I am well, thank you, those who worried actually. But things are not so well. You know what I mean, don't you?
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That night, Eden woke up after a long while of combating the horrid dreams, sitting in an unfamiliar room with a familiar feeling of defeat, of loss trouncing at her heart.
She remembered nothing.
She recognized nothing.
Not in the blankets and the huge canopied bed on which she rested. Not in the lace curtains and the mauve wallpaper. Not in the vintage furniture and the sepia velvet couch. Not in the dynamics of this chamber and the lethargy of the hour of night that it was.
Not even in the sleeves of her own nightdress.
Only her exhaustion was recognizable. And that knowledge_ of Magpies bereavement was raw. Fresh.
The spring in the barrens was past. The oasis in the wasteland had dried up.
Her spring_ her oasis was dead.
In a grave, alone somewhere, in these hills and the woods.
She blinked rapidly.
Slowly, as the weariness passed out and languid energy filled her brain, she realized where she was.
It was a grand room, in the living heart of the manor, the Ashleyton. Away from the servants quarter. Away from the kitchens and laundry rooms and the supply quarter. Away from the vivacious chores and the never ending hum.
Nearer to Lord Adelwoods chamber.
Nearer to him.
Very near, in fact. He was not two doors away. Or hardly.
He had insisted for her to stay away from that room in the servant quarter. She did not protest. It would have been foolish enough, to lie upon the cot of that chamber and hope for the sleep to attain her. It would have been impossible.
It was a room with memories. Good from better to bad till worst.
She rubbed her hand on the white silk fabric of the quilt and wondered why she could not sleep peacefully even with all this luxury.
They all knew by now, the maids and those footmen, cleaners and the gardeners, the truth of her identity. Of who she really was.
Not a maid, at least. Not a no one.
They had expressed nothing but every pair of eyes that met Edens asked her the same question that she had no vigor to answer.
Midst all this, Lord Adelwood had ushered her upstairs, allotted her this room and Mrs. Hopkins had helped her bathe and change into her nightgown. Pie, she had been informed, was in Lord Adelwoods keeping. To be cleansed and fed.
Hence, here she remained, alone, as naturally alone, as night is in the lack of moon.
Her moon was gone, afterall.
She was out of the bed before she knew and near to the window. Her heart slashed in her bosom when on relieving the curtains, she saw the sky to be cloudless and starlit.
Moonlit.
Glee-lit, as if.
What was it celebrating? This sky? What was it so happy for? What hilarity was making the stars twinkle such?
A saddened heart often resents all that is genial around it and so did hers.
When she had asked Maggie to stop living in fantasies, she had never realized Maggie would stop living altogether.
Perhaps it was as such. Perhaps for Maggie, fantasies were the ground holding up her breath.
And when Eden asked her to stop living in fantasies, so she did.
She stopped living in fantasies. She lost her ground. She stopped existing altogether.
The instigation grew too much upon her making her already wounded nails dig into the windowsills and her jaws ground together.
An ephemeral wish to throw herself off the ledge flickered in her head.
She staggered away from the window with a start, breathing heavily, stumbled on the by-stand and knocked the sophisticated vase off balance.
Before she could help or hold onto the handles of the chinaware, the porcelain crashed on the wooden floor with a deafening clamor, its shattering cry ringing loud in the dead of the night and the echo that followed bellowed the walls of her room making her flinch in shock, cover her ears and shut her eyes hard.
As if, if she were to refuse acknowledging accidents, they would stop happening actually.
Long after the vase had witnessed its tragic end, long after its pieces had been speckled all over the five feet circum on the floor, long after its infringemental racket had died and so had its echoes, Eden dared opening her eyes.
She winced at the sight of tiny, jagged pieces of the bone china, wondering who on earth caused such indemnity in middle of the night.
She stood a moment there, staring at the mess. Slouching.
Wondering suitable excuses for next morning.
There then, hunching down, she reached for the largest shard of the ware, grimaced at it and started collecting rest of the pieces, as quickly as she could when footsteps from beyond the door made her fingers freeze in dread.
She was still drooping on the floor as the door of her room was rammed open, showing up a very bewildered Lord Stephen at the door, with a lit candle in his hand.
From between his Lordships feet and the doorframe, a tiny head popped into the room, Pie_ that was, and then a tiny body squeezed in and Pie was into the room, woofing at Eden in what appeared_ a midnight salutation.
Eden straightened slowly, the shards from her hand, meanwhile, slipped off with exhorting din, making her look chastised as if she had been caught in a mid-foolery.
"What even were you trying to do?"
His voice was gentle and somewhat hoarse from sleep. His eyes looked drowsy from this mid-sleep dilemma but equally bright from the reflection of candle from his emerald irises.
Pie yapped at her.
"I was only_ I was opening the window." Eden explained to Pie, avoiding Lord Adelwood. "This stool came in way."
Pie ignored her, and busied himself in sniffing at the broken chunks littering the floor, hoping to find something of its interest.
Stephen, on the other hand, leaned his head onto the door-frame, sighing. He watched her stand penalized in the moonlight, the radiance assigning an enticing shadow to her face, by her small nose and slim lips, making him wonder how he had ever thought of her to be unsightly.
