Chapter 56: Break The Cheap China
Penelope did not respond.
She could not.
She desperately clawed for some composure, praying she could bar Mirabel’s poison from seeping into her mind. But the venom had already found its mark, bleeding into her darkest insecurities.
Instead of arguing, she merely let out a quiet, weary sigh. Perhaps coming here had been a fool’s errand.
"Are you leaving so soon?" Mirabel tilted her head, her gaze tracking Penelope’s retreat with unbridled satisfaction.
"If you fly from this room, you would do well to weigh my words long and hard on your journey back. I may be no saint, but I understand the cruelties of this world. Before your heart is shattered the second time, I counsel you to flee from this sham of a marriage."
Penelope halted, her boots freezing against the cold stone floor.
Slowly, she turned back to face her tormentor, forcing her spine to straighten despite the ache in her chest. "Do not trouble yourself over my plight; I am well aware of where my conscience lies. You would do better than to look to your own salvation, Mirabel. By all accounts, the shadows of the gallows hanging over you is far more severe than any marital discord of mine. Tend to your own survival, if you truly wish to see the sun again."
With that final, icy direction, Penelope turned on her heel and stepped out of the cell.
Behind her, the muffled, furious thud of Mirabel’s fists slamming against the table echoed through the heavy door.
Outside, in the corridor, the commander of the guard let out a breath he seemed to have been holding, his shoulders visibly relaxing the moment Penelope stepped back into the light unharmed.
"My Lady—"
"Tighten the guards," she ordered, cutting him off with a cold precision. "Henceforth, whenever a servant requests access to the detainees’ quarters, they are to be thoroughly searched both before they enter and upon their departure."
The commander bowed low. "Of course, My Lady. It shall be done."
He watched in silence as she swept past him, but Penelope had no intention of fleeing the manor just yet. Drawn by a melancholic gravity, she found her steps leading her away from the vaults and up toward the desolate wing—to the chambers she had once shared with her mother.
When Mirabel and her mother came into their lives, she and her mother stayed in a separate quarter away from the rest of the family.
Her mother might have accepted Lady Genevieve and her daughter into their home, but that was only because she sought peace despite being the one betrayed. But even then, those two managed to stir trouble one way or the other.
Upon making it to the doorway, Penelope pushed the door open. Her mother’s bedchamber stood entirely hollow, stripped of its tapestries and furniture, leaving only the ghosts of the past.
Penelope froze at the threshold, her gaze instinctively tracking upward to the exposed wooden rafters.
In her mind’s eye, the phantom image flared to life: she was standing in this exact doorway, but as a horrified child, staring up at her mother’s lifeless form suspended from the beam. The wooden footstool her mother used to hang herself had already toppled onto the rug below.
She had walked blindly into that horrific sight at the break of dawn. On the eve of that terrible night, her late mother had uncharacteristically insisted that Penelope sleep in the far wing of the manor. It was right after her mother had an argument with her husband, so she believed her mother simply needed some space to get over it.
For years, Penelope had believed the request was merely a calculated mercy, a way to ensure her daughter would not intercede and stop her.
But now, as Mirabel’s venomous words echoed through the hollow chambers of her mind, the foundational truths of her life began to fracture. The narrative of her mother’s tragic end suddenly gaped with glaring, dangerous omissions.
If her mother had not succumbed to despair... had she been silenced? Was it not a suicide, but a foul murder?
Was that... possible?
Her mother was no weak woman.
Not even Lady Genevieve could stand up against her mother so–
A chill settled deep in Penelope’s bones.
She realized, with a sudden surge of dread, that she had dismissed her rival’s boasting far too easily.
In her haste to guard her own heart against Mirabel’s malice, she had nearly blinded herself to a treasonous truth.
"Ah... my head hurts."
There was a tempest of revelations swirling around her now, so vast and tangled that Penelope no longer knew which thread to pull first.
A sharp breath of pure frustration escaped her lips.
She raised a fist, tempted to strike the cold, unyielding wall, but she reasserted herself at the last second. She forced her hand back down to her side, and the restraint only made the fury burning in her chest feel all the more suffocating.
By the time the violet hues of the evening settled over the courtyard, Penelope finally stepped out of the oppressive manor.
Her carriage was waiting, the horses stamping restlessly in the chill air. Martha stood beside the carriage door, her anxious posture melting into visible relief the moment her mistress appeared.
"My Lady."
Penelope did not immediately board the carriage. Instead, she leaned heavily against the lacquered wood of the carriage frame, looking thoroughly spent.
"Martha," she murmured, her gaze drifting to the cobblestones. "When the weight of the world grows too heavy to bear... what do you do?"
Martha blinked, caught entirely off-guard by the vulnerability in her mistress’s voice. "Pardon, My Lady?"
"It is only... I feel as though the very air is being choked from my lungs," Penelope confessed, her voice barely above a whisper. "There is a torrent bottled within me, but I haven’t the slightest notion of how to simply grant myself release."
Martha tapped her chin at that, giving the matter serious, professional thought. "When I am truly by myself, My Lady, I break things."
Penelope’s brows lifted. "You break things? In the Marquis’s estate?"
"Oh, never the fine porcelain, of course," Martha clarified quickly. "But the pottery barn down by the lower village sells misfired, lumpy clay bowls for a copper piece a dozen. The ones that won’t sit straight on a table. I buy a basket of them, take them behind the stables, and smash them against the wall."
She shrugged. "Or you could smash them with a heavy cudgel whichever works best. I think about what, or who, is the cause of my distress and I shatter them right after. "
A startled, involuntary laugh escaped Penelope’s lips. "Are you being serious? You smash them against the wall? Does it really help?"
Martha offered a prim, innocent smile. "I highly recommend it, My Lady."
****
An hour later, the shadowy intrigue of the Viremont estate had been replaced by the earthy, straw-scented chaos of a commoners pottery barn.
After Martha had bartered a handful of coppers for two massive woven baskets filled with deformed, lumpy clay pots, they had retreated to a secluded, overgrown stone wall just beyond the village boundary.
CRACK!
Penelope wielded a thick oak branch she had scavenged from the forest floor like a broadsword.
A misshapen clay pitcher exploded into dust against the stone wall.
"That," Penelope gasped, her hair loosening from its elegant pins as she raised the branch again, "is for Vincent’s unmitigated arrogance!"
SMASH!
A lumpy bowl met its demise, shards of gray clay raining down into the grass.
"And that," she breathed, her cheeks flushing with a wild, unladylike heat, "is for Mirabel’s poisonous tongue!"
Martha stood a safe distance away, dutifully holding the second basket like a loyal squire at a tournament. Whenever Penelope shattered a piece, Martha instantly proffered another deformed vessel with a perfectly straight face.
"Excellent form, My Lady," Martha commented dryly, handing her a particularly hideous, lopsided vase. "A fine strike. Who is this one?"
Penelope gripped the oak branch, her chest heaving, a fierce, manic grin breaking across her face.
For the first time all day, she could actually breathe.
"This one," Penelope declared, raising the club high above her head, "is for whatever traitor put a noose around my mother’s neck!"
CRASH!
