Clouds bruised the sky, a rolling thunder growling in the distance as carriages went by, all sleek and dark. Joanna looked down at her sewing, not seeing it, dreaming of faraway places, with exotic names and shining blue skies. A beggars cry brought her back with a start and gave her pause.
She looked around her room, too small for a woman and too large for a girl, and she felt somewhere in between. Bedecked with tapestries, the dolls and the storybooks, a child's room it was and she a mere child? She was coming on 17 in the winter, now almost a woman. What did women do in their spare time? Surely more than this. She stood and stretched, an idea slowly forming.
It was a matter of moments to cross the hall and make her way into her keepers study. No one was due home for several hours; there was plenty of time and no chance of being caught.
Perhaps should could surprise him over dinner with intelligent, worldly musings rather than a child's inane speech, to be seen as a woman, something and someone to talk to in the long hours he normally spent perusing his papers, ignoring her and the world she inhabited. Sometimes he gazed at her, but Joanna knew he didn't really see her, his eyes distant, a peculiar expression on his face.
Perhaps once she was educated she could even, eventually, convince the judge that they could holiday somewhere for a time, distant from her boorish tutors? Perhaps even as far away as Bath!
Smiling she chose a book at random from the shelf, opened it up and curled up on the soft leather couch to read, feet tucked beneath her. Many of the words baffled her, but the pictures did well to tell the story, and what a story! She snapped the book shut in a kind of awe struck shock and thought for awhile.
Very very carefully she opened the book again and continued to read, lost in the words and the pictures.