The afternoon sun on her face, she turned back to her writing desk and sighed heavily, pinching the bridge of her nose. She had just completed the fair copy of her novel two days prior, and now she was being asked to pack up and leave.
Subject always to the needs of men, she thought in exasperation, and attempted to control the manuscript (which was unbound and loosely paginated, even in fair copy, with bits sewn and cut still) into a semblance of a neat stack of paper. Gazing out at the front drive, her stomach lurched as she beheld a coach and four crunching up to the house, a liveried footman prepared to spring down and assist in the delivering of the wealthy any minute. She almost knocked the pile askew again. She did not need her cousin at the best of times, and right now was not the best of times.
Taking another deep sigh, she gathered the stack and stuck it in the desk's drawer before drawing a small silver key from the front of her bodice and turning it in the drawer's lock. She had only managed to make the one fair copy, painstakingly, and she needed it safe.
Standing and smoothing her indigo skirts, the young woman of four-and-twenty squared her shoulders and prepared to greet her cousin. She counted backwards from sixty in her head, and at exactly fifteen seconds remaining, their manservant gave a polite rap on the door to the parlour before extending the door into the room with his hand so he appeared as part of the house as its fixtures. "Miss Goodwill, your cousin Comtesse d'Aubigny and her husband, Comte d'Aubigny, have arrived." As he stated their names they came forward through the door as one, nearly knocking the older man Smythe back into the door he was so passionately clinging to.
"My darling Celia, how grown up you have become!" Comtesse d'Aubigny gushed in a voice that was lilting and also not quite her own. She practically ran to her cousin to grip her wrists and draw her over to a sopha centred under two of the four long windows on the west side of the room. The weight of the manuscript in the desk drawer felt like a presence to Celia from its position diagonally from them. Comte d'Aubigny, a reserved and astutely polite gentleman of old French stock, whose family had been in England some hundred years, took a position standing beside where his wife sat on the couch. He gazed out the window with a bemused expression, and Celia knew he was attempting not to join his wife in congratulating her with such enthusiasm.
As Celia politely thanked her cousin, the count tilted his head to the side and his eyes crinkled further as he did murmur how pleased he was to hear the news, his smile obviously restrained. Comtesse d'Aubigny, cousin though she was, was far too much to sit in a room with for longer than a half hour, while her husband's quiet enthusiasm Celia could sit with all day. She hoped her new fiancé were half as kind—though perhaps less reserved.
She bit her lip as her cousin studied her face, still holding her wrists so tight she ached to pull them back. "Such a tame response, my dove! Why, you must be very pleased, no? When Comte d'Aubigny proposed I simply wept of joy for hours!"
"Mr. Sommer," Celia replied, perhaps more coldly than she intended, "did not propose."
"Did not propose?" Her cousin's shock was unrestrained, and even her husband could not keep the surprise from his face. He came around now to sit in a green wingback chair across from the sopha, running his hands along his knees. "My, then how was this arranged? 'Tis barbarous, is it not sweet husband, that Celia should be given an arrangement but no proposal?" Her voice continued to escalate in tone until it pitched on questions and became inaudible thereafter.
"Cousin this is quite unusual," the count spoke to Celia directly, his graveled and slightly accented voice measured and concerned.
Celia thrust her hands back into her own lap and shook her head. "Well, papa and his father have decided it and there is nothing I am able to do. I am engaged to be married to Friedrich Sommer," here her tongue caught on the foreign Christian name as though it were a sudden bitter taste in a food she was enjoying, "and he has not yet had the courage to show his face in this house."
