The Third Uncle

Chapter Two: There Is No Royal Road to Learning

Chapter Two - There Is No Royal Road to Learning

    This evening, at this very moment, Francesca was bored. She was reading the latest scandal about an Englishman who had been poisoned by his mistress because he had bought her last season's Corsette Amazone. She rolled her eyes, ‘Tsk - men - they will never understand us.’ Sighing to herself, Francesca thought that anyone who bought something so dreadful and so uncomfortable and so unromantic a gift for his love, even if it was not his true love, ought to have been poisoned. She would have made him wear it for a day and a night and then poisoned him herself! 

    She dropped the newspaper onto the Ottoman rug, with its very fine and detailed floriate design of Turkish flowers and blossoming branches. She frowned, worrying only briefly, that someone might disapprove of it occupying that particular spot on the floor - and pushed it slightly to the left with the toe of her rose-coloured slipper, thereby adding it to the already accumulated stack of last week’s journals. It wouldn't really make any difference in this apartment anyway. ‘Men are so filthy,’ she muttered to herself, stepping over it, and to the window.

     Opening the large glass panes to allow the room to breathe, she watched a fine layer of dust become unsettled by the breeze and dance from surface to surface in the filtered light. Francesca turned her attention from the room and studied her reflection in the uneven glass. She was sixteen and naturally beautiful. She smiled. To her mind it was difficult not to be beautiful when you were sixteen. 

   Infinitely more important, however, and fortunate for her - she was Italian. It was very nearly impossible not to be practically perfect if you were young and Italian! Silently thanking her mother and father, she pulled her dark curls off her face and studied herself critically for a moment. She wasn't unhappy with what she saw, but really, what a waste. She was in her prime, and instead of having men die at her feet as a result of some incredibly romantic duel, she found herself trapped in this dreadful apartment because her uncles forbade her to go out alone. 

    Francesca turned away from the glass and gazed out over the city, and daydreamed, and while she daydreamed, something peculiar happened. In the aged, warped glass of the window, her reflection didn’t turn away and mimic her, as a reflection should. Instead, it blurred over and then paused, studying her with an expression not characteristically found on Francesca’s face ... it was a grown-up expression. There was in this reflection an almost sinister narrowing in the eyes, a slight downward curl to the lips, and then, with the passing of a cloud - it was gone.

    With her elbows on the rail, and the palms of her hands firmly wrapped around her chin, Francesca slowly awoke from her musings as she heard the low rustling of linens flapping in the wind. The sound grew louder and louder, the loud snap of silk in the wind filled the air, and then the laughter and singing of a hundred sailors burst from somewhere outside and above her. She held on to the railing, and leant out, shielded her eyes from the setting sun until she saw the source of the noise - one of Napoleon’s magnificent airships on its way over to England! 

    Since Bonaparte soundly trounced the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo, more and more of the Emperor’s soldiers were placed there to keep the peace, and help in the administration of the former British Isles. Francesca loved the great airships and their magnificent, round, golden balloons tied to the huge wood bulks of the Man O’war. 

    The ship was covered all over in patriotic flags and she could see the sailors climbing in the rigging as they pulled on the great white sails overhead. ‘Oh how I long to be on a ship such as that,’ she thought. ‘Imagine the parties on board and the handsome well-bred men it undoubtedly contains!’  Francesca turned herself back round and pouted. Laying across the windowsill with her eyes closed, she let her feet rise off the carpet. Perfectly balanced, she imagined she was floating over the city. She could smell the horses, the smoke, see the colourful markets full of people, the birds flying below from church-spire to chimney-top. She spied the shoppers through the glass ceiling of the Gallerie Colbert and finally drifted around and around Notre Dame. This wasn’t just any city, why, this was Paris!