The Unchaste

Vermillion.

C/W: Teensy bit of violence ahead that might come as offensive to you.
Don't throw your Tomatoes at me yet though... Patience!

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What she had done had come back to eat her. To empty her and guzzle her up whole.

George was dead for two days now. Philip too, damned.

And Delilah had no one to blame. Not even the man who had dictated the whole veneer of this tragic adversity.

She was the one culpable, condemned to cause ruin wherever she went, upon whatever she touched.

Today had been particularly discouraging, with the rain and gloom. And earlier this morning, she had made the mistake to go downstairs, into the kitchen, where George was no more.

Grief was still pristine when Delilah woke up from her restless fit in the library chair later, with a sob and not a sigh. The library was empty. No shadows bickering by. Safe pretension, even if this safety was bogus. She was at that abject castle, she realized dazedly, which had now become a predestined catacomb of not one, but two men she had come to wish well.

George was dead.

She would repeat it again and again and eventually, lose the meaning of it; still believing that if she were to go to the kitchen downstairs or into the servant’s quarter, George would be there on the seat next to her, set to annoy her core deep.

Imagining his absence was beyond her ability.

A half-written epistle lay on her writing desk, which she had stared at until the consciousness was lost. The ink was flowing now, having smudged the copperplate, mixed with her own tears and shattered raindrops that snuck in through the slightly parted window.

Well aligned letters now smeared into a shapeless stain of black.

Cold rain, warm ink and salty as sea, tears.

Delilah blinked rapidly and tepid wetness lined her eyes like crystal kohl. Transparent like a kiss of child.

“Go.” A gruff voice addressed her from the door and the librarian walked in with a very engaged air. “You are summoned. His Grace’s study. Quick.”

“Why?” She asked, in voice nothing but a hoarse whisper.

“Not for me to tell; is it?” He pinned her with an indifferent look. “I would have, if I could have given you retreat.”

Delilah weakly stood up from her chair, blatantly wiping her face with the back of her sleeves.

“It is fine.” The bitter librarian spoke in soft acrimony. “Hidden grief is detrimental. Let them out.”

Delilah felt she would break down just there.

So she left the library.

He was the last man she would have liked to face on this day. Or, ever after, for that matter. But he was something she had to encounter for as long as it went.

At his study, she hadn’t even knocked at the door when he asked her to enter.  She entered and stopped in the middle of the room, with an unusually subdued posture, keeping her head, eyes and agitation down; shoulders drooping. Making herself appear small.

Safety insight, gathered from earthworms and millipedes. To curl into a ball when they try to step on you, to appear not at all.

But smaller things are only trampled under soles, crunched between concrete and leather..