Chapter Text
“Did you ever feel guilty?”
There was a brief period of tense silence, as Augustine set her teacup down and the other woman lifted hers to her plump, peach lips to take a sip. Augustine wanted to rip the flesh from her body and feel the power of causing intense pain to someone who had done the same thing to her. Instead, she folded her hands over her skirts and waited politely —a sickening repeat of every feeling and motion that had been drilled into her since the moment she was born. This woman would never understand that —to wait your whole life for someone to tell you to let go, to teeter on the edge of that longheld desire, only for the noose to be tightened and the bones to crack harder than you ever thought they would.
Elizabeth set down her teacup, staring directly into Augustine’s soul: the other woman did not fiddle with her hands as the wife did, for she was all composure and Augustine was full of forbidden cracks and jumbled threads waiting to be unravelled. She wanted to say more, to elaborate, but she felt at least a little bit that Elizabeth knew exactly what she meant, down to the finest of details.
“At first, I did not want him.” Elizabeth said honestly, “My husband was desperate for a career in Parliament, desperate for recognition from his peers. To be allowed to attend the coveted hunts of the King or to receive a commission from the Queen herself.” She breathed deeply, and Augustine almost felt sorrow for her. “He thought that a relationship with the prince would be his greatest chance of glory —and that was where I came in. He wanted me to belong to someone else so he could be someone.”
Elizabeth reached for Augustine’s hands across the chaise, “You have to understand that I did not want to be a mistress —I had gone into my marriage with no great notions of love, I knew that, but I did not want to belong to someone else in the very same way I had not wanted to belong to my husband before I wed him.” Augustine felt a tear drip from her eye, carving tracks into her face as she tried to wrangle some emotion beyond hatred and jealousy from her heart —to look into the eyes of the woman her husband loved and feel anything but the pain of her own heartbreak. To hear another noise without the cracking of her bones and the elasticating sinew of her heartstrings hauled to the very edges of her soul.
“But we met, and he liked me. He wanted me from the moment he met me,” Augustine felt bile rise to her throat at the confession, pushing Elizabeth’s hands from her own and staring impassively toward the intricate gold designs of the wall. She knew that it was true —she knew in her heart that every word was the truth, because he had done it to her. He had showered his affection upon her in those few golden weeks of the first blessings of marriage, the days when she had been sixteen and carefree and believed that her husband was the most loyal and loving man to ever walk the earth. She had said as much to Frederica, her letter marked with the kohl-stained lip marks that it felt he had tried to kiss her to death with. How many mouths had those lips kissed? What was so wrong with her that he could not love her, that he forced himself to pretend for days and days and make her believe that the hidden truths of his infidelity were merely a sign of a masculine need to forge his own way in the world?
Elizabeth continued, “He was kind and attentive and young, and he wanted me. I was older than him, sure, but I had never been wanted in that way before. I had never been so desired in my life, how could I say reject that thing that I had always wanted? How could I deny him when he showed me what love truly meant?” Augustine wanted to rip her eyes out, to tear the skin and maul the heart, drink the blood and watch it drip from her lips as only the scorned wife can hope to do. “When he was engaged to be married, my husband wanted things to end —he didn’t want the scandal to get out, nobody knew about us then—”
Hearing her refer to them as us made Augustine feel sick, “—and I tried to end it. I really did. But he couldn’t let me go, he wanted me, he had feelings for me, he loved me.” Now it felt like a taunt, and tears streamed from Augustine’s eyes as she felt the knife twist in her gut. Elizabeth moved to the opposite chaise, blocking Augustine’s view of the wall and forcing them to make eye contact. Sick rose up her throat. “So, you were wed. And I was there, and my heart was cracking into a thousand pieces as I heard your small voice muttering your vows.” There was another small period of silence, before Elizabeth steeled herself and decided to say what she was contemplating.
