Dreams Dreamt by Day or by Night

By paborama

Mon, 16 Jan 2017

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2 comments

Forced recognition of the tenant farmers had given Lord Pugh a headache. Entering the garden, he stole past the lawn-mowers, into the herbacious undergrowth right to the edge of the paddock. There, reclining beneath the spread of a great Chestnut, he sat and dreamt of easier times when his grandfather had ruled the estate. No-one would have come to him asking for time-off and patches for vegetable tilling and reaping to be passed down from urchin to urchin. The current Lord Pugh hated to be thought of as mean. He was mean, but to be thought of as such was a sleight he had not wanted this side of the wedding. Oh, but what to be done?

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Something about last night's dinner had seemed off at the time and now she was paying for it. The shafts of golden light piercing the ivory drapes in the late morning heat did nothing but make one embittered of missing-out on this glorious day. The bucket by her side groaned foetidly as her stomach rumbled and her toes curled inadequately in response to the shivers that wracked her feminine form. Curse this island! Curse those two fisher lads and curse their crab soufflé!
 

She reached out and grabbed the bell-pull summoning Monique to empty her bucket, bring her a spritzed cucumber water and hold a cool, damp flannel against her burning brow. Monique was young and pretty and French, Lady Pugh hated her simplicity and her freedom. Boff to these foreigners! - home was calling her back in so many unsubtle ways.

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Lord Pugh stared grumpily down the foresight of his 12lb Double .500 Anderson Wheeler, his burning eye looking at the fawn's nose trying not to allow its cuteness to remind him of Audrey's.

Lady P had returned from holibags awfully quiet and had not yet divulged to him any of her triumphs or failures. So far, all so de rigeur. However, as a man with contacts across the best of the world's residential tourist locations, Lord Pugh had word from a local marina that Lady P had been enjoying herself as usual up until Tuesday, a fact that she would normally have failed to mention, as was proper. This time, however, she had attempted to claim upon her return that her vacances had been passing pleasant, with a smile that had almost convinced him until he remembered that, for all her elegance and breeding, Audrey was an embittered herring. Something was afoot and it wasn't the normal calibre of affair.

He shot the young beast full in the throat and lay down for a nap, the sunshine on the hills this evening was magnificent. He really rather wished he wasn't a vegetarian, supper would be endive... again.

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Lady P could not wait until this damned wedding was over. Why she had insisted to Barnabas that allowing her sister to use the house was a good idea she could neither fathom nor feign recall. Fallowball Hall was a grand venue indeed, and she loved her sister dearly, she supposed; but to have so many people from across Society invade the house at this juncture in life was neither suitable to her nor her pigswill-brained monsieur. Their lives were only going to receive increasing scrutiny throughout the affair and the damned tattle-press were sure to be in attendance too.

She nibbled the corners of her meals only now, afeared that any weight gain would show through the sheer Valentino she had splashed out on. If muck were to stick, she was damned if she wasn't going to look fabulous in the midst of it.

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He peeled the delicate shin bone into a shoe horn fit for a princess, every slide of his jack knife producing a new curl of delicate milky bone butter to drop gently upon the forest mulch. To get his knife this sharp he had Davey, the stableboy, rub it on a strip of leather over his thigh at night for nine hours straight. He had suggested originally they could share the task together, in his loft above the stalls, thus cutting the work time and giving them some pleasant bonding task to engage in twixt master and youth; Davey had declined. Indeed he hadn't even complained that this task, atop his usual duties, gave Davey almost no sleep on those nights when Lord P handed him his knife in a hankey and suggested he sharpen him up for the morning. The stablemaster had wired outside the county to get the poor lad a transfer, soon as.

Certificate 15

Story

Dreams Dreamt by Day or by Night

Talecatching

Drama

Humour