tops of the sheets, and he was overwhelmed with a strange feeling of loneliness—something that hadn’t felt so physically debilitating outside of the realms of the county in which he’d been born.
Jeffrey had never been a sombre sleeper. He tossed and turned through the night; faces he knew he’d never see again floated through the darkness, his mind seemingly mocking him. When dust began to rise out from the yonder horizon, his stomach curdled with panic. If he hadn’t slept properly, how could he possibly push himself through what was surely going to be a difficult day?
Ah, but at the age of twenty-nine, it wasn’t as though such things had to bother him, not if he didn’t allow them to. He rubbed his eyes and thrust the blankets from his shaking legs. After he dressed, he ran down the staircase and leapt atop his horse for a speedy ride towards the centre of town.
Once there, he purchased some coffee, some bread, and a slab of cheese—enough to activate the strange and amorphous churnings in the back of his head. As he nibbled his meal, he blinked out towards the building where the mystic had been. His heart thudded.
Peter sent even more staff members that afternoon, with a letter that explained that he would hire still more for Jeffrey—to consider his work towards Jeffrey’s comfort to be a part of his “homecoming” gift.
“It’s not as though I’m terribly sure you’re going to stay this time,” Peter said. “But a man must dream, mustn’t he? Further, the letter in your hands serves as an invitation to the dinner party of which we’ve already spoken, held this Friday at seven sharp. I hope you’ll do us the honour.”
Jeffrey watched as the house he’d once cared for, loved, sprung up around him—very much as though the past three years of his life elsewhere hadn’t occurred. Even the natural world, the garden outside his mansion, seemed to take flight.
The moors simmered with vitality; the sky was an endless, aching blue. Jeffrey demanded of Peter once, upon a brief interaction on the morning before the dinner party, “Do you ever feel that nature is mocking you?”
Peter, who had a bit of spittle from one of his children across his chest, turned his attention towards the stain and said, “I feel as though my children wish me to be mocked.” Once he’d scrubbed himself clean, he said, “You’ll come to the party tonight, won’t you? My wife reports that all will be in attendance, including the woman of the hour.”
“Charlotte,” Jeffrey said. “Very good. I hope I’ll be able to bend her ear for a moment.”
“I imagine you’ll find time. She assuredly considers you the dark, handsome man from the ball,” Peter said. His eyes shone brightly, as though this was no more than a bit of a romantic affair, something he’d stitched together due to his love for his friend.
**
That evening, Jeffrey arrived at Peter’s estate just after seven-fifteen. It was his nature to be fashionably late, a reminder to everyone of just how little such affairs mattered. This was something he’d dragged over from his more youthful years—something that assuredly held no weight any longer, especially given the married-with-children nature of the party.
Upon his arrival in the garden, the dark-haired beauty Louisa popped up from her chair and blinked wide eyes towards him. She looked akin to a frightened rabbit encountered in the woods. She turned her hand towards Charlotte’s and gripped it hard, tugging Charlotte from what looked like a drivel-filled conversation with the man beside her. Jeffrey’s heart pumped with panic, but he shoved all thought of it aside. He had a job to do, one that had very little to do with any sort of attraction he might or might not have felt for Charlotte.
The moment Jeffrey pressed his first foot forward to march towards Charlotte, however, Peter’s wife announced that the dinner table had been set. A stream of some fifteen people swept towards Peter, knocking him back towards the mansion. He and Charlotte lost eye contact for several moments.
When they appeared in the dining room, Peter’s wife instructed everyone on their assigned seats—an event that landed Jeffrey precisely beside Charlotte herself. There beside her, watching as she lifted her nametag from the top of the glowing plate, he said, “I suppose it’s a strange thing, us continuing to run into one another.”
Charlotte’s eyelashes fluttered upward provocatively. Her green eyes latched onto his. For a moment, Jeffrey felt as though he’d forgotten to breathe. His knees knocked about beneath him.
“I suppose it is funny,” Charlotte said. “Or mysterious. Something to be worried about.”
“Do you find yourself suspecting me of ill will?”
“Perhaps,” Charlotte said. She swept her gown out before her as she slipped delicately into the chair. She then turned her eyes towards Louisa, on the other side of the table, and gave a light shrug.
It seemed difficult to perceive the language these women had between themselves. Assuredly, it would have taken a trained linguist several years to comprehend it.
Jeffrey sat as conversation swirled around them. Staff members appeared to deliver beef and potatoes and biscuits and steaming carrots; wine was poured and poured again. Sweat billowed up on the back of Jeffrey’s neck as he considered it: how could he possibly penetrate the hubbub around them and actually articulate what needed to be said to Charlotte?
“Why are you here, then?” Charlotte asked suddenly. Her eyes remained towards the food before her, as though she wanted no outsider to see that she spoke with him.
“Peter is a long-time friend,” he said, following her lead and keeping his eyes towards the plate. “He welcomed me warmly back to the county only a few days ago. I couldn’t have returned without his generosity. I suppose it reminds me of how little of it I’ve received over the previous years.”
“I see,” Charlotte said. “Where were you?”
“I went as far as I could from society,” he returned. “Various events made it so I didn’t feel comfortable here. I suppose it’s a bit of an experiment, this return.” After a pause, he added, “I suppose I should have spoken with that mystic of yours to get to the bottom of my decision to return. I suppose she would have analyzed my aura—is that the word?—and informed me of my future.”
Charlotte turned her head around fully, seemingly no longer interested in what the surrounding dinner party guests thought. “What is it about this mystic that interests you so?”
The question echoed through Jeffrey’s skull. He felt it like a wave: the suspicion that, in fact, Charlotte questioned his involvement with the mystic, rather than the other way around.
