Chapter 11 Food Is Window To The Soul. These People Have None
Sleeping was good, Maeve realized. The beds made it better too. There was just something about the ability to not think for a while, your mind free from every sort of worry or panic as one drifted off into a beautiful world.
It was why she believed waking people could kill them sometimes.
“You say that I have to do this?” Maeve looked like she was on the verge of tears, even though she had already cried many times and the maids had worked very hard to simultaneously clean her tears and feed her all at once.
“Yes, my Lady,” Lucien replied, the formal title returning because they were in the presence of other people. “You would naturally never honour an event like this one but now that you have come-of-age, it is expected of you,”
“We have longed for this day, Lady Isabella,” One maid said. Maeve realized she was the one named Elaine. She looked young. And naive. There was a liveliness to her that upset Maeve in a way. The poor girl seemed to sleep well. “You always look beautiful but dressing you in such noble wear when you would naturally refuse it is very comforting,”
Maeve stared at her reflection on the vanity mirror, trying to hold back her pain. Her hair was pulled back, straight and tucked behind her ears. Her face was powdered so much she looked almost white, her lips were a rosy red, her eyes lined with kohl and giving a cat eye lines shaped— and the dress. It was still pretty, too gorgeous. How could they afford this?
Maeve made a mental note of selling it when she returned.
She turned to Lucien. “You’ll be by my side, won’t you?”
He bowed slightly. “As close as they’ll let me,”
Maeve wished NACE would pop up but it hadn’t returned since she sent it away, an action that would be a miracle if Lucien didn’t appear in her room announcing that she had to attend a tea meet and greet with the other noble daughters now that she’s had her Presentation day.
Maeve refused, naturally, until she heard him say that this might affect her family’s noble standing which in turn will make them ineligible for the monthly pension given to high class nobility.
And here she was.
The carriage rocked back and forth as she thought. At first, she planned on eating as much food as she could stuff down her throat, looking for the nearest room to sleep in and staying there till Lucien believed she had sacrificed her freedom enough but she also knew that this would be a good opportunity to know more about people’s external reaction towards Isabella.
She knew from her Presentation Day that she wasn’t excessively liked but she didn’t know how bad. Was it bad enough for them to want to kill her?
Her parents mentioned something about High Nobles. She had asked Lucien and he had said that he didn’t know much about noble life (he was to also speak with other guards at the place they were heading to and getting information from them as well), so with this… with this, she could personally gauge their behaviors, figure out who Isabella could have met and maybe avoid them?
But there was a tiny issue.
Isabella might have been taught social etiquette.
Maeve, sadly, was not.
As Lucien helped her out of her carriage, she nearly walked up the stairs before he stopped her explaining that they had to wait for the butler of the house to come and welcome her in personally. They waited, and waited.
The Butler never came.
Lucien saw this as an insult. Maeve couldn’t care less.
When they arrived at the main house, no one came to greet her. Not even a single maid paid any attention to her. Which was fine to Maeve, as she didn’t even want the attention in the first place. But she drew the line when she arrived at the garden for the supposed gathering and realized they had already eaten all the desserts and all that was left was tea.
Hot water and some leaves! Not actual food!
“Lady Montague, you look quite radiant, except… well, except you also look quite downcast,” Their voices all sounded British, like they were talking through their nose. One in particular was speaking, Maeve couldn’t care to know her name. Or look at her face. “It seems I mixed up the time when I sent you your letter,”
Maeve’s gaze didn’t move from the cup of tea in front of her. “Yes. Letter.”
Deep down, the woman was reconsidering her life choices, wondering why she had left the bed, but to the women… to the women, she looked stone faced, like she was minutes away from pronouncing one of them dead. And high nobles had the ability to make that happen in seconds.
They backtracked. “We apologize—”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Maeve reached out to wipe the tears falling from her eyes. “It is my fault,”
That was all she said but the other women around the table heard ‘it was my fault for thinking any of you simpletons could be of any sort of use to me. I really must pronounce you traitors of the realm’, which would make sense considering that they planned on alienating her.
But this was something they always did.
The very few times Lady Isabella came out of her room to join them in public sight, they would do these same things and she would just stay quiet and endure all of it. It was what made it fun. A weak high noble.
And a high noble whose affinity was such a secret meant more opportunities to mock her.
But this… this aura…
This woman seemed to let years out of her eyes and sobbed quietly but her eyes glared daggers into the host’s soul, and if looks could kill, she would be six feet under with vultures pecking over her remains.
“These are just desserts—”
Lady Anastasia Vierdan had not even finished her sentence before Maeve’s evil gaze fell upon her. She froze for the first time in her life, an action that felt deeply unnatural to her because you see, she was the only noble close enough to a high one aside Maeve at that table, so fear had never been an actual emotion she experienced.
She felt like crying. “F-Forgive me, for— for assuming—”
“Assuming what?”
Maeve suddenly sat erect, her eyes still on Anastasia as she tried to pull the kindest smile she could muster.
To her, she looked as graceful as a swan but to the others who were looking at her, it looked like some terrible spirit had inserted hooks into the corners of her mouth and were violently tugging them to the side as she said, “That I am upset? Why will I be? Am I not only a person who deserves to feed? Why am I even alive at all? Sweets? Barbaric? Meals? Preposterous. Why don’t you all just kill me—?”
This was it, by the way. That last sentence.
A sarcastic sentence, a sentence not really known at this time, a sentence said by a woman who had come with a plan and now had started a chain of something that she would regret for a very very long time.