Pauline

A tremulous silhouette glides across the candle-whipped corridors of a crumbling Baltic estate: Pauline, the last scion of a bloodline pickled in rumour, clutching a locket that ticks like a dying metronome. She is promised to Baron von Hagen, a man stitched together from iron filings and protocol, yet her pulse rebels each time her gaze snags on Erik—the taciturn botanist whose greenhouse shelters orchids more forbidden than any corset. Around them, dowager aunts hiss family chronicles through veils of dust; servants trade heirlooms for morphine; and every creaking door seems to exhale a decade of unspoken betrayals. When a forged suicide note surfaces—allegedly scrawled by Pauline’s drowned mother—the engagement dinner mutates into an inquest. Erik’s herbarium becomes both courtroom and confessional: petals dipped in arsenic, pressed foxglove that confesses under microscope, a single vine that strangles its trellis in slow motion. Pauline, cornered by lamplight, bargains her betrothal for one nocturnal reckoning, wagering that love, not title, will validate her pulse. At dawn, the estate’s frozen lake cracks open like a cathedral vault; von Hagen’s signet ring sinks first, then his certainty, while Erik and Pauline exchange vows in a rowboat already taking water—promising fidelity even as the oars drift away. The final tableau freezes on a close-up: her locket ajar, inside no portrait but a pressed forget-me-not, its cobalt already leaching to bruise-purple, suggesting memory itself is just another consumptive bloom.