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Chapter Eight
“Poetry too often of love and satire excites the most powerful feelings and should be selected with the utmost care.”
Private Education: A Practical Plan for the Studies of Young Ladies.
Elizabeth Appleton. 1815.
Despite a crescent moon shimmering through the slit in the curtains, Isabelle flicked the page…
If love is not to be my fate
Oh, why bestow a yearning heart?
A bleak soul wearied at the wait,
An ardent spirit cleaved apart.
With a sigh, she flung herself back amongst the bed pillows. Although her profession forbade romance, she saw no reason why she ought not to enjoy the tales and poetry of it. The sheer hunger that caused her own heart to–
Thump.
Alarmed, Isabelle sat bolt upright and peered to her chest. Surely the verse hadn’t been quite so affecting.
It sounded anew. A loud thump that came from…Mari’s bedchamber.
Perhaps the girl was visiting the water closet or gathering a robe? For it was a chilly night, the sky clear and promising an inland frost upon the morrow.
Their day had been pleasant, morning lessons followed by a sedate afternoon ride to the nearby village of Llanedwyn where the stagecoach had first deposited her. She’d not seen much of the village on that dark rainy eve, but by day, it was a pretty place of cobbled streets and narrow houses, a few shops for all local needs clustered in the centre.
With the young ladies on their drawing excursion, male house guests had also taken the opportunity to ride out to the village – Captain Brecken had tipped his hat while Lord Powell and Mr Pritchard had been seen entering the Three Horseshoes ale-house.
Later, Isabelle and Mari had taken dinner in the schoolroom, watching from the window the endless carts come and go with their wares: boxes of cabbages, churns of sloshing milk and more than a few wine crates. A vast wagon, its contents covered with wool, had lumbered past, metal-rimmed wheels gouging the gravel – blocks of ice taken from an icehouse at the base of the Snowdonia mountains, the men having most likely departed before dawn.
The young ladies and their chaperones had returned just after dusk, Lady Bronwen and Miss Pritchard dressed in fine silks and each hanging upon the duke’s arm while listening to his every word with attentive devotion, and for the first time, Isabelle had felt a little…envious of a proper lady’s life.
Then she’d given herself a sharp talking to regarding the advantages of employment…
Number 1– She was under no obligation to impress a gentleman with needlework.
Number 2– If so desired, she could purchase two raspberry tarts with her own money and eat them both herself.
Number 3– If a joke was amusing, she could laugh and not solely because a gentleman deemed it so.
Number 4– She could read romantic poetry in bed, which most husbands, she believed, might find a little off-putting.
Number 5– When cold winds blew, she could sleep in two night-rails, one pair of woollen stockings, a hat and mittens, which most husbands, she believed, might find more than a little off-putting.
A rattling sounded from the corridor and Isabelle frowned as the butler had already fitted the gate at precisely a half after eleven and it was now… She peered to the bedside clock – gone midnight.
Could the mad dog be trying its luck?
Dare she investigate?
Or would she bump into the duke in a state of déshabillé…again.
A clatter. But despite her deepening curiosity, she dithered.
Should she?
