The Carades Preparation — Episode 1

The Night Before

Monique’s invitation card delivered to Amanda Morgan (AI; author’s creation)

A companion piece to The Keeper of Secrets: The Trevelver Chronicles. This story contains explicit sapphic content and is intended for adult readers.

Amanda Morgan receives a card under her door. Thursday. Ten o’clock. Monique’s room. Come alone. Sapphic literary erotica set in 1960 Chelsea — the night before a ceremony that will change everything. Part 1 of 4.

THE CARADES PREPARATION

Thursday, 28 April 1960 — Tintagel Place, Chelsea, London

All characters depicted in this piece are adults of eighteen years or over.

The card came on a Wednesday.

Amanda found it when she came upstairs after supper — slipped under the door, cream paper, dark violet ink, placed precisely in the centre of the threshold:

Monique.

For your instruction. Thursday. Ten o’clock. My room. Come alone.

She read it standing in the doorway with her coat still on. Belinda was already in bed with a book, spectacles on, green eyes moving across the page with the contentment of a woman who had made her peace with the evening. She looked up.

‘All right?’

‘Fine.’ Amanda put the card in the drawer of her bedside table, under her watch, and hung up her coat. ‘Early night, I think.’

Belinda looked at her with the attention that was her version of asking a question without asking it. Then she went back to her book.

Amanda lay in the dark and thought about Andy.

Not from longing — or not only. More from the locating habit of a woman who has always oriented herself by known reference points before moving into unknown terrain. Andy Tolverne was known terrain.

She had been with him two Sundays ago, his Pimlico flat, the grey winter light coming through the curtains he never closed properly. He was not a man who made a ceremony of desire. His hands on her were calloused and scarred — a Royal Marine’s hands, hands that had been through things and learned afterwards to hold carefully. She remembered the weight of him above her — the breadth of his shoulders, the steadiness of him — and the thing she had no word for than completeness — as though her body had been designed with this in mind, this fitting together, the hard thickness of him and the knowledge that he wanted her, specifically her, that his body had made that unmistakably clear. This sensation of being entirely met. No one had given her body what he gave it — she had had other men before him, adequate men, competent men, and none of them had been Andy. Whatever awaited her on Sunday, whatever new instrument Monique meant to show her, Andy remained the measure her body reached for first, without her permission, every time. She remembered lying against his chest in the long afternoon afterwards, his arm across her, a man who had come to rest, and the whole of it settling into something permanent — not permanent in the way of vows or declarations, but in the way of a fact that would always have been true.

Lying in the dark now, the memory did not stay memory. She felt it the way she had felt it that afternoon — the specific ache low in her belly, her breath catching, her hand moving without her quite deciding it should, coming to rest flat against her own stomach through the sheet. She let herself feel it. The heat of it, gathering. The knowledge that if she wanted to, she could finish what the memory had started and be asleep within the hour, uncomplicated, spent.

She did not. She lay still and let the wanting simply be there, unattended to, and found, to her surprise, that leaving it unfinished felt like its own kind of honesty. Thursday was coming. Whatever Monique had for her, she suspected it would ask this same thing of her body that she was asking of it now: not to reach for the easy release, but to let the wanting go on wanting a little longer than was comfortable.

She was not leaving him behind. That much she knew, lying there in the dark, with the card in the drawer and Thursday coming.

She thought, too, of Sylvia. This was different from thinking about Andy — less located, more like being aware of a weather system that had reorganised the landscape without announcing itself. The dark wavy hair, the aristocratic carriage, the pale olive skin, and above all the large dark brown eyes, expressive and entirely steady, the eyes of a woman who had decided what she was going to see and was seeing it. She wore Cabochard in the evenings, something Amanda had registered without knowing what to do with it: the leather and white flowers of it, the sophisticated boldness.

She spoke from decision, not from uncertainty.

Sylvia’s world was women. Amanda had understood this without being told — the ease of it, the complete absence of self-consciousness about it, the way it was simply the fact of who she was. Jeremy Cador was the exception: the man she loved deeply, a satisfying and irreplaceable partner, but the exception nonetheless.

And Elayne — always Elayne, the Bonded Pair, the painter whose seeing matched Sylvia’s own.

What Sylvia and Elayne were to each other was something Amanda could not yet have put a name to. She had seen it operate, in the house, in the daily life of two women who inhabited each other’s consciousness as naturally as breathing, and she understood it as one understands a country one has not yet entered: with respect, and some awe, and the knowledge that one’s own maps will not be adequate.

When Sylvia had told her — quietly, in the kitchen on a January morning, over tea — that she had been chosen for the circle, Amanda had said: Why me?

Sylvia had looked at her with the look she kept for seeing clearly — nothing put on for the occasion, nothing softened for Amanda’s benefit.

‘Because you will go where others won’t,’ she had said. ‘And because what you carry belongs in this circle.’

She had not elaborated. She had finished her tea and left the kitchen. Amanda had stood at the window afterwards, looking at the street, feeling the particular weight of having been looked at truly, by a woman whose looking meant something.

She was going to a different country. She would still be herself when she got there.

She lay in the dark and let herself think about them. Not the ceremony. The women.

Belinda, who was already asleep three feet away and who had, without ever making a subject of it, become the person Amanda told things to before she had decided she was going to tell them. Annwyl, who left small objects on your windowsill when she thought you were tired — a flower, a smooth stone, once a square of chocolate wrapped in foil — and never mentioned it. Angela, who corrected your thinking so precisely that you felt not diminished but clarified, as though she had located the thing you were actually trying to say. Suzi, who read her poems aloud to whoever was in the kitchen at ten o’clock on a Thursday and did not care whether they were listening because the reading itself was what mattered.

Elayne, who had once sat beside Amanda for an hour in the garden without speaking and at the end of it Amanda had felt, inexplicably, less alone than she had all week. Sofia, who carried something Amanda had no name for and did not try to name, only felt as a kind of gravity in a room. Monique, who moved between Paris and London and somewhere further still, and who, in the weeks she was at Caredes House, had prepared each of them with a care that Amanda was only now beginning to understand as a form of love.

And Sylvia. Who had seen her, and said so, and left the kitchen.

These were her Sisters — by adoption, by ceremony, by the choosing that had been made on both sides over months without anyone naming it as such. She had not had that thought before in quite this form — had not permitted it, because it presumed something she was not sure she had been given permission to presume. But lying in the dark with the card in the drawer and the house breathing around her, she found she could not make the thought smaller.

These were her Sisters, and on Sunday, they would do something together that none of them would ever do with anyone else. She understood now that she was willing. Not because the ceremony asked it. Because they were.

She slept.

Amanda has slept. Thursday is here.

[Continue to Episode 2]

★☆★

The Carades Preparation stands alone, but it belongs to the Trevelver Chronicles — a cycle of sapphic historical literary fiction set across twentieth-century Europe.

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💜 Thank you for being part of Amanda’s preparation.

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★☆★

Remembered by Water, Volume One, the first novel in the Trevelver Chronicles, is available on Amazon now: amazon.co.uk/Remembered-Water-One-Trevelver-Chronicles/dp/B0GMS9QVSZ

The ongoing serialisation of the Chronicles — including The Girl From Nowhere and The Violinist’s Country — Věra’s Story — lives at trevelverchronicles.substack.com

Episode Two — The Room — follows on Thursday.

— Chris Shallow — Prague

★☆★

© 2026 C.M.G. Shallow. All rights reserved. The Carades Preparation is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the author, except for brief quotations in a review.

Entirely human-written, this story contains no AI-generated text content.

Historical Fiction Literary Fiction LGBTQ Erotica Sapphic Fiction