The Unchaste

A Ghastly Shrine

That Sunday mid- morning, the bleak moor was wide awake in the rampant, raging storm. There was no light but the storm glow that had coincided the sky. Rest was dark as wings of the reaper’s cloak.

 “That_” Delilah pulled her head back and looked up at his ashen face, his eyes bright against all that remained pallid. “That, your Grace, is akin to stabbing a man in the middle of the Hyde Park and asking what on earth made London think that you are a murderer.”

What on earth made you think Tiffany is my mistress?

His hand around her face, his own countenance had an amused sort of shock shading it. He looked stunned out of words. He collected himself slowly, and spoke. In his deep, dark voice. “I am…still unfound, Miss Eves.”

Delilah sighed, and that slightest motion left her cheeks brushing against the creases of his palm. Sensitively. Sensually. A deep blush covered her nose.

“Well.” She tried to explain. “You respect her, which is obvious and she has the highest esteem for you. You hold her hand and sit with her in the garden. Where you are, she always seems to be around. And while these symptoms might have been natural, you kiss her on the balustrade of the Stormcastle for the world to see and then wonder, why everyone believes the way they do. If that says something, your Grace.”

It was a chore to proceed through that little speech. His fingers were wandering on her soft face. His thumbs tracing her arched jaw, the lotus petal shape of the edges of her eyes. The drifting coil of her forehead hair. Her nose tip seemed to interest him greatly.

Touches were as intimate as his lips had been a moment ago.

But none like his eyes. His eyes, following the shape of her moving lips closely were making her lose her points.

She would have assumed he was not even listening the way he appeared to have ambled off. But with every next accusation she laid, his lips curled more into the likeness of a smile and that assured his audience to her.

“That’s quite a research indeed.” He blinked twice at her lips and then, gazed up into her eyes. “Just because I kiss her ‘for the world to see’ doesn’t make her my mistress.”

“It doesn’t?”

“The kiss was meant to be seen, but not meant to be.” He shrugged. So simply. “Not either was it to be so viciously misconstrued. But I believe, in the end, I cannot keep them for forming an outlook.”

“What do you mean?” Delilah asked gravely. “What do you mean that the kiss was meant to be seen but not to be?”

“Nothing.” He waved his hand abruptly, removing it from her cheek in the process, making her feel cold in ways more than one. “Just…she is not what, or who, you think Tiffany is to me.”

Delilah said nothing. She was not so used to prying in as she was to finding out. So if he wanted for it to be a mystery, Delilah too was fond of disclosing secrets.

***

In the middle of that vast and verdant, beige and grassy moorland, the pair walked hand in hand towards the ruins of a medieval abbey that had stood there since as if forever, like a stony, bony vestiges of some long dilapidated history, its Lord probably burnt alive in the ages that were dark and the queen_ taken on as a mistress to the next crown.

Its pillar and wrecked walls were like a ghastly shrine, disquiet even in the utmost hush, decomposed by wind and weather and sun and rain, cenotaph of its long dead owner whose body could never be recovered from the ashes.

Delilah had been extremely wary of this memorial, ever since as a child. It had a deathlike air in it. Like all things late, this place too felt sad. Yet, the storm was tossing and turning like a hound and they both had to take shelter. This happened to be the nearest.