The Faustian Love Bargain (COMPLETED)

Chapter 7

Stephen had taken out a bag of books from the car and passed them to Stella before she left the restaurant. There were about eight books in total, each around seven hundred to a thousand pages. It was impossible to finish reading them within a week!

The first book was on the reign of the fourteenth king, his policies and his life story. She was confused as to why she was reading about Nick’s family history. Her father walked into her room and found her with thick books stacked near her desk. He picked up one of them and was genuinely surprised, “This was one of your mother’s favourite books in university!”

Stella looked up from the book that she was closing her eyes to and asked what book he was referring to. “Do you know what it is about? I have a class test next week on these books and I am running out of time to read them,” she lied, feeling terrible that she was deceiving her father, but she was more afraid of not fulfiilling Nick's orders.

“Oh yes, your mother gave me a copy of this book as a gift. I felt compelled to read it as she was always speaking about it during our courtship days. I was a business student but this book interested me as well!” her father continued on, happy to be of help to his beloved daughter.

The book title was “Women in the Nineteenth Century”. Although the title was bland, it contained many heartbreaking and courageous stories about women, both ordinary working women and women who worked in the royal palace. There were many women, known as fallen women, who had committed suicide by drowning themselves in the river after an unwanted pregnancy or after being sexually assaulted by men.

One woman had killed the man who had tried to assault her and was condemned to death. Many women had tried to prevent the conviction but the village heads had ruled her to be a witch, and locked her into a box to die in the river.

While women fought for political and employment rights, many were forced to stay put in the domestic sphere. Things changed only when the fourteenth king, King Fredrick, ascended the throne. The king believed in the importance of women and gradually increased the participation of women in the workplace. After the royal marriage of King Fredrick and Queen Cecilia, royal concubines were eradicated and many lauded the move as the step towards female emancipation.

Stella’s mother had said that while the book seemed to be placing the royal couple on a pedestal, she found that Queen Cecilia was highly hypocritical. Queen Cecilia had, in the first months of marriage, sentenced a concubine to death for treason, on the account that she had opposed their marriage. There was little grounds that this was true but the convicted girl was forced to be stripped naked in front of the castle, whipped and hung on the tree until she died. It was the worst punishment in the history of women who had worked in the palace. Most were punished through either exile from the palace or coercion to become slaves in other royal families. The king was criticised heavily for not putting a stop to anything, and the king’s brother had apparently demanded to remove the girl from the tree. Little is known whether she had survived the punishment.

 “It was a terrible story”, her father said, “The violence was shocking during that time!” Stella did not know why she felt sad while hearing her father speak about the book. She wondered how many women were unfairly labelled as witches and killed, how many women were tortured without recourse and how many women were forced into slavery or prostitution. She wrote these thoughts into her notebook as well as several facts of King Fredrick’s reign and the betrayal and exile of Prince Gregory (the king’s twin brother). She soon found herself immersed in the scandalous and violent history of the kings and the people of that time.

As she fell asleep atop the books in the wee hours, she dreamt of herself as the poor concubine who was hung on the tree. She was searching for someone in the mocking crowd, who had surrounded her and thrown stones at her. She did not know who she was searching for desperately but she knew that she felt indescribable sadness when she could not find that person-that person whom she loved deeply.