TVisTV Book 3: Chapter 30 (RAW)

Chapter 30 - Proposals

The proposal is the only thing that the guy has control over in the entire wedding deal. It is your one chance to make this moment stand out, not only for you, but for her.

- Drew Seeley.

Desdemona took up a seat next Eloise on the settee. Seraphina let the silence stretch just long enough, then flicked open the clasp of a leather portfolio she’d tucked beneath her bureau. 

Out spilled envelopes like a small avalanche onto the coffee table—creamy vellum and pulped linen, deckle-edged paper the color of tea with milk, thick stock filigreed with pressed borders, all of them heavy with intent. Wax seals in every shade—vermillion, king’s blue, a crimson so dark it seemed almost black—glinted before the girls. Some were perfumed; others smelled faintly of the rooms they’d been written in: old tobacco, sweet wine, and incense.

“Condolences on your broken engagement,” the haughty de Savant girl announced dryly, “and congratulations on your immediate elevation to the realm’s most exciting problem.”

“Most marriageable bachelorette,” Eloise corrected loyally, stealing an opera slice and nibbling the corner. “Shall we sort them by the size of the bride price, the depth of the flattery, or the courage of the portraitist?”

“By usefulness,” Seraphina said, but she was smiling. “Make piles: alliances, attempted bribery, pity, and the fool men who think poems entitle them to wives. I do not think I will find a suitor in all of this, but this will offer a chance to make connections.”

Desdemona’s hands were deft, showy and graceful. The de Savant girl never did anything without an audience, even if it was before her two friends. She broke seals with a thumb, skimmed, and passed the contents to Seraphina. Soon the desk was a landscape of desires: folded letters in courtly hands, stiff cards engraved with names and titles, small cases of morocco leather that clicked open to reveal miniatures on ivory—little faces limned with astonishing confidence.

“The Baron of Glassmere,” Eloise read, holding up a portrait the size of a sugar biscuit. “Either the painter is kind or the man’s neck has fled the scene.”

“We met him at Lord  de Havel’s harvest ball,” Desdemona said. “He sweated through his waistcoat. A truly disgusting sight I will not soon forget.”

“Useful?” Seraphina asked, not looking up as she skimmed the baron’s terms—timber rights, a promised loan, some noise about being faithful.

“Port access on the Glass,” Eloise said thoughtfully, “but he’s mortgaged many of his lands and assets twice over. His portraitist deserves a medal for this fantasy.”

“A potential business partner, nothing more,” Seraphina decided, flicking the letter into the pile and setting the miniature atop it, face down.

Next came a florid missive from a lesser count whose seal bore a snarling badger. The portrait within showed a heroic jaw, a lion’s mane of hair, confident eyes. Desdemona and Eloise leaned in—and then both burst into giggles.

“Oh no, I remember him,” Eloise said, cheeks pink with mirth. “The jaw is real; it just… well, there are two of them. And the hair is a wig.”

“The painter’s illusions are a public menace,” Desdemona said. “There should be a law.”

“Pity,” Seraphina judged, and let it fall.

A margrave’s envoy had sent a sketch by a fashionable hand, the heraldry of his house glittering with gold leaf. “Margrave de Theren of the Eastern March,” Desdemona read, voice amused, “promises to bring ‘seasoned soldiery to the joint household’ as if you were a fortification.”

“We are,” Seraphina murmured. “Interesting, five thousand men is nothing to sneeze at, but his march is a long way from my father’s lands and I doubt such an alliance, at least a marriage alliance, would benefit me at all.”

“Also,” Eloise added, squinting at the sketch, “he has no lips. Are we sure he isn’t a miscast statue?”

They moved briskly. A young viscount attached verses to his plea—tremulous lines about candor and doves and praised her feet of all things! Eloise read them aloud until Desdemona begged for mercy and threatened to set the poem on fire just to make the room safer. A wheat magnate ennobled last year like the de Laneys offered to help her manage her lands. 

No thank you, Seraphina thought. The last thing she needed was someone meddling with the higher level decisions of running her empire. This one she placed decidedly on the “attempted bribery” pile.

A baroness Senattra de Calan whose lands were near the capital—one of the few women in the heap—wrote shrewdly on behalf of her brother, promising a winter palace and a vote in the Lord’s Council if the Lady Seraphina would forgive his “equestrian accident of a nose.” There was even a prince from the Empire whose portrait was so handsome that Eloise held it up for closer inspection.

Then Desdemona paused, fingers stilling over the crimson, almost black ribbon.

“Oh,” she sighed, her lips pursing. “This one has made the rounds at court—not the letter, darling, the man. Though I do believe this one has been searching for a wife for a long time.”

She laid the packet before Seraphina like a card in a game. The seal was a simple crest: a tower and a star. The paper was absent of perfume; the hand was a soldier’s—clean, confident, with the neatness of a man who’d written dispatches in bad light for twenty years.

The portrait case inside was plain. Seraphina snapped it open.

He was older, yes—mid-forties, if she was guessing—but younger than she had imagined, somehow. A face cut fine rather than rugged, as if the bones had decided early what they wanted to be and the years had respectfully agreed. A narrow white line crossed the upper lip, a scar acquired in a battle long past. His hair was dark with a scatter of iron near the temples. And behind him, captured with far more honesty than most artists attempted. But it was his eyes that were arresting, the artist had caught the weight of them; you could see in them the resolve of a man who had fought many battles and won. In a way, he reminded Seraphina of her father.

