High City on a Hill (Ch10)

Chapter 9 of Hertha was possibly the least successful to date, having been posted for weeks on both fanfiction.net and AO3 and garnering a grand total of zero reviews on either :-( (Either my 'regular reviewers' didn't like the chapter, or else they were away -- I am fairly certain that the FFnet reviewer hasn't even read it, because her country wasn't showing up at all in the stats, and the sample size is so small that I can usually identify individual non-Americans...)

However despite the lack of incentive I did finish typing up and tweaking Chapter 10, in which Hertha ends up giving Christine a lift to her father's grave; I had some trouble splitting these scenes, so we've got half a chapter here and then the rest of the graveyard adventure in the next chapter.

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Chapter 10 — “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again”

I had grumbled over the chill and discomforts of Beauvais. It was hard to admit, even to myself, that my father’s familiar apartments on the Place Clignot-les-Pins seemed to have grown narrow and dark and constricted after the space and luxury I’d grown used to in the Hôtel Chagny as a Vicomte’s wife. Father was glad to see me, and grateful for the company, but there was a constraint between us that had not been there before, and my thickening body was only yet another reminder that I was no longer the girl who’d left this house for her wedding over a year ago.

The childhood books that had once held comfort were battered now and more shabby than I’d remembered, torn pages a sharp reminder of how Rudi and I had once squabbled over their possession. The French novels I’d been reading at nineteen, when I’d thought myself so sophisticated, had lost their glamour and revealed themselves as shallow and foolish or cynical by turns. My bedroom had not changed since last I lived here —though I shared it now, as I’d suspected, with an overflow of boxes from my father’s study that he’d failed to find space for elsewhere— but it felt as if it had belonged to someone else entirely.

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