The Homecoming Bride

Chapter Twenty-Four: What Was I Made For?

CHAPTER SONG: "What Was I Made For?" by Billie Eilish

AN: *Quotation from "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte

Emmy helped Charlotte walk back up the stairs to the bedroom, which formerly belonged to the late Edward Seymour. Both women were exhausted in different ways as Emmy kept her arm around Charlotte's waist to support her, the Yorkshire woman keeping her own arm around the American girl's shoulders.

In Emmy's free hand, she held her luggage, her grasp barely able to clutch onto the suitcase's handle as she struggled not to collapse under all the literal weight she was carrying, not counting the baby in her womb.

"I wasn't sure if you'd come... but I wouldn't have asked if I knew you were with child, sweet Emmy." Charlotte whispered in a soft raspy pitch, like she was hardly able to breathe as she spoke.

Emmy looked close at her ill friend, seeing her once vibrant dark eyes had sunken into the sockets of her skull, her cheekbones more pronounced with her obvious weight loss and ghostly pale color of skin. Her nightdress hanged off of her once voluptuous figure of feminine splendor and Emmy felt the cracked dryness of the leftover tears streaming down her face.

"Are you kidding? As soon as I got the letter, I was gonna come. Will and I cut our honeymoon short and came back to Surrey when we heard you ended things with Joe." Emmy's voice choked as she lamented about her best friend, thinking of the heartbreak he must have endured at learning his former lover was dying from the same disease his own mother had languished from before his very eyes.

The two women made their way to the top of the rickety wooden stairs. Charlotte began to pant with heavy breathing as she tried to remain upright standing as she leaned more of her weight on Emmy and they arrived to Edward's room.

Charlotte managed to make it to the bed as she sat down with a pronounced thump onto the mattress, a painful cough crawling up her throat as she heard Emmy drop her baggage to the floor. The cough pushed up further and she tasted the rusty tang of blood needing to be expulsed from her body with her deteriorating condition.

Her trembling fingers grabbed onto the metal tin bowl shaped like a bedpan used in hospitals placed on the bedside for whenever she would need to vomit blood. She retched and gagged, her upper body seemingly possessed with the malady of tuberculosis and Emmy froze in her silent witnessing of her friend's symptoms.

Not knowing what else to do, Emmy went forward, sitting beside Charlotte and holding back her tangled mahogany hair, once so wild and flying in the wind to represent her untamed spirit when they had first met, unsure of one another and becoming acquaintances and eventual bridesmaid at her wedding. Now, Charlotte Henshaw-Seymour was nearly unrecognizable and so was Emmy herself from when she had first arrived in 1917...

Emmy rubbed Charlotte's back to comfort her as she spit out more remnants of bloody chunks, gasping carefully for breath, which even Emmy could tell was shallow and inconsistent.

"I know... I'm very much changed. I didn't want Joe to see me like this... I know I broke his heart in turning him down." Charlotte whimpered, swallowing back a gulp of saliva as Emmy reached out to bring her a glass of water to drink. Her thin fingers reached and pulled the covers over herself, bringing them up to her chin like she was a little girl again as she watched Emmy dump the blood out the window into the backyard.

Thunder rumbled in the sky outside as raindrops struck the windowsill and Emmy quickly closed the window so the room wouldn't become more chilled than it already was and give Charlotte a quicker death of cold.