@thlachesis
Bathwater dripped from every inch of the oak-paneled space, sopping the Turkish carpets slung along the walls, seeping into the floorboards, and near certainly dripping onto the nose of some hapless courtier sleeping soundly beneath the ladies’ lodgings, trickling like holy water onto an unwashed English body. The dreary climes of this sodden little isle had driven into Madeleine’s bones, an icy freeze pervading throughout her frame that could not be melted by the scalding bathwater, infused with crushes and herbs and lavender pilfered from Caterina’s gilded medicine coffers, strewn across the glinting surface of the cauldron. Lazily Madeleine engorged her sponge with another dip in the pool, head lolled to the side, eyes glazed with exhaustion as she watched it swell, dribbling across her chest, a succulent roast over the spit.
Her gaze thundered to the figure shadowing the threshold, a brow hoisted in fleeting suspicion. ‘Come, sister. I am washing the stink of the English off,’ Madeleine announced, once more dragging her buttery sponge across her collarbone. ‘They all smell of wet wool. Have you noticed? I shan’t let Lord Howard get so close again, that drunkard nearly sickened over my feet.’ Sitting upright, and with knees drawn to her chest, she turned her nose up to Héléne, declaring: ‘I am not intended for the chill and incessant rain and blustery winds of this drab isle. God desired me to be French. Or Greek, perhaps. Anything but an Albion.’
