Chapter Two: Angel
As the sun slowly rose, Catherine laid innocently in her bed sleeping softly, the pearl embroidered gown hung soundlessly in her locked closet. Just the least bit audible, were her grandparents in their shared bedchamber, just waking along with the sun.
The footsteps, most likely of those of her grandmother's, padded their way to the opposite end of the home. Not more then twenty minutes later were the sounds of cooking in the kitchen.
Catherine began to smell the air, catching the scent of breakfast in her nose. She rose slowly from the depths of her feather comforter and yawned heavily, still tired from the previous night.
"Dear?" her grandfather softly announced as he tapped twice upon Catherine's chamber door. His voice was raspy, either from age or sleep, or even a combination of the two; he was above all rather cheerful for the beginning of a new day.
"Yes, grandfather?" Catherine responded short of breath after expressing yet another long yawn.
"Dear, when you are dressed, please join your grandmother and me for breakfast in the breakfast room." he requested as he heard his only and most dearest granddaughter stand up and step closer to the chamber door until he heard the bolt unlock. The door opened slowly to reveal the angel to her grandfather.
"Of course grandfather, I could dream of nothing more." she assured him as she smiled a warm and loving smile to her grandfather before kissing him softly on the cheek.
"Of course you wouldn't, otherwise you wouldn't get breakfast." he laughed softly before he became serious once more, saying "You better apologize to your grandmother as well darling, she fears you may be angry with her." he softly whispered in her ear as she gave her grandfather, whom was only inches taller then she, a warm good morning hug.
"I will, I fear I was against myself last night grandfather." she told him as she leaned against the chamber door, preparing to close it.
"Well dear, please tell your grandmother that, you know very well how much she cares for you. Please join us when you are dressed." he noted one last time before he shuffled his way down the corridor to his wife, who was cooking her normal, daily breakfast in the kitchen. Catherine saw her grandfather kiss her grandmother once on the cheek before closing her chamber door and leaning her back against it in such a way as if to think. But she did not.
Catherine quickly moved away from her door and to her closet, which she slowly unbolted, and opened. She looked at her new pearl embroidered gown, and grabbed the pink home dress that hung to its left.
She walked slowly down the corridor; as she came upon her grandmother preparing the table, she smiled.
"Good morning dear, sleep well I hope?" the elder woman asked conversationally as she one by one set the breakfast additions upon the table, then sitting herself down in the chair next to her husband. As they prayed for a safe day, Catherine took no interest or part in it.
She seemed distracted, thinking about the man, whom last night was standing in her grandparents' wheat field, awaiting only her company, and seeming to only want her company. She heard her grandparents utter the ending 'amen' of their prayer and brought herself back to the existing reality she unfortunately lived in.
"So dear," her grandmother asked once more, "did you sleep well?" The elder lady began to fill her plate with the eggs and sausage rounds she had prepared as her, her husband and granddaughter's breakfast.
"Actually, I did." Catherine calmly responded just before she took a fork full of eggs and placed them carefully into her mouth.
"Did you have sweet dreams?" the elder woman asked curiously as she too continued to eat.
Catherine thought a moment. Should she tell her grandmother about the previous night, in the form of a dream? "Yes, I did." she paused momentarily. "I had a dream that this man was standing in the wheat field, just looking at our home. It was really unusual." she added as an after thought more to herself then to convince her grandparents.
After breakfast, Catherine sat in the kitchen on the chest of drawers and watched her grandmother wash the breakfast dishes and gather the necessities for their lunches.
"Grandma'ma?" Catherine shyly asked as she drew imaginary circles on the counter next to her.
"Yes dear?" the elder woman responded as she continued with her daily chores.
"I apologize for the way I spoke to you last night grandma'ma." she heartedly told the age withered woman.
"Please dear, there are never any hard feelings when you say things during a tantrum." the old woman responded seriously before she turned to see the look of surprised shock on Catherine's face. This only added to the small giggles in the older lady's throat that soon became loud laughs shared between the two.
"One more thing grandma'ma, before you kill yourself with laughter," she paused to control her own laughs, "have you ever heard of a man named Ralph Crenshaw?" She asked with laughter still in her voice, but her grandmother's laughs died away quickly, leaving behind a deafening echo in its wake.
"Why do you wish to know?" she asked suddenly as she looked over at her young grandchild. She paused a moment, but began to tell before she ever received a response. "The man was a blood thirsty murderer. I'm surprised that he ever had children. That monster is four generations gone. I assure you that there is no need for you to worry about a man so old that he's left our world."
Catherine calculated the tables a moment. "Were his children named after him? Generation after generation?"
"Well, yes. But that's nothing for you to worry about. That family line ended in 1488, when the last son disappeared when he went on a hunting expedition in England." The elder lady resumed with the washing of the dishes. "From whom did you hear that name from?" she asked to suit her own curiosity.
