God's Crusade

Part Forty-Three

"Surely you have been happy here, Hermione?" Lucy Slade asked as they walked arm and arm in the gardens behind the big house. It was a fair question, she thought, because before her husband denied his daughter the right to leave and pursue her own idea of a future, her stepdaughter had seemed more than content with life in Meadvale. "I always thought you were...these ideas of yours have just distracted you, my dear..."

"Oh Mama...you just don't really understand...I was on holiday here?" Hermione sighed searching for the right words, because poor Lucy could not understand. She had never lived outside the Reformist world and could not imagine personal any freedoms. "It started out as giving a few months of my gap year to my poor grandmother...making her last days as happy as possible for her. Dad...I mean Papa...urged me to just enjoy the experience...and the more I immersed myself in it, the happier Gran was. I found it all so strange at first...I will always remember my first night with a real guardian looking after me...but it was just a gap year for me...an interlude? I didn't want to go to the college my mother had chosen for me and I wanted to get away from it all...and although it wasn't easy at times, I did that here. Papa encouraged me to take the time to think, and I did...I accepted my training from Miss Scott and Miss Lewis for his sake, and later on for yours...as it felt right here..."

"Oh my darling Hermione, it is right here...you are living in God's love?" Lucy assured her passionately, rather confused with what she was hearing as she had never heard of a gap year and had grown up thinking that only boys went to college. She knew that was not always the case. Her parents had talked of the time before the Renaissance. But things had changed, and those sorts of thoughts were simply not appropriate anymore. Hermione was talking heresy or at least madness. "Your father just feels that your mother's bad influence on you in the past is affecting your judgement, and he is acting in your best interests..."

"Oh Mama, I simply don't belong here," Hermione insisted, although she realised that it would provoke a long lecture from her stepmother, and more, if their private conversation was reported back to her guardian, or her father. But she could not hate Lucy. She could not even bring herself to hate her father. Her stepmother was a product of her upbringing and her experience. Even if she was not such a devout Reformist before she completed her national service, it was obvious to Hermione that anyone who had spent five hard years or more in a convent came out as a devout disciple. But her family were nice people. Lots of people she met were nice, despite the repressive lives they were forced to lead because of the laws introduced for their own good. Hermione had heard all the excuses, over and over again, and she had also seen a lot of the evidence for herself. Britain worked on many levels, just not for people like her.

However, she was not stupid, and she realised she did not have any choice. If her father wanted to keep her there, he could do so, with ease. Between him and Miss Lewis, she could be forced to do anything he wanted, although she could not imagine him doing anything other than find her a husband to keep her 'safe' and 'happy' for the rest of her life. He was denying her the life her mother wanted for her by imposing one of his own, and he would not change his mind, not in a million years. So she stopped fighting just as everyone else must have done. Resistance really was futile. She told her stepmother that she would try to accept her father's decision, and when they went back inside Miss Lewis was told the good news. It did not change her routine one iota, but Miss Lewis seemed immediately more inclined to treat her with patience. Her afternoon lessons finished a little early and she joined her mother to watch the early evening news before they would change for dinner, and she heard a report that made her realise, once and for all, that she had been fighting a losing battle.

"Good evening and this is the BBC news at six o'clock. Republican Presidential candidate Aaron Lumsfield and his Reformist vice-presidential running mate Shapleigh Nixon III have cemented their small lead in the polls by announcing a broad programme of reform, to be implemented if they win the election in November. In a move fully supported by British President Kieran Radcliffe, President-elect Lumsfield is planning a pilot National Service initiative to provide nurses and teachers for underfunded hospitals and schools, plus a series of decency laws and a married man job swap scheme with unmarried women, designed to take the financial pressure off working class families..."