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“It is the east,” he called up to her. “And Miss Tarleton is the sun.” She sighed a little. “It’s night.” “It’s Shakespeare.”
If it had spread its corruption beneath her skin the moment she had inescapably concluded that happy ever afters, the ones full of kisses and rose leaves, and promises and poetry, belonged only to fairy tales.
“Miss Tarleton, Shakespeare was a genius.” “But clearly not a geographer.”
“Why on earth are your lady friends climbing your ivy?” “No reason.”
Now are you leaving? Or do I need to fling things at your head until you do?”
“She’s a . . . she’s a wanton. A . . . a violent wanton.” “Yes, yes.” Valentine accepted a towel from a delicately hovering servant and draped it over the shoulders of his unexpected guest. “And I’m a sodomite.
That’s not the action of an un-help-needing person.”
“You remind me,” went on Grace, undeterred, “of Lord Byron.” That did not sound good. “Self-conscious about my weight and dressed like a prick in clothes that don’t belong to me?”
The worst of it was that she didn’t even dislike dresses. She enjoyed them. But in London they felt like a prison. Like a lie she was telling about herself.
they offered their face—with all its beauties and its paradoxes—to the world with a kind of defiance.
The aria—whatever it was—couldn’t have been much longer than three minutes, and she didn’t have a clue what was being sung about, only that it felt as though someone was delicately stripping the skin from her bones with a silver blade. There were no vocal tricks, no embellishments or flourishes: just the performer’s voice merciless in its power and perfection like nothing Peggy had ever heard before. It was beautiful, but it was beautiful in the way that the night was beautiful in winter, when it was at its blackest and coldest, and you felt as infinitesimal as the distant stars. It was
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“Did I really faint?” “Just a little bit. Round the edges.”
she could find a way to write herself out of her own forever.
she wasn’t sure she knew how to explain the parts of herself that didn’t always fit together when she wanted them to. That went unseen even, she feared, by herself.
“That is what music is, you know.” Orfeo had not moved their hand. “The only force in the universe at whose feet language will lay her crown.”
Orfeo turned their face away, their laugh vanishing into their shoulder. It hurt Peggy, in some tender private place, to think that this would be the part of themself they chose to hide.
“Thank you, my heart, for sharing that with our friends.”
“I love you with all my heart, exactly as you are. I would never want you to be otherwise, but, sometimes, just sometimes, I wish you could be a little bit . . . not.”
they were extraordinarily rare because something something natural pigments something something delphiniums something something bluebells.
Bonny, to whom pausing was alien, rushed on regardless.
Maybe dramatic beyond all reason was her type.
When somebody comes to the front of the stage alone and makes everything about them, that’s called an aria. You’ll relate.”
I am mildly conflicted about my life sometimes And it is hard to know how to be yourself When everything in the world is full of other people’s ideas About what things are and mean. But mostly I am very lucky with the people who love me And fine. Mostly I am fine.
Same, Peggy, same. ❤️❤️
the kind of beauty that did things to you. Hurt you and healed you and humbled you. Left you not quite the same.
These are big questions for a small Bonny.”
While she wasn’t one to boast, Peggy was an assured lover. Considerate, competent . . . some other things probably. In any case, it wasn’t relevant. Because she was none of them now. She was a ravenous desperate mess, and Orfeo was melting against her like being mouth-attacked by a ravenous desperate mess was all they’d ever wanted in the world.
She definitely didn’t throw people against mirrors and kiss them like she wanted to climb inside them and build a willow cabin next to their heart.
“And just because I am not romantically inclined does not mean I do not experience love at all. You might not have realised this about me, but I am a very loving person.” “You are. In your way.”
I never thought I'd see the day when, not only do I like Belle, but I identify with her! I'm going to have to re-read this entire series again with this new insight. UGH.
“It’s easier to be . . . um. Part of someone else’s story
Peggy was no more satisfied to be mistaken for a gentleman than she was to be mistaken for a lady, but—if one had to be mistaken at all—being mistaken for a gentleman came with certain advantages. Specifically, greater tolerance extended for being loud and annoying.
“I wouldn’t call it a rescue. I haven’t fought a single dragon or solved a single riddle.”
“You make me feel safe.”
you couldn’t write your own story in the margins of someone else’s.
“Me?” Orfeo repeated. “Oh, I was mutilated as a child. Otherwise, I am perfect.”
“Indeed,” they agreed, too much in their voice to be easily untangled: pride and shame and hope and sorrow and anger turned brittle over time.
there was an unexpected pleasure in being the someone that someone else came home to.
then they’d talk until dawn in that foolish, nothing way that lovers did, their words as golden to each other as the first sunlight of the day.
Peggy knew if she tried to explain, she would fall apart completely, so she lied. Of course, Belle knew she was lying, but she pretended she didn’t because, sometimes, that was what friends did for each other.
It was not, however, wall-to-wall romantic devastation. Sometimes she allowed herself the brief respite of feeling utterly fucking pathetic instead.
Peggy, who had hubristically believed herself incapable of having her ghast in any way flabbered by either Bonny or Belle. And yet here she was, flabbered of ghast, and smacked of gob.
It was probably for the best, Peggy told herself, that Bonny and Belle were growing up a little. Even if it also cost the world a little magic.
my life does not need a villain. It has a hero.”
I’ve never been someone’s favourite person before. I’m always an honourable third or in the running for second.
