Lady Penelope in emerald bra and knickers in Swiss hotel bedroom (AI; author’s creation)

Perfect Farewell — Part 2

Swiss Education: Part 6B

Gstaad, Switzerland — June 1957

Continued from Part 1

Upstairs, in a room above the lights of Gstaad, Sylvia Trevelver and Monique Gournay have just finished their final night together as lovers. They have become Caredes Sisters. Their Swiss year is over.

In London, in eighteen months, a renovated Georgian townhouse in Chelsea will open as Caredes House, and Monique will arrive as its first Initiatrix — a destination prepared across this year by Sylvia, advised in turn by her mother Lady Penelope Trevelver, the Matriarch, and by the Dowager Lady Margaret.

But the night is not yet done. Two floors below the sleeping girls, Lady Penelope is still awake, in her emerald gown, by the window.

Sylvia’s paternal aunt, Lady Isadora Hawthorne, lives in Paris and runs a salon of artists, writers, and women who live quietly outside convention. The Swiss arrangements were hers.

For new readers who want the wider Caredes context, see Part 1.

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Content Warning: Explicit content, emotional themes of separation and transformation.

An updated companion Story to “The Keeper of Secrets: The Trevelver Chronicles” series. The Swiss Education of Monique is part of the Sylvia Trevelver universe.

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Two floors below that final night, Lady Penelope sat by the window in her emerald gown, a wine glass balanced between her fingers, the alpine darkness spread before her like a held breath.

She had not changed. She had not needed to. There was a particular kind of vigil that one kept dressed.

She had not needed magic to know what was transpiring above — her own Swiss finishing school memories provided all the understanding required. But it was not Rougemont she was thinking of now, nor even Mariana — her Moon Muse at Haverstone, her something-else-entirely at the Institut, always present in this landscape like a quality of light.

She was thinking of Eleanor Harrington.

Eleanor, who had dark eyes and a laugh that carried across the Haverstone quadrangle. Eleanor, who had loved Sylvia as completely as a sixteen-year-old could love.

Eleanor, who had wept when Sylvia graduated — and whose tears Sylvia had described, sitting in Penelope’s Chelsea drawing room the week before Switzerland, with that careful, clipped language: ‘I embarrassed myself over someone I couldn’t have.’

The vocabulary of social mortification rather than heartbreak.

Penelope had listened without correcting her. Perhaps she should have said: this is not embarrassment, my darling. This is grief. You are allowed to call it that.

She smiled now at the darkness.

Upstairs, her daughter was sleeping in the arms of a young woman who had done exactly what Penelope had hoped — and more than she had dared plan. Not replaced Eleanor. Not erased her. But given Sylvia the emotional ground on which to understand her: to set her down properly, to stop calling love by the wrong name.

Isadora had called it logistics. Penelope had always known it was something closer to grace.

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‘Perfect timing,’ she murmured.

‘Talking to the mountains again?’ Charles said from the bedroom doorway, silver hair catching the lamplight. He had changed into his burgundy silk dressing gown, his steely grey eyes warm as they settled on his wife. ‘They never answer, you know. I’ve tried. They merely repeat.’

‘They answer,’ Penelope replied, setting down her glass. ‘You simply don’t speak mountain.’

She looked up at him. ‘I was thinking about Sylvia. And Eleanor. And Jeremy.’

Something shifted in Charles’s expression — not surprise, but the slow arrival of something he had been waiting for. He crossed to her, his former military bearing softened by years of marriage but still commanding. ‘You think she’s ready.’

‘I know she is.’ Penelope covered his hand with hers as it settled on her shoulder. ‘Tonight completed it. Monique gave her what I hoped — not a cure for Eleanor, but the understanding of her. Sylvia goes home knowing the difference between what Eleanor was and what is still coming. She can receive Jeremy now as he deserves.’

‘We have been rather a good team,’ he said, with the satisfaction of a general whose campaign has gone precisely as planned.

‘We have,’ Penelope agreed.

She rose to face him with the unhurried feline grace that was entirely her own, the emerald silk whispering against itself.

The space between them had its own grammar after all these years — she knew every clause of it, every pause. She felt the familiar quickening that she had stopped being surprised by long ago.

‘How many years,’ he murmured, ‘and I am still not accustomed to you.’

‘Good.’ One word, her husky alto at its warmest, and she felt the slight change in his breathing that told her everything she needed to know.

His answer was to kiss her — deep and claiming, his hands threading through her hair whilst hers found the lapels of his dressing gown.

When they finally broke apart, both were breathing harder.

‘Come to bed,’ Charles said against her throat. ‘Let me worship you properly.’

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She took his hand.

