LADY ANN'S FOLLY: Chapter Six - Part Seven

Ann’s face crumpled as one emotion after another pressed through her at the sight of the man she had promised her life to.

Richard, for his part, regarded her coldly, measuring her stance and position alongside who he thought was his fiancée. For a long moment Ann was lost in the sight of him, forgetting who she looked like now – who she was – losing herself in the momentary belief that he saw her as she was meant to be: as Lady Ann. But that sense was slashed away as his face crinkled into a sneering disdain edged with fury and even potential violence.

“Well?” he snapped. “Is this… creature bothering you darling?” His eyes flicked across to Mavis and Ann flushed at the sound of that affectionate word levelled at somebody other than her.

She found her eyes drawn down to her dishevelled attire; her dirty hands; her bulging bosom; the sense of who she was now curling tighter around her, accompanied by a shimmer of something at the back of her neck that tickled her brain and drew her deeper into the moist depravity of the lower class. Then up she looked again at this impeccably dressed and groomed lord; at the barrenness of his pitiless expression; and she got a further jolt of acknowledgement of her newfound status.

“She came out of the bushes,” replied Mavis, her voice crisp and more well-honed than it had been a moment ago. There were imperfections still, but subtle ones, easy to overlook. “Talking ridiculous stories about magical mumbo-jumbo. I was just telling her to leave me alone.”

“And she ignored you?” Richard looked from one woman to the other. Ann’s face paled with alarm.

“Yes. She refused to withdraw. I was just becoming frightened.” Mavis looked Ann in the eye and winked, smirking with the side of her mouth that Richard couldn’t see.

Ann shook her head, flapping her lips, trying to defend herself, but there were no words that would come. What could she possibly say to free herself from this developing nightmare.

“You impudent sow!” snapped Richard, descending the steps toward them, brandishing his cane. “You filthy little urchin. Be off with you! Get away from here, or you’ll feel the sharp end of this stick.”

Ann staggered back, raising her arms in panic. Richard prodded her in the flank and she gave a yelp of pain and shock, then he prodded her again, forcing her along like an animal.

“You have no right, speaking to your betters,” he said. “How dare you approach a lady. Your very existence is a stain on this county. Look at you. You’re good for nothing; like all your kind! I wish that the lot of you could be exterminated – all the lower orders – but then of course we’d have no one to do the labour!” He gave her a sharp crack of his cane on her buttock and Ann cried out in agony. “Keep to your own kind, you corpulent sow! Do you hear me! Keep to your own kind!”

Ann started to run, tears pouring from her eyes, moans of anguish coming from her mouth and Richard stopped, shaking his cane in the air as if he might continue pursuit at any moment.

Ann looked back as she ran and saw the pair watching her as they walked toward the coach. She saw the mirth and disdain on Mavis’s stolen features and the tears came ever faster as she fled from the grisly scene.

She ran down the drive, desperately afraid that Powell or the gardener would see her and see her locked in the stocks; afraid that Richard would charge her down on horseback; but no one did see her. No hoof beats pursued her.

In the end she came to a stop several hundred yards down the lane and just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, barely able to catch her breath. She remained there, hands on her knees, pitched forward, in pain from the cane strikes as much as from the fire in her lungs.

Then the hoof beats finally came and she looked up in fear to see the coach approaching rapidly from the direction of the hall. The lane was narrow there – too narrow. She looked left and right, realised it was going to run her down if she didn’t move, and hurled herself into the ditch to avoid the crashing horses and whirling wheels.

The coach didn’t slow and Ann clambered back onto the road, watching it recede, knowing what this meant.

Mavis had said she had the pendant. She was leaving the village. She might not be back for weeks.

Every day that passed, Ann would become more and more like the original Mavis until she lost her original identity entirely – until she craved the life of a peasant simpleton. There was no escaping that. She’d seen it happen to Burt as he became so used to his life as a labourer that he refused to go back to his former riches.

That would happen to her; she knew it.

This was her last and only chance to retrieve the pendant and get her life back and she’d failed. Her life was lost to her forever.

Unless…

She watched the coach pass round the further bend out of sight.

Unless she ran after it; caught up to them at the station; tried one last time to convince Mavis to give her back her life before it really was too late!