The Historian’s Novel

Maybe her mother hadn’t yet gotten her message, Amelia thought, as she nursed her cut thumb with her tongue. Pulling the injured digit away to find solace in how the handsaw had not gone through to the bone.

   “Ooh, that looks bad,” she whimpered, her voice going unheard in the carriage house she had snuck into.

   Fumbling with her clothes, using but a small lantern to see, Amelia took out the silk and gauze the maid she had tasked with finding a handsaw had given her. At the time she thought the maid’s worry unfounded. But now, she wanted to give the woman a raise. Amelia’s idea to sabotage the coach she and her father would be using come first light… It probably wouldn’t work if somebody spotted a pool of blood on the ground.

   Now if only said sabotage could go as easily as envisioned. Unfortunately, most of the coach had been constructed with metal. Meaning despite Amelia’s book smarts which assured her that yes, a handsaw should in fact be able to cut it, the slit she managed to make after an hour of work was still no greater than the length of her pinky’s nail.

   Nearly a fifth of her lanterns wick had burnt out by that point. Which led to impatience. That led to a fumble.

Amelia stayed strong. Quietly sniffling through the pain as her progress grew even slower now that she only had one hand to use. There hid a wish in her heart that all of this shouldn’t be needed. A small naïve voice which wanted Amelia to run to her father for help. She told that small voice to go kick a rock.  Reminding it of a childhood memory it could use to reflect on why asking her father for help would be pointless.

   “What’s her problem?” Havoc had once asked when Amelia’s mother, Ophelia Strightsworth, brought to his office their crying three-year-old daughter.

   Havoc’s stern face could be considered scary on a good day. And his curt question only caused Amelia to cry even louder.

   “She hurt herself,” the beauty explained patiently to the beast, “I thought you’d might want to console her.”

   Sighing, Havoc lowered an immense arm over his desk for Amelia to be placed on his hand.

   “Hold still and count to ten baby girl,” he said, pressing two fingers against Amelia’s neck, where he felt for a pulse. Then, like a brute, he roughly hiked up her dress to examine the problem.

   “She scraped her knee. You brought her to me for something of this level? With how loud she is, you would think she had lost her foot from a landmine.”

   That had been one of the few times Amelia remembered her mother getting angry at her father.

   “Havoc you scoundrel!” Ophelia said loudly, rescuing her child who reached with both arms for her mother, “Amelia is still a baby! Why can’t you remember how you were at her age and comfort her? You’re her father for heaven’s sake. When she’s in trouble, who else should she turn too but you?”

Ophelia placed an open palm in front of her daughter, atop of which burst a small flickering flame which took the form of two dancing dolls. The use of magic effective in distracting a child.

   Watching this, Havoc dismissively snorted. “At her age I was being trampled by horses,” he said, digging through his desk to find a small vial. “There’s a roof over her head. She’s got food in her belly… I should think all of this,” he gestured to the room they were in, “should count towards me ‘helping’. Rub some healing balm on her, then go fetch a servant to buy candy if her whining doesn’t stop.”

   His callous response resulted in not only a crying daughter, but a wife who joined in.

   “Can’t you heal her?” Ophelia asked Havoc, sitting down on her husband’s lap while administering the ointment.

   “I’m not a backline healer,” Havoc said, though he had the decency to look somewhat ashamed when his wife glowered through misty eyes at him. “It took me years to get my own regeneration under control,” he said, trying to defend himself under the noise of his pen’s writing that gave him an excuse not to look at her, “I have no time to learn how to heal others. If she’s going to be weak, that’s Amelia’s problem. Not mine.”

   Amelia’s memories grew fuzzy from that point. Leaving her presently, with a sour aftertaste that wouldn’t quite go away. It’s how Havoc had always been. He had pulled himself up from the dirt on his own and he expected others to do the same, regardless of who, or how old they might be.

Which in Amelia’s mind made it clear confiding in her father would never work out.

   Amelia decided to lament other things. Such as having not been born more like the princess from the Historian’s Novel. Who could show off an ankle’s worth of skin for an army’s worth of salivating men to do all the tedious work for her without question. Unlike those Amelia had access to; A bunch of servants who were already spreading rumors that their miss had obtained a handsaw to cut a book in half out of anger because of its ending.

   Amelia pulled the handsaw back to see how much more she had progressed.

   “My hopes for the future are running pretty low if this is what I’m relying on,” she grumbled, after finding no visible progress had been made.

   Letting her arm rest for a few minutes, she went back to cutting. After all, Amelia had bigger plans than simply saving the Kingdom. While her father might have grown content to waste away in stagnation and let Heimdall run things for him, Amelia wanted to use what The Historian had written to elevate her own standard of living. First, she would befriend the princess, putting herself in the future royal’s good graces. Finding the king’s long lost daughter ought to be worth more than a few accolades. Should she decide to in the future, she might even make Domina, and have her own barony to manage. While her father could at least become a Viscount.

   Of course, she might need to splash him with a bucket filled with ice cold water to wake him up to the idea.

   But if she could do it, then it might shut up those sniveling guests who occasionally visited on business with her father. And their children, who constantly droned on and on about how awful it must be, to live in the shadows of her mother in a no-name border barony. She could see it in their eyes, that they held a distain for her father, for having used brute strength to achieve fame, and for having saved and be-smitten the Lady Winchester when her escort had been ambushed once upon a time.

