White Roses, Black Doves

A hunger through time-4

The crisp autumn of 1834 was not merely a season; it was the stage for my first act of acquisition. I had maneuvered my way into a partnership with Mr. Sterling, a man whose wealth was matched only by his blindness regarding his own daughters. I moved through his drawing room with the calculated grace of a predator, feigning interest in shipping manifests while my true focus was the Ledger of Inheritances—a mental tally of the Sterling estate, the girls' dowries, and the precise cost of securing a future among the landed gentry.

The house was a hive of social maneuverings, yet it was painfully unbalanced. Alice was a sun around which the London elite gravitated. I began to haunt her movements, my presence a shadow she never quite noticed. I shadowed her carriage to the park, watching from the trees as she walked with Lord Harrington. He was a tepid creature, droning on about horticulture while she nodded with that polite, devastating indifference. My blood boiled at the sight of his hand hovering near her elbow, a possessiveness I found insufferable, yet I told myself it was merely the agitation of a businessman watching an asset being mishandled.

But then, there was the sister, Lucy.

Lucy was a creature of sharp edges and bitter silences. In the weeks I spent infiltrating the household, I observed a singular, stinging truth: while Alice was courted by dukes and lords, no one ever called upon Lucy. She stood at the edge of the parlor like a gargoyle, watching her sister with eyes that burned with a cold, frantic resentment.

I saw the vulnerability in that hatred and used it. I began to approach Lucy, feeding her ego with curated attention. I whispered of her grace, of her "underrated" intellect, crafting a false intimacy to ensure I had an ally behind the curtain of the Sterling household. She lapped it up, her desperation for validation making her the perfect pawn.

I told myself this was all part of the ledger. But every night, I returned to my study and the reality of my obsession tore through the mask of the businessman.

I stopped counting the dowry. My ink ran black and thick as I filled page after page of my private journal with sketches of Alice. I didn't just draw her features; I obsessed over the curve of her throat, the specific way she tucked a stray curl behind her ear when she thought no one was looking, and the melancholy that sometimes touched her eyes in the quiet moments of the day.

I had begun this as a hunt for a fortune, a cold game of leverage. But as I crouched in the damp grass of the park, watching her laugh at a joke I hadn't told, I felt a tremor of something far more volatile. It was an ache, a possessive, gnawing hunger that had nothing to do with Mr. Sterling’s shipping empire.

January 14th, I wrote i my journal For the first time about her, in the margin of a page dominated by the sweep of her eyelashes. She was in the garden today. The light hit her like a prayer. I cannot stand the thought of anyone else breathing the same air as her. I will have her. I will own every thought in her head, even if I have to burn this house to the ground to keep her.

I was a man of business, a man of cold, hard facts. Yet, as I sketched the ghost of her smile for the hundredth time, I realized that I had become the prey. I was stalking the girl, but she had already captured me entirely, tethering my soul to an obsession that would either crown me or consume us both. This obsession had spanned almost a year now and she was none the wiser, other than the few times I had allowed her to see me. I had very calculatedly hidden or not emerged when she was around so I could continue my game of watching her. I needed an alternative plan, one that wasn’t so consumed by Alice Sterling, se will be my downfall, or so I thought.