Of all her ill-fated admirers who ever was drunk by the semptiernal febrile youthful Vanille, only one stirred the early flames of passion within her. If one satisfied long-lived whimsical being could meet Vanilla in his days and manage to not come under her perilous charm, when they would look back they would certainly feel as if centuries had passed. Yet she remained consonant like the Algol.
The static crimson flames of desire were kindled again after one woeful decade since she received her lord's blessing.
That was a mellow tepid afternoon of July. On the bustling boulevard of Colchester, among the restless surge of costermongers still bawling to sell their previous day's wares for a pence or two to the fair wealthy nobles, was Vanille—in a dark green gown fabricated from taffeta, selling berries and plums.
The present she received was yet to be used. She merely wanted to spend some of the early years like a plain youthful damsel of New England.
The corruption was brewing in the air, in the blood, in the infected hearts of whimsical aristocrats. Crimes, cries of false accusations and death sentences were piling up on one another alongside tax differences. Those imperious vain peers of the realm loved to chaffer despite possessing a heap of luxury.
A crucial decade such as this welcomed Edward Wright. Whispers unfurled like a ball of yarn fanning the judicious adroit nature of the sharp witted elite who was recently ranked as the Viscount. It had only been a month.
Who would have thought that Vanille's fortune would beckon this upright agile young man of seraphic elegance so swiftly? When no-one yet received the fancy of observing this new viscount's countenance.
Vanilla collector her goods readying to head home. The tangerine condensed to a dark carmine dispersing the message of an uprise.
It was the obstreperous stygian stallion in which he invested fifteen silver coins to a merchant. The slim bold olden merchant displayed several more to this young viscount, yet he had his eyes fixated on this specific one. He even found a name for it—quite an affection he held for it, which became suddenly unruly and galloped temerariously towards the small stalls ahead.
When the tepid imprudent hooves were at the verge of collision against the ever enchanting lady of darkness, the staggered dismayed humble viscount pulled the rein.
A couple of plums fell out of her sack as she swoop down on her knees to collect them. Her heart pumped blood rapidly at first when she perceived the disobedient stallion coming her way. But when his alarmed yet solemn expression swayed a little after receiving a forbidden glimpse of Vanille, he lowered his head.
"He must have given you a startle, my lady. Pardon me. I assume you are unharmed..?" He asked with unmasked reverence. "I shall compensate you, My Lady."
Vanilla gathered the unsold plums in her fair willowy arms.
Edward Wright was a man of reverence and perseverance and his voice resembled the whet of a recently forged sword to uphold justice.
"Compensation?" She questioned. "I would not have the necessity of it if you buy them."
He stared at her in disbelief then smiled somewhat abashedly. "Yes, I shall. The most exotic of fawns would not have much delight to receive such ripe plums from a dainty youthful nymph than me, my lady."
"Quite the encomiast young man you are."
Vanille's smirk could bring down a hell storm upon any morbid pleasure seeking immoral soul. But it was her fancy to this charming virtuous soul that had put a hindrance to her agile unsatiated nature for that poll.
"Would you not fancy to have my name?" He asked. "As for my own part, it is definite yes."
Vanilla held out a plum to his stallion as she offered her basket to Edward. The dark stallion calmly ate the fruit from her hand as if it was brought up by her.
"Onyx never let any stranger feed him Lady...?"
"Vanille Scorpio." The name reverberated around her lips like the first tune of a harp touched by an amateur artist. Soft, unpolished, yet magnetic.
"Vanille Scorpio."
Her eyes like the darkest of moldavite sparkled at his utterance of her name.
"There is a certain hypnotic pull in the ringing of your name my lady. I cannot place my finger on it."
Edward then let out an embarrassed chuckle. "I have not yet paid for those plums."
He then took out a small yellow velvet pouch from his waistcoat pocket. There were twenty gold coins inside of it.
Edward's hands received the subtle touch of her cold slender knuckles and he seemed physically numb for a brief moment.
"Edward Wright's flower of luck must be in full bloom today."
"Why do you speak so?" Vanilla looked at him with eagerness reflected in his eyes. "Should it not be the opposite? Twenty gold coins in exchange of a basket full of plums."
"Perhaps this man hoped to be etched forever in the mind of an ethereal beauty. A wishful thinking I must add Lady Vanille."
But Vanilla never had the faintest feeling of love for a mortal before. That was the birth of a forbidden desire in the pit of a charred heart in the name of Edward Wright.
She extended her right palm towards his mouth. "I have a feeling that your wishful thinking would not remain a wishful thinking in the end, Lord Wright."
Vanilla already turned back.
"Lady Vanille—" Edward called out to her in an impatient manner.
Her footsteps had begun to fade. He looked at the darkened sky. "That can only mean..." He mumbled to his self.
When he put his gaze down she was already gone. "She has gone... How quick..."
A decade had elapsed since that fateful evening.
Many empires fell and corruption slithered away by the time Edward Wright became a Duke.
He stood upright as he began and his people could not be any more contented than they already were. Yet his heart remained dull at the sound of festivity and joy.
It was a boisterous caliginous mid day of October at the demesne of the rhadamanthine duke who once bore the most prepossessing simper for a lady whose entrancing beauty impelled him to sustain all classes of inconveniences and unrest that ever stemmed from the long historic records of ruler's paramountcy and masses' reluctance to resistance.
The duke's equerry took a deferential bow as he declared his presence. "My Lord..."
"Speak."
"This humble servant has prepared a carriage for your afternoon promenade."
The thin frame of the once juvenile eleemosynary viscount no longer embosomed the yearning of taking part in the conditional pastime termed Existence.
