Weekly Writing – October 5 2024

The man who stood outside, soaked by the rain Trina had heard only as distantly as the foyer’s clock, brushed his sodden hair and hat up and out of the way for a better look at her. A tall man, not as much so as the servants made to work in the stables or till the fields, but taller than Trina, and the fact he wasn’t standing there under her mistress’s will made him seem massive.
“My apologies for calling on you at such a late hour,” he said, and his voice rang in her head like a broken clock chiming out of time. A new voice, a broken thing in her routine, and for all she had fantasized about that, she’d never plausibly imagined how she would answer it. “This storm has rendered the roads quite impassable. I hoped I might prevail on you – or your master? – to lend me a space in your stables for the night.”
She had seen so few men, ever, aside from the other servants. Paintings around the manor described them to her along with the rest of the world, and this man could have stepped out from one of those paintings. With his short, rich beard and black clothes, his eyes as bright as the lamps hissing along the walls of the foyer…what was she meant to say? She reached for her mistress for once, in desperate spirit, for answers, and the will that ran her like clockwork every day of her life reached in to fill her with a smiling poise that seemed to hardly leave any room for her at all.
“Of course,” her mistress said through her. “I’ll rouse the stableboys to see to your mount. You must surely have one, to be travelling so remotely.”
The man’s eyes narrowed on her, taking in the change with obvious suspicion, but there was barely room left between her pattering heart and breastbone for fear.
“I do,” he confirmed. “If you can provide a clean, dry stall, that will be more than sufficient to-”
“Do not suggest that you would spend the night in that stall with a soaked, disgruntled horse,” her mistress said, using Trina’s voice with a smoky depth and surety she wouldn’t have thought she had room for anywhere in herself. “I’ll have one of the guest rooms made ready at once.”
None of Trina’s shock could show on her face. A guest there, staying in the manor? A stranger, and new duties surrounding him, surely, a living shattering of her routine, staring at her as if to see whatever was under her skin.
“I would be much obliged,” he said, in a tone that suggested he would have been more comfortable with the horse in the stable.
The smile on Trina’s lips spread to a sharp edge, wielded by her mistress with deft and perfect care.
“Excellent,” she said. “It has been a long time indeed since we’ve had a guest here. I would welcome the diversion.”