Braun Hallen did not like to hear this. Not many men in Lykke thought it worthwhile to do business with women. But he bowed and offered a bulky arm to me. If he wished one of his business transactions would close with me in his bed, receiving my wifely duties, he would have to play along.

I kissed my father’s cheek and took Hallen’s bulky arm…all the way to the door, at which point I released him, curtsied, and dismissed him pointedly.

I took my coat from my father and shrugged it on, flipping my long, fair hair out of the collar. And then I hurried upstairs. For I would soon have my pyre, and it made my heart bounce like a fox over mounds of snow. The bed, with its dreary covers, would have to wait until some weariness overtook me by force. The moon called.

“Eat something first, Twilight,” my father shouted after me from the foyer. “And for the love of God, this time take Vincent!”

Episode 18: A Gaggle Of Fools In A Study With A Young Woman

Stories change their tone as they are told. This is one of the manifold reasons I preferred books to conversations. Fools can manipulate the meaning of stories in their own minds, but the truth of the words will always exist exactly as the author intended them to.

Men lie. Books always tell the truth.

The story of how Braun Sam Crawford saved the plain governess and the handsome mute heiress spread through Southern Lykke. How valiant was he. And how quick and how strong. To wrangle a hideous monster with no weapon, using only his bare hands and the incomparable power that ever swells from the testicles of men. Such was his great affection for me. Such was his great esteem for his family name.

People fancied that I would swoon into his arms, as I had when the grippling assaulted my feminine wiles that one crisp evening, and that I would marry him and carry the Crawford name as he had carried me back to Kendrick Manor.

Since she was almost bludgeoned to death, though she was unaware it was my doing, June much preferred to teach me indoors. She became as stiff and uncreative as any other governess, only she did not try to force speech from my lips. She only read to me out loud and often, which was cumbersome because I was a more expedient and more vibrant reader than she and could do the job much better myself if only she had let me.