Deprivation- The Feast and the Famine

Chapter 14- Innocence

Like a flower, Claudia folded outward showing everything and revealing nothing. The world did not know how to interpret the beautiful patterns she displayed.  She was marrying a handsome, wealthy and pretty-worded man. She had every right to be happy.  So they saw the joy of a girl well wedd.  She folded out to reveal all with every glance, but no one saw anything. Animal lust and love just as unrefined filled her every line.  No one saw.

No one but her mother who watched her with something akin to longing and something akin to hate.  

And so passed an overflowing handful of days.  Claudia was not joyous but preparing for the sun.  The rest of her small world was oblivious to anything but a dreamy look in her eyes.

Very little broke up these days.  Life is extremely monotonous.  Its drone is only interesting to those caught in the middle, and often not even then.  

Even Claudia’s music lesson, when it failed to produce anything other than a stuffy woman and a piano, caused no ripples. Claudia, it would seem, was not hoping or planning.  She was merely waiting patiently.  He could appear at any time—angel and devil that he was.  It was no more likely in his sister’s house than elsewhere.  All she had to do was wait.

But he was not the man to break her patient waiting.  One day as she slipped out into the garden, a heavy hand plopped on her arm.  And Claudia stirred; her eyes snapped up and met her step-brother’s brutal face.  They said nothing but stood for a moment with his hand painfully clutching her arm.

Until Claudia, with the gentility bred into her, smiled and bowed her head.  “Hello, Roderick.  It is a fair day, is it not? Walk with me?”

“And if I’ve no wish to walk with you?”  He replied.

Claudia laughed knowing it was not a joke, but knowing she was lost if she did not pretend it was.  He brought his other hand up to clasp her free arm.  Claudia flinched.  

“Mother tells me you’ve taken to night walks.”

Claudia could not speak.  She wilted; her world of sunshine floundered and came face to face with her old reality.  Something of his strange maleness, which shocked her at every encounter, and his cruelty, left her unable to defend herself.  

“People will begin to talk.  Is that what you want?  I think it is.  I think you are bent on disgracing us all.”  His eyes burned.  Panic rose up inside her.  Because she knew that if Roderick ever found out it would all be over for her.  Because he didn’t care if she was disgraced.  Deep down, she believed it was one of the few things he desired, to see her shamed, ruined.

“You know that it is not.”  Her eyes had flown to the ground.  The memory of Bennett’s hands wouldn’t come to her and she was alone with her fear. Abandoned.

“You are a fool or worse, do you know that?”

A moment of clarity came, and Claudia lifted her eyes. Roderick did not know. He did not even suspect.  If he had he would not hold his tongue.  His suspicions would spill over and engulf them both.  “Mother has made it clear already that night walks are not for young ladies.  Let me go if you please, you are hurting me.”

His hands fell away but his face did not.  It loomed there angry and defiant, brutish.  His anger, she knew, was unreasonable.  Events merely provided an excuse for some burning rage already inside him.  For an instant, her mind grappled with a concept it could not in the end hold.

“You are not in the least contrite.”

“For I have not harmed you, Brother, nor shall I.”  Claudia took a step back.  Her smile shook.  Strength and beauty fled leaving her only a frightened sheltered girl.  “I am silly perhaps but have done no harm.”