When Caroline woke up from her nap, she noticed that the sun was already setting. Upon grasping that, she groaned and squinted her eyes, burying her head in the pillow immediately afterwards, hoping that no one would disturb her while she was getting rid of her sleepiness. That hope of hers shattered the moment she heard a knock on her bedroom door. After she got her head out of the pillow, she turned around and smiled as convincingly as she could, politely greeting the person, whom she observed was Rosemary. It had to be her due to her appearance, which was similar enough to Harold's. Both of them had innocent and gentle faces and rather light blond hair and trustworthy, shining smiles the kinds of which were rarely witnessed in the world.
"Supper has been prepared," Rosemary said in her sweet voice, after which Caroline saw the tray in her hands, which contained a porcelain plate with roasted rabbit meat and a tall glass of red wine.
"Thank you, miss," she chirped, her stomach roaring and her eyes gleaming at how delicious the meat looked, commencing her meal as soon as Rosemary walked out of the room, leaving the door only slightly open.
Half an hour later, when she ate the food and drank the wine and Rosemary cleaned up after her, the two of them sat at the edge of the bed, doing nothing for the first few minutes except staring at the distance in complete silence and occasionally glancing at each other, wondering what they could talk about and which one of them was going to initiate the conversation. To prevent herself from dying of boredom, Caroline decided to ask the first question that came to her mind, which went like this:
"You are a charming and beautiful lady of twenty-eight with a large dowry at your disposal. Why are you not married then? You could have anyone you want, and you reject that opportunity. Your life would be fulfilled if you found yourself a kind husband who would support you financially and socially. After all, you have reached the peak of your beauty and youth, and at your age, everyone either looks for a marriage or has one, except those like your brother, whom no one obliges to make such a commitment. Is there not a man in Britain you could be content with?"
Rosemary sighed, looking at the floor. "My heart has passions that do not allow it to be held in its designated place."
"And what may those passions be?" Caroline asked coyly, having assumed the reason with ease yet still wanting confirmation, for she believed that there might have been a chance that she was in the wrong.
Rosemary shivered. "The admission of those passions is something I cannot let slip from my tongue, but assure yourself that whatever you have assumed is correct, Madam Proust, as you are an expert when it comes to societal affairs."
Caroline smirked. "So who is the object of your affections then?"
"You would not know him," Rosemary said, sighing again afterwards. "It is not a thing of fame but a thing of anonymity. He writes me letters every week, and I respond to him with much intimacy and consideration, but I feel like I hardly know anything about him. I have been made aware of nothing more than his most base interests and thus cannot tell the area of Britain where he comes from, let alone anything vital about his identity. At least there is the picture of him I painted in my mind, which will live on forever because I will never meet him, and if I never meet him, then he can never disappoint me."
"Concerning love and marriage, what does your father have to say about your prospects?"
"He is the reason I can never be with the man of my dreams. Since it is August now, my father has already found me a husband, whom I will know by heart by December. By April of next year, I will be married to a person I never consented to meet, let alone unite with in an eternal process I cannot back away from. My father has got a shining heart without a hint of corruption, which means that the matrimonial partner he has found for me has a personality far more valuable than the riches he possesses, but if matrimony is without love, then what worth does it have?"
"My heart aches for you. Your soul is at risk of withering due to a loveless marriage, which I have been lucky to avoid thanks to falling in love with a gentleman with lots of money while having lots of it myself. However, that risk is not too big, for countless other women like you have had to go through the same thing, and some of them had the fortune of dying unscathed and satisfied with what they had. You might even realise that a man who prefers being mysterious to being genuine is not worth your time and fall in love with your destined husband, and I am not telling you a farce, as I have seen it happen to some of my acquaintances. Grit your teeth and tolerate whatever occurs to you, and in a year or less, these worries will look like they came from a past life, and they will have become so insignificant that you will laugh at yourself for having indulged in them in the first place."
Rosemary scowled. "The man I admire is not being mysterious simply to be mysterious. From the contents of his letters, I have concluded that he is shy and overly afraid of revealing his identity to me due to the unfounded belief that if someone found out, which, according to him, they surely would, it would be disastrous and ruin both of our lives."
Caroline laughed. "So he is cowardly instead?"
Rosemary snorted.
Caroline shrugged. "It is rather visible that this conversation does not please you in the slightest, thus we shall move on to another theme. I heard you love poetry, right?"
