A second brief installment. Thank you to those that chose to leave me kind words. It does help the word flow when people actually care enough to comment 3
Part 2
They call her Miss Cameron when they call her anything at all. She comes from a long line of workers - mother, grandmother, aunts and great aunts.
Her mother died in childbirth with her sister Rebecca, a waif of a child who never reached her third birthday. She was a job, a chore, a difficult task, the young one, and her aunt Beatrice would often suffer the burden of coughs and sickness and wailing when there was only need for silence.
For a long while Allison resented the child yet she tends her grave as a ritual now that she is gone. In life, the little girl was difficult..
In death she is simply the epitome of a Victorian tragedy.
Miss Cameron rarely sees her relatives. They are scattered over houses and stately manors where their skilled hands are required. A worker's life is often solitary with only a rare letter or note to act as a substitute for love, for affection. Miss Cameron loves her Lord, her master, curses the Gods for bringing her into this world under the guise of lower class so that they may never be together as she and Joseph were. She is an aristocrat in all but name and as a young child she had overstepped her social standing and taught herself to read. Her aunt Beatrice has her Lady write for her, beautiful, scrawling letters that look like nothing more than swirls and patterns but Allison pens her own words.
Allison wanted more.
Tonight she sits at her sparse table, a candle to light the page upon which she writes and her words are those of love lost twice over, one by name and one by death.
Gregory. Joseph.
She scrawls deep and lyrical words by which to purge her weary soul knowing that, once done, she will burn the page by the flame of this very candle. Eric calls it witchcraft yet Allison will insist upon the cathartic nature of this very ritual.
Tonight she feels but one person watching. Eric is away chopping firewood in the yard and the cooks are preparing late supper for the Lords. The snow is coming, can be felt in the air, and soon they will be isolated by that blanket of white. Priority is warmth. Comfort.
For the new employee, it seems, it is rest.
Old William is sleeping in the private quarters he earned through years of loyalty so Allison is left alone with Lord Rowan's bastard.
The bastard watches.
"I don't know what you're looking at," she says as those blue eyes, hidden by the shadow of night, fall upon her. She feels him watching as if his eyes touch her, a physical presence that transcends the space between them.
He says nothing.
Somehow, the very act of his ignorance angers her to the point of reaction.
"You have no right to lie there," she whispers, broken yet venomous. "No right at all."
No right to live and breathe where Joseph gasped and died, no right to watch her as she pours out her soul onto these pages when it should be Joseph that does the same.
Robert says nothing. Does nothing. It pleases him to think that he makes her ill at ease with a mere look in her direction. He figures it well deserved for the judgements she has bestowed upon him without even hearing him speak. She called him spoiled. Useless. She pondered whether or not he was a whore until Eric told her to hold her tongue, to refrain from allowing her grief to affect her very spirit.
Robert has known women like this before, so proud, so bold, so unwilling to look past his cursed face, a face so like his father's.
He takes a breath and holds it. He fights to remain neutral when his instinct is to snap back, to humiliate her as she attempts to humiliate him.
"You'd better sleep," she tells him, her voice laced and punctuated by a bitter, warning tone. "Work begins at half past four. Joseph used to tend the animals before sunrise. I take it you'll be doing the same?"
The rise in intonation indicates a question. Again, the young man says nothing. Eric had pondered his mental capacity and wondered if their Lord had brought home a halfwit to play with only to be told he holds his tongue by choice, it seems, not necessity.
Allison wonders whether he is no more than a feral animal captured and contained and it causes her stomach to clench in sympathy for a moment, just a moment and then it's gone.
She remembers that mark on his face only when he slips further into shadow.
"You hide," she says. "Show yourself."
He doesn't move. Allison holds the candle up closer to his face in abject curiosity wondering if the flame will cause him to flinch.
"I see you were no stranger to punishment," she says as she looks more closely at the mark beneath his eye. The skin is broken. Beneath the opening is a livid pattern of yellow and black and blue. Perhaps his master struck him dumb with a beating, a belt to his skin to drive out the devil's influence.
Perhaps it was well deserved, perhaps not.
"Lord James is a gentle man but Lord Gregory does not suffer disobedient fools."
She looks down at his hands and only now does she see the marks of defence, the knuckles tight and bruised. The indication is that he did not know his place; that he raised his hands in self protection and perhaps even made his mark.
Instinctively, she reaches out to inspect the wounds. She doesn't know of Lord Rowan's attitude toward the boy, how he had been frustrated to the point of violence with his servant and son's belligerence, his tendency to run away, the unwillingness to speak his name.
A last straw the previous week, Robert had finally hit back.
"Did you meet flesh and bone?" the woman asks. "Did you fall under the spell of violence and disobedience? Shame on you."
Shame? Shame, she says?
In what is his first show of life and free will at all he angrily pulls away, turning onto his side to face the wall and to escape the scrutiny he perhaps invited. There was a moment, though, a tiny little glimpse of pain from the man that hides inside.
It stung a little.
It's ironic, in a way, that it is Allison who feels the burn of the wax; the heat of the candle as it drips down her fingers.
She should know not to play with fire.