"Emily spoke of it yesterday, just as an after thought to something her Mother and Father had said to her." Catherine spoke distantly of her life long best friend as she thought about the man who lived in the woods.
As suddenly as she had asked the question, Catherine jumped off the chest and bid her busy grandmother farewell for the time. She quickly ran down the short corridor and into her chamber, closing the door behind her, although not bolting the door as she had done the night before.
The young girl plopped her thin body down upon her bed before she began to think. Once doing so, she got back to her feet once again and dug out a notebook, ink bottle, and a quill. She opened the notebook, uncapped the inkbottle, and began to write.
She wrote to herself about the previous night's events, detailing the descriptions of her sights and sounds. The appearance of the man in the night, Ralph Crenshaw; his silky voice touched with a distant British accent. The way his skin was aglow in the fire light, and the iris of his eyes so dark, could have been a portrait of the night painted carefully on the canvas of his eyes, and how the man's personality told a story other then the one he wished it would, almost as if he held within him a deep, dark secret.
Catherine sat up a moment and thought. For a man of his age, which could have been no older then around twenty-five, how could he hold the composure of a man withered with age? The longer she pondered this question the more bewildered she became.
It was hard to tell how long exactly she sat upon her bed, attempting to calculate and figure out explanations as to why the young man was as he was, but after not too long, Catherine was asleep, wrapped up in her feather comforter. The sun had to yet even rise to high noon when a beautiful young girl the same age as Catherine slowly popped her head into the chamber through the ajar door.
This girl, known as Samantha, slowly creped her way into her friend's bedchamber as she slept softly. Samantha herself was greatly shorter then her counterpart Catherine, but then to say, there was very little that the two held in common. Her hair was black with curls that reached not far bellow her shoulders, and her eyes were blue like the cloudless sky. The dress she wore was one of a bit more fancy then that of the one that Catherine wore, due to Samantha's family being far richer then that of Catherine's could ever dream of being, but the two girls never took notice of these matters, making their friendship stronger. Samantha, as Catherine found out, was a new immigrant from England; she had left home when she was seven.
As Catherine rolled over slowly and opened her eyes just a crack, she noticed a dark haired form bent over looking at her as she lay upon her bed. Catherine was not sure what it was that she was seeing, so she blinked the sleep out of her eyes and did a double take and screamed when she noticed the hunched figure was her friend Samantha.
"By the Gods! Samantha! What are you doing in my chamber?" Catherine exclaimed as she sat up in her bed with a frightened but shocked look upon her now deathly pale face; Catherine's cheeks then flushed red from her angered shock.
"Your grandmother informed me that you were in here sleeping and that I should wake you up!" Samantha smiled as she joyfully sat on the bed next to her friend. "Only naughty girls stay up all night little missy! You were up all night, weren't you?" she asked as she carefully wrapped her arms around Catherine's neck and shoulders, speaking like she knew her friend had done something lecherous.
"I was not up all night!" Catherine weakly defended herself as she flushed embarrassed; Samantha's intuition took Catherine by great surprise.
"Oh, really? Care to prove it?" Samantha checked her friend as she pulled Catherine down upon her back and climbed atop her.
"I need not prove myself to you!" she weakly shot back at Samantha, who was giggling softly, as she sat on Catherine's stomach lightly.
"Then you were!" she excitedly exclaimed as she leaned forward whispering, "Where did you go? And with whom? What did you two do?"
Catherine sighed heavily, finding that she was obviously defeated. "I went for a walk through the forest, with a friend of mine." She said the words quietly, as if they were the incantation to a dangerous spell she felt better to not utter.
"The forest?" Samantha exclaimed in surprise as she rose from her hunched form upon Catherine's body. "With a friend of yours? Which friend? You have like, hundreds!"
"I do not!" Catherine exclaimed as she embarrassingly attempted to sit up, but her efforts were all in that of vain, for it seemed Samantha was unwilling to sit upon anything besides her friend. "His name is Ralph." she whispered almost silently as she allowed her body to flop backwards upon the bed.
"What was that?" Samantha asked as she noticed that her witty friend had spoken and that she herself had not heard it.
Catherine slightly raised her voice and repeated the words she had just previously spoken. "His name is Ralph, he's an older male friend of mine." she added as a sudden after thought. She knew that would make her promiscuous friend interested, just as did any talk about an older man.
"A man? Named Ralph? Catherine, there is no man in our village named Ralph." Samantha stated as she thought a moment on the idea of a young girl entering the nearest large forest with an older, more experienced man named Ralph, which nobody knows whom is. "Is he cute?" she suddenly asked, off the worry and on the man.
Catherine suddenly raised her upper body, using her arms to hold her up as she looked shocked into the pools of daydreaming that were now Samantha's eyes. But then as their eyes met, both straight faced, they burst out with an uncontrollable laughter, which seemed endless. This case of giggles had in fact lasted until a knock came at the door, presumably from that of Catherine's grandmother.
