This is today's offering (day 154) for @mydivathings' #365daysofwriting challenge (click here to see her current post)
Today's picture prompt (below) is a Photo by Nicolai Fedderholdt on Unsplash
This can be read alone or, if you missed them, you can read the first four parts:
Part one: @felt.buzz/outwitted-a-little-bit-of-fiction-for-365daysofwriting-challenge
Part two: @felt.buzz/outwitted-part-2-a-fictional-tale-for-365daysofwriting-challenge
Part three: @felt.buzz/outwitted-part-3-some-fiction-for-365daysofwriting
Part four: @felt.buzz/outwitted-part-four-a-work-of-original-fiction-for-365daysofwriting-challenge
The girl returned as I raised myself up from the bath, the warmth from the steam, and the wine, clouding my head, and making me feel unsteady. She draped a towel around me, and helped me climb out of the bath. The towel was warm and soft, and I realised I had not felt such luxury in years.
Not since I was a child.
She helped me dry myself, with the towel and then sprinkled a powder perfumed with lavender, over my thin, battered body. She helped me into clean robes. She didn’t utter a word, and I after a while gave up asking her questions. When finished she led me out of the bathroom and back to the room where I had eaten. She pointed to the cushions by the fire, and I sat, observing her as she made tea, using a heavy iron kettle that sat on the metal surround of the fire.
Of my sister there was no sign. And her tutor, mentor, co-conspirator - or whatever he was to her now - Grevyl, was also absent. I listened. Trying to pick out sounds, from beyond the room in which I sat, above the ting-ting-ting of tea preparation. The noise the spoon made, against the pot, reminded me of the ritual Mrs Karn went through when she made tea. The careful warming of the pot. The precise measurement of tea leaves, spooned into the pot. And how she would stand arms crossed, ignoring our attempts to distract her, watching the clock for the correct number of minutes to elapse before pouring. She always used black tea of course, served with cold milk. She wouldn’t have tolerated the spiced tea they enjoyed in these parts. She was stuck in her ways, but a good sort. Protective of me and my family.
I remembered how Mrs Karn had pulled me to her, when Father barged out of my mothers chambers, a look of anger I had never seen before. He stormed down the stairs calling for Grevyl to come out, to explain himself, to get away from his family. Wiry and strong, was able to slip free from her grasp and I ran after my father, with both fear and a feeling of exhilaration too - a feeling that justice might be served on the man who had dared to show such an interest in my sister’s education, and not in mine. And perhaps, also, a secret hope that, at last, I might get my sister back.
My father went from room to room, opening doors and slamming them closed with fury when Grevyl was not revealed behind them. I knew where they would be, of course. There was one room in the East wing of the house that Grevyl had commandeered. He’d had a locksmith come up from the city to fit a special lock, a mechanism the like I had never seen before. Grevyl and my sister spent hours in that room. So, grabbing hold of my fathers cloak, it was to that room I led him.
My father hammered on the door, but there was no answer. He put his ear to the door and listened waving his hand at me to keep me quiet.
“I can hear you are in there Grevyl!” he yelled, at last. “Come out here! I swear if you harm a hair on the head of my little girl, you will experience agony you never thought possible! Mathilde! Are you in there? Are you alright?”
There was no response, and my father sent me off to fetch Jake’s father.
“Tell him to bring his heaviest axe!” he said.
I ran as fast as I could. Jake was still chopping wood, and he looked up with surprise as I sprinted into the courtyard, out of breath and panting. It took a full two minutes before I was able to make myself understood, by which time Jake’s father had come out, alerted by the shouts of his son.
Jake and I followed his father, large axe over his shoulder, and some kind of metal bar in the other, that he called a lever, as he marched back towards the house. My father was still hammering at the door and, for a moment, I feared he might weep when he saw Jake’s father arrive. He did not. Instead he nodded, a grim smile on his face and indicated the door.
“Get it open!”
The door was old, but well made, and the oak was as strong as the metal Jake's father forged. It took him almost a quarter of an hour of work before the door gave up, and splintered enough to pull it apart.
The room was full of smoke.
No, not full, exactly. It hugged the floor and looked almost as if you could walk upon it. Just like the thick carpets, my mother had laid, in my parents chambers. It was only when we walked into the room, shouting desperately for Mathilde, and it clung to our legs, cold and damp, that I realised it was not smoke.
It was cloud.
...
You can read part 6 straight away! : @felt.buzz/outwitted-part-6-an-original-fictional-tale-for-365daysofwriting-challenge