.
The next trip, however, had been a small success, for although he didn't see her, he might have unwittingly found out her name.
.
.
He appeared busy as he unloaded pelts from Henry's back, but he couldn't have been listening more intently had his life depended on it, when one Mrs. Stanley began gossiping about the townsfolk.
"...Mr. Swan, he's getting on in age. What a wonderful job Isabella is doing to care for him, giving up her own prospects, such as they were..."
Somehow, though Mrs. Stanley's words were commiserative, the inflection on them was contemptuous. It was obvious that the old cow was really saying Isabella had no prospects.
Isabella.
He had no idea whom she might be to the elderly Mr. Swan. His wife? His nurse? Was she perhaps his daughter?
Although there was no reason to hold out hope that the woman in the white skirts and Isabella were one and the same, he felt oddly elated at having found out this name, and unable to accept the hateful eventuality that she was the old man's wife.
He stayed among the dry goods at John Banner's store much longer than necessary, but Mrs. Stanley had already moved on to other, more salacious subjects, and did not mention Isabella again.
This time when leaving the little township behind him, he was hopeful.
And so, it continued. For months, he'd been coming to Forks to see Isabella.
Sometimes he caught a glimpse of her braid, earthen against white, as she stepped into a store. Other times he was lucky enough to see her up close, to follow her every movement with his hungry eyes, memorizing the angle of her resolute chin, her delicate and slightly freckled nose, the elegant fingers of her white hands, with their rounded nails pared short.
He couldn't get enough of those moments.
He inhaled her, sometimes forgetting to keep up the pretence of activity and stilling completely to observe her with all the diligence of a star pupil memorizing his lessons.
His trips into town increased in frequency, but somehow, his need for her did not lessen. It seemed the more he got, the more he wanted.
With each flip of her braid over her slim shoulder and slight lift of her bright skirts to keep them out of the dirt, he fell deeper and harder, and became more desperate.
He knew her every gesture, could recognize her willowy form from miles away. He never tired of cataloguing her intricacies and nuances.
Like a miser, he stored them all away in the vault of his heart, just to plunge his hands again and again into the treasure chest and let them tumble through his fingers like gold coins.
He stumbled to the river and threw himself in, laughing and crying, wanting her so damn much that it hurt to breathe.
In the dead of night, he could pretend that they belonged to each other, as lovers.
And then, one day, everything changed.
He knew this at one glance of her familiar and coveted form.
For on this day, she wore black.
.
.
previously...
.
Isabella was well aware of the town's opinion of her, and though she was indifferent to how she herself was perceived, it hurt her greatly to know that her father might be affected by the gossip.
She had hoped that after the passing of so many years, people would stop gnawing her tragedy like the old bone it was, and let it be buried quietly.
She did everything in her power to prevent becoming the fodder of hearsay and rumor mongering, which in her case, was to do nothing at all to draw attention to herself, unlike other young ladies.
She did not realize that it only made her more noticeable.
Where they wore colorful dresses with tiny corseted waists and intricately bunched bustles as was the fashion, she wore her own mother's outdated clothing, with its leaner, column-like silhouettes.
Isabella wore Renee Swan's dresses despite their frivolous and impractical light colors and old-fashioned cuts for remembrance- it was all she had of her mother.
Where other young ladies spent hours at their toilette (even in little old backwater Forks), Isabella spent no time at all, preferring her quickly plaited braid and clean water on her face each morning, her complexion unblemished and pale as a result.
Where eligible maidens nonchalantly paraded in pairs, waiting to catch the eye of a well-to-do bachelor, Isabella kept her father's modest house, performing all the duties that were once done by her own mother.
Where those virtuous virgins attended Church each Sunday, looking suitably demure and marriageable (while their chaperon mothers fended off admiring glances from the town's strapping sons), Isabella sat stiffly in the pews, with downcast eyes and hands clasped tight.
In short, where once she was a curiosity and a pitied unfortunate, she was fast becoming the old maid, the spinster, the town's outcast.
Where she sought to disappear, she became the glaringly obvious other.
Where she had once (in fact, twice) had the pick of the town's young men, now she was destined to wear the brand of the pariah, and though she'd never married- the Black Widow.
While her father liked to attend Pastor Newton's sermons, Isabella thought them the worst kind of torture, endured only under greatest duress- that of putting her father's happiness and peace above her own.
She sat through the sermons week after week as though on a bed of nails, tolerating the ridiculous notion that there was a God and that he cared a fig for their mortal coil.
And so it happened that on a certain Sunday, she was once again in the stuffy little church, her arm secured around her father's waist as they made their way to the doorway at sermon's end.
Pastor Newton waited, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with the congregation.
While Isabella wanted to be quick about leaving, her father's shuffling gait invariably got them to the church door after everybody else had gone.
Such was the case this Sunday, and she dreaded it, for Pastor Newton was nothing if not persistent.
.
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A/N: Thank you for reading.