The People of Dewbrook

Chapter Twenty-Five

The second one came to be a week after the first one, when Rosemary could no longer hold off the deal her father had made with Oliver Burns. The men quickly found out about her secret admirer and the circumstances of his death, but Oliver was not too surprised, and her father was not upset for long. This arranged marriage was the best possible opportunity for her and her family, so she took it lightly, knowing that she would not have to sacrifice much.

She was in the right. Their consummation had introduced her to the true joys of lust, after which she was eager to make love with her husband whenever possible. When one of them was bored, they would read some of the many letters Samuel had written to her, laughing merrily at the pathetically poetic memory of him. When not consumed with that nor any of the other mundanities of her life, she wrote, which she had also done while being poisoned, but not much. Now that she was healthy and in good spirits again, she wrote ambitiously, finishing her long-awaited first novel at the beginning of December after many revisions.

The moment she was done with the last page, she merrily ran to her husband, pointing at the large stack of papers once she had approached him. "Look, my dear! I have finally finished the first work that I can be proud of. I will give it to you to read if you would like, and you will surely be done with it in a week, and if you consider it to be good enough, I will attempt to publish it."

Upon looking at her work and then at her lively face again, he raised an eyebrow. "I am glad that you are so sure of your abilities, Rosemary, but are you not aware that people might not take your novel seriously due to obvious reasons? Also, have I read the title right? Read it out loud to me, just to make sure."

"Gladly," she chirped. "The book is called 'Cordelia: A Gothic Novel'."

"I do not understand why you would not write romance," he said, his voice laced with confusion.

"There is romance in Cordelia," she defended herself, causing him to let out a deep sigh.

"Fine," he said, vaguely annoyed. "I suppose that I will read it, and then we shall see whether I am impressed or not."

"That was one magnificent story," he said a week later, holding the pages firmly in his hands while placing himself on the edge of her bed. "Sure, it was a little dark, but for a beginner, you are great at the craft. The struggle between the heroine and her nefarious butler John felt really real to me with how you contrasted their respective virtues and flaws. In the beginning, I was afraid that it was going to be a weeping Gothic melodrama with impenetrable prose, but it was never quite that. 

The hidden depths of what at first glance seemed like a standard virtuous heroine and scheming villain were lovely to observe, and near the end, I was afraid that Cordelia was going to succumb to the darkness within her soul, but I am relieved that she did not and that the good people lived happily and the evil ones did not get to live at all. At least that was a relief. But how are you going to get it published?"

She winked at him. "Well, I have a wealthy benefactor who respects me and knows me well enough and says that my novel is great for that of a beginner, you know."

He giggled. "Yes, I suppose that you do. Let us see how it goes then."

The following month, the novel was published under his name, but even though there were no people who could confidently say that it was a stupid book written by an equally stupid woman who should give up the pen because they could never be sure of the secret, it received only middling success, and there were still quite a few notable critiques in newspapers that sold well in the region, including some that claimed that no man could write such a womanly work of literature, but it did not matter. Her first novel was published, her marriage was successful, and it was all that she needed in life, making it easy for her to forget the horrors she had witnessed.

Matthew did not get to see such a happy fate. Dominated by his lust and haunted by the revelations he had received on that fateful day when the ball was held, he watched miserably as life went on without him, his great beauty decaying with stress and age, his presence in the town becoming more and more ignored as time went on, empty of the passions of life, a state which was sure to remain until his death. He yearned for nothing more than to return to his sinning, but women would not look at him again, seeking out new pleasures. If he did not find any consolation, which he had no idea how he would do, he would be damned forever.

The rest of the town remembered the horrors until the end of August, when new things started happening again at last. Many people wanted to replace Caroline and Matthew, and many more wanted to enjoy the pleasures of whoever the replacements would be, which meant that nothing had changed in particular, and it seemed that it would not change for a long time. The wealthy were decadent and selfish, the poor were poor, and the middle class was somewhere in between. Corruption lay everywhere, and when Death did not remove it, it appeared that nothing could. But corruption, or at least this particular kind of corruption, could not last forever, which everyone knew well. Either five or fifty years later, this gaudy way of living was going to be replaced by a completely new one, whatever it may be. All in the will of God.