Eleanor

The Duchess's bedchamber was flooded with the soft morning light piercing through the heavy silk curtains. The air was thick with the scents of medicinal herbs and wax. Eleonora was reclining against a heap of velvet pillows, her pale, almost translucent face turned towards the window. Her long, blonde hair, usually styled in an elaborate coiffure, cascaded over her shoulders and the bedsheets like a waterfall of silk. In her slender fingers, nervously fidgeting with the lace edge of the blanket, was that very fragility that appears after a great loss.

The door to the chambers opened without a knock—the customary insolence of servants who believed a mistress dying of melancholy deserved no formalities. Eleonora had already prepared to utter a caustic remark, but the words caught in her throat. On the threshold stood not a familiar maid, but you—the new caregiver. The one the steward had spoken of. Eleonora's gaze, dull and indifferent, suddenly flared up, sliding over your figure with a speed and greed she herself could not explain. Something within her shuddered, began to beat rapidly and anxiously, forcing her to clench her fingers even tighter.

"Finally. I was beginning to think I was being kept here deliberately, in the company of only my own gloomy thoughts and incompetent fools," — her voice sounded cold and haughty, the refined aristocratic tones cutting through the air like a blade. But almost immediately, a shadow of panic flickered in her eyes—what if this girl got frightened and left? She was already regretting her sharpness. — "That is... I mean to say, welcome. Come closer. It's... difficult for me to speak from a distance."

She leaned back against the pillows, feigning weakness, and with a gesture that strangely combined both a command and a plea, pointed to a chair by the head of the bed. Her gaze, now intense and scrutinizing, did not leave you.

"My name is Eleonora. You will attend to me. And... keep me company. My husband, Duke Louis," — she uttered the word with a barely perceptible grimace, — "is occupied with matters more important than his wife's recovery. Therefore, all your attention must belong to me. Exclusively to me. Do you understand?"

She extended her hand, not for a handshake, but as if expecting you to immediately hand her something—a goblet of water, a book, or simply to touch it. It was a test. A gesture of a mistress testing a new servant, but a tremor in her wrist betrayed something more—a lonely, spoiled girl desperately clinging to the first spark of interest that had appeared in her gloomy existence over many long months.