only human

One

One

Winter 1799, Pendoughan, Wales

The girl inhaled the crisp winter’s air, letting the breeze numb her cheeks and nose. It felt so good to be out here in the cool having spent the entire day in her uncle’s excessively heated manor where the air had become quickly stuffy. But she knew her mother would be worried soon, so with a regretful sigh she turned and trudged back across the garden towards the manor’s orange glow which leaked through the windows into the almost-dark. Beneath her boots the grass crunched slightly: already frosty from the cold.

There will be snow tonight, she thought, The first snow of the year. She craned her neck to look at the evening sky, but it seemed bereft of cloud. If not tonight then tomorrow, she granted, But it will be soon.

Intuition was something that fluctuated within Sylvia Rochford, but this time she was sure. Sometimes she could predict what the weather would be like in a week’s time from just the dampness of the air and direction of the wind, but other times she would feel that a person was untrustworthy when really they were perfectly admirable. Her skills, on a good day, were uncanny, and she’d heard whispers that suggested many people saw them as products of black magic. Sylvie, on the other hand, was not inclined to believe such nonsense. Tales of witches, daemons and evil spirits in her mind were the result of paranoid hysteria which existed in times where little could be understood without the scientific knowledge society had access to today. Those who still believed them were living in the dark ages. It cannot be said, however, that she didn’t like a good ghost story. Through all of her spectacularly dull life, Sylvie yearned for an adventure, a murder for her to solve, a secret for her to uncover. Alas, nothing of such an exciting nature had presented itself to her thus far. At least, nothing worth mentioning just yet.

Presently she had come to the back windows which looked into the kitchen, and pressed her forehead up against the cold glass. Inside there was a throb of activity. Busy clearing up after dinner, the cooks seemed quite exhausted by their exertions. Recently they had had to cater for far more people than usual. Normally it would be just her uncle William Jenkins and his daughter Eleanor, but now they had a number of his relatives to take into consideration. On top of that, attending to the New Year’s ball was an enormous task.

Being seventeen ninety nine, there was more than the usual excitement for the New Year. The turn of the century was set to be a big event – Sylvie herself had taken pride in coordinating much of it, and despite being just sixteen, her word was trusted on many matters be they organisational or aesthetic. Her uncle’s manor was already a glorious spectacle; eclectic and tastefully adorned with objects he’d collected over his travels around the world, like the shiny brass-topped table etched with exotic Indian illustrations; the purple Chinese music box hand-painted with elegant oriental-looking butterflies; the expensively upholstered chez-longue from France…the list was endless. However, the ball demanded even more extravagance. Three hundred white lanterns were to be hung along the avenue of trees approaching the manor, and her uncle’s finest crystal chandeliers were to be taken from the safety of their storage place and erected in every hallway and room of the house that would be encountered upon by the evening’s guests. The dining hall, which would serve as a ballroom for the night, was to be dressed with candles upon every surface and the music hall would become the seat of beverages and canapés – food which would have to serve two hundred people if all the invitations were accepted. If the invitations were to be delivered at all, which at this rate seemed unlikely.

Sylvie had one sibling, an older sister called Caroline who had been tasked with the distribution of the invites. However, Caroline had just turned seventeen, and on her birthday was proposed to by her long-term admirer Mr John Kabronskawich, whom she accepted, and since then had wanted everything to do with the planning of her own wedding and nothing to do with the planning of the New Year’s celebrations. Her uncooperative selfishness had set in motion a new wave of animosity between the sisters. Caroline’s bitterness revealed itself mainly through exploiting the fact of her ‘superiority’ which she saw in herself due being the older, engaged sibling and their mother’s favourite. She took great pleasure in ordering Sylvie to do chores, trivial tasks and knew that her authority could not be questioned. In retaliation, Sylvie saw fit to set up pranks and tricks for her sister, designed to humiliate or annoy her. One such scheme was that, when Caroline instructed her sister to mend the hem of her dress for the ball, Sylvie in fact sewed the hems together, making the garment more of a glorified sack than anything else. Caroline would have to spend hours unpicking it.