Corben's Thirst: The Thirst Within Part 1.5 Read Online Free PDF Page A

placed her hand over my heart—“that owns me as you do.”
    “Mr. Ashby, the way you carry on, you may just end up killing your new wife out of happiness.”
    I pulled her closer and gently bit her earlobe. She let out a little moan accompanied by a shiver. “Charlotte,” I breathed on her neck. “Do not speak of dying. If you die, I may just die myself, to follow you.”
    “Then I will not speak of it. We shall never be without the other, and today is the first day of our life together.” She smiled at a new thought. “What is something that you have always wanted to do? We can do anything.”
    I looked at her and returned her smile, but I didn’t quite agree. The one thing I had always wanted to do was take back that time with Madeleine. But it would be a secret I would take to my grave.
    Instead I said, “I would say learn French, so that I could talk to you and have no one else understand us. It would be like our secret language.”
    “We can do that!” she said happily. “I will teach you.”
    “So we shall,” I said, returning her smile. “How about you?”
    “My dream is silly. I have always desired… to become a nurse.”
    I laughed. The eldest daughter of Baron Jean-Luc de Mayes, one of the richest women in the region, who could choose to spend the rest of her days doing absolutely nothing in some fancy watering hole… she wanted to be a nurse. “That is not a silly dream. It is honorable. Whatever makes you feel that way?”
    “I respect the occupation. I always helped take care of my sisters when they would fall ill. I would have wanted to study medicine, but my papa would not allow it.”
    “You can study now. We can find a tutor and you can study with him.”
    She sighed. “No… it is too late now.” Then she looked at me and her eyes brightened. “Instead, I will teach you French. And I will devote my life to loving you.”
    I kissed her. “As I will mine,” I promised her.
     
     

4.             Toxicity
     
    Our happiness did not wane in the first year of our marriage. Now seventeen years old, Charlotte was expecting our first child.
    “Alexandra,” she crooned to her belly every day.
    I didn’t mention that there was of course an equal chance that Alexandra may be a boy, because she would hear nothing of it.
    “I just know, I am the mother of a petite fille ,” she would say. Little girl .
    Her happiness was contagious, and so vast. She created a screen of harmony so thick that I had no way of foreseeing it would come crashing down around us in less than a year.
    She was almost nine months pregnant, a few weeks short of our first anniversary, when I first noticed signs of her illness. Charlotte started to walk less and less, staying holed up in her rooms with her maid. I was clueless, and attributed her paleness to exertion from carrying a baby. Her belly was huge, and she was so tiny.
    One morning as I came back from riding, I caught her maid crying softly in the servants’ kitchen. She was preparing something by the fire and swirled the spoon sadly. It smelled like tea, a strong herbal infusion.
    “Sara,” I called to her. “What is the matter?”
    She jumped when she saw me. “I am sorry,” she said, and started sobbing in earnest.
    “Speak to me, child. What is troubling you so?”
    “The mistress… she is sick, Master.”
    I automatically looked up in the general direction of our bedroom and almost dashed to my wife, until I remembered I had seen her not two hours before and she had been fine. “Sara, I saw her this morning. She is well; she only tells me she is tired.”
    Sara didn’t look me in the eye. “I am not as confident as the mistress, Master.” Her nose was red and I could tell her eyes were bloodshot. Her devotion to Charlotte moved me.
    “She rests in bed, and will feel better soon,” I said, more for her benefit than mine.
    “I pray your words are true. I am preparing her herbal medicine.”
    I eyed the liquid in the pot. “This