Period Romance

I was looking back over our aborted Period Romance and was thinking that, perhaps, we could press forth, finally allowing Fermina to meet her pirate love? Anyway, I've dusted the thing off, and compressed my own and Elanor's installments in order to present this, our untitled romance, as it stands thus far. I'm very impressed that there even seems to be a "missing fragment", which adds a sense of authenticity to the whole thing. If anyone does actually read it, I'd appreciate suggestions as to where it should go from here (conventiently, we have a comments section!).

"Madrid, Spain, 1437

Fermina de la Saint-Amour was lost in thought. Sitting delicately beside her bedroom window, her eyes were drawn towards the hot, sultry, sticky city that snaked out before her. A soft breeze, tinged with the scent of bitter almonds, was lightly touseling her still damp hair, while sneaking through the weave of her white muslin gown to dance across her soft olive skin.

She felt empty. What did life promise her but misery and regret? The luxuries and riches that enveloped her were but a prison: a gilded cage of ennui and sadness. She wanted more. She wanted life to shake her; to throw at her all the danger and excitement that it could muster. She sought suffering. A suffering that would erase the scars of her father, the Count Daza’s cruel dominance.

Never far from her mind was the knowledge that only a few feet away, he could be found pacing the halls of his mansion, the “La Denetrione”, brooding over the wheelings and dealings of his machiavellian existence. To her, the city below promised escape. Within its rank heat and throbbing crowds she saw nothing but freedom. Freedom, and the promise of something more…

Fermina shook her head, and willed herself out of such an enchanting fancy. For she knew that today, like everyday, that prospect would be denied her. She had reached an age where it was no longer considered decent to venture unaccompanied into the city that had been her refuge as a child. She was now not even able to accompany Rosamunda, the houskeeper, on errands or to the market, as she was told that her presence in such surroundings could tarnish her, and reflect poorly on her station. If she was rarely seen, she became a rare commodity, and her father could control the kind of people who saw her so that she was made available only to those with specific intentions. She knew all this. It had been decided for her. So, with a sigh, she coiled her hair and fastened it at the nape of her neck. She then bent to gather up her embroidered house gown, and stray ebony tendrils fell across her cheek. Having fastened the eyes of her gown, she composed herself and moved languidly out of the room. She had to perform her duty, and appear before [missing fragment...]

“Father”, Fermina whispered, eyes downcast.
“How are you this morning, my sweet daughter?” The Count did not wait for an answer, for he was not used to interruptions, even from his kin, “it is a beautiful morning, is it not - the sun shines over our fair Madrid, the birds sing - it truly is a beautiful morning”. His cheery obfuscations sent a chill through her spine; the Count did not concern himself with life’s trivialities, unless… unless concealed beneath lay a grander design. “On such a day as this, it seems a shame to be trapped, as it were, behind the cold walls of La Denetrione, especially for someone of your beauty”. The last word he mouthed languidly, as his eyes met hers. She looked away. What could he possibly mean? Could he at last be offering her the glimpse of freedom she had for so long craved? As her mind drifted towards familiar thoughts of escape, the manservant Alejandro poured into her empty cup some pomegranate juice. She glanced at him, but his eyes would not meet hers. Her mental wanderings soon ended as the Count’s booming voice flared back to life.

“You have been cloistered behind these walls for too long Fermina. You are a woman now, a grown woman. There is a limit to what you can learn from Rosamunda and myself; to what you can learn from within La Denetrione…” With a burst of feeling, Fermina began to entertain the impossible thought that perhaps today, after all these empty years, the Count Daza could be about to offer her the freedom she had for so long craved; the freedom her mother had won all those years ago. Her heart began to soar, releasing within her feelings of hope, passion and desire that had slept dormant for the entirety of her empty life.
“It is for this reason that I have decided to…” Fermina was aware that her fate rested on the words that were to follow. The difference between joy and sadness, life and death – her future stood before this rhetorical precipice. She felt a burning within her as she waited for the Count’s intent to be revealed…

