✓ | ✩ louis partridge imagines ✩

primula vulgaris / v.t.

you silently made your way down the dirt road that led away from the garden, carrying a small boquet of primrose in your hands. taking in the scenery around you, you couldn't help but let out a sigh that broke the silent atmosphere. you felt as if all the energy you could muster into creating lively conversation was already used up in you brief interaction with lady caroline. 

she told you that there were no updates, despite the fact that his face haunted you in almost every newspaper and missing persons poster you saw around london. it haunted you more that you were greeted with nothing but grim smiles from servants and lame attempts at reassurance every time you came back to visit basilwether, hoping that your childhood friend and lover had returned.

you kicked up dirt, letting out your frustration as you made your way over to the small treehouse that you and tewkesbury convinced some of the gardeners to build when you were children. what you would give to go back to that time in you life. 

much like tewkesbury's parents, your parents were also marquess and marchioness, but of southhill. southill was a quaint area in the countryside that was located a mile or two away from basilwether, and a carriage or train ride from london. this made it easy for your fathers to meet about noble affairs and for your mothers to have tea together, which meant that you and tewkesbury found yourselves in each other's company quite often.

after you the two of you became teenagers, you never relied on your parents to be able to see each other. you always took turns visiting each other's estate on horseback, spending hours fooling around in the gardens of basilwether or splashing around in the lake at southhill. 

your parents always joked that the two of you would end up together, as your brother was the sole heir to the southhill estate because you were a girl. it was no secret that you and the young lord had feelings for eachother, feelings that came to be after more than ten years of friendship. hell, the two of you even planned your future. a future where the two of you were to take over the basilwether estate. a future where you would be the two nobles that made change happen in parliament as they fought for equality. the two of you truly believed that you could change your world for the better, as long as you had eachother. 

even after the late marquess of basilwether's recent death, which would leave any woman bitter for years to come, lady caroline found it in her to joke about the fact that you were most likely going to take her role, whenever you came to visit. 

"lady y/n," she would say, "soon to be marchioness of basilwether. probably a better one than i ever was." 

if only that were true. 

after the marquess died, tewkesbury was ready to take his father's role. that was until his grandmother, the dowager of the estate, and his uncle forced the idea of enlisting in the military on him. enlisting in the military was never in the future that the two of you had planned, but they were adamant on him joining regardless.

you knew that was the reason he left in the first place. you knew he wouldn't want to live a life where he would regret every second of every day until he died. 

tewkesbury had been missing for a month now. the sad part is, he didn't even tell you. on the morning a week before he was to be sent off, you woke up to find out that he had gotten on a train to london and was nowhere to be found. ever since then, you've been visiting basilwether constantly, in hopes that maybe he'd be in his room waiting when you got there. 

you thought that maybe today was the day, until you sat down for tea with lady caroline just to find out that he was still gone. so now, you found yourself staring at the rope ladder that hung from your childhood treehouse. 

hoisting yourself up, careful to not drop the boquet you were holding, you made your way inside the treehouse. dusting off your dress to rid it of any dirt, you took a look around the place. it was still untouched, as you and tewkesbury left it. you didn't have the heart to come back to it without him, but you figured you had to at some point. as much as you hoped it wasn't the case, he could've been dead for all you knew.