Lady Honora Carnall knew that there was very little she could have done to avert the fate that had befallen her family. The child, who had challenged her so much, with her untamable curls, puzzling mannerisms and piercing gaze had become a woman. There were few people left in doubt of that fact now.
It had been a spring like any other. Lady Honora had been struck down with a mild fever, as she was highly sensitive to the changing seasons, and to whittle away the hours she would lie there, envisaging a garden party so splendid that she would surely be practically swimming in good favor.
Once she could sit up for any length of time, with shoulders weighing heavy under her knitted shawl, she wrote with her nose to the paper, ordering ornate tablecloths, seasonal vegetables and a fanciful wide-brimmed hat that would keep her out of reach of the dreadful sun. The flowers had mentally been arranged, and the finger sandwiches' precise dimensions duly noted.
Aurora, the youngest of her children, would of course be fitted in a pale, floral pattern becoming of the season, and be found frolicking with the other unmarried young women whose lilting laughter and inhibited smiles would inspire mirth among guests. Lady Honora was of the mind that a good event could be measured in the marriages it procured, and she knew that while the girls flounced among the burgeoning, aching wilderness like wood nymphs enticing travelers, the lingering gazes their nubile forms invited had every potential of bearing fruit.
Indeed, the event could have waited – garden parties were far better suited to the midsummer months, after all. She was pleased to boast at having hosted the first garden party each and every year, but was bitterly aware that there were far more impressive gardens and far more eventful parties in the months that followed. It was her own rigidity and pigheadedness that had kept her daughter on the fixed path to ruin. After all, there was nothing more symbolic than a gown so bridal and virginal drenched with scarlet blood in auguring of the death of a future.
"It's gone, then?" the girl asked emotionlessly, as they lead her, by limp wrists up to her bedroom.
"Goodness, child, what do you mean?" Lady Honora demanded.
Once behind closed doors, the two tremulous maids began frantically deliberating.
"The baby," Aurora reiterated simply. "I didn't want it, so I'm rather glad."
For a moment, Aurora thought that perhaps she wasn't losing a baby after all – perhaps this was all just a figment of her imagination, because the three women before her were suddenly suspended in motion, like limp wooden dolls, and she had never witnessed anything so surreal or comical.
Then her mother's face slowly began to contort – first, like a yawn, her jaw unhinged itself, and then the colour drained from her face, forming the mask of a silent scream.