The night we escaped was much like any other, with one small exception: Mr Spencer was unusually generous when pouring Lord Cavendish his customary glass of port after supper.
Lord Cavendish had been drinking steadily through the course of the evening meal, aiming barbed remarks at Margot from the fish course onwards. By the time the roast pheasant was served, he had become irascible and outright vitriolic towards us both — a display which had not gone unnoticed by the footmen standing at attention along the gilded wall of the dining room, once again bearing silent witness to our humiliation.
There were no guests residing with us at Braithwaite Hall despite it being high summer, and after supper we retired to the drawing room. Margot and I bent our heads and applied ourselves to our embroidery, hoping not to attract further hostility. Lord Cavendish clenched his pipe between his teeth and snapped open the newspaper. Margot’s hands were shaking so badly she could barely form a stitch, and she startled every time he turned a page. I clutched my embroidery hoop with white knuckled rage, brimming with a fury so intense yet so utterly futile I could barely conceal it.
By this point, Margot and I were well acquainted with Lord Cavendish’s cruelty, which was both continuous and gratuitous. But what could two young women hope to do, orphaned and unprotected as we were? Our parents had succumbed suddenly and unexpectedly to a smallpox outbreak only three months earlier, forcing us from our comfortable life in London. We had sought refuge at Braithwaite Hall in Lancashire, home of our distant relative, Lord Cavendish, but soon discovered the wind shrieking in from the nearby Irish Sea was far warmer than his welcome.
We were surprised, that night, when Spencer returned with the decanter not half an hour after he had poured Lord Cavendish’s first generous glass of port. Feigning forgetfulness, he risked the rage of his master:
Apologies, my Lord — it quite slipped my mind that I had already brought in the port. Would you like another?
And so it was that a second substantial helping of liquor found its way into Lord Cavendish’s glass, a libation which quickly found its way down his Lordship’s throat.
Margot and I sat silently, slowly stitching in the gathering gloom: the day had been warm and summery, so the fire was not yet lit. When a draft ruffled the fabric hanging from my embroidery hoop I glanced up in surprise, and realised Spencer had left the drawing room door ever so slighty ajar. Lord Cavendish never allowed us to venture out of a room without his permission and had not let us outside the house since our arrival, so an open door presented a tantalising range of possibilities — the foremost of which was escape.
I caught Margot’s eye and gestured as imperceptibly as I could towards the doorway, and was gratified to see her own eyes widen in astonishment. We stared across the drawing room at each other, scarcely daring to breathe, then looked over at the armchair where Lord Cavendish was hidden by his newspaper.
A soft snore greeted our ears.
I looked back at Margot in consternation, wondering whether my ears had deceived me, but sure enough — another, deeper snore soon came from behind the newspaper.
Quietly setting my stitching aside, I reached down and eased off my shoes, indicating to Margot that she should do the same. As Lord Cavendish’s snores became louder and more rhythmic, I noticed Spencer had returned to the drawing room door and was now gesturing for us to join him on the other side. Stepping silently in our stockinged feet, we crept across the room and out the door. Following Spencer along the hallway, he led us through another doorway I had never noticed before and down a narrow staircase leading to the servant’s rooms below stairs.
I will admit there were tears in my eyes when Spencer pressed a purse full of money into my hands and handed us both an apple to eat and our shawls for when the night air became chilly.
Stay on the grass and head straight for the gate. You will leave footprints if you tread on the gravel of the road. Once you’re through the park, turn left and make for the Witch Wood, not right towards the village: he won’t expect that. A mail coach should come past the far edge of the Witch Wood early tomorrow heading towards Manchester. His Lordship never told you, but you have an elderly great aunt there — I’ve written her address on a piece of paper in your purse. There should be more than enough money for your journey. Now run!
And, dear Reader, run we did — out across the grass and under the trees into the deepening evening, headed for the Witch Wood and our freedom…
This has been one of Blue Jai’s Vignettes — where I play with words to provide a pop of fictional colour in your day. If you have enjoyed this post, feel free to click the follow button at the top of the page. I’d also love to hear your comments, or for you to tell me how you would have responded to the picture prompt intsead.
It’s been a while since I put fingers to keys, and I’m a little overwhelmed by how different a place the world has become in the past six weeks. These here are crazy times, to quote an old Boom Crash Opera song — which no doubt shows my age (but also proves I’m not old enough to be included in a high risk category based on the number of years I’ve been kicking around the planet).
We all have favourite songs and tunes we could listen to on repeat for days. But every now and then, it is an absolute delight to listen to a whole album in its entirety: just as the artist wanted you to hear it. In the age of the playlist the album is easily forgotten — but you can bet your last roll of toilet paper the artist who recorded it thought long and hard about which songs made the final cut and what their sequence should be on a record. Here are some albums I think benefit from listening to uninterrupted:
On the flip side (SUCH a bad pun it’s almost delightful), snippets of song lyrics sometimes stop me in my tracks and produce a moment of sheer delight. Here’s one I rediscovered lately when listening to the Foo Fighters’ song “Times Like These”…
I used to joke my kids know the only two things I have regularly delivered to our house are books and wine, but since I’ve ditched the drink the only things likely to turn up on our doorstep are boxes from Booktopia. Book deliveries are, to my mind, full of the promise of good times to come — particularly becase they are also likely to involve my favourite armchair and a cup of tea.
I still read aloud to my kids. I’ve done so ever since they were newborns and I suspect I will continue to do so for as long as I have literature to share with them and they have the time to hear it. For years now, most of what I have read to them would probably be considered to be above their reading level but which I think they’re capable of understanding. In any case, since we’re reading together they can always ask questions if there are things they don’t comprehend on first hearing.
Oh! Delight in a seashell…especially at the tail end of summer. We are so spoilt with our seafood around here, thought in the interests of sustainability we try not to go overboard with our consumption. Even so, The Bloke is and always will be a sucker for a prawn roll — not the variety that looks something like a spring roll, but the kind where you cut open a fresh bread roll, butter it (in most cases generously, in his case obscenely), fill it with freshly shelled prawns and slather those with seafood cocktail sauce. Yum.
Blue Jai: 