Note: Thanks to the Baroness, for her enduring, beautiful characters, and to Elyse, for checking that everything makes sense!
Comfort
It held his shape as it had once, not so long ago, held him, held her. Tailored seams measured the width of his broad shoulders and chest, before tucking neatly in to fit his slim waist. She held the coat up against herself, inhaling his scent, the sleeves trailing beyond her fingertips when she balanced his arm upon hers. The silk lining was soft like skin, and she imagined that she was touching him as she slipped a hand into the folds of the rich material.
Marguerite, watching herself in a full-length dressing mirror, hugged his memory to her heart. It was silly, really – he would come back to her, as he promised each time they parted – and yet here she was, drinking in his lingering presence as if … She sighed impatiently, closing her eyes, remembering instead of thinking.
Remembering when he had wrapped this very coat about her shoulders, her hair folded beneath its high collar, and taken her free hand in his (she had needed to clasp the heavy mantle by the lapels to hold it on) as they ran back to the house. They had been oblivious to the building clouds that evening, sat together in the arbour by the river, indulging in the quiet and the seclusion, until the heavy rain soughing onto the water below them had penetrated their love nest and their reverie. Dressed for dinner, unprepared for the elements, they had laughed and screamed at the prospect of dashing across the lawn, and feeling the cold rain numbing their faces, dragging at their hair, saturating their clothes. 'Wait,' his voice had held her back as she stretched an arm out into the downpour, 'take this', and then his beautiful coat was about her, enveloping her already damp gown in its transplanted warmth. She could smell his musky aroma, then and now; a ghost of the river and of open spaces.
"Percy," Marguerite sighed her husband's name.
She slipped the coat over her simple morning dress, smiling sadly at her reflection: at the sharp lines of the shoulders in the coat jutting beyond her own, and the way the collar, edged with material to match his waistcoat, covered her jaw line and most of her ears. She looked like a child wrapped in her father's greatcoat.
Stretching her fingers free of the cuffs, she unpinned her hair, although it had taken her maid a good while to arrange it, so that she might once again feel its cool smoothness beneath the collar, pressing against her neck. Tarnished gold fell about the grey silk, her hair embroidering curlicues upon the plain panels of the coat. Then with a shrug of her shoulders and a twist of her flowing curls, Marguerite tucked away the sight that her husband loved so much: she couldn't bear her hair falling loose without his fingers to idly comb through its lengths, and only sought by wearing it down to recreate another sensation from that night.
Holding her own wide-blue gaze until her face appeared blanched and unreal, Marguerite wrapped the coat tightly around her. As she did so, something sharp in the lining dug into her skin. Still watching her reflection, she gripped the lapels and spread her arms, revealing an inside pocket stitched into the plum silk.
A letter, a note, the merest sign – he never left her without hope. Marguerite reached into the lining and smiled when her fingertips brushed against a folded square of vellum, torn from the corner of a map. It had been sealed with his stamp, the shape of a small pimpernel pressed into red wax, and there, beneath the printed word 'Paris' from the original design of the map, the letter 'M' had been neatly penned in his bold script.
She traced the strokes that formed the initial of her name, imagining his own fingers so close to the same paper, and caressed the emblem on the seal before eagerly breaking it open.
"My own love," she read, "how I cherish the way you hold fast to the faintest wisps of a memory, and how it stabs at my heart that you should need to: your beauty, your noble, kind soul, implore me to stay, even though your lips no longer speak the words that used to stay with me from the moment I left your side. If I loved you. Know always that I do, and will forever more, and that I will soon return to replace the phantom that warms your own heart in my absence. Yours eternally, Percy."
Tears brimming in her blue eyes, Marguerite pressed her lips to the parchment and then tucked it into the neckline of her gown. Suddenly able to laugh at her maudlin behaviour, she slid his coat from her shoulders and carefully folded it along the seams before draping it over an ottoman. It really needed pressing and airing, but she thought perhaps she would let Percy to pass it onto his valet.
When he returned.