Beautiful Thoughts: A Revelation and a Relative

(for the first four episodes, click on Fiction – Or Is It? above)

For two weary days Annabelle had been confined to her bed, concealing ‘neath a damask coverlet the blanched visage and scarlet-rimmed eyes of a feverish chill. Her fair friends had been as attentive as Lady Agatha would allow; fear of contagion being one of the few earthly terrors the doughty dame would permit residence in her noble bosom. Polly sent Mrs. Betteredge’s latest novel, The Hermit of the Heights, ready-marked in all the most terrifying places; and if she privately thought that young ladies who lurked in chilly foyers in order to pounce on their errant friends were perhaps inviting illness, the remark never escaped her crimson lips. Stacia hovered at Cook’s elbow, attempting to persuade the half-deaf beldame to produce the dainty trifles sure to tempt an invalid appetite. After all efforts had proven fruitless, she hustled the old lady from her fiefdom, donned an apron, and turned to with amazing skill and great success. From the sitting room, Lorelei played all of Annabelle’s favorite Scotch melodies to lift her spirits during the long afternoons, then sacrificed her own rest to lull the sufferer to sleep with the Brahms they both loved.

Beautiful Thoughts: Pollyanna’s Peril, Concluded

“Who?” repeated Annabelle from the coziest armchair in Pollyanna’s room.

“Drusus, Anna; Senator Thomason’s youngest son. We met him three weeks ago…”

“Where?” demanded the puzzled young miss.

“… at the Senator’s ball, don’t you remember?” continued Lorelei.

“Yes, young Drusus – brother to Tiberius and Germanicus, no less,” added Eustacia. “What a family. The party was in his honor, yet by eleven o’clock he had disappeared – and no great loss, in my opinion. Never have I seen a young man so thoroughly convinced of his own superiority to the rest of the civilized world.”

“It is true he danced not at all, and rarely spoke, but perhaps he is simply shy, Stacia,” replied Lorelei. “The poor Senator was most distressed by his early absence. I wonder where he went?”

Pollyanna burst into tears and buried her face in the snowy linen bedclothes.

Beautiful Thoughts: Pollyanna’s Peril, Continued

An unusually subdued quartet of fair young maidenhood kept company at breakfast next morn. Their youthful countenances reflected pale and listless in the shining mahogany of Lady Agatha’s grand dining table; a table much like the great lady herself, having been brought at untold trouble and expense from the feudal halls of the ancient Alicyns to grace the home and ennoble the name of the wealthy, powerful Rooths. Unlike many such arrangements, uniform satisfaction had been the result of this delicate transfer, and the newly-made Lord Rooth was expertly managed by his lady wife throughout a happy life into a quiet, content grave.

Now Lady Agatha had the management of two young nieces and their two bosom friends in their first season of B____ society, and her commitment to duty was equaled only by her determination to see her bevy of girls take their places at the pinnacle of the season’s festivities. She soon proved a fierce but able general in the forays and skirmishes of the social whirl; though she could check Annabelle’s riotous spirits with one stern glance, the girls were gowned, coiffed, slipper’d and gloved to a vain young lady’s highest standards and infinite delight. Though Eustacia was warned not to ruin her eyes with needless reading, that learned miss had unchecked access to the library; and if Polly’s emotions seemed overwrought and changeable to the doughty dame, a dainty tray of cocoa and biscuits seemed to manifest itself whenever it was most needed, no matter the hour. Even the shy, sylph-like Lorelei, whose elusive grace and endearing charm had heretofore entirely escaped her own notice, was beginning to color and blossom under Lady Agatha’s unobtrusive encouragement, and more than one dowager that season had watched with despair as “that quiet girl” effortlessly collected the beaus of her own showier offshoot.

Lady Agatha read her morning letters in the strangely quiet breakfast room, noticing at last the wan faces of her protegées.

“Annabelle, are you asleep at the table?” she snapped.”What is it, child? Are you ill?”

Beautiful Thoughts Part II: Pollyanna’s Peril

The still of a white-wrapped winter midnight had long since descended upon the stately house of Dame Agatha Rooth, bastion of B_____ society and aunt to young Annabelle. The dowager lay soundly sleeping, secure in her great name and her nightcap of true Valenciennes lace, certain that her four lovely protegées were secure as well in the fortress of the Rooth ancestral home.

But hark! a stealthy footstep, a rustle as of lace and velvet: something moved in the darkness, something soft and sly, tiptoeing on slippered feet toward the grand staircase. Who had penetrated the fiercely-guarded realm of Dame Agatha? Who dared cross the chilly vastness of the foyer? Whose cunning and desperation could have prompted such an incursion? Softly, softly, each step a whisper on cold marble…

“Aha!” squeaked Annabelle, popping out from behind the balustrade with a most unladylike suddenness. “I thought it was you! Where have you been?”

Beautiful Thoughts; or, The Candid Conversations of a Young Lady, Preserv’d for the Edification of Future Generations

“How can I, with my feeble powers of description, do the scene justice?” fretted Annabelle.

“Oh, heavens!” cried Polly. “Do go on, Anna!”

Indeed, the most exacting critic of romantic literature might well have agreed with the charming Pollyanna. Having arrived at the supreme moment of breathless suspense in her tale of the last evening’s festivities, Annabelle seemed paralyzed by self-consciousness. Was it her power of narrative or the substance of her tale that stopp’d her fluent tongue? Three young ladies of fashion in various stages of deshabille, gathered round a blazing fire in the exquisitely appointed bedroom of the tale’s teller, waited with scarce-concealed impatience for her next words.