𝐀 𝐒𝐖𝐀𝐍'𝐒 𝐋𝐔𝐋𝐋𝐀𝐁𝐘 - Cinderella AU

I - wounds in the parlor

i.

Mid November, 1788

"I HAVE NEVER ASKED ANYTHING of you, Isa," Ruby Alderidge trembled, her words mere wisps of lifeless things that her purple bloodied lips forced out.

Blood was trickling down the edge of her lips as Isadora Tremaine's tears splashed onto the battered girl's face as she held Alderidge's cold cheek in her palm, bending over her form on the surgical table as the physician barked out hushed orders at his attendees—mentions of various equipment and other things to be fetched in desperate urgency.

Isadora Tremaine watched the life flicker in her dear friend and confidante's pale blue eyes. She had only ever seen them brighten and dim over the course of their ten year friendship, their girlhood tainted and painted by everything the ladies had gone through together with crystal glasses and straw baskets full to the brim of gorgeous but cruelly plucked flowers in their peripheries.

"I will do whatever you ask of me," Isa cried, watching through her tears as the whites of Ruby Alderidge's eyes filled with blood each second—miniscule veins tightening and bursting in the girl's tortured exertion to stay present—drenching her soft blue irises against a canvas of red instead of the white.

"Archie—," Ruby choked the name of her beloved son out, coughing out a spraying of blood. "Little Archie is obedient, he will listen to you. I promise he will never give you a reason for complaint."

"He is a darling boy," Isadora managed, her throat closing up. "Archie is a darling boy, and I will care for him."

Isadora Tremaine's eyes hurt. They throbbed on her face like hard stones, and her throat felt as though it would choke her of its own accord. Her chest felt like she was being stabbed continually, a knife being thrust in and out of her body. Just like someone had done to Ruby Alderidge.

What fault was it of hers? She had only been a mother.

Ruby Alderidge had the unfortunate privilege of having borne a bastard son with a gentleman who's name she was much too wholehearted to let loose and tatter. The man had turned his back on her, leaving the lady in her forlorn circumstances, with no money or house to her name.

Isa hadn't known all that had transpired, her confidante had chosen to conceal the part from her-worried perhaps of Isadora Tremaine's own reputation and family name. Though Isa understood, the concealment had still made her feel wretched-as though she were a bottle of expired deadly nightshade corked away in the darkness in someone's cabinet, away from the light and where she was most needed—to help in her own desolate way.

She hadn't found out about her dear friend's child up until an year earlier when the poor boy had turned four and his presence had become known to the entirety of their quaint French town—plunging Ruby into a spiral of being shunned and pronounced a harlot to have given herself so to a man and raising his illegitimate child.

Toulouse was a town much confined by the utmost principle of propriety and decorum, though most people residing had often been reduced to chewing leather just to have a sensation akin to eating. 18th century France was plagued with droughts that spread sporadically and often died out abruptly only to dominate the next second. Toulouse was the hub of it all, and played host to the highest and lowest of French society all at once.

Isadora Tremaine had herself been privy to the unbiased flounderings of Toulouse, though she had started her residence in the town eleven years ago when her widowed mother had married the Baron and had brought both her daughters along to move into the gentleman's exquisite chateau in Toulouse. Eleven years had seemed little to her often, but they had never weighed on her shoulders as hard as they did at present.