He had her in his arms in his bed by the fire and she
was ready for anything but he had to think of consequences...

source Cover

Lady Graves is my NaNoWriMo novel in progress.

Chapter One begins here: Lady Graves - ch. 1 - NaNoWriMo 2018 - freewritemadness: Day One

Day 391: 5 Minute Freewrite: Thursday - Prompt: debt + Day 392: 5 Minute Freewrite: Friday - Prompt: Be gone

15-Nov-2018
Day 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

He had her in his arms in his bed by the fire

and she was ready for anything but he had to think of consequences. Offspring, for one.

Propped on his elbows, he paused to look into her eyes.

She sighed. “Must you be like this?”

“Like what?”

“Stopping whenever something is starting. You are a killjoy!”

“No, I am a good boy. I will not be guilty of exploiting my English patient,” he said.

“You are maddeningly scrupulous. Am I still a patient? I’m feeling good, Herr Doktor.”

“Are you, now.” His smile was as arresting as the depth and intelligence of those dark-fringed green eyes. “Maybe memories should be harder to retrieve. Maybe we’d all be healthier, or happier, if just couldn’t recall the atrocities we’ve suffered.”

A log popped in the fireplace. She turned her head and watched sparks soar up the chimney.

“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,”

she murmured, not sure which book of the Bible that was from.

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"And this is why we are not allowed to forget unpleasant things. Look at me! The wild child is sent off to marry a Bavarian prince, rather than embarrass the family with more of her wayward antics, and where is she now? In the bed of a fugitive! Begging to be exploited, but the fugitive is more scrupulous than she is!”

He laughed, pulling her closer. “Tell me more about this wild child and her antics.”

“She doesn’t mean to be bad. And she didn’t want to marry Prince Hal; it was more a punishment than a prize.”

“Ah. The truth comes out.”

“He drinks, he trifles with women, and he enjoys public executions. And for all his wealth, he somehow manages to run up a lot of debt.”

Stangler rolled to his side, head propped on his hand. “Here I’d been hoping to persuade you to run off with me to America and forget Lindenstein, but now I want to see for myself: did Vee deliberately try to kill you to pass herself as the bride of a prince, and if so, will she be as miserable with awful Hal as you would have been?”

“Wait. You want me to run off with you to the land of the savages?”

“Ach, mein Lieblich.” He swept her brow with the lightest kiss. “If it were up to me, you’d already be Lady Stangler, and we’d be crossing the Atlantic by now.”

She lay still, picturing a ship on moonlit waters, pondering the title “Lady Stangler.” Was that a marriage proposal?

“I’ve already lost my dowry,” she said, thinking out loud. “Until I locate Vee and find out if my name and identity have been stolen along with my life, I am no longer free to marry within my station. That would leave me free to marry any scandalous social reformer or political prisoner or escaped convict who catches my eye.” She snuggled closer to him. “Or I might be like those French Enlightenment thinkers who would have us overthrow religious rules and regulations.”

He tucked her head under his chin and locked her in his arms. “You’d best wait for society to catch up with you, my little reformer. I have seen unwed mothers pilloried. Do you even know what it means to be pilloried?”

“To severely criticize someone in public?”

“Worse. A pillory is a wooden framework with holes for securing the head and hands. You’ve likely seen thieves exposed to public derision at the pillory.”

“That awful man at the tavern had burn marks on his hands.”

“Crudely done, but clearly not accidental. Have you ever seen a red-hot branding iron? They have a ‘T’ for thief, ‘F’ for felon, or ‘M’ for murderer, and iron loops for holding the offender’s forearm in place.”

She shuddered. “Is there a reason you must think of these things now?”

“I just had a vision of finding Vee and branding her forehead with a big letter M for murderer.”

“While I was entertaining visions of… never mind now.”

She started to rise but he pinned her to the feather bed, kissed her again, then heaved a theatrical sigh. “Gott in Himmel! The trials and temptations I must bear! If you would but marry me you’d put me out of my misery, but what about your own--”

In a flash, Emil bolted up from what appeared to be a comatose slumber and barked at the door. His ability to go from inertia to action never ceased to astound her.

Stangler donned his cloak and boots; she hurried into her boy’s outfit and followed him into the night. The nearest tree was a linden, and Emil whimpered at something in the branches.

End of Day 15 (word count 759)

16-Nov-2018

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“Siegfried,” said Stangler. “You silly cat.”

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Emil sniffed the ground and ran to the coop where the guinea hens took cover each night. Something had broken a wood lattice which now bore tale-tell feathers followed by a trail of blood. Emil growled but didn’t give chase. Stangler walked to the tool shed and came back with hammer, nails, and more lattice strips for a quick fix in the night.

