Mistaken Identity...

This set up for a historical romantic-comedy was written some time ago on a whim before realising that I can write neither romance nor comedy. It was promptly abandoned and languished in a dark cupboard until I had the urge to tidy said cupboard. In an attempt at ‘make do and mend’ I patched it up and hopefully the end result is not too tatty...

With every step it was like the point of a dagger was being dragged across the soles of her feet. With every other step it felt like that dagger was pricking into the vulnerable sides of her toes. Rosalind Clare allowed herself only a brief, gleeful moment to imagine flinging the wretched shoes far, far away before focusing once again on putting one foot in front of the other. In normal circumstances she would have enjoyed the opportunity to take a solitary morning walk with the fresh spring sunlight gently gleaming against the delicate new shoots of bud and leaf. These, however, were not those circumstances.

It was as she took another step forward that she felt the right shoe begin to slip. It should have been impossible; they were crushingly tight and inflexible after all. Nevertheless the shoe was about to fall off and she desperately flexed her abused toes as she tried to cling onto the soft inner lining. It was all to no avail. The slipper slipped right off and landed rather predictably in a muddy puddle.

She was going to be in so much trouble.

“Oh you vile thing!” She stomped her foot before remembering too late that it was no longer shod. Her throbbing foot was now also cold and wet. “Argh!”

“It’s only a shoe.” The voice was impatiently sarcastic as was the expression of the man it belonged to. Rosalind scowled at the stranger, too upset to be appropriately embarrassed by her predicament.

“It not just a shoe!”  She exclaimed heatedly. “It’s an incredibly expensive and fashionable shoe. In fact it’s one of a kind.” She was fairly certain he muttered something unpleasant under his breath about females and fashion but she was too agitated to care. “Now what am I going to do?” He was deliberately obtuse when he answered her rhetorical question.

“You could always wash it. Your skirts are so long I doubt anyone will be able to see them anyway.”

“I can’t wash it!” She practically screeched at him. “It’s just... It can’t be done.” She trailed off miserably. Rosalind was by now fully aware of the ridiculousness of the situation and she could feel the flush of delayed embarrassment heat her face.

“Oh for goodness sake.” The man bit off as he strode forward and plucked the shoe from the puddle.

“No!” She cried. “Don’t touch it - your hands!” As the man thrust the shoe toward her she realised that his hands were not encrusted with dirt and grime as she had expected. They were in fact perfectly nice hands. Elegantly tapered, with clean nails and few calluses, they were clearly not the hands of a common labourer.

“Well. Don’t you want your shoe back? Or don’t you want to get your precious hands dirty?” He was baiting her intentionally.

“Oh just give it here.” She said snatching the shoe away from him ungratefully and examining the damage. “She’s definitely going to make me pay for this.” Rosalind moaned plaintively to herself.

“Who?” The man asked rudely with unapologetic nosiness.

“Lady Judith. It’s her shoe.”

“Why on earth are you wearing her shoes?”

“Well it certainly wasn’t for fun.” Rosalind retorted crossly to the incredulous look he gave her aching feet. “They’re too tight for her to wear. As I have bigger feet she told me I had to stretch them.”

“You’re one of her servants?”

“I was, but after this she’ll either dismiss me outright or force me to pay her back.” Sudden understanding forced a delighted laugh past her lips. “Did you think I was a Lady?” Amusement smoothed away the previous ire she had felt for him.

“We’ll tell her it’s my fault.”

“That’s hardly going to help.”

“I’m not worried about paying for them.” He shrugged carelessly and she frowned at him, wondering if he realised exactly how expensive Lady Judith’s taste for shoes were.

“No I cannot accept that. This is my responsibility.”

“Nonsense. As I’m going to marry the woman it’s hardly of any consequence whether or not I’ve ruined a pair of her shoes. I can buy her another fifty pairs after all.” Rosalind nearly dropped the shoe back into the puddle. The man standing before her in plain homespun garments looked nothing like a powerful baron.

“You’re Fulk fitzGerald?” Forget hurling the shoes far, far away she suddenly wished that she could find herself even further away than that.

“Exactly, so why don’t we just keep this incident between ourselves.”

Twenty-Five And Counting

This time next year I shall have celebrated another birthday and will have reached the quarter of a century mark. For something that sounds so significant I know already that I won’t feel any different. Logically, of course, I know this because really I’ll only be a day older than I was the day before. We celebrate the passing of a year, but I wonder now if the days in between those celebrations are of more importance. If I want to wake up the morning I turn twenty-five and feel different I am better off doing something in the 364 days before my next birthday, rather than expecting an automatic annual upgrade.

Seeing a picture of your two day old self certainly puts things into a strange perspective. It has made me reflect upon everything I ever said I would do by the time I was a grown up. A quarter of a century is sounding pretty grown up to me, yet I still find myself wondering sometimes when the life I imagined for myself might begin. This year I have decided to act on that feeling and try to achieve some of the wishes my younger self earnestly made. Obviously this takes an amount of careful thinking as I couldn’t choose the utterly ridiculous and implausible. For example I haven’t decided to travel the world, fall in love and immediately elope. I also didn’t want to make promises I couldn’t keep; I have learnt by now that I cannot change who I am and the bigger challenge will always be to respect that.

After all this careful thought I came up with three ‘wishes’ that I think I could realistically fulfil in the coming year:

Revisit Scotland and stay in a castle: Admittedly this wish had to be adapted as I originally told everyone that I was going to move to Scotland, live in a castle and keep a flock of sheep. Whilst this may still be on the boundary of improbable I am able to save the money needed to spend a weekend in a Scottish castle.
Write a novella: I started this blog nearly three years ago after realising that I hadn’t written anything substantial in a long time, despite that very week telling someone I was going to write a novel. For as long as I can remember I have said that I wanted to write a book and it seems to me time to finally do something about it.
Go swimming once a week: In the grand scheme of things this wish probably appears quite unremarkable. I can remember, however, always begging for an extra five minutes in the pool and confidently believing that I’d never stop swimming. Well now I’m old enough to get those extra five minutes so it seems silly not to enjoy them.

