Re: Study; watching the theatricals.
Mina did not know the young doctor. Any memories she had of his association with Vanessa had been stolen by the same tide that took all the rest, leaving only that one image behind. Dirt on a box, and walls of earth beyond and climbing to a sunlit green that would never again be hers. It twined, that memory, with the vague stirrings of death upon a stage, an unease that the pallid creature in periwinkle wore as casually as she wore the opulent dress upon her shoulders.
There were no stirrings of recollection as the somberly dressed young man approached, though inquisitiveness nested in the bright blue of eyes that had lost none of their outward gleam when they became darkened by pigment flecks in sclera.
She smiled at him, cheeks blushed by nothing similar to petechiae. The daughter of the house, etiquette was a thing so ingrained that it lifted the corners of healthy pink lips from pure memory of muscle. "You find it displeasing?" she asked, rather than answering his question directly. Gone were the days where she danced the waltz of demureness. A wife, cast aside, was still a wife, and she was no longer expected to lower pale lashes and titter. "The stories are the fashion," she said of the theatrical, where the young woman was being circled like prey for the carrion in their fine cloaks. "We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author," she quoted, and she graced him with a questioning look, her attention shifted from the faux-gore that gave her no squeamish pause. "Think you they want to walk these steps?" she asked of the gathered blooms and their hidden gazes.
The women about them covered their faces with gloved hands as the terror on the stage neared climax, but Mina did not cower. The girl she had been would have run from the room in demand of sunlight and brightness, and I want a brighter word than bright. But she defied the tensing of muscles that indicated that selfsame desire, not quite dormant, and she remained beside her companion and did not flinch.
"Mina Murray," she offered, soft spoken, a question in the quietly lingering impudence of her gaze.