domitan_yu
In the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and twenty-one, when the ash trees whispered their secrets into the wind and the village of Norbridge still dreamed in its sleep, a letter arrived at Hawthorn House.
It came wrapped in linen, the wax seal unbroken, its ink smelling faintly of violets and loss.
Miss Margaret Linwood read it thrice before the hour of breakfast.
She was twenty-seven, and already the world had begun to forget her.
Her beauty, once the subject of idle parlor praise, had quieted into something less golden, more ash-colored. The kind of beauty that made people stare and then turn quickly away. She spoke with the diction of the well-read, but her voice was not remembered. Her presence was often mistaken for absence.
And yet, she held within her a sort of storm. The kind that doesn't announce itself in thunder, but in the slow, aching flood that follows.