It was as Miss Sykes stumbled over herself that Carmelina abruptly realised she may well have done the same, only verbally; even in trying not to, it felt as though she had dug a pothole for herself, that even in trying to be clever and casual Constance had caught her out somehow. Or Carm had said too much without trying: a fault she was not unfamiliar with. Half of what she said on a good day was gibberish anyway. People ought to expect her nonsense.
Not settling for a man. A man - not a man at all? And there she went, reading into statements she shouldn't, as though she were parsing a complex curse-tablet and not an ordinary conversation. Carmelina heard Constance's - Madam Sykes' - correction, clarification, but was almost too struck by her demeanour to properly digest it. For a suspended moment, she caught herself imagining it - the notion that that could have been what the house matron meant -
She didn't believe it for a moment, and so she reached out to press Miss Sykes' arm to steady her belatedly, as if a brief moment of contact would be enough to dispel her illusions, ground her back into reality, where her touch and her topic of conversation would both be duly dismissed as mere nothings. "Well, one might find other things to fall in love with," Carmelina replied a little more carefully. Things, indeed. She waved a hand about, trying to sell this with the same mirth as usual. "A career. Ancient curses. Teaching." She inclined her head at Connie, trying to fathom which of them was the more inebriated, and added a good-natured observation (from one perilous topic to another): "Lucky, I think, that you don't have many flights of stairs ahead of you tonight." Merlin, if even the dungeons seemed far, how would she ever get up to her office? (She supposed she rather needed the six-storey climb to clear her head, after all this.)
Not settling for a man. A man - not a man at all? And there she went, reading into statements she shouldn't, as though she were parsing a complex curse-tablet and not an ordinary conversation. Carmelina heard Constance's - Madam Sykes' - correction, clarification, but was almost too struck by her demeanour to properly digest it. For a suspended moment, she caught herself imagining it - the notion that that could have been what the house matron meant -
She didn't believe it for a moment, and so she reached out to press Miss Sykes' arm to steady her belatedly, as if a brief moment of contact would be enough to dispel her illusions, ground her back into reality, where her touch and her topic of conversation would both be duly dismissed as mere nothings. "Well, one might find other things to fall in love with," Carmelina replied a little more carefully. Things, indeed. She waved a hand about, trying to sell this with the same mirth as usual. "A career. Ancient curses. Teaching." She inclined her head at Connie, trying to fathom which of them was the more inebriated, and added a good-natured observation (from one perilous topic to another): "Lucky, I think, that you don't have many flights of stairs ahead of you tonight." Merlin, if even the dungeons seemed far, how would she ever get up to her office? (She supposed she rather needed the six-storey climb to clear her head, after all this.)
