Chapter Seven: Another Letter

Lizbeth had gone to the kitchens like she had been told to do and had met the staff there. They were two lovely, sweet older ladies who she had fallen in love with almost instantly.

She had stayed with them, sitting on a high stool in front of a tall counter, eating the delicious French Toast (with much more confectionary sugar than was necessary), and talking with them about simple nothings. After about half an hour, she had excused herself apologetically and told them that she would return in the afternoon if she could manage it, and returned with only one wrong turn, which had been quickly righted, to her room.

She had carefully opened her door, whilst looking at the floor, so that if her admirer had slipped his map underneath her door, she would not disturb it. He had, and she grinned toothily with joy and appreciation.

She picked it up, dusting it off carefully, and moved to her vanity, shutting the door softly behind her. She sat down and lit the five candles in her candelabra again before studying the parchment carefully.

She bent over it closely, as the ink of the hand drawn lines of the hallways and rooms of the maze of the Opera House's backstage had faded over time. The map was, indeed, very old, but was nonetheless quite helpful. She rolled the parchment carefully into a small tube, tied one of her lesser used ribbons (A lovely red that clashed horridly with her hair.) around it in a pretty bow, and slid it in her vanity drawer with the first note from her admirer.

Smiling softly, she pulled out a box of her own rarely used stationary from the same drawer and set it upon the surface of the table, lifting the lid with extreme care. She slid out a single piece of her coveted, very fine letter paper, a delicate, old-fashioned quill like pen, and a small pot of expensive emerald ink.

She had saved her small allowance from her father for three months to buy that beautiful ink when she was at finishing school, but she had only ever used it once to write a poem. It hadn't been a very good poem, but it was her own attempt at creativity and she had kept it in this box. It was still in there, under all of the other sheets of parchment paper, and she sometimes took it out to read it over once or twice before putting it away again.

She opened the pot of ink extremely carefully so as not to pill the tiniest drop and dipped her pen into it, then set about writing a letter to her 'Monsieur'. When it was finished, she left it to dry for a few seconds as she pulled an envelope from her stationary box, and wrote a simple 'Monsieur' on the front of it. Then she folded the letter carefully and neatly and slipped it into the envelope before turning it over and creasing the flap down. She plucked one of the tall white candles from the candelabra and tipped it almost sideways over the flap of the envelope in order to let the melted wax drip onto it as she pulled a lovely pendant on a long golden chain out of the box.

The pendant was a colored engraving of a beautiful sunflower that her mother had often used as her own wax crest when she had been alive. It was one of the two things that Lizbeth had of her mother. Her father had either sold the rest of it or given it to the baby Anella after Leanora Davinton had died shortly after birthing her.

Lizbeth had been seven years old at the time and her nursemaid, Marian Applegate, had taken this pendant and a cameo pendant of Leanora and had hidden them in a pair of Lizbeth's shoes, saying that Beth would need something of her mother's when she was older.

Marian, or Nana, as Beth had liked to call her, had been right. The two pendants had been a great comfort to her when she had been shipped off to her first finishing school when she was ten years old. The school had been in Hereford County, and had been run by the sweet Lady Carterson. She had been sent to her second finishing school in Sussex when she was thirteen.

It had been a girl's boarding school during the autumn, winter and spring months named Madame Weller's School for Girls. Madame Weller had been a hard woman in her late forties and could be quite harsh when one was not on their most impeccable behavior morning, noon and night. Lizbeth had many a time gotten a sharp switch taken to her back when she could not control her temper towards the woman.

During the summer months, she had visited her father's estate in London for a mere week before she was off to another finishing school in Southampton. It had been rather pleasant there, though she had mostly kept to herself as there hadn't been that many other girls there.

She had gone to those schools until she was sixteen, when it was expected for a young lady to be old enough to put up her hair and for her father to throw her a coming out party or ball. But that had never happened as she had been packed off to yet another year round boarding school in Bristol until she was eighteen. Then had been a year in a finishing school in Cornwall, followed by another year in another school in Essex, and then yet another change to an all girl's University in Cambridge, which, though advertised as a University, was really just another finishing school for older girls.

She had been there for two years, again coming home in the summer months for a week, maybe two, before being packed off to Newcastle the first year and Dover the second. She had been twenty-two then, and if she had been any other girl, she might have been already married with one or two little children, but it was not to be.

Her father had called her back home with utmost urgency near the end of that year, and she had hoped at the time that he had finally realized that he could not keep sending her away from society forever if she was ever to get a husband. But that was not to be either, for no sooner than three days after she had gotten home, the three of them had hurried all of their belongings onto a ship and had sailed for France to fulfill her little sister's, who had been a mere fifteen at the time, dreams.

Alas, the Opera Populaire had been burnt down a mere week before their ship arrived in Calais. Her father had bought both the ruins of the Opera House and a large manor just outside of Paris the day that they had arrived and thee years later, here she was. Throughout it all, these two pendants had been a comfort to her.

Late at night whilst she was at school, she would pull them out and just sit there, holding them. It had to be late at night especially at Madame Weller's because the young ladies were not allowed any jewelry whatsoever, and, if caught with it, a girl was to have it removed, watch it be smashed into pieces, and then punished, sometimes severely, for disobeying the rules. She knew this because she had seen it happen to a girl her second year there.

The girl's father had sent her a beautiful costume jewelry pendant and Madame Weller had dome into the classroom at a most inopportune moment when the girl was showing it to all of them. Madame Weller, who had already been in a bad mood that morning (Lizbeth knew this because she had been having a hard time sitting still because of a few whips to her bottom for speaking to the cook after breakfast), had torn it from the girls neck and have smashed it with her heavy copper paperweight.

For the rest of that year, Madame Weller had taken to doing random searches in all of the girl's rooms for any and all jewelry and Lizbeth had found a sneaky hiding spot under one of the floorboards beneath her bed.

Sometimes, when she took them out and ran her fingers over them in the dark, she could almost feel her mother's presence and she didn't feel quite so alone in the world in those moments.

She ran her thumb over the sunflower now, smiling slightly and watching the hot candle wax slowly pool over the flap of the envelope. When there was enough there, she put the can back into it's holder and quickly pressed the pendant into the wax, holding it there or a few seconds before pulling it away cleanly.

When the wax had dried on both the letter and the pendant, she carefully picked all of the wax off of the pendant and slipped it back into her stationary box along with then pen and the bottle of ink. She looked scrutinizingly at the wax and could only just discern the indentation of the sunflower. It would have been much better if it had been colored was, but ah well. She would just have to make do until she saved up enough money for a colored candle that would be specifically for letters.

She picked the letter up and, after putting the stationary box back in the drawer, left the room, hoping that Madame Giry was back from the city so that she could give her this letter to deliver to her admirer.