Story Snip from Larksong: Chapter 9 and Character Faces!

hapter 9!

Thank you to everyone who's been reading along!

Larksong is set in Montreal, July 1914.

In chapter 1, Alice, after her grandmother's funeral, arrived at the family cottage to take care of her grandmother's aviary, only to find that her parents had already leased the cottage to another family for the summer.

The only way she could have one more summer in her favourite place was to surreptitiously take on the role of governess to the two young girls...

In chapter 2, we met George, laid up at the hospital with a broken leg. Instead of joining his friends on a Grand Tour of Europe, he's being sent off to recuperate at a rented cottage in the country...

In chapter 3, we returned to Alice's point of view, and saw her bonding with George's younger sisters. Then she got a surprise -- George was arriving at the cottage that very day!

In chapter 4, we had a hint that Alice finds George attractive and interesting -- but also unbearably rude.

In chapter 5, they had their first argument.

In chapter 6, they argued once more, but the stakes were higher: war is on the horizon.

In chapter 7, George attempted a rapprochement. The chapter ended with him asking, "Why don't we both go sit in the parlour?"

In chapter 8, Alice had some feelings stirring...

Now, in chapter 9, during their first evening together, they begin to suss each other out over a card game...

(I've called it euchre, as a precursor to bridge, but if there's a better possibility, please let me know!)

Alice fetched the cards from the games drawer in the hall bureau and joined George in the parlour. He'd settled himself at one end of the sofa, leg propped on a cassock, but his tea was out of reach, still on the table where she'd left the tray. She made to bring it over, then saw the flask at his elbow, and paused in the doorway.

His profile was to her and he either hadn't heard her footsteps or deliberately did not look her way. The shadow of his beard had grown darker. Suddenly––irrationally––she wondered how his stubble might feel against her own cheek. His long fingers curled about the tumbler next to the flask, tapping rhythmically, school ring clinking against the glass. He was a McGill graduate then––her younger brothers likely knew him.

But that was family, not related to her Miss Underwood persona. I must align my thoughts with those of a governess, if I'm to play this game.

To act as a servant, that was her role, or the truth would out, embarrassing not only herself but, more deeply, shaming her family. She would lose all chance of a continued connection to Granny's home, and the birds would be left in the hands of those who did not care for them as she did––as Granny had.

She'd best alert him to her presence.

She rattled the doorknob before entering, and George acknowledged her entrance with a nod over his glass. She slid a deck of cards across to him, then perched on the opposite end of the sofa, hands clasped in her lap. He set the glass down before reaching for the deck, and she noticed then that he was seated at an angle, his weight mostly on his hale side, while the other hip hovered above the sofa.

She could have smacked herself for her blindness. How often she had ached from remaining in the same position! And how often Granny had plied her with cushions to keep her comfortable.

She jumped up and gathered two of the bigger cushions off the chesterfield beside the hearth, too late realising what she'd done when she met George's horrified gaze. How delayed her mental faculties were this evening, always one step behind. Certainly it would never do for a servant new to the family to presume to know the desires of the master of the house, or call attention to his discomfort, or––worse––the fact that he had not managed to hide it well enough.

He couldn't know, of course, that he'd hid it well enough for others, but that she'd read the signs easily due to her own predicament last year. Could she reveal that much without seeming presumputously familiar? They were about to play cards, after all, so a certain degree of familiarity had already been broached.

She stepped forward with the cushions, frowning at all the twisted thinking and frustrations involved in acting, and tossed them onto the cassock beside his cast. Then she turned her back on him and made a production out of rearranging the teacups and sugar bowl on the tray. Breaking a biscuit in half, she nibbled at the corners, though she felt no hunger. She could give him privacy, at any rate, to make up his mind as to whether he would accept the cushions.

A scrape of the cassock leg, a grunt, and a general shuffling told her he had done so. Or perhaps he'd denied himself something that would ease his pains.