“You mixed up his name and I wanted to stab you. I wanted to hurt you because I knew that I would have gotten them right —I would have loved him right and true and honestly, I would have been the wife he dreamed of having if my youth had not been ripped from me to attach me to a spineless, thoughtless man.”
Elizabeth enunciated every word as Augustine choked on the lump in her throat that seemed to grow larger with every syllable. The tears cascaded, smashing like pelts of rain against her hands and etching rivers into her face. Dissecting the parts of herself she had always tried to hide —first from her father, and then from her husband.
“But I knew he would come back to me, because he loved me. He spent three weeks on that honeymoon writing letters of disgust and remorse, regretting that I had not been his wife instead of you.” Her tone was becoming more spiteful by the word, and Augustine could understand that all of this anger had been built up for a long time. Five years and twelve days since their engagement had been confirmed, and Elizabeth had been enraged ever since that day. Augustine did not understand why —James was her husband, he had been bound to her since before he was two years old, why could he not love her? The woman he always knew he was destined to be with, the woman his parents had perfectly formed for him since the moment she was born?
The knowledge of the honeymoon was worse than anything else. At the time, she had believed every single lie he had fed to her. Believed that his pleasure belonged to her alone, and his heart had chosen to lie with their destined marriage. She felt stupid now —she had blatantly gorged on the physical intimacy that he had provided her, the trust that she had naively fed his power upon. In her head, she could not imagine that he was such a selfish person. Even after she had caught him in bed with his purported one true love, even after she had listened to his blubbering lies and forgiven him if only not to watch his eyes flood with tears and beg for her forgiveness, as though she were some deity or another.
Augustine could not imagine that her husband was an evil man. Despite his secrets and his lies, his infidelities and childish indulgences, she could not picture his soul as black as she wanted it to be. She sometimes thought she was sixteen again, in those sacred moments when he kissed Louise’s head before sending her off to bed, when he read from the engraved picture books at bedtime and bathed the children with his soft, pale hands. The hands that had been joined to hers at that godforsaken altar.
“He wanted me more than he ever wanted you,” That one tore at her soul just a little bit. “He wants an attentive, experienced woman who matches his fervour and knows him for the man he truly is. And I fill that role for him. You are merely his wife —a ceremonial object he plucks from his boudoir whenever he feels the need.” It felt like her father was here again, holding her hands in that strangely decorated drawing room in Hanover and promising her that her marriage was the greatest honour and prestige she could ever hope to achieve. She had been just a girl then, full of hope and all the wrong kinds of fire.
Her mother was there, in the back of her mind, screaming from the pain and begging her husband to save her life instead of the child inside her. Augustine had seen her in the bed, watched the blood trickle from her mouth and the pain–filled doe eyes contort into revenge and hate at the knowledge that she had sacrificed her life for all of nothing —a dead baby and a husband who had shown his true colours. Augustine supposed that she would die that way, full of hate and vengeance for a man who had never truly loved her but to whom she had devoted her wasteful and regretted life. She would become a fable, a story for future generations to feast upon as the perfect image of how a wife should be. Silent in life and in death. Full of nothing but children and obedience.
“There is no was about him and I. In some way, we are made for each other. We belong to one another and there will never be a parting between us so long as the other lives. We are and always will be.” Augustine’s tears had stopped, the realisation of her fate sobering her heart to the truth of Elizabeth’s words. “There is nothing in my body and soul but love for him, devotion to him, and his in turn for me. I am completed by the knowledge of his undying attention and passion, and the notion that he will never belong to anyone else but me. Not even the girl he was forced to marry —in his eyes, I am his wife, I am the only one he needs. And you— you are merely an obstacle.”
Elizabeth stood, the spite and revenge in her heart fueling her ascent. Augustine watched her leave, the dipping curtsey a mock if there ever was one. Her heart ached to hear the words spat in her direction, and she wanted to scream —I was just a child! She smiled, ignoring the black drip of kohl from her eyeline, and stood, facing Elizabeth’s back. The woman had not been dismissed, and thus the doors had not been opened for her. A small victory. She stood there limply, as though she expected the world to fall at her feet because one man loved her more than his wife.