"Very well," he said—the inward dispassion reluctant to be astray from him, cloaked him staunchly the longer the contemplation of the previous week's marriage treaty, which was to be arranged after the soiree held two days prior to that—wrangled his mind.
"My Lord..."
The equerry's reverential call a second time constrained him to look back at the horse drawn carriage—the promenade which appeared to be a bridge between nature and a wrecked soul in the eyes of whimsical beings, was far from a repose in Wright's journal that strukeout every sentence which led off to the direction of state alliance affairs in the worldly camouflage of marriage.
"Pardon this naive commoner's ingenousness in the matters of state. Yet I cannot forbear, in good faith, stand aloof while you labor under such weight, My Lord."
He listened to the elderly professional who had long served sharing his wisdom and perspicacious mind for his country.
"The house of Beaumont had dispatched a portraiture of the young and only lady of the house for your perusal. It should arrive by late evening. I believe my lord's motives are not hidden from this commoner's sight, yet I implore you to weigh them against the present posture of the realm."
"Rafe..."
"Yes My Lord..." He stood at the carriage door awaiting the final words of his master.
"None other air I crave more than the one these solitude hours of early twilight brings. Trouble me no further by the morrow's light, when I shall deliver my firm resolve."
The door closed in, leaving the olden wearied bone bow one more time before the carriage galloped away in the direction of East.
The coachman was instructed of a destination and yet the purpose and the specified quarter had remained in pending state.
A significant silence ensued marked by only the stamping of hooves. The fatigued mind of the elegant liberal viscount of whose heart pledged a silent covenant to the parting hours relinquished by the enchanting Vanille, could not soothed by the ripened firethorns crushed and spreaded across the horizon.
When the stampede took an abrupt halt that was the indication for his brooding to be put an enforced end to.
The boulevard was one of the very few places where his stately affairs could not break through the invisible fence laced with illusioned harmony.
He waited for the carriage door to be opened.
"My Lord, this place..." The coachman surveyed the surroundings.
It was as he found it decades before.
"Attend me in half an hour's time and take the carriage to a distance from this spot."
"Yes My Lord."
Edward had never truly forsook—the place, he never yielded from his memory.
The small stalls' closed casements quietly wrought a distemper upon his spirit—a trapped melancholy within one's esse.
The evening breeze for which his yearning ushered him to this specific ground abated the moment he stepped down.
"Perhaps..." He heaved a long encaged sigh, "my departure will carry this heavy apprehension which I have bridled for over a decade, that parting is absolute—with a desire so forbidden that I shall not be granted a final glance at your countenance."
The still ether awoke by the sharp zephyr, caught unwarned, fanning his deep copper locks into a wild disarray.
But he did not compose himself, instead this sudden disorder provoked a laughter he presumed oblivion had taken it. The reason? His own self was not aware... Or perhaps he was... As he knew his wishes would never reach satiety.
"What prompted this grave declaration?" The rich half smile of scorn wrapped in the mellow juices of plum—her voice, arose the despaired spirit of the high lord who recounted the early years of his viscount rank.
"Lady Vanille..!" He clutched at his heart—the sorrows of the dormant years ebbed away all the bitter resentments of his heart. "The flower of Edward's luck has not wilted absolutely."
Vanilla walked to where his startled spirit was caged within, a sylphlike grace enfolding her lithe sinuous posture.
"Youth, never an eternal possession Lord Wright and yet, your words never lose their luster—constant like the northern star."
"Edward. After a decade that wrecked my body like a slow poison being decayed by a century old curse, these ears can no longer admit any other title but the designation of their own possessor Vanille."
There was no lady this time which bemused her.
"You exalt me to the upper altar beyond this earthly sphere securing a seat among the constellations, to be gazed upon with a reverence I scarce deserve."
"And I have faith in my judgement Vanille. The goddess I pray to in your name cannot refuse my devotion." Every word he spoke flowed with the fluidity of an ancient stream that carried a hundred million vows every century.
"What strange misfortune had befallen unto the upright canorous man..." Her gaze narrowed down on the reached out arm of the pitiful whimsical soul.
"Your absence Vanille."
"Edward," she obliged to his request at last—a gold coin in the left of her enclosed palm, which she unfurled.
"I have preserved the last one of your... remembrance Edward. The Viscount—ah a grievous error, the righteous Duke of Colchester has reached his years of discretion. Why must he consign his soul to such dark perdition?"
The dews of melancholy began to brim as he drew forth another gold coin pouch from the depths of his waistcoat. "Bring me the year we chanced upon one another Vanille in lieu of this, I pray. And I shall promise to be attentive to every word you utter."
She brought her hand to rest upon his with a smile she never produced for any whimsical being since her awakening.
"All is not lost, Edward."
He fondled her flesh—in the ever insatiable thirst of breathing the same air by her side.
"Vanille... bereft of your presence, what fate awaits me, you may comprehend by now. I can only pray for the remaining ill-fated years of yearning recede into the shadows fast. 'Time fleeth on nimble wings. The hours vanish like morning mist...'"
He brought her fingers to the near end of his lips leaving only a feather's width distance. "Unless my fate be rewritten by your hands Vanille."
The distance was closed by his fervent touch of suffering. "I do not wish to know to what dimmed seclusion did you retreat, nor the reason of our fate not colliding one more time when I arose to my new title—but, I have never stopped seeking the goddess, for the altar I prepared ages ago."
"If this is what—" She pressed the end of his knuckles to her lips, a tranquility possessing the pair of bright moldavites-her eyes. "Your soul aches for, if the devotee prays so arduously, how should the goddess find a resolve to withstand such calamitous devotion?"