The Beggar Princess by Lidiya Foxglove

Author:Lidiya Foxglove [Foxglove, Lidiya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Princess Bethany

Indeed, I wrote that night until my hand cramped. Suddenly, I knew where I needed to go with the new story, how to breathe life into my formula. My head was a whirl of desire and confusion.

Finally, Jack sat down across from me. “Perhaps you’d better stop and come to bed.”

“I can’t stop,” I said, but I put down the quill. I looked at the pages. In the morning I would have to see if they were actually good.

“Will you read them to me?” he asked.

“Not now.”

“When they’re completed to your satisfaction, then?”

I flushed. “I’ve never read them aloud to anyone before.”

“Reading aloud helps pass the long winters around here,” he said. “It is certainly one of the finer points of modern civilization, aye? You might write better dialogue if you did.”

“You don’t like my dialogue?”

He slid out of his chair and came around to me, taking one of my ink-stained hands in his. “I love your dialogue,” he said. “Still, there is room for improvement. Your characters declare things quite a lot.”

I paused. I already knew that when I read this to him, he was going to have suggestions about changing things, and it was going to make me fume. But no one had ever taken an interest before.

“Maybe,” I said, “after I look it over tomorrow, I will read it to you.”

“Come to bed.”

I hoped sleep would dull my lust, but instead I was conscious of his warm body beside me. I wanted to press against him, feel him closer.

I woke to his hand gently stroking my breast, and I was instantly aflame again. I turned to him, curling into his arms. I felt his hard sheath beneath his trousers. He must be as tortured as I was.

“You’ll be a good little princess today, aye?”

I nodded.

He took my hand and pulled me out of bed, onto my feet. I was used to waking up slowly and letting my ladies dress me, then sailing over to the breakfast table, but I knew that peasants had no such luxuries. And I was a peasant, at least for now. What I would be by the end of the week, I didn’t know, for I still didn’t know who Mr. Elmwood actually was. But I was starting to trust him, even without knowing, strange as it was.

He gave me a litany of instructions on the various cooking implements and how to use them, how to manage the fire and keep the food—or myself—from burning, and how I should cook eggs and porridge for our breakfast. I was already sick of oats, but that was what we had to eat. I didn’t dare complain.

I made the porridge as he fed the chickens and tended to some chores outside.

Not as easy as it sounds. The fire was so hot on my face that despite the chill of the day, I was sweating. I fumbled and fussed with the iron arm that moved the pot in and out of the fire’s heat. I wasn’t sure what porridge ought to look like while it cooked.

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