He thought about it. (Pick up the nearest book, turn to page 49 and use the first sentence as a writing prompt.... nearest book was Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson M.D.)
Her eyes were a keen sort of brown, now that he thought about it, lit with a fire and imagination that he would never fully comprehend. Those eyes had seen much more pain and desolation than they ever ought to have witnessed. But then, they were not hardened to the human plight. This translated through the way she moved, the gentleness of her hands, through her very bearing when confronted by those in pain.
He had never met another woman quite like this Charlotte and she touched a place in his heart that he had thought to be cut out and burned a long time ago. As he gazed out the window at the falling snow he wondered whose hearth she knelt as that night, tending to the fire intermittently while she comforted the household and more importantly the invalid she had come to minister to directly.
It was indeed a marvel that she wasn't oftener sick than the rogue cold that was sometimes the aftermath of being kept awake over too many days in the vigil of the healer. He had never personally called her to his side when he was ill, though he had thought about it from time to time. But her attention was far too much for one such as himself to afford. Not that she charged exorbitant prices for her services (for she actually only asked for sustenance when she was at a particular home for a prolonged amount of time) but he could not afford her. He felt himself unworthy of even the smile she sometimes cast his way when he passed her in the marketplace as she made her tired but no less cheerful way home (though, sometimes it was more melancholy if she had not been able to save whoever she had been asked to tend).
However, she always smiled at him. The dimple in her cheek leaving a sweet indentation pointed to by the corner of her mouth much like the Big Dipper and the North Star. She always greeted him in the same warm manner. "Good day, Charles. I hope your mother is well?" To which he would nod, no words being able to issue forth from his mouth until she passed, out of earshot once again.
The crackle of the fire snapping more sharply than it had all day recalled him to the company he kept. His mother, Ms. Mosgrave, was reading a book Charlotte had recommended to her after having treated her cold a month or so ago. And they were joined that particular evening by Sophia Croft, the woman he was expected to marry. She, with her blue eyes, looked at him expectantly and he remembered with a jolt that she had asked him if he had been feeling well. Had he answered the question already and she had asked another? Or had he lost himself in thinking about how he had been feeling under the weather and started to think about Charlotte instead of answering aloud.
"I... I am sorry, Miss Croft. What was the question?" She laughed and he felt the tension mount in his shoulders. He didn't like it when she laughed--it always felt as though she were enjoying a private joke.
"I asked if you have been well," she prompted, "and then, rather suddenly, you walked to the window and looked out as if the answer was there and not actually within your own self."
He nodded almost absently before nodding firmly. Sophia needn't know he was unwell for she would surely insist upon staying until he was quite well.
"I am well," he finally answered to which her eyes narrowed the smallest degree but her smile remained the same. "And how are you, Miss Croft?"
"Won't you call me Sophia? You have been courting me after all for the past year," she said, a tightening at the corners of her eyes gave away her consternation at the fact that he still refused to address her informally as would befit one in love. But he was not in love, regardless of how everyone else felt about the match.
Now if it had been Charlotte...
Charlotte called everyone in the town by their first name and only those who were jealous of her freedom scorned her for the informality of her very person. But then again, she had helped in the birth of the vast majority of the town and though she didn't look it, she was older than the vast majority as well. Token of her being a witch and longer lived than the normal folk.
Indeed, she had assisted in the delivery of himself from Ms. Mosgrave, before his father died away on a journey he should not have taken in the first place and had been warned away from by Charlotte herself.
But though she was older than he, Charles had no qualms in loving her just the same as if she was younger than he as her appearance suggested.
"Charles?" Sophia prompted, the agitation more prominent in her features as he looked over at her and saw his mother pause in her reading and look at him with a spark of amusement in her weathered features. She had told him that the day would come when Sophia would stop putting up patiently with his tendency to start thinking about topics unknown. Aside from that, Ms. Mosgrave had confronted him a number of times and though he never admitted to her being spot on, she had surmised just what or rather WHO he thought of in the times when he was suddenly absent from the conversation.
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