Juliet's Trail of Petals

Chapter 2: Part 1: The Garden

I see the door open and see that it's her, harrieta, she's walked into my room! I leap off the cliff of my loneliness and into her embrace.

"You're alive? H-How did you manage— How? How are you here?" I begin as my eyes act as waterfalls on my cheek, and I thank the gods that were shown to the romans. 

"I'm not here Alexandra, I am not with you any longer. I am here to ask for your forgiveness," her voice acts as fresh, clean water to a stranded man in the desert to my ears. 

"Of course I forgive you my love," I'm afraid of asking something I may already know "W-Will you be staying?"

She bows her head and begins to cry. Her face, however, stays completely at peace.

"I can not stay with you, my beloved. I must go now, remember my love for you exceeds that of the secrets I have kept," she says softly as she walks out of my bedroom door and abandons me once again.

And then I awaken. I lay in my bed another night weeping, surrounded by plates filled with my dinners, the visage of my beloved carved into the walls of my memory. I see her face in my mind, I think of the words she barely managed to breathe, with the last being "I love you." I sit and think of the pain she must have gone through, because although I can make small cuts on my wrists, it will never amount to the pain she must have felt between her wrists and her mind. I remember feeling her soul and then not as Mercury led her soul into the afterlife. And as I remember all of this I look out of my still broken window, toward the sea of roses, where my Harrieta lay. As I watch the garden, with just the pale moonlight, I see the flicker of a lantern, one that I had seen before. Where that lantern casts its light, it shows not a face, but a red cloak seemingly looking for something. This person looked up at me in my window, as they had every night they had visited since her death, and they stood and faced me as they had done every night around this time. Whoever they are, they never deal damage to my roses, and thus are not a problem. As they turned toward the direction of the middle of the garden I wondered if they knew who lay to rest there, I wonder if they knew anything that happened that night. I thought nothing of this person, since the gardens had become a place for those from our kingdom to mourn the passing of the woman that would have ruled by my side.

I hadn't gone to visit Harrieta because I am afraid the memory of her laying in the bed of her favorite roses with her wrists cut open by a—

I had not yet thought of what she had used for such sickening wounds, nor do I remember her holding any such weapon. I do not remember that a weapon or tool of any sort was retrieved from where she had laid. I began to think of that night in greater detail, and I summoned the investigators who dealt with and determined my fiancé's death. As I wait the few long hours it takes for them to arrive, I continue to ponder. Then I remembered what my father had said about "her people." I think of her last words and what she was intending to say, I then remember something specific that she said. "It was not me." The worst of this strain, I couldn't find her ring. The one my love said she inherited from the women that raised her in her bedroom in the wing reserved for our servants.

If she had done such a thing to herself, why would she deny it? And to whom was she referring to when she mentioned that someone else was there? Was she being stalked? Where were the guards that would usually be in the gardens? Had my Harrieta actually left me of her own free will? These questions continue to drown me, and so I spill them onto parchment with possible answers, all leading to one: Harrieta was murdered. But why? I continue to ponder this as I await my visitors. And I ponder the possibility that my thinking is led by emotion and grief. Maybe I am denying the fact that she was so miserable she turned to the shoulder of suicide to cry on.