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Marigold
Sophie is five and trembling with fever. There is a wet rag on her forehead and water trickles from it, into the wells of her closed eyes and drip down her narrow temples.
She doesn't know where she is or how, all that she understands are the layers of blankets beneath and a rough, motherly hand in hers. Irma, if she were to guess. It is hot and cold, and her body doesn't feel like a body, it weighs her, sinks her, drags her into oblivion and her throat. Her throat bleeds. Torn and scratched, wrecked by cough and large, wet balls of yellow-orange flowers. They are damp, sticky and disgusting, and rest on her lips, coming apart fickle petal by fickle petal.
The door opens a sliver, someone whisper shouts and the hand in Sophie’s tightens for a second before it has to leave. Water drips elsewhere, away, muffled and unreal behind the wall of blood gushing in her ears.
Sophie is five and shivering, undone by a fever for the first time in her life, and she is to be alone, save for the dirty flowers pooling in her mouth.
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Daisy
Sophie is eight years old, sitting on the carpeted floor of a country estate she has never had reason to visit before—one gentle hand toying with her necklace; the other, palm up in her muslin lap.
An autumnal chill descends from the tall, columned ceiling, down and down until it wracks a shiver through her body where she waits, has been waiting all day, from sunrise to sunset.
One of the maids has set the sconces alight. The fire flickers quietly, casting strange shadows around the drawing room. Sophie’s shadow begins and ends with her, barely a smudge under her curled legs, a thin, wavering existence where she leans against the back of a sofa, careful not to press her oily hair into the upholstery. Three different maids have walked past her already, but not the man she's been waiting to see.
Her fingers curl around the odd, otherworldly petal in her hand. White, narrow, and delicate, much like the tether she imagines between herself and Lord Penwood. It's covered in dry spit and tears apart the moment she thumbs at it.
Sophie waits. Will wait until someone finds her for dinner and leads her to the dining hall, where she might find the father who has, once again, forgotten what he promised before bringing her to the countryside. That they could go on a walk around the sprawling Penwood gardens if time permitted. He simply never has the time. The petal curls and rolls, unrecognisable, turns duller and duller the longer she holds onto it, and it will turn to dust soon enough, another piece of her to be broomed away the next morning.
Tomorrow, she decides, she will walk around the gardens herself.
And if she wakes with another thin, white petal in her mouth, she will just swallow it instead, just how she used to swallow the petals that came before, the ones she barely remembers from after her grandmother vanished forever. They stopped within a few years. Perhaps, these will stop, too.
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Lilac
Sophie has been clearing her throat all morning, earning caustic side-eyes from Araminta and worried looks from the others. She isn't unwell, no, she told as much to Posy when the girl came up to her to ask quietly. Her voice has been scratchy, breathing difficult. And the reason rests in front of her now.
Lilacs crowd the middle of her cleaning rag, the one she's been rubbing Araminta's shoes with.
Some soft, miniscule petals are flecked with blood. The rest spread uneven, crumpled like bunched up papers, already coming loose and close to shriveling. Sophie breathes through her mouth and the air burns down the dry stretch where the flowers had been stuck for who knows how long. Her eyes burn too.
Lilacs, the flowers of first love.
Her first love, in a goddamned, threadbare rag, in her itchy, drying palms in her dirty lap where she sits Araminta’s shoes because she has to clean them like the servant she is and always will be.
She clutches the rag tighter and closes her eyes, hiding away in the quiet of her room, finding her way back to that glorious, magical night, now a distant dream she can't even believe had been real. She thinks of Benedict—in her heart, she doesn't think of Mr. Bridgerton, no; she thinks of Benedict, her Benedict, the one who taught her to dance most patiently—and she thinks of his warmth, of the gentleness of his touch.
His tender hands and his softer words, on her one night of dreaming, living the life she might have lived had her father loved her… But that is the thing, isn't it? She hadn't been loved.
She opens her eyes to the lilacs.
Is it because he has forgotten her already? Is it because she was the only one who fell in love that night?
Is it… because this is how wanting love always ends for Sophie, with wilting flowers and a tinge of bile in her mouth?
Of course, it is. Even her family couldn't love her. How could Benedict keep loving her from a memory? Who knows how many ladies he has danced with, and kissed, and talked to, and, and—
Sophie ties the rag by its ears and tosses it aside.
She picks up a brush and taps it against the floor, a little to loudly, to shake out any dirt before she sets it on Araminta’s shoe.
The memory of that night is hers. No bloodied lilacs can take it away from her. So what if she continues to think of him? She can very well do whatever she wants. She can keep throwing up lilacs until the end of her days, when she's an old maid, still steeping tea for Araminta or one of her insufferable grandchildren should Rosamund bring them around.
As for Mr. Bridgerton, he can go on and get married and live the perfect, glamorous life of a gentleman but she will always have her Benedict in her heart. The charming man, who, for the first time in years, let Sophie believe in the possibility of love. That is enough.
And these lilacs, she thinks, glancing at the wrapped rag cursorily, are Sophie’s—and only Sophie’s—to have.