This is not in my usual writing projects at all, but I wrote it for school and it turned out really well. Because I doubt very many people will read this, please please do read and review. Please, you have no idea how encouraging it is. Anyway, Warnings: This is really sad, their is a slight Carton/Lucie ship, but it is not meant to take the place of her husband.
Disclaimer: I do not own Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens did.
"The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of a crowd, so that it swells forward like one great heave of water, all flashes away. Twenty three."
The year was 1837, it was a year of sorrow and regret, of new beginnings and remembrance. An old woman stands at the foot of a tall stone monument, her bright white hair braided into an ornate bun at the nape of her neck. The signs of wealth echo in her black silk gown and her rich pearl earrings. She stands, slightly stooped, leaning on a cane of wood as her kind blue eyes take in the scene around her.
She is wealthy, for when she was young, she married a young man who loved her with the fullness of his being. He, though he had abandoned wealth, was destined for success. The years had come and gone in her happy home until she had nearly forgotten the whispers of a bleeding heart that had confined in her long ago. Then, when her hour of sorrow was most dire, the bleeding heart had overcome its pain and delivered her from the condemning life of a widow.
It was only after he had perished that she had discovered how much she regretted her unresponsiveness to his confession. Although it was not love in its purest form, it was a longing for a life that might have been, and a wish to right a wrong.
However, life carried on until here she was, a woman touched by many years come to see the sepulcher of a doomed love.
The cold Autumn wind whispered through the trees, and the scattering leaves were like ghosts of the marching, screaming, bloody feet. The monument stood cold and bare, a tomb to the screams of La Guillotine. The setting sun cast a shadow of black on the gnarled cobblestone road. It was the witching hour, that time between night and day when the fires of the dying sun slowly fade to black.
The old woman, bowed upon a stick, read the inscription on the monument. The writing was cold and hard, printed words for a eulogy of thousands. They read:
Here lie her victims,
La Guillotine,
The requiem of a revolution,
Slaughtered unseen.
He was one of the victims. He had died to save her husband, and now, after many years, she had come to see him again.
She had always desired to see him, his footsteps had never ceased to follow her and bring her to his grave; but she had been afraid, afraid of her terrible lust to see it, and she had been guilty.
Finally, here she was, at the end of her life with no husband, no father, and children all gone away. She had followed her golden thread to its origin, her greatest sin. She had no regrets, as the silver knife came from the folds of her skirt, but that she had left him so cold, without a flower of hope to sustain him.
So in the end, as the knife plunged into her breast and the many faces turned toward her in terror, as the murmuring rose to a shout and the great heave of water overcame her; she thought with relief that she had finally found the footsteps of a destiny that had followed her all her life. She had done a far better thing than all she had ever done.
"All flashes away."
She was content.
In this epilogue/ alternate ending, I wanted to focus on the guilt Lucie must have felt after Carton sacrificed himself for Darnay. Although I do prefer the couple of Carton and Lucie, I did not want to change that part of the story, therefore I left it up for debate. I did not want to take away Carton's heroism in the end, so I emphasized on broadening Lucie's character by giving her some flaws. Perhaps she goes insane at the end of her life? Her father did so why not her? Originally, I was going to have her see a vision of Carton and get closure, but I thought that this ending was more shocking and it just kind of happened while I was writing. I mentioned the motifs of footsteps and the golden thread as well as the blood, and I talked about the themes of guilt and depression that plagued Carton's character.