Not because she needed leading — Penelope Trevelver had never needed leading anywhere — but because she understood, after all these years, that choosing to follow was its own expression of power. She gave it deliberately. He received it the same way: with the gravity of a man who has never taken her lightly.

At the bedroom threshold, he turned to face her, and for a suspended moment neither moved.

The lamplight behind him caught the silver at his temples, threw the planes of his face into warm relief — that jaw she had noticed across a Chelsea drawing room before she had quite decided to love him, those grey eyes that had never once looked at her as though she were a problem to be managed.

She raised one hand and traced the line of his jaw. He turned his mouth to her palm and held it there.

‘Penny.’ Her name — the private one, the one only he used. ‘I am still not accustomed to you.’

‘After twenty years,’ she said, ‘that reflects rather poorly on your powers of observation.’

‘On the contrary,’ he said against her palm. ‘It reflects rather well on you.’

He drew her inside.

His hands found her through emerald silk — her waist, her shoulders, then the fastenings at her back, which he worked with the patience of someone who has never confused delay with restraint. Each hook gave with a small release of tension she felt in her skin before she felt it in the fabric.

The room’s cool air found her in stages — shoulder blade, the curve of her spine, the small of her back — and his mouth followed the revelation of her, unhurried, specific, as though committing to memory he already possessed.

The warmth of her skin released the faint lavender he had always associated with her: that quiet, distinctive signature that was entirely Penelope, that had never belonged to anyone else.

When his lips reached the base of her neck she exhaled his name without deciding to.

‘Charles.’

‘Patience.’ The word arrived warm against her nape.

He knew what he was doing. He had always known, and the knowing had never made him careless — if anything the opposite. His mouth found the place below her ear that had been his particular discovery since their wedding night, and she felt her whole body recalibrate.

‘I have been patient,’ she said, ‘since the soup course.’

‘You have been extraordinary since the soup course,’ he replied against her skin. ‘Which required considerably more discipline.’

She turned in his hands.

The half-unfastened gown held its shape only by the proximity of his body, and she reached for the tie of his dressing gown and drew it loose, pushed the burgundy silk from his shoulders with the unhurried deliberateness she brought to everything she genuinely wanted.

Then she looked at him.

Twenty years, and she still looked — not from habit, but with the appetite she had never lost for this specific man.

The breadth of his shoulders still carried the soldier’s line beneath the years. The scar at his collarbone, a campaign souvenir she had kissed into something private between them, caught the lamplight. The flat plane of his stomach, the dark hair greying there as at his temples.

And lower — his cock, already full and certain with wanting her, which she had never once in two decades regarded with anything less than frank, proprietary satisfaction.

She wrapped her fingers around him.

His breath left him in a short, involuntary release — the sound of his composure briefly deserting him — and she felt him harden further under her hand.

She stroked slowly, feeling the weight and heat of him, watching his face with the attention of a woman who has never found the subject less than fascinating. His hands came to her hair. His jaw tightened.

‘Penelope.’ Her name in his voice, reduced to want.

She brought her mouth to the scar first — that small, silver territory she had claimed years ago — then moved lower, following the path her hand had mapped, taking her time because she had always taken her time with things that deserved it.

She felt his whole body draw taut, his fingers tightening gently in her hair, his breath gone shallow and effortful.

‘If you continue,’ he managed, each word carefully retrieved, ‘I shall not be capable of giving you what you deserve.’

She looked up at him from beneath dark lashes — that look he had never once been proof against. ‘Then I suggest,’ she said, level and precise, ‘that you take charge of the situation, Colonel.’

He kissed her with a thoroughness that left no room for further negotiation, and she met him with the full, unguarded confidence of a woman who has never in her life needed to perform desire she didn’t feel.

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The emerald gown pooled at her feet, and Penelope stood in the lamplight in the red French lingerie she had bought herself in Paris to mark their twentieth anniversary — pieces she had chosen to wear tonight from some instinct that had proved, as her instincts generally did, correct.

The balconette bra in deep red satin, its demi-cups edged with Calais lace, lifting her breasts with an architectural precision that was also tender.

High-waisted panties, satin and lace, with a small satin bow at the centre.

The suspender belt sitting snug against her narrow waist, its gold clasps catching the light.

And the stockings — silk, fine as a whisper, their lace tops grazing the inside of her thighs.

Charles went still.

Not performance — she had always known the difference. The genuine arrest of a man confronted with something he cannot quite receive all at once.

There was a quality to Penelope that defied simple accounting — at forty-two she was not merely beautiful but ageless in the way of women who have always inhabited themselves completely, as though time had negotiated with her and come away with the lesser deal.

His gaze moved over her slowly: with attention, with care, with the awareness that this was not a moment to rush.

‘Good God,’ he said. The rest of the sentence didn’t come.

