Page 43 of The Rest is History
Capture that smirk with my mouth.
Take pleasure in her eyes darkening as their expression shifts from triumph to helpless desire.
I allowed myself the indulgence last night of imagining that I was leaving her to stew till this morning (no matter that it was she who refused to discuss the situation via WhatsApp). But now I see I was wrong. If I’m not mistaken, she’s spoiling for a fight.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ she asks when I don’t return her greeting. I could swear she saves up all the things she’s itching to say to me at school during the week and vomits them all out on a Saturday, when I’m not her superior.
I inhale slowly through my nose. Planning my next move. Biding my time.
Lauren looks from Elodie to me. ‘Trouble in paradise?’
‘Charlie’s not happy with the way I taught Anne’s trial to his A Level class yesterday when he was at home puking his guts up.’ Elodie puts her hands up to adjust the loose fabric of her hood. ‘The little shits wouldn’t pay me any attention until I wrote the wordsreverse haremon the board. That got them in the zone pretty quickly.’
Lauren lets out a low whistle. ‘What’s your problem, Charlie boy? That’s exactly what they accused her of. Sounds fair to me.’
‘I am not getting into this here,’ I tell them in slow, even words. ‘I will speak to you later, in private,Elodie.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Lauren says. ‘Sounds like you’re going to get it later, babe.’
There’s something about her tone that brings home thedouble entendreshe didn’t intend. Because this woman has aggravated me enough that I wish I was giving her a hell of a lot more than a tongue-lashing later.
‘I am literally quaking in my boots.’ She turns to Lauren. ‘Come on, Laur. Let’s go talk to some kids. I have no interest in the king when he’s being a grumpy old grouch.’
I stew all day. I take lunch alone, because Elodie is surrounded by the other queens in the break room, and the solitude suits me just fine.
My mood won’t shift. Won’t lift. Won’t give me relief.
I’m disgruntled, pissed off. Worse than that, I’m twitchy. Like my blood is busier than usual, coursing through my veins, and my nerve endings are on high alert.
I’m not used to being undermined. Disobeyed. I run a tight ship in my department. For all the noise she makes, Zara plays ball, and Amanda was always pleasant. Accommodating. And now this temptress has muscled her way in, completely disregarding my lesson plan for yesterday and distracting my students by turning a critical coup into a pseudo-romantic farce.
I’m furious with myself for asking her to take the lesson. That’s what it is, really. I should have left them the notes to read and asked them to write an essay laying out the salient points. I should never have let Elodie Peach loose on my class.
Not for the first time, my thoughts turn to Henry. He had to put up with this shit, too. I’ve always found it fascinating, the hold Anne had over him. Her attitude towards him would have been unlike any he’d seen before, and on the one hand, it surprises me that he liked it. This is a guy who’d never been challenged. Never been toldno.Whose existence, once his brother the heir died, was honed to create an aura of God-given majesty.
There’s a but. I can see how utterly refreshing he must have found her. Fearless. Staggeringly intelligent. Sophisticated. Well-read. Bold in her ideas. And the nearest thing he’d ever allow himself to have to an equal among the female race. There’s no doubt that much of the heat between them came from that clash of two strong wills.
We know they fought. Hard. We know she screamed at him. Taunted him. Baited him. We also know those tools formed part of Anne’s arsenal in keeping Henry’s flames fanned for six long years while his men worked on a divorce from Katherine.
She couldn’t give him her body, so she gave him the best mental foreplay she had.
I’m thinking begrudgingly about the fine line between irritation and arousal as I climb the stairs behind Elodie at the end of our shift, her dark shape moving ahead of me, her skirts rustling. About the conundrum of having found her more staggeringly beautiful than ever this morning when she floated over to me, a smirk on her mouth, despite the vibrations of my anger escalating every hour I didn’t have it out with her.
Anger that makes me feel positively violent.
‘In here.’ I jab my finger at the doorway of one of the hundreds of rooms serving little obvious purpose in the endless upper corridors of the palace.
‘Fine.’ She sweeps through the doorframe and I follow, slamming the door behind us with more force than is strictly necessary. The room’s painted burgundy and has little going on apart from a table, some chairs, and a stuffed bookshelf. Probably someone’s office during the week.
I shouldn’t be doing this here. I should wait till Monday and speak to her at school, when we’re in the appropriate context and I have the advantage of being her superior. But I’m too angry to wait. Too riled.
I take a step towards her. ‘I won’t waste anyone’s time. I saw Martha and Tallulah last night, and?—’
Her eyebrows rise. ‘Didn’t realise you had a thing for hanging out with seventeen-year-olds on Friday nights, Charlie. That’s a bit creepy, don’t you think?’
She is so fucking insolent.
‘Martha is my niece,’ I grind out. ‘We were at a family gathering. They told me all about your little stunt.’
