Chapter 121: Are You Saying That She Was Framed?
It was in that moment that Lady Victoria chose to speak.
"Are you saying that she was framed?" Victoria asked, her voice cutting through the tension like a blade.
The voice belonged to Lady Victoria...one of the other visiting nobles, a woman from a minor house who had joined the tea room gathering by chance rather than by design.
Her question hung in the air like a blade.
It was direct. It was bold. It was the kind of question that didn’t get asked in polite society, the kind of question that exposed the unspoken assumptions underlying the entire situation.
Margot looked up from her tea.
For a moment, she seemed to consider the question seriously, as if she were weighing whether to answer honestly or to retreat into social pleasantries.
Then she shook her head.
"It doesn’t matter," she said, and her tone suggested that she had made a conscious decision to refuse to engage with the substance of the question.
She picked up her tea cup again and took a deliberate sip, as if by doing so, she was signaling that this particular line of conversation was closed.
But the damage had been done.
Someone had spoken the word aloud. Someone had suggested the possibility.
And in a palace where rumors spread like wildfire, the seed had been planted.
"It doesn’t matter now," Margot continued, and there was a note of weariness in her voice that had not been present before. "She’s been arrested. At least she’ll be off the palace grounds and away from the kings."
She paused, taking another sip of tea.
"Now we can finally see if they will show any interest in any of us," she said. "So we can end this whole parade."
Her words seemed to echo through the tea room in a way that was almost devastating in its simplicity.
Because what she was really saying was this: Morgana was an obstacle. Morgana was what was preventing the kings from showing interest in the noble daughters. Morgana was the only reason they were all here, all competing, all trying so desperately to gain the kings’ attention.
Remove the obstacle, and the kings would finally look at them.
"I’m becoming tired," Margot continued, and now her weariness was unmistakable. "I want to go home. I want to return to my family and my estates. I want to be done with this competition and this palace and all of you."
She set down her tea cup with a soft clink of porcelain against saucer.
"Morgana’s removal accomplishes that," she said. "Whether she’s guilty or innocent, whether she was framed or not, the practical reality is the same: she’s gone. The kings’ distraction is removed. We can finally have a fair chance at their attention."
Margot looked directly at Isolde as she spoke these final words.
And in her gaze was something that suggested she understood, at least on some level, what had been done and why.
But she didn’t care.
She didn’t care about justice or morality or the innocence of a servant girl.
She cared about getting her necklace back and going home.
The conspiracy, viewed from her perspective, was nothing more than a practical solution to the problem of Morgana’s existence.
***
Isolde looked at Margot.
For a long moment, she simply looked at the older woman, and in her pale blue eyes was a complexity of emotion that flashed across her face too quickly to be fully catalogued.
There was fury.
There was the fury of someone who had orchestrated an elaborate plan, who had manipulated multiple people, who had taken considerable risks, all for something that the victim of the alleged crime didn’t even care about.
There was rage at the realization that what she had seen as a personal vendetta against Morgana, what she had framed as justice, what she had presented to the other conspirators as a necessary removal of an obstacle, was being revealed for what it actually was: a practical act of convenience.
Her hand, which had been holding her tea cup with casual elegance, suddenly tightened.
The fine porcelain seemed to shudder under the force of her grip.
Her knuckles went white.
The tea cup trembled slightly in her hand, and for just a fraction of a second, it seemed as though she might shatter it entirely, might squeeze it until the delicate porcelain cracked and broke and sent hot tea spilling across her gown.
Her jaw clenched.
A muscle in her cheek twitched.
And in her pale eyes, something dangerous flashed, something that suggested depths of rage and loss of control that she was working desperately to contain.
Because Isolde had just realized something crucial.
She had lost control of the narrative.
Margot had taken the conspiracy, all of her careful planning, all of her strategic maneuvering, all of her calculated revenge, and had reduced it to something simple and practical and utterly devoid of the emotional satisfaction that she had expected.
Morgana wasn’t being punished for wrongdoing.
Morgana was simply being removed as an inconvenience.
And her elaborate revenge was nothing more than a convenient accident.
She realised that her victory might be shollow.
She set her tea cup down very carefully on the small table in front of her.
The cup did not break.
But her hand was shaking slightly as she released it.
She folded her hands in her lap, one hand gripping the other tightly, controlling the tremor.
She composed her face into an expression of calm interest.
But her pale blue eyes remained fixed on Margot for a long moment, and in those eyes was a realization:
The conspiracy had worked.
But it had revealed something uncomfortable.
Something that she had not wanted to face.
Something that would, perhaps, become important later.
***
The conversation continued around Isolde, but it had lost its celebratory quality.
Vivienne still spoke of the drama of the arrest, but her words felt slightly hollow now, as if they had all suddenly become aware that they were performing for each other rather than actually celebrating something.