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This story started with a glance at a picture of a lady, an image that popped into my brain, and then the story wrote itself. Even the crappy poetry at the end.

 

                She reached into her waist pouch and extracted the feather. The glistening edges caught the gentle wisps of air as the rain pelted down and the gusting breeze swept by. She knew that out here was a terrible place to pull the priceless token out, but she couldn’t help herself. She knew she was quite addicted to the whole affair, and other than a few memories of the glimpses she had of his face, the feather was the only physical reminder of him. Feeling a wave of quiet delirious love brush at her shores, she allowed it to overcome her and decided in this frail ecstasy to kiss the token, blushing and wishing that the target of her love would somehow feel her touch.

                As she moved the feather toward her lips, a strong gust pulled the feather from her grasp and sailed it on through the blowing wind and rain. With a very unladylike cry, she plunged into the gale, leaving the safety of the pavilion and the stern watch of her austere husband. 

                Flummoxed by the fact the rain didn’t weight the damn thing down, she scrambled off after it, praying to catch it before it broke above the muddy, noisy street, where if it fell, the snow-white artifact would never be clean again. With each labored footfall, she cursed herself for pulling the precious thing out in this weather in the first place. Her large hat was flopping around the crown of her head and her lightweight, feathery hair was working loose from her bun at the nape of her neck. She hoped no one in her husband’s polite company had noticed her frenzied pursuit of such a trinket, but it meant the world to her.

                As though the furies were all combined against her, the precious token sailed high through the bare branches of an elm tree, and finally weighted with water, fell with a plop right in the deep mud of the street. Her breath hissed through her teeth, and she scrambled forward, seeing the pony cart a way off and thinking to rescue it, threw herself to her knees on the grass and stretched her hand out to grab the scoop of mud and deflated feather. 

                A page boy, eyes full of rain and heart full of fear at his mother’s wrath at his being late stepped right on the poor lady’s hand, but what was worse was that the feather stuck to the lad’s heel, and off he went down the road, hardly noticing what he’d done. With a shrill cry of pain and frustration, she plunged into the road after the urchin. She didn’t want to call too much attention to herself, but she was desperate to get the feather. She reached out to grab the boy by the shoulder, but she suddenly tripped in her delicate shoes and fell with a splat in the mud. Her large skirts billowed out over the filth, but she was determined, and reached forth her hand to the boy’s heel and tried to peel the degraded token off, but he stepped out of her reach. In a single mode of thought, she crawled in the mud after him, sloshing it up into her hair, her face, all over her clothes, calling for the lad to stop, but he was in a single mind too, and kept walking. 

                A rough hand hooked around her left arm and jerked it hard. She felt a few bones pop. Still in a single mind, she tried to struggle on after the boy but her shoe was caught and the lad was almost out of earshot already. She dragged her husband a few inches in the slick mud before he jerked her arm again.

                “Elizabeth! On your feet!” He shouted, his face red and his eyes bulging. Despairing, she watched the boy disappear, the token of her love still stuck to his cursed shoe! She began to cry, which only angered her husband more. “On your feet, damn woman!” He hissed, grabbing both her arms and yanking her upward. She stood only for a few seconds, but soon crumpled to her knees again.

                “On with you, damn you!” Her husband cried, directing pony carts laboring through the muck around his wife. Their blank and common faces stared as they passed. Distinguishment brought to its knees in the mud, at last! What better sign of the changing times could any of them ask for? Her pale, round face was screwed up in sorrow, her dark blue eyes spilled forth rain of their own. Her husband was threatening her with everything he could if she would just stand, but she was beyond standing, and especially not for him, the b*****d. Never for him. He tried once more to force her to her feet, but when that attempt failed, he wiped the precipitation from his face, and glanced at where the party was being held and was disappointed beyond words to see that nearly every one of the city’s echelon were witnessing the incident, slack-jawed, wide-eyed, and disgusted. 

