Page 31 of The Baroness of Sin
Martha spent a week searching for answers. She needed to find a way to reconcile the feelings of both her heart and her head. She didn’t feel she was any worse than when she came back, but she didn’t feel any better either.
She had tried talking to Emma about the matter, but Emma had proven very reluctant. When Martha made a point on multiple occasions of trying to explain the elaborate and complicated emotional aspects of the whole convoluted situation, her eldest sister would slowly grow more and more panicked. She would eventually put her hands up to frantically silence her sister. “I keep telling you, I’ve never been in love. I cannot possibly offer any advice on what to do.”
Martha was frustrated by her sister’s unwillingness to help, but she could understand what it felt like to be completely out of your depth when it came to romance. And her poor sister had even less romantic experience than she did.
She went back and forth when it came to her only other alternative, her Aunt Barbara.
On one hand, her aunt wasn’t married.
On the other hand, Martha didn’t believe that her aunt had lived her whole life with absolutely no experiences with gentlemen. She may have some advice to offer when it came to this situation.
Aunt Barbara didn’t need to know everything about her private life. That was, of course, assuming her aunt wouldn’t be able to sniff the truth out. She considered her Aunt fairly conservative and enigmatic, but if Martha knew one thing about the woman, she was shrewd.
Martha waited until Barbara was taking her tea alone and silently joined her. The older woman clearly saw Martha come and sit but did not turn from the book she was reading.
After several long moments of silence, Barbara clucked. “Make yourself a cup of tea, dear. I’m not sure what it is you need, but I refuse to break the decorum of the moment. If you drink tea too, we will both be much more comfortable.”
Martha wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to cringe as if she were being scolded. She instead made up a cup of tea and calmly waited for her aunt to address her again, occasionally sipping while she waited.
“Are you going to tell me what you came to talk about?” Barbara asked without turning from her book. She did, however, peer sharply over the cover and the frame of her reading spectacles.
“Well, I was hoping you could give me some advice,” Martha tried to meet her aunt’s directness with her own directness.
“Advice?” Barbara asked, while she set the book down on the table, seeming to be at least a bit more interested.
“Yes, about a gentleman,” Martha clarified.
“What could I have to say about gentleman, unmarried and unloved,” Barbara scoffed.
“Unmarried, but isn’t it likely you have garnered the attention of young men before? Someone as charming as you must have,” Martha insisted.
Barbara scoffed again but seemed appeased, “Well get on with it; what’s this advice about?”
“This is kind of hard to say; I had a relationship with someone. It was not necessarily a romantic one, but I have developed feelings for them. It was not the most appropriate choice, but... well, what was done was done, and I do not think either of us regrets it, but now I am terribly unsure of what to do.”
“Ah,” Barbara said concisely.
“Yes,” Martha sighed.
Her aunt sat silently across from her, and she appeared to be thinking up an answer.
“Does this person have the same feelings for you as you do for them?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Martha admitted.
“Ah, well there you go,” she said with a smile and patted her niece’s arm and went back to pick up her book.
“Aunt Barbara? I don’t understand. What do you mean?” Martha said with a mixture of confusion and needful plea.
Barbara set her book down again, with a look of mild frustration. “Isn’t it obvious, my dear? You can’t possibly know if you are about to make a wise or unwise decision without knowing how the other person feels. You need to figure out how this mystery person feels about you before you can decide on anything,” her aunt then added under her breath, “though if you think I don’t know who you are talking about then you have a rather low opinion of my powers of observation.”
But Martha didn’t seem to notice that she still was still talking. Martha looked off into space as if she had just heard something completely ludicrous, mostly because she was baffled that the thought had never occurred to her.
“That makes complete sense, Aunt Barbara.”
“That is something I hear quite a bit,” Aunt Barbara remarked dryly.
“Suppose, though, I get my answer. What then? How will I know what to do after that?” Martha added worriedly.
