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| Goatswood |
This is a 12-part story, originally posted at iRez. It's part of the Avatar Blogger Month event and featured at the Avatar Blogger Crossfit exhibit at LEA11.
2. The Inn
The young couple
arrived at the Inn after a fast-paced walk down the street from the station.
They were the first. They dropped their bags by the bar and studied the black
board scribbled in chalk, a menu of sorts. Pheasant and some pudding would be
satisfactory, they decided.
“The pheasant is delicious today!” the
innkeeper exclaimed, thrilled with the unexpected increase of customers.
The couple
didn’t reply. Whispering among themselves, they took refuge at the booth
farthest away from the bar, where a book lingered on.
The woman
picked it up and opened it. It was about the legend of a highwayman who used to
hide in the upstairs rooms at the Inn where he, apparently, ended up being
arrested. The couple exchanged a look of complicity. Had anyone seen it, they’d
be concerned. No one did.
More
passengers arrived and the innkeeper was ecstatic, waving everyone inside with
words of welcome and yelling at his wife to hurry up with the food; by the
looks of it, this crowd wasn’t the drinking type. His wife, a woman not as inclined
towards working as she was towards enjoying a day’s rest, wasn’t pleased at all.
The extra work on a Sunday didn’t suit her; she firmly believed Sundays should
be devoted to the family.
The stationmaster entered the Inn, fighting
his way through the crowd, looking left and right.
“Has anyone
seen the tall man who was standing by the entrance back at the station?” he
asked, hopeful that he could get rid of the odd piece of luggage.
Through the
years, thousands of passengers had passed through his train station and never
had a bag been lost under his supervision. Even that time when a member of the
royal family decided to test the railway services by accidentally-on-purpose
dropping his bag under a bench in the station and taking off in the next train,
did that bag get damaged, violated or lost. Within two days, the bag had been
returned to His Royal Highness, who sent a letter of praise the stationmaster framed
and kept discreetly but proudly in a drawer at the station.
No one replied,
so he left the Inn determined to find the man somewhere else.
By then,
most of the people had either settled down in one of the booths or at the bar.
As the innkeeper suspected, only a handful asked for a drink.
“Here it
is, roast pheasant and steam pudding,” he said, placing the plates on the small
round table. “It’s so nice to see new faces. When a train drops people off at
the station, they don’t come this far. They usually stay by the hot-air balloon
or on the platform.”
The couple
stared at him, a bored look on their faces.
“Would you
like to have anything else with the pheasant and the pudding?”
They shook their
heads. The food looked ok and it was hot, at least that. They had had enough of
rain and cold weather.
“Right, so…
I better be on my way, busy day here!”
The
innkeeper felt drawn to those two, but he couldn’t quite explain why. He was
divided between making a bit more of an effort to get to know them or do what
he really needed to do which was to attend to the extra large clientele. “Let
me know if you need anything else. Just call me, my name is Augustus!”
The man waved
the innkeeper away. Augustus didn’t like that.
“Annoying
little man,” the woman said. “Augustus… He’s going to be trouble, I tell you.”
“No, dear,
we’ll take care of that. I just hope Ron is doing what he’s supposed to be
doing.”
“He’s so
stubborn, Fred…”
“I know.
But he’s the best,” said the man, lowering his voice even more.
“I wish we
didn’t have to depend on him so much...”
“Millie,
listen to me, it’ll be ok, you’ll see,” said the young man, stabbing the
pudding with his knife. “He’ll do what he was told and we’ll be out of this simpleton
village in the blink of an eye.”
“I am not
so sure of that, Fred,” mumbled the woman.
Fred wasn’t
in the mood to perpetuate this line of conversation with his ever so pessimistic
wife; instead of replying, he looked around the Inn, noticing that some of the
people had left, probably to take a walk through the picturesque village. It
was still early.
“I’m going
outside to stretch my legs. I’ll be right back, dear.”
Millie
acquiesced. She knew her husband sounded confident, but he was in fact as
unsure as her. Ron was the best; Ron was reliable; Ron was the right man to get
the job done. However, she didn’t trust Ron and nothing would change that. She
never liked it when people kept little secrets and reveled in them as if these
were some teenage practical joke, just like the bag packed with the sleeves
hanging out. Ron said it made him look like a lunatic and he seemed to enjoy
that. She didn’t.
“There are
people walking all over the village,” said Fred, back from the street. “And the
stationmaster is going bezerk looking for Ron” - he sounded amused.
“Let’s get
out of here.”
“Bu we
haven’t heard from…” - Fred stopped abruptly when he realized the innkeeper was
standing next to them.
“Hope
everything was to your liking,” said Augustus, suddenly suspicious of these two
whispering in the corner.
“Sir, it
was delicious, thank you,” replied Fred.
“But… you
haven’t eaten anything,” complained Augustus, exaggerating an expression of
disappointment.
“We are
tired, dear sir, but it was very good,” insisted Fred. “Wasn’t it, Millie?”
Millie was
rummaging through her purse. She looked up, startled.
“Umm...
Yes, yes.”
“Well,
should I bring you anything else?”
“No, thank
you. How much do we owe you?” asked Fred, following the innkeeper to the bar.
Millie went
back to her purse. She was so frustrated that she threw all its contents on the
table and picked one item after the other, realizing that what she was looking
for was simply not there.
She stood
up, went to Fred and nervously pulled him outside by the sleeve of his coat.
“I don’t
have it.”
“What?”
“I can’t
find it. I had it in my purse and now I don’t,” she replied, tossing and
turning the contents of her purse.
“Millie.”
“I didn’t
lose it, that I guarantee. I didn’t touch my purse till now. I just wanted to
review things. And it was gone. Someone must’ve taken it.”
“How…? The
purse was with you the whole time. Wasn’t it?” Fred asked hesitantly.
“It was,
but… I fell asleep right before we arrived here. You woke me up, remember?”
Fred
remembered. He specifically told her not to go to sleep while he went to the
next carriage to grab some coffee. When he got back, she was, of course, fast
asleep. The last few days had been extremely tiring and that was taking its
toll on them.
“I didn’t
memorize any of it, only mine…”
“I did,”
Millie replied, trying to look confident.
Fred looked
at his watch. “Where is Ron? We need to get moving.”
As the two
walked away hand in hand, just a regular couple going for a walk, Augustus
watched them closely. Through the door of the Inn he intentionally left
half-open when the couple hurried outside, he eavesdropped on their
conversation and frowned.
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