                Finally realizing his wife was beyond considering obedience, he labored to pick her up from the mud. Her large skirts, so fashionable with the great ladies of the city and were only worn by her in their company, were his insistence and now his bane as he struggled to lift her from the filthy street. He did manage to stand upright, his wife dead, wet weight. She didn’t try to help him at all, and he struggled back to the park, cursing the mud that ran down his fine and expensive coat. Calling for one of the servants to bring his Hansom, he debated placing his wife on top so that the rain would rinse the mud from her but couldn’t bear the thought of brown streaks down the side of the carriage, so he set her inside on the floor, and climbed over her sobbing form onto the seat, putting his muddy shoes on his wife’s muddy shoulder.

                Barking orders at the driver to get them home at once, he wiped each of his shoes off on his wife in time with the jostling of the creaking carriage. 

                About a third of the way home, she became more lucid, her sobs dried some, and she sat up.

                “Damn woman, how dare you embarrass me?!” Her husband demanded, the veins in his forehead bulging with his eyes. She turned to look blankly at him, her hair wildly askew and her face running with brown mud. “That was an important speech that we were listening to, why couldn’t you have been still for another five minutes? And why in hell would you go slopping through the mud like a pig?! Are you trying to humiliate me?!” His voice rose to thunder inside the Hansom, but she only blinked in response. Her normally comely face was made wretched by the dirty water dripping from her chin and the ends of her dismally askew hair. Absolutely revolted by her, he turned and stared out the window, fuming and hotter than a screaming teapot.   He did know about the stable boy, her strange, non-sequitur love for him, the feather, although she fancied he was completely ignorant of it. The very idea that a stable boy at all would capture her attention was bad enough, but that she would behave in such a manner in public made it the most horrendously horrible and disgraceful experience in his life. For the hundredth time, he wondered if he ought to regret having sent the boy to a certain death on the war front in Russia. 

                A block from their large home, she quietly pointed to her dry shawl, rolled up on the seat next to him. He threw it at her, angry and not given to gentlemanly behavior while no one was looking. She picked at the edge of it, not doing anything, but he could see her trembling with cold so he picked it up once more and flung it around her shoulders, pulling it tightly across her neck. 

                Calling for help from their servants, he pulled her from the Hansom. She was taking to her own feet now, but she moved as though she were in a dream. Yelling at servants, hitting them when they didn’t respond absolutely promptly, and generally making an a*s of himself, he led his wife inside, holding her small wrist as though it was a pole or a sword. Tossing her in the general direction of her room, he demanded she bathe.

                “The Babingtons are going to still come for dinner, so you must be presentable.” He sneered. “Though you are only to show yourself long enough to explain you feel ill.” Leaving her, he stomped off, almost in tears himself every time he recalled the incident. Shame burned in his chest, and he slammed the door to his study so hard a picture of her grandmother fell from the wall with a crash. 

                The servants weren’t sure what to do, and only were about to make their way towards their soiled mistress when she flung the shawl down and ran to her room, her muddy heels thumping incredulously on the floor. 

 

                She wasn’t seen for hours. When the Babingtons did come, her husband tried to explain her absence, but Amele was his wife’s friend and would accept no excuse from any other mouth than Elizabeth’s, so she soon stalked off to find her. No matter how her husband implored, Amele would not be convinced. 

                The two men conversed quietly in the dining room, and Mr. Babington was just about to ask him about the interesting gossip involving his wife when two screams erupted from his wife’s room. Both men streaked toward the room, but Amele met them halfway, screaming and crying and rubbing her hands in anguish. 

                “Oh, my friend! My friend!” She cried. Elizabeth’s husband pushed past her and to the room, and stopped. He only stopped.

                His wife’s long, white body lay on the floor. The soiled tent of dress lay in the corner, still muddy, still dripping, the puddle of dirty water congealing around her figure. She faced away from them, but he could see one of her dark blue eyes bugged, staring, cold. A pen lay under her hand, a journal lay on the table near her naked form. Gingerly stepping around her body, he reached for the journal, sliding it open to the final page.

                “…is lost. Young child, know you not you tread on a broken heart, forever meant to wander? Oh youth and innocence, you trample a poor lady’s dying, bleeding soul! For my brave soldier has died, my heart is left to ponder. Oh love! Thou hast rendered me a fool.”  

 

Author's Note

If you don't like it, don't blame me. Blame the essence of the story.