Finn Sr trotted out his usual hospitable pleasantries Marigold supposed, but when he looked up from his plate and met her eyes, he seemed intrigued. Marigold was about to get up to go, and said that she would leave the man in peace, but he stopped her. They met eyes again.
“You look familiar,” he said.
Marigold struggled for an appropriate response. She simply shrugged.
“I am from the fire kingdom,” she said.
“You do not look like it, dear,” Finn Sr said, smiling kindly. “Don’t most of the people from the fire kingdom have some shade of red hair?”
“It’s true, I’ve always felt a little out of place because of that difference,” she acknowledged. “Both of my parents had shades of red in their hair. But not me. Still, little oddities of birth happen, so I’ve never meditated too much on it.”
Finn Sr nodded slowly. He opened his mouth to speak again but was interrupted.
Hestia, Finn’s fiancée, was there, and Marigold clocked, without malice on her part, that Hestia was jealous of the intimate conversation Marigold appeared to be having with the patriarch. Marigold kindly made space for Hestia on the couch and excused herself.
“Your future daughter-in-law is here,” she said.
Marigold couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw an expression of exhaustion on Finn’s face as she passed.
She got the sense that Hestia, while clearly beautiful and charismatic, had a needy side, and a propensity to drone on and on. Marigold happened to like that sort of person, but it clearly wasn’t to Finn Sr’s taste.
Marigold ascended the stairs and then paused to look down on the scene below. Most of the revellers had taken their horses or carriages home by now, but a few were still gathered in groups, eating the cheese that Rosemary had put out or pouring themselves the last of the wine. It was a warm scene that, Marigold thought, she would treasure for some time. She saw Freddie lying on a chaise lounge, complaining to her friends of fullness. She saw Rosemary, her duties now done, sipping from a brimming glass with her feet up, evidently proud of the feat she had pulled off. She saw William and Julianne tending to her with high drama, Julianne feeding her grapes off the vine and William attempting to grab his sister’s feet to massage them, while she laughed and tried to keep her wine from spilling. And she scanned the room once more and saw Finn…
Looking right at her.
Surprised, Marigold smiled, and Finn smiled back. Marigold thought of the incident on the stairs earlier and nearly blushed. In a tizzy about her horse the first time they met, Marigold hadn’t yet taken in how attractive this man was. He was probably a few years younger than her, with a muscled frame and dark hair that he wore slick and combed back. His jaw was strong without being severe, and when he smiled, he had deep dimples in his cheeks. Flashing blue eyes. Tan skin.
Marigold turned away from him and climbed the stairs to her room.
In the spare guest bedroom, Marigold felt safe. When she closed the door, she didn’t feel the need to open a window–it was already open, in any case. This type of confinement was totally different than what she had once felt. The modest lodgings suited her. Lying in that twin bed, Marigold felt a return to her childhood self. As if she might wake up and hear her parents plodding along downstairs, hear her mother chiding her for sleeping in, telling her to hurry down to breakfast.
Marigold changed into the nightdress she had packed–a sheer, white slip–and got underneath the covers. She seemed to fall slowly, contentedly, into sleep, like a feather drifting on the air, making its slow way to the ground, a curved arch, like a hammock.
*
Marigold woke up in a panic. She heard animal sobs and felt a kind of rattle within her. She gripped the sides of the bed and realized…the crying was coming fromher.
She put her head in her hands and cried harder, because she realized that, even though she felt so comfortable here, she had to leave. And she was so alone in the world. So totally alone. A different kind of loneliness than the one she had experienced in the fire kingdom, but still loneliness. She cried for the unexpected deaths of her parents, which left her adrift in the world. She cried for the ways she had been treated by men before Topaz…the man who forcibly took her virtue after her parents’ died, knowing she was alone at home, vulnerable and weak…She cried for how unclean that made her feel, priming her for the “love” of Henri, which was really just a desperate clinging to someone in the world who seemed to care for her. She cried for the disappointment she felt when she could not love Topaz, though he was good and kind.
But she had to look up, because she heard a knock on the door and someone was standing there.
It was Finn, who apparently slept in the room next to her, and who had heard her sobs. He looked around to see if anything was disturbing her, some intruder, and then when he realized it was only her, he paused in a moment of understanding.
Marigold tried to apologize for the noise, but Finn, who was only a shadow now, advanced toward her, sat on the bed, and…held her.
“I just feel…alone,” she said.
He didn’t press her to explain. He only wrapped his arms around her shoulders, and she put her hands on his forearms, as if to lock his embrace around her. He held her tighter and she sobbed. She felt his strength and his warmth, she felt him nestle his head in her hair. Slowly, he began to rock back and forth, and her tears dried.
“You don’t have to explain,” he said, over and over it seemed, until eventually he picked her up in his arms, and she locked her arms around his neck, and he carried her into his room–navigating the darkness as he did so. In his room, there were masses of pillows and heavier blankets, and he wrapped them around her. Marigold made no excuse. She was only happy to be with someone, and she feared that if she said something, she would break the spell and politeness would take over. He would leave her.
She almost feared he wasn’t real, and she had to keep touching him to make sure. To hold his hands.
Marigold might have felt some sense of impropriety if he hadn’t held her so tightly in his lap, keeping her there so that she would have had to object for him to release her. It was dark…he was warm…and for the first time in awhile, Marigold felt some stirrings of desire, once her sorrow had abated. But eventually they fell asleep, Finn’s body wrapped around hers, his hands stroking her hair, touching her waist.
It was a fantastic dream.
Except that it wasn’t.