She waited, glad to have changed from evening shoes to slippers, given how much of the day she'd spent on her feet. She stirred the milk into her tea as though each drop needed its own moment of deliberation. At last, when he'd begun to shuffle the cards, she took up her tea and resumed her seat on the sofa. So much for the first quarter hour. How many more times might she catch herself behaving inappropriately before the night was through?

"You do know the rules of euchre, do you not?" he asked. His voice was loud as it broke the long stillness. He glanced quickly at the cushions beneath his leg and thigh, then away.

Gratified that he'd accepted her help, she bit back an "of course" and replied, "Yes, I have played once or twice."

"What I propose is simple enough: essentially you play both your and your partner's hand. You'll have to sit across from me, though, or shift a bit."

Under his watchful eye she drew her knees up side-saddle to the sofa, but even ten minutes in this position would soon give her a cramp. Casting about, she caught sight of the afghan draped over the back of the sofa. Granny had always made sure that comforts were at hand for those who sat near the fire.

She draped the afghan over her lap and, hidden by its folds, settled her legs in a decidedly unladylike but much less cramp-inducing posture.

Did George realise he was staring at her?

As if he had already divined that she was inventing falsehoods about herself with every breath and was simply biding his time, waiting to trap her in one.

She reached over and cut the cards, and that seemed to wake him from his daze.

"Shall we play for a wager?" he asked as he began to deal, both to themselves and to each side, where their partners would have sat if they'd been at a table as a foursome.

At his words, she suddenly understood which family he belonged to. He was the middle Cunnick brother; and she ought to have remembered when she'd met James that afternoon, but she'd been more preoccupied then with ensuring they accepted her as who she said she was.

George and James might have belonged to any family and she would not have reacted differently. Now, though, she had placed them: the Cunnicks were one of the more prominent families in Montreal, but George's side had emigrated from England only a few years ago. There'd been some sort of scandal in Toronto involving a cousin, a rumour of inappropriate behaviour, dark deeds, and gambling. George's use of the word wager had triggered her memory. Knowing exactly which side of which family he belonged to, she remembered something more: they had declined the invitation to her coming out party two years ago.

She began sorting her partner's cards. "What would you like to wager?" she asked, speaking low to keep her voice from snapping with excitement at the recognition.

It wasn't George––though she wondered what his excuse would be––or James, who'd already been too old and married off, but the rejection from their cousin Charles that had rankled. She'd nearly forgotten about that puppy love. She'd carried a torch for him for nearly six months, after their paths had crossed at the Dorchesters' New Year's Eve do.

She'd woven many an idle fancy about how she and Charles might dance together and how he'd be so captivated by her charms, he'd not want to share her with anyone else, whether that night or at any subsequent party, especially her upcoming debutante ball.

How crushed she'd been when the Cunnicks' reply had come, how the shards of her broken dreams had stung. She flushed, recalling how she'd used those very words in her diary at the time. It was no longer the feeling she recalled but the memory of rationalizations she'd thought up to assuage the pain.

She would act on behalf of her younger, hurt self. She would act coolly, and take the chance to get her own back a little. Even if it was against the wrong cousin.

"We might wager on some sort of entertainment," she suggested, as George had not yet spoken. She laid down her partner's hand and glanced at him as she gathered up her own.
"Good thought," he said. "Is there a phonograph in the house?"

He hadn't met her gaze, though he was absorbed not so much in the cards before him as in the room, his gaze taking in Granny's bookshelves and, on the mantelpiece, the assorted beach finds––outsize rocks, petrified wood––alongside the watercolour Alice had once attempted of a sunset.

"There is," she told him, relieved that he didn't seem to have the singleminded focus on his hand of his gambling cousin. It ought to be easy enough to beat him at this game. "A Columbia Records one."

"Then if I win, you shall buy me a new cylinder tomorrow. There must be a shop in the village that sells a few. And if you win––"

"I'll tell you what I'd like if I do," she said, and played her first card.

Images of Alice and George, all saved on my Story Inspirations board!

Do you seek out images of your characters?
Who do they look like?