And so, dear reader, if I haven’t completed these wishes in the coming year then you must call me out on it. I want to be able to approach the next milestone knowing that I have achieved something. Instead of continuing to attach all my aspirations and wishes to an unknown future life, I want to try and start some of that life from today. Perhaps in time I can come to appreciate the everyday of now just as much as the idea of tomorrow.

 

A Few Of My Favourite Things

Everyone ought to have a favourite book. There should be a book on your shelf, mantelpiece or floor (or indeed wherever else you might keep your books) that is a particularly battered paperback. The edges are scuffed from where it has bounced around in a bag, there might be the accidental tea-stain decorating the corner of a page, and there might even be multiple copies from when you couldn’t resist a snazzy new cover design. A favourite book is both well-thumbed and well-loved.

I have found that my favourite book has loved me nearly as well as I have loved it. It has nursed me through colds, heartache and pre-exam jitters. I have read Romancing Mr Bridgeton more times than can possibly be necessary and even now I can remember the first time that I found it on a library shelf. It is a story full of wit, hope and happy endings. I do not expect that this book would be everyone's cup of tea, and nor should it be. As I said everyone ought to have a favourite book of their own. But still I cannot quite resist the opportunity to share a little...

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On the sixth of April, in the year 1812 – precisely two days before her sixteenth birthday – Penelope Featherington fell in love.

It was, in a word, thrilling. The world shook. Her heart leaped. The moment was breathtaking. And, she was able to tell herself with some satisfaction, the man in question – one Colin Bridgeton – felt precisely the same way.

Oh, not the love part. He certainly didn’t fall in love with her in 1812 (and not in 1813, 1814, 1815, or – oh blast, not in all the years 1816-1822, either, and certainly not in 1823 when he was out of the country the whole time, anyway). But his earth shook, his heart leaped, and Penelope knew without a shadow of a doubt that his breath was taken away as well. For a good ten seconds.

Falling off a horse tended to do that to a man.

It occurred to her that it would have been nice if she could have said that she’d fallen in love with him as he kissed her hand before a dance, his green eyes twinkling devilishly while his fingers held hers just a little more tightly than was proper. Or maybe it could have happened as he rode boldly across a windswept moor, the (aforementioned) wind no deterrent as he (or rather, his horse) galloped ever closer, his (Colin’s, not the horse’s) only intention to reach her side.

But no, she had to go and fall in love with Colin Bridgeton when he fell off a horse and landed on his bottom in a mud puddle. It was highly irregular, and highly unromantic, but there was a certain poetic justice in that, since nothing was ever going to come of it.

Why waste romance on a love that would never be returned? Better to save the windswept-moor introductions for people who might actually have a future together.

Read More

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Make Believe...

As a child I was particularly melodramatic. If I wasn’t acting out a tortuous deathbed scene with dolls, then I was fearfully envisioning the unknown horrors in the dark corners of my bedroom, or pretending to be someone else entirely. (A Russian princess was, for a long time, a personal favourite).

I’ve always considered my vivid imagination to mean either a) One day I will write a damned good novel. b) Perhaps if I were a little prettier and plenty louder I could consider acting. Or c) I am in fact stark raving mad.

And so this week, whether due to reminiscence or madness, I offer a little piece of melodrama. Imagine the kind of scene in which the characters look charming in cinematic soft-focus and there is a sudden emotional and dramatic swell of music...

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Her steps across the inner bailey were hesitant. There was a battle raging deep within the heart of her, warring between the safety of ignorance and the fear of knowledge. The Earl had returned and news of his victorious campaign had quickly spread. Yet she knew that the price of victory had been paid with the lives of common men. Men like her husband. She did not know whether he would be among those trudging wearily through the gatehouse now or if he was buried in haste at some far off place.

Anxiety chilled her bones to numbness until she was unable to move forward, whilst her skin beneath the heavy wool gown prickled uncomfortably with sweat. She watched the moving mass of bloodied and soiled men with wide eyes, all the while her fingers tensed and clenched against the clasp of her cloak. There was no logic to her desperate search as her focus switched from first one face to another. Then her wild eyes centred on the only face that she had needed to see. In that moment she felt the relief loosen her muscles until she trembled. The jubilant clamour within the bailey seemed to quieten to a distant hum until all she could hear was the thud of her heart that matched the sound of her feet running towards him.

His own strong stride cut the distance between them. Her arms wound themselves around his neck as he encircled her waist and lifted her clear off the ground. He spun them around and around until their laughter became breathless with dizziness. Her hands fisted in the bedraggled length of his hair as her lips sought his. The kiss was hard and fierce, their teeth clashing a little in their rush to taste one another again after months of uncertainty. The metal links of his armour pressed painfully hard against the yielding softness of her body, but it only confirmed to her that he was truly there. No dream could feel so real.

“You came back to me.” Her words were muffled between them but he felt the slight tremor of her fingertips against the coarse growth of his beard. The hardships of the past months were evident beneath her touch. His bones were sharper under his skin and the puckered line of a scar disappeared below the protection of his armour. They were unwelcome reminders of what might have been lost.

“Always.” He pressed a reassuring kiss to the soft down of hair at the crown of her head.  The perfumed water with which she had washed teased his senses. She would have fanned her hair across her shoulders like a mantle as she sat in front of the fire to dry the thick curls. It was a familiar ritual and the memory of it struck the core of him. He held her tight as if the impression of his arms would continue to hold her the next time they were parted. “Always.”