Joy V. Sheridan writes

Charity Amour

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE, part 3

She rustled the paper he had written the directions on and threw it deeper into her bag. To anyone else it would be valueless: to her, it was priceless. She tiptoed across the room, picked up her courage and unlocked the door having taken the key which Lord Rispian had secreted about his person. 

One flash up the stairs and she had in hand her travelling case once more. She needed to make haste if she was Falmouth-bound this very night. Would it always be that way for her, emulating once again, her earlier existence, bag in hand? She groaned inwardly: her mind wheeling as she moved, like the cycles of Life which were taking her finally away from London. And which of those vistas would she keep the most keenly to her heart? 

She found her way, for she had made enquiries regarding the necessity for such a flight, earlier on in the week. Where to pick up the coach for Cornwall and the like. 

She was en route! As she settled into its somewhat uneven and bumpy interior, her mind continued to circle with the motion of the wheels. Such an arrangement of domains; of situations; of times she had experienced; tumbled in her brain.

Right from her shabby gentility after the demise of her dear Papa, her impecuniously-rewarded employment with Lord Rispian’s sister, Lady Ames: the barren strata of neglect and her near-starvation upon the streets of London Town after that dreadful business in Chelsea. The vivid spectacle of her brief, meteoric appearance upon the boards: the belladonna seductions at the Château des Amourettes. All these scenes passed through her mind. Which would be the one to lodge most ardently in her memory? 

Would it be the Château as she had seen it engulfed in flames, burning scarlet and stippled with gold against the milky omnipresence of a winter’s grey-white dawn? Seeing once more, perhaps until she slept her final sleep, those vapourous whirlpools vortexing about the turrets, domes and steeples, bursting forth to an accompaniment of screams and falling masonry with horrifying crescendos? Burning fast and shortlived, like the exotic blooms which had flourished for so short a time beneath its roof? Or would it be the first knowledge which she had gained - personally - of a man? Dear, dear Seyton! It all but pulled her heart out of her body to consider him missing, dead according to his treacherous kinsman. 

His dark eyes stared hypnotic and compelling from the ghostly illumination behind her closed eyes. Would it be the scene she had last been embroiled with: would she always bear Lord Rispian’s phallus heaving further and further up her, probing into the core of her being, only to melt off into a parallel of unfulfilled lust like a horny son of Daedelus?

She felt a shudder of shame and pleasure warmly course through her at the recollection, the coach's motion setting her frustrations even more acutely on edge. How she had been forced, by dint of circumstance, to change! And what she had done to a member of the aristocracy? If and when it was found out it would be considered a heinous crime. Lord Rispian would surely seek to find her out and punish her. And punish her, reputedly, Lady Seyton Clover - as she had proclaimed herself to him - publicly. 

She fingered the signet ring and removed it from her finger. Mayhap it would be as well to secrete that more securely about her person. One never knew about footpads and highwaymen these days.

She lifted it and examined it, alone as she was in the coach, by the light of the swinging lantern. There was the inscription on its inner circumference, which proved that it could be no fake! The letters curled S and C into the minute shaping of a small creature. Her husband, Lord Clover, had explained that it was a family emblem, known and passed on, only by the male members of the family. 

It was a beaver and the name also of her final destination even now: ‘The Beaver House Plantation’ - near Kingston, Jamaica. The West Indies! Mayhap Charity was welcoming now the opportunity for further adventure: for her heart thrilled with expectant pleasure at the thought of her travels and of her concluding passage (as she hoped) to Freedom. 

Would her dearest Papa, the old servants at the Richmond home, her friends, Great Aunt Alys: would any of them have known her these days? Albeit, perhaps it was merely months which had passed but she felt that they had so changed her she could barely recognise herself! Who was this woman full of schemes, with the beautiful, haunted face who looked back at her from the mirror? 

She ran her tongue over the slight suggestion of carmine about her full lips. She might ever be Charity Amour to some but to herself now, she knew that she could have no other name than this action of all actions, had provoked in her.

She would be Charity Renegade. That story waited only time for its unfolding. Yes, she mused, now I am ‘CHARITY RENEGADE!'