Read Online Autumn Rose: A Dark Heroine Novel by Abigail Gibbs - Free Book Online Page A

and below the village school, where the old-fashioned bell tolled to announce the end of the day, the train passed, eventually coming to a halt beside the smaller, lower ferry.
    It was a world perfectly preserved, continuing on in its own isolated sphere, relying on its unquestionable beauty to bring in the tourists. Yet its isolation was why I suffered.
    Finally, as time in my angst seemed to move much slower, I reached the other side of the river, the trees lining its bank broken and falling into the silt. It was a pity that the leaves had fallen so early—it was barely September; empty bottles, sandwich papers, and silk handkerchiefs testimony to the summer nights whose mark had not yet been erased. But that was what they got for perching on the riverbank. They were rotting. They were dying.
    Why? Why did you have to tell them when I asked you not to? What have you achieved by doing that?
    There was a brief respite in the chill as I moved away from the sea, only for the cold to be replaced with fog as the tower of the church near my house came into view and with it the harbor a little farther on and the salty suspension that the sea mist carried inland.
    I still couldn’t comprehend everything that had happened that day. It felt as though the events since that morning had occurred over several days and were still no more than skin-deep. Yet my body hadn’t failed to note the pricking, and inside, I felt oddly numb—my mind’s way of protecting itself, I supposed.
    I glanced at the clock on the church tower, surprised at how long it had taken me to get home. Time just didn’t seem to move in a constant way anymore.
    Inside, the blinking light of my laptop lured me in as I placed a cup of tea on the desk and checked my e-mails. Sure enough, Jo had returned a sprawling epic that required much scrolling. Despite her confused lineage—French-Canadian and German, now serving as a guardian at a boarding school in Switzerland—her English was word-perfect, something eight years at St. Sapphire’s had given her.
    The first three paragraphs were dedicated to gushing about how hot the prince was, and how I should feel lucky to be bestowed the chance to be so intimate with him. The rest added up to a warning: what I suspected of him and his family was not a light accusation and that I should tread carefully. She ended with her own theory as to why he was here, which I dismissed immediately, blushing.
    I leaned back in my chair, unsure of how to reply. I contemplated telling her about losing it that morning, but decided against it, not wanting to provide any opportunities for rumors. There was no point telling her about what the prince had revealed: she didn’t know I hid— had hidden —my title.
    Pushing away from the desk, I collapsed onto the cushioned window seat. Through the window, I could see the maple tree in the garden, the nearest branch just a foot or two from my window—when I was a child, reluctantly returning home from school for the weekend, I would often seek solace in the crux of its branches, where the trunk would divide into four and form a neat little seat, perfect to fold into. It was my own palace of leaves, decorated with pinned flowers plucked from the garden or dream-catchers, which I would make endlessly at the desk where the laptop now sat—some of the frail structures had survived, and were now dangling from the eaves of the window, minus the feathers. They had become rotten and mildewed, and my mother had removed them. When I had collected more gulls’ feathers to replace them, she had taken those, too.
    I knew I couldn’t face school the next day. I couldn’t face the questions on top of the already mounting dread I had at the prospect of detention on Thursday. Besides, a day would act as a sort of buffer against the shock: the buzz about my title would have died down a bit by Thursday. Let the prince deal with the questions, I thought. Let him sort out what he caused.

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