Chapter Text
Marianne
I kneel in the muddy garden, plucking herbs beneath a quiet rain that’s nothing like the one that fell when you left. Each raindrop is fresh and new, untouched by your heartfelt poems and implied promises.
They no longer touch my heart.
Did they ever touch yours?
Mamma calls out again, begging me to come inside.
“It will stop soon!” I reply, hoping it will.
It was only a drizzle, but now, the water seeps in, my knees cold through the growing dampness of my skirts.
I don’t care. I tear at fresh mint, more selectively than my haste may suggest. There’s something grounding about these moments, kneeling in wet earth outside our cottage, that’s reconnecting me to the land of the living. To a life that’s exactly how it was before I met you, but that I’m only now beginning to appreciate.
If not for the Colonel, I wouldn’t be here at all.
Would you have saved me, Willoughby? If you’d been here, instead of wherever you were, courting her? Would you have carried me through the pouring rain, like the Colonel did?
I suppose you would have, given there is precedence; oh, how swept up I’d been when you’d lifted me in your arms and carried me down the hill. You didn’t hesitate or delay—into the house. Onto the parlour sofa.
You visited me again the very next day. And then near every day after that. Reading me Cowper and Sir Walter Scott, evoking nature and longing in sweeping, romantic words.
I was enchanted. How could I not be? You were a man after my own heart.
Except you weren’t.
And you didn’t find me in the rain. Nor did you visit constantly, like you once had.
Because you weren’t here.
And I’ve finally accepted that you never will be again.
“Marianne!” Elinor calls now from the doorway. “Come inside—please.”
Margaret appears beside her, hands on hips. “Yes, come inside at once, before you drown!”
I relent. The rain hasn’t stopped. Has grown only heavier. I stand, stretch my back, head inside. Boots off. Notice for the first time that my wool stockings are soaked.
“The tea is steeping—as are your skirts!” Mamma scolds when she catches sight of me. “Hurry up and change at once, before the Colonel sees.”
I try not to roll my eyes, a habit I’m finding difficult to break. “He was here yesterday. You can’t assume he’ll come again today.”
She exchanges a look with Elinor, as if they know better.
“He always comes,” Margaret chimes, returning to her lookout post in the window seat.
As I trudge up the stairs, a faint smile tugs at my lips.
Yes. Colonel Brandon always visits. Every day for a month after my illness, and though I’m just about recovered, every day since.
He’s slowly becoming a part of the fabric of our lives here. I can’t dwell on what that might mean, or whether it would bother you if I said it has significance.
But there is a truth universally known: that what is there cannot be here. And it’s that vague elsewhere I imagine you in, flitting through parties and chandelier-lit ballrooms, dancing with another woman. Deep down, I know it cannot be an eternal state. There must be quiet moments, even for you, that are filled with silence. Moments in which, I believe, you must think of me too.
But as much as my heart aches, it doesn’t matter. Not truly.
Because I was here.
And you were not.