“The Margrave of Averne,” de Savant commented loftily, and her tone made the title sound like a mistake the realm hadn’t corrected yet. “Handsome Raphael. Famous for it. My mother told me that in his youth he was a very bad boy indeed.”

“And famous for winning sieges,” Eloise added, peering over Seraphina’s shoulder. “And for leading daring charges, if half of my brother’s war gossip is true.”

Seraphina did not trust the small shift inside her chest: surprise first, then curiosity’s bright flare, and under that a practical voice already enumerating what Averne meant. Fortresses that held strong, passes that could be opened or closed through the mountains, trade caravans that moved when he said they moved. It truly was a shame about his age… it was a gap that was simply too great.

She put the portrait down as if it burned and reached for the letter.

Lady Seraphina, it began simply. I write as a soldier, and so will keep my words short. I admired your conduct at court when you presented yourself to the king. I admire your father more than I enjoy the position we all find ourselves in. If you are taking counsel, take this and burn it: you do not need a husband at such a young and tender age. But if you will have one for the sake of the realm, I will not be a burden to it or you. — R. Averne.

“He certainly does not beat around the bush,” Desdemona said. “Bless him.”

“He writes like a man who has had to explain disasters to kings,” Seraphina murmured.

Desdemona’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “He’s a widower. With children about your age. And, according to rumor, a temper like a bear disturbed in winter. All of which is to say: do not even consider him.”

“Lecherous old man,” Eloise added brightly, because the script of the story demanded it.

They giggled. Seraphina, however, did not.

The ridiculousness of it made a small smile threaten: a girl barely out of ribbons and a famous margrave. But there was also the letter, so clean and without pleading, so very unlike all the other offers. And then there was the memory of a winter many years past when she had insisted on on acquiring some of the silks personally from the trade caravans near the border to the Empire. She recognized his face.

“Men like him will make for bad husbands,” Desdemona went on, unlacing the silks of her tone and letting the steel show. “They have too many commitments. They come with a retinue of ghosts and old memories. And he is not a man can be trained, as my mother likes to say. Worse, he is widower and has not forgotten his first love. You do not want to be the second act to a beloved dead woman.”

Seraphina, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, looked from face to face as if she had misplaced the right expression. “He… seems kind,” she said, tentative, then flinched as if the word had been too loud. “I think it is a reflection of character that a man can love as deeply as he does… most men cannot.”

Desdemona’s mouth softened for a heartbeat. “Kind does not mean safe. He has too many shared interests with the current Crown.”

Seraphina rolled her eyes playfully. She made herself reach out, gather the letter, and lay it—carefully, precisely—on the rejected pile.

“There,” she said. “Happy?”

Eloise’s laugh was a small astonished thing. “You took much longer with that one that I thought you would.”

“I am trying,” Seraphina said lightly, “to avoid sending the realm into an age of chaos. Some of these things need careful consideration.”

They went on. A boy of nineteen with a smile like a lit candle; a lowly Knight elevated last year whose family offered mining rights that weren't theirs to offer; a foreign prince of Al-Lazar who seemed convinced her golden hair alone could resolve a trade dispute. They ate meringues between letters and invented new categories—‘men who mention their horses more than once,’ ‘men whose language tutors will never forgive them,’ ‘men whose mothers wrote the letter for them.’ With every name, Seraphina moved paper, paring away options like trimming a hedge.

When the last envelope had been opened and the last portrait case snapped shut, the desk held neat little stacks that meant the future would not have to improvised: formal rejections would be sent. Some were to be ignored outright, there very presence here an insult.

“Burn or box?” Eloise asked, nodding toward the heap that would not be needed.

“Box,” Seraphina said. “We never burn information.” She looked to Eloise. “Help me draft the rejections; I’ll provide language for the rather more delicate ones.”

“Yes, Lady Seraphina,” the doll-like girl replied, just the smallest hint of resignation in her voice.

“And this one,” Seraphina added, touching the Averne letter with a fingertip so light it might have been an accident. “I’ll handle this one by myself.”

Desdemona’s brows rose. 

“This one, I do not think, will fit a normal template,” Seraphina explained, tone bland as milk. “Out of respect for his offer, I will give this one a little more consideration. It will cost me nothing to be courteous.”

“And gains you what?” Desdemona asked, entirely too innocent.

“Good manners. The Margrave is a powerful man,” Seraphina said, and left it at that. “By the way, have any of you seen that rascal, Hughes?”

“I smelled your beau,” the de Savant girl coughed, a bit of cake going down the wrong pipe as Eloise elbowed her in the ribs. She shot de Laney a hurt luck before taking a gulp of tea. “I mean I saw him with you in the library the other day. Thick as thieves as you usually are.”

Desdemona must be, of course, moon mad as her family were famous for being. Seraphina was quite sure she had been alone.

When the others bent again to cake and commentary, she slid the Averne letter into a drawer at the desk. For a heartbeat her thumb rested on the clean press of his handwriting. Then she tucked the letter beneath some other stacks of paper, where only she would reach for it later.

That night, when the common room had emptied, she would choose her paper—the thick, sober kind, without gilt—sharpen a pen, and write a rejection that did not quite close a door. It would leave him with nothing but respect and the faintest impression that, in another hour of history, the letter might have read differently.

For now, she added his name to a list no one else would see and moved on, because the realm and her position expected her to.