Netvor: Beauty and the Beast (Now on Tapas)

The Seaside

If you like Netvor please consider voting!

It was morning when I woke, a mere hour before I would leave my home forever.

The hour had since then passed, and while the rest of my family members were rummaging through their things discreetly, I was already packed and waiting in another corner of the house.

The inner city of Beaulieu where the family townhouse stood was true to its name. The sunshine was golden and pure, the gulls screeched from down by the pier and the palace of the noble family glittered magnificently against a backdrop of cerulean blue.

It was a warm September that should have warranted a swim. Instead, my clothes, a cotton nightgown and a dark cloak, were sticking uncomfortably to the surface of my damp skin.

There was nothing more inconspicuous for me to change into, and I sat in my mother's room watching the sun rise out of the sea, dreading it with every tick from the grandfather clock.

My mother had been beautiful. At least, that's what I always said in company; it was what people wanted to hear when they asked me about her.

′Oh, Seraphine was so young and so beautiful,′ friends of the family would echo, followed by the unavoidable, 'what a pity.′

Seraphine was my mother's name, and I think I heard it more after her death than I ever did when she was alive. It was as though my mother had died, but this Seraphine's death was more important. I had never seen so many family 'friends' clumped in our tiny receiving parlour. Nor did I cry as many false tears for Beautiful Seraphine as the courtiers, but I wept secretly for my mother.

The room where she had lain for the last of her months was dusty and grey from disuse. A thick layer of three-year-old dust covered every surface and the windows from which I looked out were murky from grime.

This wasn't really my mother's room. Her place had always been with Papa, or in the drawing room downstairs where she liked to embroider and tell stories.

The room had been forced upon my mother's memory because it was the last place she had been seen alive. Coughing and sputtering strange feverish words, she had sat in bed, the covers pulled up to her neck as a sickness ravaged her mind and body.

Mid-remembrance I heard my eldest sister, Régine was calling me in a quiet, urgent voice from outside the hall. I stood up from the bed, my hands still cradled in the nook of my lap as I shuffled quickly across the room.

I gave it one final look, a shiver curling up over my shoulders as the early sunlight filtered in through the windows, giving the illusion of life to the small dancing bodies of dust that were cast into the air.

My heart gave way to a swell of grief, but I kept the emotion down in the bottom of my stomach, creating a small pebble out of it. I slipped out of my mother's room and ran to the front entrance on the first floor.

"There you are, Chérie," Father whispered as he saw me descend the stairs. He gathered me up into his arms when he saw me shaking and held me tight as if to offer some of his strength.

"We had better be on our way," Régine whispered, and all four of us piled into the front entrance as Father opened the door.

"The sun rose while you were dawdling," the middle daughter, Belle, agreed before shooting me a deadly look. She was fourteen, hardly two years older than myself, and already thrice the beautiful woman I would ever be.

We left quickly, donning the hoods of our dusty-brown cloaks, and slipped out the front door of the three-story townhouse. It was located close to the centre of the city which meant ours would be a very long sprint to the docks.