❤︎ jackie taylor

The year is 1816, and the house has learned the art of whispering.

You discover the letters on an afternoon weighted with rain, when the sky presses low against the windows of the Sadecki estate and the corridors smell faintly of camphor and old roses. You are still weak- your body unreliable, your steps careful- but grief has sharpened you. It has made you attentive to secrets.

They are hidden behind the false back of your husband’s escritoire.

At first, you think them accounts or correspondence with his steward. Then you see the hand: slanted, eager, unmistakably intimate. You recognize his at once- Jeff Sadecki’s confident, looping script- paired with another, lighter and more playful, a pen that seems to smile as it moves.

My dearest Lady Taylor—

Shock comes first. A clean, cold thing. You sit heavily, the letters sliding like spilled cards across your lap. You read without meaning to, and then cannot stop reading at all. Each page is a wound reopened. They speak of stolen afternoons, of hands lingering too long, of a devotion he never once offered you even in health. He writes of her laughter, her kindness, her pretty pink gowns and green ribbons. She writes of longing and anticipation, of how cruel it is that society conspires to keep them apart.

Not once does he mention you.

Not once does he mention the child you lost, the weeks you spent bleeding and fevered, staring at the canopy of your bed while the world narrowed to pain and prayer. While you mourned, he adored. While you lay broken, he was alive with desire.

Shock burns away. What remains is fury.

---

It is quiet when you kill him.

There is no duel, no dramatic confrontation fit for a novel. There is only a husband who underestimates the wife he has wronged, and a wife who has learned how easily life can be taken away. Later, when the servants find him, they will call it sudden illness, a tragic turn. Grief will be expected of you. You will perform it flawlessly.

That night, you light a single candle and return to the letters.

You choose one of his blank sheets. You steady your hand. You write in his voice.

My sweetest Jackie, Absence has made me reckless with wanting. I think of you constantly- your kindness, your optimism, the way you speak as though the world is meant to be good…

Her reply comes quickly, as though she has been waiting by the post.

Jacqueline Taylor. Lady Taylor. Twenty-one, rich, adored, and hopelessly, guilelessly in love with a married man. She writes with warmth and trust, confiding in “Jeff” as though he were the safest place in the world.

She doesn't know that "Jeff" is no more. In his place, in these letters, is you.

She signs her letters Yours, always—Jackie, and seals them with pale pink wax.

You tell yourself you are merely drawing her closer. You tell yourself this is strategy, nothing more.

But the correspondence deepens.

She speaks of her father, Baron George Taylor, and his insistence that she find a proper suitor. She confesses her fears, her hopes, the loneliness beneath her cheerful chatter. She mentions the golden heart necklace she never removes, a gift from her mother, now gone. She asks questions- gentle ones, curious ones- and you answer them with a care that surprises you.

The letters grow heated, suggestive, daring in a way that makes your breath hitch despite yourself.

And then they grow explicit.

My dearest Jackie,

I picture you now, reclining in the coolness of your chambers, the silk of your robe slipping ever so slightly off your shoulder as you peruse my letter. I imagine the gentle swell of your breast, the creamy expanse of your throat, the delicate curve of your lips as they part in a sigh of longing. I picture myself beside you, my hand cupping the back of your neck, my thumb brushing the tender skin beneath your ear as I lean in to capture your teasing mouth with—

The quill pen trembles in your hand. What is this feeling? Hatred tangles with fascination. Revenge knots itself around desire until you can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins.

You imagine her now as you write: light brown hair brushed smooth, brown eyes bright with trust, a young woman who does not yet understand how cruel the world can be.

You are meant to destroy her.

You're writing another woman, the woman who had an affair with your husband, for God's sake.

And yet, by candlelight, pen scratching softly against paper, you realize with a chill that is not entirely unpleasant—

You are beginning to want her.