   “Yeah… Well… Mom said yes, so shut up,” Amelia mumbled, refusing to use swears despite nobody being around to hear them.

   Because as her mother used to say when scolding her father, “There will always be one person who will know. And that person is yourself.”

   “Now if you want to show me how sorry you are; you’ll do well to find another use for your tongue.”

   Amelia ceased cutting. Her mother had never said that.

   It took an approaching light; seeping through under the carriage house’s entrance for her to realise the voice intruding on her recollections, had not been pure imagination.           Hastily gathering up her affairs in a panic, Amelia scrambled to hide behind the coach’s rear body. Extinguishing her lantern in time to hide from the lovers who had made of all locations, the carriage house as their rendezvous spot.

   Their entangling bodies performed a sloppy waltz to the coach. Where Amelia covered her mouth to stifle the shocked gasp that tried to escape her, when the two began to use it as a set piece for their enjoyment. They were already in varying states of undress. Amelia could only watch from her hiding spot in a trance, as the maid playfully denied the knight’s attempt to further slip his hand up under her skirt.

“Here? Are you sure?” gasped the man, removing his shirt while asking the question.

“Take me. I want you to take me on top of the carriage.”

   It’s not a carriage! It’s a coach! Amelia wanted to shout. But showing herself now would be terribly embarrassing for everyone, so she justified peeping further to know when best to skedaddle.

    As the clothes began falling, and the moaning grew louder, Amelia watched the lovers kiss, knowing she could probably use her own forehead to boil a full pot of water. To make it worse. She knew the two servants. One, a once stable boy who had worked hard for his promotion to squire, then knight. The other, a woman Amelia often saw toiling away in the kitchens.

   “You’re treating me like a lady,” growled the woman, “are those muscles for show?”

   “Don’t blame me if you can’t walk straight tomorrow,” the knight said, and Amelia put a small space between herself and the coach, when she began to feel the jostling transmitted against her. 

   Amelia felt mortified. Here she was, a Baron’s daughter, watching two of her family’s servants go at it like animals. The lantern they’d brought casting more than enough light for her to see the supple form that began riding atop the coachman’s seat in a manner that made her worry they might fall.

The longer they went, the more Amelia’s admiration for the princess, and all other women began to increase. Until that moment, her knowledge of sex could only be found from inside books. If a man presented himself to her, she would have no idea where to start.

Nor could she for the life of herself understand the strangely warm sensation that had begun to grow round her heart. She chalked it down to embarrassment. All while her mind couldn’t help but recall the more explicit events The Historian had described in their book. Her imagination, for a split second, super-imposed the princess’s description over the maid who she spied on.

   Goodness.  She couldn’t imagine having multiple lovers at the same time. The intimacy before her looked exhausting.

   An assessment that corroborated with how the knight and maid seemed to be taking a rest. Until Amelia worked out that no, they were only changing positions. But with the knight’s face disappearing between a pair of breasts, and the maid occupied with looking to the ceiling in a pure state of rapture, Amelia decided her moment to flee via crawling had come.

   Except now crawling felt a lot naughtier than it had in the past. One forearm over the other, she tried not to be self-conscious over how her body moved. Making what should have been a short distance to freedom, feel like an eternity.

   Finally, she escaped out into the night, through the door the lovers hadn’t even bothered to lock, and into a warm air that felt refreshingly cool against her damp skin.

   “Why couldn’t they have found a bed,” Amelia complained quietly under her breath, looking back at the pair to make sure they hadn’t noticed her sneaking.

   Only for the maid’s sudden blissful cry to jolt Amelia away and into a hasty retreat. That is, after Amelia loudly slammed the door shut behind her in a petty act of revenge. Stifling the giggles that came when she heard the two yelp in surprise.

   Serves you right! Amelia gloated while running as fast as she could, (which by a normal person’s standards amounted to a brisk walk) all the way back to the front entrance of the Strightsworth family manor.

   Knowing the guards would see her coming from a mile away once she stepped onto the cleared garden grounds, Amelia first stashed the handsaw in a bush. Finding as she did, a few wild onions which she placed in her pocket. Breathing in deep, Amelia did her best to calm down before approaching the guards in the distance who stood as a firm set of three; two to keep watch, the third taking his turn in catching up on some sleep.

   “Name yourself!” one of the guards ordered upon noticing Amelia’s silhouette.

   “It’s… It’s me!” Amelia shouted back, worried they might take her for someone suspicious in the dim light of the twin oil lamp streetlights which marked the manor’s front lot.

   “Amelia?” asked the other guard who moved passed her colleague to check whether everything was alright, “I had thought the maids were exaggerating, but you look like you have a fever. What’s going on?”

   “I… I think my sleeping pills caused me to sleep-walk out my window,” Amelia said sheepishly. “Please don’t tell anyone. I have plans to join my father during tomorrow’s patrol, and I don’t want to give Heimdall a reason to tell me I can’t.”

   “Sleepwalking with a lantern?” The first guard said dumbly, earning himself a slap from his colleague.

   “Of course, of course,” the second guard said, guiding Amelia back into the manor, “We’ll wait to make a report, you’ve no need to worry. By the time he knows, I’m sure you’ll have impressed the Baron so much he won’t even think to get angry.”

   It was as good as Amelia could hope for. The guards were after all, employed by her father. And though there might be less of them than there had been in the past, and their discipline might have slacked some, she could still feel the pride they put into their work under her family’s name.

   And they would die along with her father. If her crackpot plan failed to work.