So, anyway, I feel like Valancy would be a true crime girly if she was alive today. I included their ongoing joke because it comes up a few times in the novel, but it does strike me as a weirdly morbid one. (Bit rich coming from a former goth kid, but I'll own my hypocrisy).
I'm very sorry to be doing this, but I'll have to take a week or two off - I have a pretty major project in my professional life that is taking up too much of my energy so the next pages are just not done. This is a truly annoying time to have to take some time off, because we're almost almost at the planned break, but I sadly simply don't have enough time in my days to finish these pages right now.
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If you're not familiar with the Bluebeard fairy tale, I personally think it's one of those motifs that comes up a few times in European fairy tales (innocent maiden marries wealthy man who's murdered his previous wives). I've come across a few different versions with different names for Bluebeard, but the most famous iteration (and, to my knowledge, namesake) is from Perrault. The summary is essentially that a maiden marries Bluebeard, who has a large mansion or castle, and after they've been married for a short while, he has to go away. He gives her the keys to all the rooms, warning her that she may go into all the rooms except one room. While he's gone she explores through each and every room until she runs out of new rooms and enters the forbidden room. There, she finds the bodies and gore of his previous wives, and drops the key in her shock. The key can't be cleaned, so when he returns, he realizes she's been in the room and knows his secret. He then goes to punish her for her curiosity by way of murder, but she is (usually) saved in the nick of time by her brothers who arrive to intercede just in time, and kill him.
You can read a version of it here (via Project Gutenberg, scroll down past the Sleeping Beauty portion). I wouldn't suggest too many of the other versions. I always envisioned Bluebeard to be kind of a Henry VIII type, (as illustrated in the linked version), but to be honest, the Perrault versions all had a lot more racisms than the version(s) I remembered so... it's there if you want it, but I'm choosing not to link to them.
