The Protege

Chapter One

I glanced back at the solid oak door one more time as I tiptoed down the hall, the red carpet muffling the sound of my feet. I reach the stairs finally daring to breath but still on my guard. If Damien caught me now he would torture me then kill me, slowly.

He is not my father. When I was five my true father was attacked by bandits while travelling to town to get medicine for my mother, sister and me. I don’t remember my father much. All I know about him is from rumour. It is said he was a kindly man. Good to his family, kind to his friends and honest to everyone. I hope that they are true although I’ve learnt not to trust rumours. My father was normally a good fighter. But, as it was with him sickly and near to death he couldn’t hold them off. They killed him for his old carthorse and the medicine money in his pocket.

My mother and sister died and I was left alone. I sat in that house for two weeks with their rotting corpses until a neighbour came to check on us. She found me, curled up on the floor in the kitchen my small frame as far away from the bedroom in which the decomposing corpses of my mother and sister lay. I didn’t speak for months after that. Just went around her house doing chores to keep busy. But my neighbour was as poor as my parents had been and couldn’t afford to keep me so regretfully she had to take me to the orphanage.

I stayed in the orphanage for nine years. It wasn’t an easy existence. We worked hard the orphanage hiring out the girls services as maids and the boys as dockworkers. But I revelled in it. Every sideboard I dusted, every floor I swept and every bed I made I thought less and less about my parents. By the time I was seven the soul crushing sadness that I had felt since my family’s death was almost completely gone. I had friends. I was happy. I had hope.  It hadn’t always been that way. When I first arrived at the orphanage I was a small pale girl with platinum blonde hair and startling blue eyes. The girls thought I was pretty and weird. Needless to say they didn’t like me.

When Mr Laurence came to the orphanage looking to adopt we were exited. During the week before the interview we polished the orphanage until it gleamed even in the faint moonlight. On the day of his arrival all of the orphans were up at five o’clock. The girls giggled excitedly as we donned our Sunday dresses leaning on the banister of the second floor. Every few minutes one of us would think they heard something and we would all rush to the top of the stairs straining to get a look through the foyer windows into the yard.

It was midmorning before the doorbell rang. Once again we all rushed to the top of the stairs as quietly as possible not wanting Mr Laurence to think we were a bunch of eavesdroppers. Peeking over the railing I saw Mrs Caveat the house mistress rushing to get the door stopping to quickly preen in the sideboard mirror she straightened the wisps of greying hair that fluttered around her face before opening the door.

“Hello Mr Laurence it’s a pleasure to see you again,” said Mrs Caveat ushering him into the house. Alice, one of the older girls whispered to her friend, “I’d heard he was handsome but the rumours didn’t do him justice. Have you ever seen eyes that shade of green. They’re like the emeralds I saw in Mrs Caveat’s desk except that emeralds are pale in comparison.”

Her friend sighed, “You really should stop waxing poetically about the nobility you know what happened to the last girl Mrs Caveat caught with that posh boy from the Haversham estate. Kicked out of the orphanage she was. She may work us hard so that she can have her diamond earrings and such but at least we get three meals a day and the leftovers from the houses. You liked that bit of apple pie I gave you last week didn’t you. That’s far more than I can say for poor Emily. She’s probably rat food by now.” I looked back to Mr Laurence he really did look very young for his age. From what I’d heard he was supposed to be in his thirties but if I hadn’t known better I would have thought he was barely out of his teens. His eyes really were quite beautiful and I could see his arm muscles clearly through the fine linen of his shirt.