"Catherine darling, are you two well?" the elder woman inquired with a slight laugh in her own voice as she cautiously stepped into the chamber.
"Yes grandmother, we're well." Catherine giggled softly as she took in large gasps of air in the effort to regain her breath.
"Great dear, I was beginning to feel worrisome. Please come join me for some lunch my dears." The elder woman promptly left the chamber after extending the invitation to the two girls.
Later that evening, the golden rays of a setting sun washed over Catherine and Samantha as they lay on their backs in the soft spongy grass that grew just feet away from the back steps that lead upward to the cabin home. The golden light appeared to accent Catherine's blond hair just as beautifully as the full lunar orb that expressed bright light only one night a month, carving the image into an even more beautiful picture.
"Samantha? Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier today?" Catherine asked suddenly as she forcefully pulled herself from the blessed feeling of a nap after supper.
"Earlier? You mean about Him?" Samantha half sarcastically recalled Catherine's and her's earlier conversation about Catherine's reason for being so tired that day.
"Yes silly, it is partially related to Ralph, maybe even completely." Catherine mostly spoke her after thought to herself.
After a moment or two of silence, Samantha spoke. "So are you going to tell me whatever it is you were going to tell me? Or were you just trying to rub it in my beautiful yet lonely face that there's a mysterious man out there who seems interested in you?" She joked around with her words but as she spoke the last question, Catherine seemed to blush heavily, perhaps afraid that what Samantha spoke could possibly be true, but would an older man take interest in a young girl? Or was all that just fairy tale?
"I'm sorry, I became distracted suddenly, just totally went blank." Catherine giggled apologetically as she blushed. "But there is something I wish to show you, it is in my closet in my chambers. Do you wish to see it?" she asked excitedly.
"Of course!" she responded as Catherine helped her off the grass and into the cabin home.
While walking down the corridor, Samantha's mind went unnaturally blank before she began to think about how easily Catherine became embarrassed. So simple, as if every or anything can make her blush.
"Samantha, please bolt the lock behind you." Catherine whispered as she carefully unlocked her closet.
After Samantha was assured the chamber door was locked, she turned around, and was completely stunned at the sight she had to behold. Catherine was dressed in a gown of European royalty, beautiful enough for even the Queen of England herself to presume.
Catherine!" Samantha walked forward and felt the pearls, which were carefully sewn onto an amazingly rare fabric that was almost never seen on a woman unless born to a family with riches of a king. "This is what that Mr. Ralph gave to you last night? It's beautiful!" she exclaimed as she felt uncontainable joy at the sight of the gown.
"He wants me to wear it tonight when we see each other again. It's such a beautiful gown; it makes me wonder where in the world he would be able to gather enough money to purchase something so expensive! You know what I mean?" Catherine obsessed as she turned and allowed the gown to grace the soft curves of her body.
"Yes, I hear what you are saying. It seems odd that a man whom you seem to only know for a few hours would give you a dress worth so much. It makes one think, what kind of job one had to gather that much money to purchase such a gown." Samantha pondered the question a moment longer before allowing a large smile to pass over her lips at her uncontrollable excitement that the gown itself seemed to be radiating. "But you know, I wonder what an older man would want in return for such a treasure?" she giggled in such a curious manor that Catherine jokingly slapped her friend's shoulder, laughing along.
As the two girls began to settle down an hour or so later, Catherine walked over to her door and unbolted the lock. This made it possible for one of her grandparents to enter the room later on that night, if they wished to check on her as they usually did.
What only seemed minutes later, both Samantha and Catherine were sound asleep under the feather comforter, cuddled together in a loving manor only best friends ever could. Both girls were still dressed, and Catherine still wore the gown.
However, when the elder man came by to check on the two girls before bed, he took no notice of such royalties as the gown and continued upon his way to bed.
At the high-rise of the moon, Ralph Crenshaw IV emerged from the forest's edge and came to a stop in his place in the middle of the field, just the same as the night before.
'Catherine dear,' he spoke to Catherine's mind. 'Join me in this dance?' he asked as he awaited a response from inside the cabin.
Just when he believed she was not inside, a figure dressed in a fancy gown embroidered with pearls stepped in front of Catherine's chamber window.
'Join me dear Catherine.' he called once more as he raised his hand to her, waiting for her to slip her hand into his.
Catherine carefully climbed out the window and stepped about six feet in front of Ralph. The look she expressed was that of detachment, like it really were not the soul of Catherine who ruled over her body, but rather a force that took her over to do a person's bidding.
The reflected moonlight off each and every pearl on the gown gave Catherine the appearance of acquiring wings, with the heavenly grace of her pale, always glowing skin and radiating platinum blond hair. With all held in contempt, the appearance for all onlookers was one of the grace of an angel in the night.