London, Murray House, Mina & Vanessa
Mina remembered.
Dirt on wood and a burial, and a man whose face she could not recall. She remembered her father's final words to her. She understood that, somehow, she had gone from this place. Before that, a blur, and then Jonathan's face. Dear, sweet Jonathan. All things before were remembered, of course, clarity in heartache, and she could still feel the flutterings of Ariel's mistress' wings upon her chest as she clawed at flesh and heart. But years had passed between then and now and, for all her forgetting, she was changed by it all.
She undertook the ride from seaside to London with two maids, trusted old things from her youth, and no more. She was not bold; she had never been bold, but she would not allow Vanessa to think she would be controlled. No more that sweet and biddable girl. I must choose between despair and Energy──I choose the latter, and so decided. She decided it in the way she'd decided to marry a man with tiny feet, so that they would look fine upon the ballroom floor. Impulsive and of the moment.
She would not worry about the missing things; they served her naught.
She undertook the journey in silence, and when the carriage stopped before her father's London home, she looked up at it with the same awed innocence of her fair youth. She'd stayed there while in London, of course. She'd slept in that room, just there, as Jonathan paid court to her. She'd stepped from this very door evening after evening, invitation after invitation.
Yet it seemed she'd been gone long enough for the flesh to fall from her bones. Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced, and she smiled that meek and obliging smile of her younger years, and she entered the foyer when an unknown servant tugged open the doors. She did not ask where the man she had known since her girlhood was; she had learned silence sometimes yielded more than asked questions.
"Please inform Miss Ives I await her in the sitting room," she said, instead, and she turned in cream and the palest blue, hair up in curls that were somehow yet neat, and her step quiet as she entered the room her mother always favored when receiving visitors.