The Bride of the Immortal Read Online Free Page B

while Mairin had started to wonder if her sister’s words had only been an attempt to keep her from feeling lonely.
    Without being motivated, Mairin opened her cupboard to prepare the clothes she was going to take with her. Now that she was about to leave, she felt that the years had gone by fast. Some of her days she had spent in solitude and isolation, studying her books or working on some handicraft. On other days she had been taught in English, German and Latin, history, biology, mathematics and physics, religion, philosophy, art and etiquette.
    Her private lecturers, mostly elderly women with stern looks on their faces, had rarely been kind to her but the longing for knowledge and the thought that her family had been rewarded well had kept her going. Despite their rigour, her teachers had treated her better than most of the students and the staff of Sunflower Garden had. Even now she was bullied on the rare occasions when she encountered them, for example in the evenings when she had to join them for supper in the dining hall. This was one of the reasons why she hadn’t asked for help with the preparations. She didn’t fool herself into thinking that the maid who had been appointed to her would actually do anything to help her in her task.
    In any case, there wasn’t that much that needed to be prepared. As the unwelcome guest or maybe even prisoner she saw herself treated as, she had never possessed many dresses. The ones she owned had been handed down from the headmistress or her niece, Mrs Enderby’s daughter, and already old, worn out and modified by the time they had changed their owner.
    Again she was feeling a surge of anger.
    Why should she take those dresses with her? Wasn’t she – the bride of the immortal – supposed to wear fine gowns instead of these rags? Where was her material reward for bearing with the hardships for all those years?
    On a whim she decided to only take her undergarments and one dress with her and to leave the rest behind. Instead of the heavy trunk, she was planning on using a small suitcase that was just big enough to hold the neatly folded belongings.
    At any rate, there was nothing she really cared for except the pendant she never took off. As Mairin raised her hand to touch the heirloom her mother had left her, she noticed that the small trinket was gone.
    Panic was welling up in her throat.
    Taking into consideration that she wasn’t allowed to leave Sunflower Garden, the pendant had to be somewhere nearby and although Mairin knew that finding the trinket was only a matter of time, she was panic-stricken and frantically started looking for it as if every second counted. After turning her quarters upside down to no avail, Mairin rushed out of her room. Unsure where to turn she stopped abruptly and threw a glance down the corridor to the right, then to her left, trying to trace her steps. There weren’t many occasions on which she left her room – art lectures and meals that weren’t brought to her being two of them – so there was a high chance that it was close to the dining hall or the kitchen.
    Without losing any more time, Mairin lifted the skirt of her dress, just as much as necessary for being able to move freely, and started running. She ignored the few girls she encountered in the corridors and on the way downstairs, certain that her curious behaviour encouraged at least some of them to hurry back to their room to spread gossip about it.
    At the moment she couldn’t care less.
    Mairin didn’t slow down until she had gotten closer to the kitchen, where she wanted to try her luck first. Her dress rendered her unable to search the floor on her knees and so she only slightly bent them to get closer to the floor. Like that she continued looking for the pendant, carefully scanning the ground, afraid that she might accidentally overlook her treasure. Still heavily influenced by the adrenaline rush and the short run, she almost tripped over her skirt and had to hold