Eden felt even more convicted for disturbing him in sleep as he accessed her from across the distance with intense force of eyes.
"Was it much expensive?" She blurted out as her nerves got better of her.
"Quite." He answered.
"How much?" She asked.
"It was imported."
Wide horrified eyes looked into his face.
He tried not to smile.
"You know, my lord, I cannot compensate much."
"Indeed?" He raised a brow. "Then why were you asking?"
Eden glanced around her on the floor with a sorry look on her face, her eyes still swollen from tears and sleep.
Pie wagged his little tail cheerfully, meanwhile engaged in licking a vague brass left-out of the vase.
"Come here Eden." Stephen extended his hand towards her.
He perched the candle higher to make the floor more accountable as Eden hopped over the shards and flints and at last reached to him.
He took her by hand and pulled her nearer to himself. "It was wrong enough to leave you alone tonight."
__
After he had tucked Eden into his own bed, he went to the windows and uncurtained all of them.
His room was larger and had more and bigger windows than hers. The removal of curtains had flooded the room with cold moonlight, illuminating it into a sedate little haven, lying bare to her eyes the hills that silhouetted the horizon all along.
Eden had loved it.
And him.
He had then picked Pie up who was trying to wrestle the moving shadow of the curtain and tickled its fur making the pup yelp in delight and placed it on the couch where the petite thing had snuggled itself comfortably into the cushions and fallen asleep almost instantly.
But when he himself lay in the bed following all this, Eden refused to look his way.
She was nervous. Scared.
This was new.
Shared slumber with him when she had been unmindful and too woebegone to realize it was one thing. This was another.
Insensibility then had veiled all that proximity could have evoked.
But right now, in this dead hour of midnight, in these moments of utter sensibility, when the worst had slipped out and what lingered was just a nothingness, when she was very much aware of her own heart and his, beating side by side, it was impossible not to be dazed by the mist of immediacy that included him, and her and no one else in the world.
The darkness was deep. The silence, heavy.
She watched the moon soar into the sky.
It was hard to tell whether the clouds were floating or the moon was gliding. Perhaps it was both. It was otherworldly.
She breathed in deeply and turned her face to his side.
He was watching her.
The sudden flash of his sea green eyes trapped are her astray attention like shiny marbles do with the kids.
She was locked. Captured.
Hostaged.
In the moment.
The sheer force of his single-minded gaze was enough to drag her breath away. His frown only embellished it more.
"It was fair to break a vase just to watch the moon." He whispered stroking her hairline. "But it would have been unjust to break a heart for that cause. I thought you would never look at me."
She smiled at him for that.
He smiled too.
"Eden.." Her name began in oblivion and ended in it. His lips moved but wordlessly. "I wish never to see you like that ever again."
And had there been any more he had wished to say, the word froze on his lips when her fingers touched his cheek.
Her eyes followed her fingers.
She found what she had thrived to find.
His dimples.
The small dent on his cheek that deepened only when he smiled. A setback on his feature that only enhanced it more.
She lifted her head leaned forth into him.
She had intended the kiss to be on his dimple but what happened thereafter was wholly accidental.
The kiss, instead, ended partly on his cheek and rest on his lips. She gasped at this blunder, her lips parted against his skin, and he froze.
But then, when she was about to back away, his arm weaved through her waist pinning her onto him.
He twisted their bodies, such that she was lying on her back and he was looming all over her. The proximity never increased.
His chest pinned her deeper into the mattress.
One intimate brushing of nose against nose was all it took.
His lips met her, with such ferocity that the world could have collapsed around and they would not have known.
It was absolute carnage, the way this kiss continued.
Breathless bodies. Sweat slicked fingers. Pulsating hearts.
The months old promises were rebroken and reformed.
He was not gentle but nor was she.
Her braided pigtail fell free from her ribbon, her hair cascaded down in frenzy.
The throb of passion grew and grew until it had enveloped everything around them. The ache within her disputed the desire within him.
His forefinger found a pulse behind her ear that his lips seeked to taste.
She bit him on the crook of his neck when he kissed it, that pulse.
Left a glistening half-moon.
Marked him as her own.
There, they grew too loud, Pie woke up with a woof, jumped off the couch and demanded to be taken onto the bed immediately, lifting his little front paws.
With a chuckle, Stephen's mouth left Eden's. Ill satisfied, they both stared into each others eyes for several moment, but the interruption was too sweet to be ignored.
Stephen backed off from her body, and turning over, picked Pie up.
The spoilt little thing chose the place right in between them to be comfortable and doze off again.
Hence, it was on that night, when the lonely moon soared high in the sky and mist framed the horizon, when night owls went on their nocturnal patrols and bats flew around blindly, when lovers loved and Pie slept soundly in between, beautiful things happened.
Across the hill, over a solitary grave, fresh bluebells blossomed and rained down the tree, littering it, covering the brown mound of earth with indigo petals.
Perhaps this was what Maggie had willed.
'Find Happiness.'
Those exactly were her words.