“It is for this reason that I have decided to send you to live with the order of Espantaso de la Alumbramiento Virginal…” With these words, Fermina’s heart sank into the familiar depths of despair and hopelessness from which it had ever so briefly been released.
“You will leave tomorrow at dawn, sailing on La Transferencia. Alejandro will accompany you…” By this point Fermina was no longer following the Count’s cruel words. She was once again resigned to her fate, her imprisonment. The possibilities and dreams that only seconds before had seemed so close, so real, were now as distant as the dark mountains that ringed Madrid – merely shadows that lurked beyond reach. With all the rage that her limp heart could muster, she looked the Count squarely in the eye and slowly whispered the words that were to seal her fate.
“I hate you, father, I hate you!”

An intense silence followed, alleviated only by Alejandro’s sharp inhalation of breath. But Fermina’s eyes remained defiantly fixed on her father, in the hope of catching some approximately human reaction in his face before it fled to make way for the steely impassivity that usually resided there. She was seeking some sign that her declaration had at least momentarily revealed a chink in the supremely indifferent façade that he had presented to her all the days of her life. With some horror, though little surprise, she was made to finally realise that it was no façade at all. He was indifferent, and quite genuinely so. He was no actor. He had been indifferent to her love when she had loved him - a childish folly, you must concede, but one to which all children are prone – and he had been indifferent to the disappearance of that love once he had killed it. So it stood to reason that her hatred - long felt but only newly performed - would be insufficient to register some acknowledgment in him. In the face of her anger, however forceful or implacable it might have been, he would feel no compulsion to alter his position. Her changes meant nothing to him. She meant nothing to him.

Flames of humiliation licked her face, and yet, his mind had moved to other matters. His attention switched back to the papers before him, as if the interlude that had scorched her with such vehemence had not even occurred. Time passed. The blood roared in her ears. Her eyes prickled. Her mind was filled with shouting, as she attacked the situation from as many angles as her rage was propelling her to find. Perhaps it was pure futility that she lamented his carelessness in regard to her. She knew his faults, and she knew them to be rabid and numerous. She even knew that, had she lived her life in the knowledge that he adored her, she would have scorned his love. Had such a love existed at all, she would have seen that it was tainted by its source. But still, she was cut to the quick by his matter-of-fact dismissal of her self in its entirety. When the value of one’s existence is rejected or denied, it is a potent slap. It wallops you, irrespective of whether it has been delivered by a wholly detestable figure. And such wounds can only inflame further when you know that all you have to offer in life is your existence, when you are a woman of mean education and without the consolations of work or a public life, and when there is no other hook on which to hang your identity besides your presence in a household. And now Fermina was to be banished even from that meagre position. She had thought it impossible that she could exist in a more pronounced state of invisibility, or that she could ever be made to feel more keenly that she was worth little in the eyes of others. But she was now to be removed even from those around her who, in a practical sense, at least had to think of her on a daily basis, even if such thoughts were tinged with irritation. So, she was consigned to further degradation.

And yet, though her reeling mind had fixed upon no source of consolation, she began to regain her composure. It was a measure of how much of it she had clawed back that, a few minutes later, she had regained enough to be darkly amused when, having emerged from his papers, her father’s face contorted into a startled gape when he found, to his astonishment, that she was still there. It was laughable that he should have been so astounded, and yet, it was characteristic of his thinking. She knew that, to his mind, she should have ceased to exist as a presence in his life after he had made final and binding arrangements to be rid of her. It would seem to him a galling miscalculation to find that she remained, and that his decision would not acquit itself in actuality until the morning. But the fault would rest with Time, not him. And it would pass. It was a pittance, but Fermina felt that that look on her father’s face, when enlivened by an instant of unpreparedness, was the only victory she would ever win. Now that she would be leaving his house, consigned to some distant hole, she had the feeling that it would be the only memory she had amassed over her lifetime with him to show that she had once had an effect on his selfish composure. Her presence had been felt. But it was a paltry memento to account for the only life she had yet known….