A Bride For Us

The Promise and The Battle

The mattress beneath protested Lily's constant tossing and turning. She threw the pillow over her face and growled into it, frustrated. She was frustrated at life, Raymond, fate and poverty. She was frustrated that she was stuck in a marriage with a man who found the very sight of her distressing and most of all, she was frustrated about the fact that she couldn't leave.

It didn't matter how much she wanted to pack her bags and head back to New York, she couldn't. After Raymond had told her, without mincing words, that she wasn't a part of his family, she had stormed up the stairs and had dug into her bag for her little savings. To say it was little, would have been putting it lightly. The money she had was barely able to pay for a coach to New York and was certainly not enough for boarding and feeding.

She didn't have any family except for a great Aunt, whose existence she only knew about and whose face she never got the privilege of seeing. She certainly didn't have an address and even if she did, what were the chances that her great Aunt would accommodate her?

She was doomed!

The thought seeped into her consciousness, bringing tears to her eyes. Doomed to remain in a loveless marriage with no way of escape.

She turned over to her side, the mattress feeling highly uncomfortable beneath her body. She tried to think of a happier time, days spent with her parents before her father died in a coach accident and her mother followed suit, pneumonia killing her. A time when she lived in a home with servants to see to her every need, a home with vibrant wall colors and beautiful flowers surrounding the building. A home with warm baths and warm meals. A city inhabited by beautiful, high class women and respectable gentlemen, one of which Lily had imagined she would be married to.

A soft sigh escaped her lips as a tear slipped down the side of her face, dropping and sinking into the white sheet. It shouldn't have turned out so badly, she wasn't supposed to be married to a farmer who could barely feed his family and could certainly not act like a husband.

Still, fate had played a cruel game on her and whether she liked it or not, she was here, on a farm and married to that farmer.

The sound of movement caught her attention. Believing herself to be imagining it, she laid still for a while until she heard it again. It was faint, and but for the silence of the night, she wouldn't have heard it. But then she did, she heard it, the distinct sound of the floor boards that were in desperate need of repairs.

Rising to a sitting position, she placed one feet after the other on the floor and rose to her feet. Her night coat sat on the chair by the fireplace. Grabbing it with one hand and shrugging it on, she turned the door knob and made her way out of the room.

She stood in the small hallway, darkness clouding her vision for a while until her eyes adjusted to it. Slowly, she began making her way to the stairs, when she saw it...

She froze, frightened by the sudden appearance of Scarlet who stood drenched from head to toe.

For a while, Lily just stood there, her eyes running from Scarlet's messy brown hair, to her extremely dirty night dress, to her muddy shoes and back to her face.

“Scarlet?” Lily whispered, covering the distance between them. She wasn't thinking about what the child might have been doing out in the rain, and so late at night, all she thought of was the child's safety. “Are you alright, darling?” She touched her face, examining her intently.

Scarlet seemed nervous and unwilling to make eye contact with Lily.

Lily leaned down, squatting before Scarlet whose skin was extremely cold. The first thing that crossed Lily's mind was the death of her mother due to pneumonia. She shrugged off her night coat, placed it on the floor beside her and began helping Scarlet out of her wet night dress.