Rosemary's face beamed like that of a little child when a new toy was bought for it, and she answered the question affirmatively with overwhelming excitement. An hour had passed without them noticing while they were talking about their favourite and least favourite poets, different styles and movements of poetry, as well as the tragic lives of several poets they both admired. They had not even touched on sonnets, let alone prose and literature in general and various classifications within it, and the night had already fallen. Caroline would not have noticed it at all if Rosemary did not yawn several times.
She bent her head towards Rosemary with a gentle smile. "My dear, is it time to rest?"
Rosemary would have answered affirmatively if she had not remembered something, after which she told Caroline to wait for her while she goes to another room to get something from it. Her eyes wide, Caroline sat still during those few minutes that she was not there, wondering what the object could be. When Rosemary returned and revealed it to have been a heap of papers, she stared at it intensely, amazed at what she knew to be the lady's old works of fiction. She was smiling at it for a while, but her smile waned when she noticed that Rosemary was sighing and frowning. Carefully positioning her hands on the other woman's neck, she asked the following question:
"What disturbs you about the things you have written? I intend to be a friend of yours, and thus I shall not mock you, no matter the quality of your writing, for I do not even know when you have written all of this. You ought to feel calm about showing others what you have made, as that is the first step if you want to rise to fame."
"I do believe that these works are good, but the memory of them still ignites rage within me. For years beyond counting, I have sent all of them to several different newspapers, and no one has ever had the will to publish them. Something is always lacking, and I am not aware of what it is. Writing has been my passion for as long as I have known myself, and yet no one has bothered to help me when it comes to realising it."
Caroline shrugged. "Some people are too blinded by societal expectations to let a woman be a writer, some do not consider your stories fitting enough to publish in their columns, and some simply do not think your writing is good. However, if you go through enough practice and torment, no matter how long it may take, you will be published someday. I know that this advice is not the best, nor the most unexpected, but I am an aristocrat, not a writer. I hope that this reminds you that nothing in life is easy and that if you wish to succeed, you have to grit your teeth and never give up, or else you will not be satisfied with yourself."
Rosemary smiled at her. "Thank you, Madam Proust. Also, I do not write merely prose, but also poetry. This shall not come as a surprise to you because you have been made aware of the fact that I love both forms of writing, and you could read some of it if you would be pleased by it."
Caroline kindly accepted the offer, and for the following hour, she listened while Rosemary was reading her short stories and poems, giving critiques in as much detail as she could, which was not that small, for since she was used to reading, she was also used to reading with attention and finding meaningful things between the lines, even those the authors did not put in their texts intentionally. The writings were better than she had hoped they would be, and Rosemary saw that she was nicer to her in giving her critiques than she had expected her to be, only displeased with small fragments of the works here and there. Not much of it remained in her head in the first place, but for a long time afterwards, this particular critique, which Caroline happened to tell her several times with different phrasing, would be stuck in her mind:
"I have noticed that your writing lacks emotion, as though the narrator is detached from the intense situations that are occurring to them. Even when you try to be dramatic, the reader is disaffected by it, for your best attempts at drama are repeated exclamation marks on one page and ornate sentences of woe that have been used a million times and are thus worn by age. Perhaps you should imagine yourself in the narrator's position the next time you decide to put something on paper."
For the following several days, Caroline hardly ever saw Rosemary. When she did see her outside of the dining room and bedroom, the young woman was too busy writing in her study to focus on anything else, her face red as she held her quill tight in her hand. It seemed as though she had taken her advice seriously, and with nothing but the best of wishes for her, Caroline half-closed the door, whose creak was barely audible.
The piles of well-used papers began to grow, as well as the piles of crumbled ones that were tossed onto the floor in frustration. The windows were closed and the curtains were drawn all the time to avoid distractions of any sort while the aspiring writer was looking for her muse, constantly awaiting the arrival of her magnum opus from her shaky and exhausted hands, her skin beginning to pale from the lack of sunlight and bags beginning to appear from her eyes from the lack of sleep.
Caroline could not help but be a wee bit disturbed whenever she would visit Rosemary for a short while and see her in a worn-out state, demanding that her visitor go away, but she decided to ignore her until this trance went away, which it did quickly. The consequences of that state prompted her to avoid writing for a while, allowing Caroline, who by this point had been permitted to stay in the Wells manor for as long as she needed to for supposed consolation, to get closer to her, and during numerous hours, they talked to each other without restraint, and nothing changed until Stephen Rochester came to town.