Rain In Hertfordshire

Gold Gilded

Thunder rumbled far away in the sky, pilfering through the window into the quiet library that night.

The glass pane clinked, abused by the vapid breeze of the rainstorm and Sarah lifted her head from her book, momentarily amazed that it still was raining so late into the night.
Beside her, the lamp that sat on the desk was the only circle of halo poorly lighting the pages of her book. She looked back at the ajar volume on her lap and found that she was a stranger to everything scribbled all over it.

Her fault, doubtlessly.

Stalking her fiancé this afternoon, she had left the best part of her thoughts there with him...as he had mourned and wept over that anonymous grave. And now she couldn't find sanity in solitude as much as she sought it....for what man would sit in the rain and weep for his long lost so indifferent of the world? The carcass that had been left of him, seemed empty. It ate. It drank. It sat mindless. It read not. It slept not.

It lived not.

And now, in that dark room, on her chair surrounded by the shadows of heavy book and moth eaten pages, Sarah stared at the carpet and found herself envisioning a wet patch of soiled earth quilted with withered Bluebells.
She saw Harebells and false daisies. Se smelt torn grasses and rain. Instead of the prevalent scent of burning whale oil from the lamp, that belonged_ she had the countryside in her senses.

Not that she did not miss the vibrances of her London home...indeed, the lights had been fantastic there.
But something about the cloud shadowed meadows of Herts enticed Sarah, in an odd, sad way.

Soon, she would be Robert Penfield's wife.

He was known to be a simple man and there was a lot of other ways this could be said in.

He had not been an extraordinary man, for instance, was a way to say it. But Sarah herself, when she thought about it, found nothing out of ordinary in her own person...and that, somehow, settled things.

Yet.

Yet when this afternoon, she went after him in the pouring rain and found him madly walking uphill in this Storm....Sarah realized there was a gilded inventory in his keepsake. A fable she much wanted to hear.

It seemingly had a tragic end...it likely had changed the world in its time but she couldn't contain herself.

Sarah needed to know what had happened.

Whose was that grave?
Who had such hold at his heart that.... It certainly wasn't his....

Suddenly, the empty house echoed with a series of prolonged, garbled noise from the floor above the library and Sarah was up on her feet, flinching as the lasts of the clamor recceded, followed by a single, distinct thud.

First uncertain of her concern, She reasoned it might just be some servant. But the house was small, the servants quarter were in a separate building and that a maid or a footman had lingered back here to this hour was a fact vexatious in itself.

Also, it was called to her mind that the persistent storm could have possibly damaged the attic somehow, for the house had a history of desolation of forty years now.

Picking the lamp up, she rushed outside, in the dim, night-lit corridor and up the dark stairways.
The storey right above was quiet, the hallways empty and by the look of it, untrodden by such noise.

Sarah progressed up yet, into the darker heights of the house.
The ceiling slanted over here and the rain pattering the baked slates up over the roof made the deserted quadrant of the house boom with racket.
Just when she had decided the noise to be some old window swinging on its rusty hinges_ another set of ruckus called her.