‘I thought I knew every version of you,’ he said.

‘I know,’ Penelope said.

‘Not this version,’ he said. ‘Not tonight’s version.’ He crossed to her. ‘I don’t think I ever will.’

His hands found her waist — that narrow span he had always marvelled at — and drew her in.

His mouth found the upper swell of her breast above the lace edge, and she felt the warmth of his lips on skin that the fabric had made hypersensitive, the contrast exquisite. She threaded her fingers into his silver hair and held on.

‘You spoil me with this lingerie,’ he murmured into the soft skin above the lace.

‘I spoil myself,’ she corrected. ‘You simply benefit from my excellent taste.’

When his mouth closed over her nipple through red satin — the heat and pressure of him through the fabric, the specific suction she felt in her spine, in the backs of her knees, in the gathering warmth between her thighs — her back arched on a sound that was not quite speech.

That husky note she knew affected him unreasonably, and she had never once deployed it consciously.

‘Charles,’ she said, her voice roughened. ‘Stop treating me like something fragile.’

‘Impatient as ever,’ he murmured, with the particular satisfaction of a man who has never once mistaken her impatience for performance.

He dispensed with the lingerie with a practised efficiency she had always found deeply, specifically attractive. Red satin and lace joined emerald silk on the carpet.

She was bare now except for the stockings, which he left.

She had always loved that he left the stockings.

He laid her on the bed and looked at her. Just looked, for a moment that stretched long enough to make her feel the full weight of being seen — not assessed, not catalogued, but truly seen, in the way that is both more vulnerable and more sustaining than desire alone.

Then he came to her.

His hands moved over her body with the fluency of two decades of study — the full curve of her breasts cupped in his palms, thumbs finding her nipples with a precision she had first taught him on their honeymoon in Paris and which he had long since surpassed.

Her hips, her waist, the silk of her inner thighs. She was already wet, had been since the window, since his mouth at her shoulder blade, since the moment she had looked at him and felt the familiar, reliable, never-diminished want of him.

When he finally pushed inside her — slowly, completely, with deliberate thoroughness — her eyes closed and her breath left her all at once.

He was still. Letting her feel him. Letting himself feel her.

She opened her eyes and found his, grey and steady and entirely present. Something passed between them that needed no name — had never needed one.

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Then he moved, and she rose to meet him.

Her hands found his back and pulled him deeper. Her voice, roughened now to its lowest register, directed him without ceremony:

‘Deeper.’

‘Harder.’

‘Yes. There.’

Her nails drew slow lines down his back — not punishment, not urgency, but instruction. He obeyed with the plain pleasure of a man who has never found her authority anything but arousing.

He drove deeper, hands gripping her hips, and the sounds that filled the room were the unguarded sounds of two people past the need for restraint — her gasps, his breath, the audible proof of how much she wanted him. Had always wanted him. Would want him in ten and twenty years more if the world was just.

‘I love you,’ she said — not gasped, not cried, but said, clearly, her eyes open and on his face. ‘Goddess, Charles. I love you.’

‘I know,’ he said, his voice rough with exertion and something older than exertion. ‘I have always known. My Penny.’

She felt the climax building — that gathering heat, the specific tightening she recognised the way one recognises a long-anticipated resolution — and she did not reach for it or hurry it. She simply let it approach.

He felt it too; she saw it in his face, the slight change in his focus, the adjustment of his angle that found the place inside her that made her cry out into the lamplight.

When it broke, it broke completely — a long, rolling, full-bodied release that moved through her without apology. She heard herself. She didn’t care.

Charles thrust deep and held there and let go with a groan she felt in her bones, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, his weight coming down into her arms.

She held him.

This. This was the thing that could not be explained to anyone who hadn’t lived it: not the pleasure, which was considerable, but the afterwards. The absolute sufficiency of it. Two bodies, one bed, the alpine night beyond the window, and nothing in the world requiring their attention.

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Author’s Note

This is Part 2 of three. The story began in Part 1 (Sylvia and Monique’s final night together as lovers) and concludes in Part 3 (the morning farewell at the station).

All characters depicted in sexual situations are at least eighteen years old.

Monique’s complete journey — including her relationship with Clémence and her complex past in Paris — will be published later in 2026 as The Girl From Nowhere.

💙 The Girl From Nowhere is the new strand in the Trevelver Chronicles universe. If you are new to the series, the world of Sylvia Trevelver and the women around her begins in Keeper of Secrets: The Trevelver Chronicles and continues in Remembered by Water, Volume 1.

https://medium.com/creative-touch/perfect-farewell-part-1-a172515cf1de

💚 Support authors: highlight, comment, clap (10x).

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© 2026 Chris Shallow. All rights reserved.

“Still Waters” is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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