Chapter Eight: The Diary.

Berkley Castle, England

Dec 2010

It's 2am; there is a chill in her room despite the modern heating and the fire burning brightly in the hearth. Sitting in an armchair in front of the fire she basks in the warm glow as she reads, looking up she notices the sky outside her room looks odd, and so she heaves herself up and wanders over to the window to stare outside. It's snowing. Huge flakes fall en-masse from a ghostly sky and already the fields and parkland surrounding the castle are covered with inches of white frosting.

It looks like a Christmas card. The countryside rendered as a painting, hiding so much of what's modern from the eye under a blanket, that she fancifully imagines it looks exactly as it did two hundred years ago. Not being the sort of person who indulges in fanciful thinking very much, she smiles to herself at the direction her thoughts have taken.

She sees it all so clearly though, imagines long ago conversations filling these rooms, and life above stairs contrasting with life below. Is it her authors' vivid imagination or something more? Her rational top layer says it's her imagination, her heart quietly insists on more, a connection to this place, to these people.

Her dinner with Richard Berkley had been a pleasant relaxed affair in his comfortable dining room in the private wing of the castle. The hotel has so many staff that Richard confessed he rarely caters for himself and just has the kitchen make whatever he wants. With 24 hour room service provided for the hotel guests and a large housekeeping staff he says his life is very comfortable really, and she had to agree.

The food was very fine, and Richard was entertaining company, regaling her with tales of his youth, his older sisters who are both married with children now, he told her about his wife, who'd left him for some famous footballer apparently. Brennan could see the shadows in his eyes when he mentioned her, the pain still cutting him deeply. He told her about his parents, who he'd lost in a plane crash when he was only twenty two years old, and how once he'd inherited the title and the responsibility for the castle he knew he'd have to make changes in order to keep his ancestral home his. Brennan guessed he was now in his early forties, ten or so years older than her. She liked him very much, they had much in common despite the cultural differences and if she hadn't come to see Booth as the man she loved, she knew the old Brennan would have had no problem engaging in a fling with the Earl. As it was, he accompanied her back to her room, only to kiss her goodnight via the knuckles of her hand in his very English way, before he bid her adieu and left.

What a difference a year or so makes, what a difference love makes. Now that she's acknowledged it, now that she understands her own heart and its desires she looks back on her own past behavior and is amazed that she's changed in the all the ways she has.

She no longer wants a sexual partner to scratch a physical itch; there is a burning need now, a desire almost overwhelming to know what it feels like to make love to someone. Well not someone, Seeley Booth. She doesn't simply want to share her body with a man; she wants to share herself, Temperance, with the only person who's always understood her. Who sees her not only as she is, but as she wants to be, as she could be.

Booth, who loved her once so deeply and whose love she rejected, out of a fear that one day his love would wane and the end when it inevitably came would be more than she could stand. Not that she could admit to that reason for the longest time, fear is irrational most of the time, she had rational reasons to cloak her rejection in, and now she curses herself every day for falling back on old patterns she's surely grown beyond by now.

If only Booth had fought harder to convince her, but her rejection stung him so badly he fought not at all; and this is the only part she blames him for. Why couldn't he fight harder that night, fight her and make her see reason as only he ever can. Why did he have to pick that moment to behave so uncharacteristically, because now he's changed everything and she's terrified it will end them.

For though she's his partner, she doesn't know if she can stay that if he marries Hannah, has a family with her. She thought the preservation of their friendship the only important thing, now she wonders how much she can stand to witness; how much silent pain she can cover up before the dam inside her breaks.

Pulling the heavy damask drapes closed to keep out the cold, she returns to her seat by the fire, wondering if anything but Booth can chase away the chill in her heart.

She picks up her book, worn red leather and aged yellow pages covered in elegant script eerily similar to her own. The phrases and the wording are like something from Jane Austen, the cadences different and the language sometimes unfamiliar, but the entries lure her in and though she should have been asleep long ago she cannot put it down.

She found several diaries waiting for her, simply sitting on her dresser when she returned from the lab. The top one is dated from March 1816 when Therese travelled from Essex east of London to the wilds of Gloucestershire and Berkley. Her pupils before the twins had been boys who were old enough now to be sent away to school, so with an excellent reference she had been able to choose from a number of positions. The one at Berkley was the most prestigious, the sisters of an Earl, a castle to call home and being that her pupils would be girls the possibility of reasonably long-term employment. It had been an easy decision and from her diary Brennan had gleaned that Therese had loved Berkley upon first sight.

"Its setting is sublime, this vast building that is so happily situated in the rolling Cotswold hills, I am drawn to this place as none before it. I feel most at home here and my apartments are so tastefully decorated, I have every comfort I could desire and shall save much for the future at this rate of pay."

She had loved Bastian's sisters almost immediately too, especially Alicia, the older and bolder girl who Therese described as "The most beautiful child imaginable with her dark eyes twinkling, full of mischief. A keen mind, one in need of instruction."

Her fascination with the Castles absent master appeared very early on also. From Therese's first look at his portrait and then a distinct absorption with a marble bust, it seems his physical beauty stirred something within her she knew was dangerous before they had even met. Once Bastian came home Therese's descriptions of him spoke volumes to her growing attachment to him.

"His face, I could look upon all day and never grow tired of the looking. In his eyes I see an understanding of me, as if he knows me on a level none before him have ever seen. His gaze is always warm, open, for a nobleman this alone tells me that his underlings have his respect, that he feels his privilege as a great responsibility. He is a good man, I think, honorable despite his reputation with women. I feel for him as I should not, as it is not safe to do, and yet I am helpless to stop these feelings growing daily. It is unwise to say the least."

Brennan is amazed by the mirror of her own feelings; Therese however was in touch with her emotions, open with herself always about what they were. Brennan on the other hand has lived since her teens in a world where she kept such a distance between what she felt and what she acknowledged she felt that she lost the ability to know her own feelings somehow. Her love for Booth she knows now has always been there, right from their first disastrous case and their instant physical attraction to each other. By the end of that case she had decided she truly disliked him, but love and hate are two sides of the same coin and it was a twist of fate flipping that coin hate side up for a year.

Slowly, so slowly she came to see how important he was, but she can look back now and see she felt it even then. From her fear when her refrigerator blew him up, to her desperate beating of a bounty hunter when he went missing. Killing to save his life, lying to protect him, kissing him under mistletoe that was no hardship at all, and always, always working to aid him even his score with the universe, just so that he would feel at peace. A thousand acts of love she performed and didn't recognize until too late.

Her vision blurs suddenly and afraid the tears will spill over and damage the delicate paper she closes the diary and places it on the coffee table. She's overly emotional and she needs to rest, she'll come back to all this tomorrow.

She checks that the fire will burn itself out safely, and then she douses the lights and pulls the curtains back a little to let in some moonlight, the thick covers on her bed will prevent her from catching cold.

Climbing in she swipes her eyes clear of moisture and laying her head on a thick fluffy pillow she closes her eyes and wills herself to sleep. As wind howls outside and more snow falls she wonders if Bastian and Therese will enter her dreams.