Evangeline Rosewell has too much love to give. Fortunately, the three people she loves the most are exactly the same way.
( THE INFERNAL DEVICES TRILOGY )
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THE LONDON INSTITUTE, 1873
*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧
Evangeline Rosewell did not know where she was.
She didn't know where she was a lot of the time, lately. It was a blur of different houses and different smiling faces. Smiling faces that quickly stopped smiling, she found, as soon as they realized she was not a happy girl. They wanted her to be happy; it made her easier to deal with. She didn't know why that was, but she had heard plenty other adults say so, when they thought she couldn't hear them. Many adults thought children couldn't hear them. She had learned that, too. She had learned a many things over the past year, but the biggest lesson was one she held close, like a safety net.
The lesson was this: A lot of nice people stopped being nice when other people were not watching.
Another thing she learned was that being homeless was not as fun as she once thought it was, before she had been thrust into such a predicament herself. She had fantasized, once, about running away with a little sheet full of things she would need, thinking of it as some sort of adventure. She knew better now.
The money that her father had left for her could not be touched until she was eighteen, or so the Clave and many other adults had said, and the Rosewell family's funds had been frozen until then, save small allowances she was given every month just for toys and dresses and anything materialistic she might want. She hadn't seen much of that monthly allowance the past year. The families who had gleefully taken her in had claimed them for themselves, claiming it was theirs, to pay for her upkeep.
Evangeline knew the money wasn't theirs. She just didn't think it was worth much of the trouble. What did money matter, when both her parents were ashes in the wind, and she was now being carted off from house to house, never knowing where she'd be next? The families could have it all if they wanted. The only problem was that they never seemed to want her. They wanted her at first, because of her name. The Rosewell line was a fine family, a prestigious and famous family, a lineage full of strong warriors. They had jumped at the chance to take in the Rosewell orphan, thinking it would uplift their status somehow.
All it did was make them realize they didn't much like sad little girls. And Evangeline was possibly the saddest little girl they had ever seen. All she did was sit at windows or stare. She did not play, she barely spoke unless spoken to, and when she ate, she ate slowly, as if she had to force the food down her throat. The families probably could've handled that—"She is grieving, let her be sad," a kinder soul would've said—but then the nights came, and with the nights came the night terrors, and the crying, and the absent-minded roaming of hallways when Evangeline couldn't sleep.