“A raccoon, I imagine, did this evil deed.” The doctor shook his head. “When I think of the orphaned animals I’ve rescued, and this is my reward!”

“Kindness rarely goes unpunished. How many ways have I heard you say that?”

“It’s from a medieval account, not a fiction, sad to say, in which a Mutter Ficker named Eudo left no good deed unpunished, no bad one unrewarded. He would favor the cruelest and wickedest men with the most power and authority, but he severely punished those who were merciful. I should have remembered that before saving the lives of fallen French soldiers only to get myself imprisoned on charges of siding with the enemy.”

She smiled at the way Emil tilted his head, apparently fascinated by every word Stangler uttered. “You do love to deliver lectures. Maybe in America there will be universities, and you could unburden yourself of all this knowledge to a captive audience in a classroom.”

“Dear lady, you wound me! For more than a hundred years now, America has had Harvard, Princeton, and Yale--that’s only three that I will burden your ears with--so, yes, the New World already has colleges and booming cities like Boston and New York. And I would indeed be a wonderful teacher. You're turning out rather well if I do say so.”

"You're becoming quite full of yourself!"

The smell of fresh blood and damp feathers wafted through the air.

“Do you know,” he said, “I’ve been thinking we should we leave your scheming maid to carry on the bloodline of Prince Hal, while Lady Stangler sets sail across the Atlantic and remembers never to look back, lest she, like Orpheus, loses what she has at hand.”

Orpheus. His young wife died of a snakebite, but he found his way to the underworld and charmed the beasts of Hades with his music, finally gaining permission to bring his dear Eurydice back from the dead, but only if he rowed a boat out of hell without once looking back to make sure she was still there behind him. All the obstacles he overcame, only to emerge from the cave into the light, turn around, and discover she was not all the way out of the passage yet even though he was. Deal breaker! He did everything right, only to lose her a second time due to some technicality.

“I hate stories,” Lady Graves said. “I hate history too. And politics. Perhaps I am a misanthrope like you, after all.”

“Ach, but I saw you unfold like a blossoming rose tonight with the Lanza family. You need human society. I am a weary, jaded cynic.”

A raindrop fell as if to illustrate his claim, and another, and in an instant, the clouds let loose a steady downpour. He drew her into his cloak and they ran for the cottage door.

“If this rain keeps up, the roads will not be fit for travel.” They ducked inside and she tossed another log onto the fire before removing her hastily donned garments. Emil had to be coaxed back to the hearth, torn as he was between guarding the guinea hens and guarding the fire.

“Oh dear.” She held the old, mended pants to the light. Stangler moved closer to see what was the trouble, but she shook her head. “Just a woman problem. Another thing to delay the journey to Lindenstein.”

Stangler retreated to the loft, then came back with an assortment of rolled cotton and leather contrivances that looked vaguely like instruments of torture.

“I once had a wife,” he said, “and we traveled for weeks at a time. I know the ropes. Or the rags, as it were.”

Her face felt flaming red, and it wasn’t that she stood too close to the fire.

“I am afraid to ask what these are and how they work.”

“Then I shall write it down, with illustrations, and leave the room as you figure it out.”

"Ugh! Very well, then. Be gone!"

She hated being so indebted to him on so many levels, and this was a new low. The prospect of bleeding on the man’s feather bed was more horrifying than trying to tuck rolled cotton into bodily orifices and--well, she just wouldn’t give any more thought to it than necessary. She made a dash to the privy during a lull in the rain and almost screamed when something dark flashed by her in the night. Another raccoon, maybe? She washed her hands outside the cottage door with lye soap and went in to find a new tea scenting the air, and a humbled, laughable, drenched version of Siegfried stealing Emil’s bed by the fire.

“Red raspberry leaf,” Stangler said as he handed her a steamy teacup. “If that doesn’t ward off the ills that plague women at this time, I have fennel, ginger, peppermint, and more.”

“You are too good to me,” she murmured.

“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities,” he said in that tone he used when quoting a book, “but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, and who, though distant, is close to us in spirit--this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.” He smiled. “Goethe.”

She had read him too, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and heard how young Schubert with his fellow students and artists came under suspicion in the aftermath of the French Revolution for “revolutionary activities” or dangerous thoughts.

“Life belongs to the living,” she recited, “and he who lives must be prepared for changes.”

She wanted to hold these moments with him forever and keep Emil from growing old the way dogs will and keep Siegfried at the hearth, plant flowers in a greenhouse as the Lanzas did, and keep the fire burning in the stone cottage for years to come.

The flames flickered as the door opened and a whoosh of cold air burst in, and a dark shape appeared at the threshold of the cottage.

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End of Day 16 (word count 1042)

source: azquotes.com