“You do not understand what it is like —to love someone who does not love you back.” Augustine summoned the words from her heart, feeling the truth bleed into every phonic. Elizabeth turned, her narrowed eyes fixing like vulture claws to Augustine’s heart, already mangled by the swell of conversation blurring about on the pages of her brain. “You do not understand what it is to be formed for someone else. To spend thousands of days of your life being carved into the perfect person in the hopes that someone else will enjoy it.”
Augustine picked up Elizabeth’s pearls, from where they had fallen from the train of her dress in her attempt at a hasty exit, and felt their smooth curves in her broken hands.
“From the moment I was born, I was moulded for him. My bedroom was painted red because his favourite colour was red, I had macarons every night before bed because that was his nightly routine. Since I was eight years old, I have had a glass of champagne by my bedside each and every night because his favourite drink was champagne. I have read every work of Shakespeare and Homer and Pope and Moliere because his favourite form of entertainment was prose. I spend every other night at the theatre because that is his passion.”
There were no tears this time; she was full of hatred and fire. Both for this woman, who saw nothing beyond the scope of her own selfish desires, and the people around her who had bound her to a future she did not want before she had the voice to protest.
“I do not know who I am without him, do you understand that?” Their eyes met now, a clash of resentment and unadulterated loathing burning through them. “I lie in bed each night and wait for him to come to me. I wait for him to lie above me and mould me into my perfect shape —to make me a mother, for I have nothing in my life that sets me apart enough that I must rely upon the incumbent duties of my female human nature. I bear children for his image, and watch them wither before my eyes without a tear in them, as a good wife should. I support his ambitions and cater to his desires because that is what I was born for. You do not understand what it is like to be made for someone and have them abhor the very notion —to be completely and utterly his and yet, without direction or supplication, completely rejected.”
She threw the pearls to the floor by Elizabeth’s perfect pink heels, watching the woman’s eyes flicker down to them before coming back up to meet hers again. “He never wanted me, I understand that now. He was forced to wed me, and his resentment of that fact has led him back to your adulterous arms time and time again.” Augustine stepped closer, untying the purple fichu from around her neck, taking Elizabeth’s left hand and placing it there.
“Take it.” Augustine advised. Elizabeth maintained her stare, but her eyes softened, recognising the purple silk from that horrible day her heart had mourned the loss of the man she knew would never really be hers. “Do you know why I am giving you this?” The countess shook her head, a tear dripping from her eye as Augustine raised her right hand and placed it gently against Elizabeth’s cheek; the courage of kindness ignited by the indelible desire to break through the burn of hatred marring her tender soul.
The questions and answers swam in the tears that lined their eyes, the recognition that their hatred was misplaced and the perceived threats were nowhere to be found. “This belonged to my mother. She died when I was four years old, and she left me with this as a reminder —the reminder that I could never trust a man, first my father whose ambition had pulled her into the cold claws of death, and then my husband, whose heart may never belong to me and be placed in the hands of another. I understand that now, I understand what she meant when she gave this to me. And I want you to have it,”
Augustine removed her hand from Elizabeth’s cheek, taking a step back and motioning for the doors to be opened. “I want you to have it as a reminder —that my husband belongs to me and that, as long as you live, you can rest assured that nothing you think belongs to you is solely yours. That, though my husband may be a foolish man with selfish desires and intermittent displays of affection, he will always be my husband. I want you to live with this as a constant reminder of the pain and suffering you have caused me, both collectively and solely with your words, and that, should I die, my blood will be upon your hands, never to be washed away.”
Her eyes traced every movement, watching Elizabeth bend to the floor to pick up the cracked pearls and rise again. Augustine watched the tears in her eyes and all she could think was —this is what you deserve.