source
Thomas Doughty, 1791 - 1856 Fanciful Landscape 1834: oil on canvas

My NaNo book is Lady Graves.

2-Nov-2018

CHAPTER TWO

Her head was on fire

and she didn’t know where she was or how she’d come to be here. A one-eyed dog stared at her, his head cocked, as if trying to choose the most courteous way to inform her that her life was ruined and she’d only herself to blame. Not that she believed that, but everyone else did.

To her sudden chagrin, she couldn’t recall who “everyone else” might be.

“Who are you,” she asked the dog, “and why am I here?”

He wagged his tail, then leaped from the bed and bounced up and down like a coiled spring. What a strange animal! She’d never seen a dog quite like this one, but she heard the name Emil in her mind.

She sat up, slowly, her throat raw, her scalp burning--and only one eye! She and the dog!

Gingerly, she touched the swollen, bruised flesh that sealed her right eye. Ouch. Very well, her eyeball was still there, hidden inside her head.

“What is this place?” she asked, though the man was nowhere to be seen. The dog yipped an agreeable reply.

source

“I have been abducted,”

she whispered, coming slowly to her senses. “I must escape!”

Someone had dressed in her a clean linen shift, one she’d never seen before--that much she knew. Her one eye made a swift surveillance of the tidy stone cottage with a window on each wall. Steep, narrow stairs led to an upper level. The air was sweet with a yeasty aroma of bread rising, of drying sage, rosemary, lavender, and more herbs than she could discern in one sniff, and milk curdling over a warm stove. She caught a whiff of dog as well, but like horses in a stable full of hay and even the occasional skunk, the odor of dog had never offended her. This, she knew. How she came to be here, she had no clue.

She swung around and planted her feet on the floor, tried to stand, and fell back to the straw mattress and feather tick. Then she noticed a bed pan and shuddered to think of the indignity of a man assisting her to a chamber pot, much less dealing with--oh, the indignity! Surely the man had a maid she hadn’t seen yet.

She tried again, slowly, rose to her feet, and managed the chamber pot, then found the pitcher and basin for hand washing, then fell back to her sick bed. Her sick bed! She wasn’t ill--she was injured, grievously injured, and her only guardian was a one-eyed dog. Apparently she had dozed off again, because her eye opened and there he was, the bearded man with green eyes and dark lashes, her captor. With a gasp, she shot up, just as he was bending closer, and their foreheads collided.

“Ach du Liebe!” he cried, rubbing his head, then clasping hers and investigating the damage. She flinched away from his touch. “Vorsichtig,” he said. “Wary, you are. With good reason, I am sure, but I can assure you, my mission is to do no harm. I a healer.”

Emil’s tail thumped the floor as if to vouch for him.

“Good Sir,” she said slowly, “if I am to trust you, then you must tell me who you are.”

He hesitated. “You may call me Klaus.”

“I would not presume to be so familiar, Mr. Klaus.”

“You are no ordinary maiden,” he said with a smile. “Perhaps you attend to a duchess in some fine manor house. In England, I should guess, by your fine speech.”

“Maiden?” She felt her heart pound at the affront. “Why do you hold me in such low esteem?”

“Why do you bite the hand that feeds you?” he returned. “And why do you not favor me with your name, my lady?”
“My name is--”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, the same way his dog did.

“My name,” she said, certain it would come to her any moment now, “is…”

Tears sprang to her eyes, or one eye, at least; hot, salty tears ran down her throat which was already raw, and she couldn’t even let out a scream. Just a hiccup. Hands clasped over her mouth, she stared with one eye at the stranger sitting at the edge of the bed she’d so mysteriously found herself in.

“What have you drugged me with?” she cried out. “I cannot recall my own name!”

The dog moved closer, standing on two legs to lick the tears from her face, his front paws on the edge of the mattress. She managed a brave smile for the endearing little character but not for the man with the mild German accent.

“Emil found you, Fräulein, badly beaten and buried in a shallow grave,” said the man. “I’ve seen head injuries far worse than yours, and your amnesia is only temporary, I am sure, but very grave. If you’ll pardon that word.” He flashed her a penitent smile. “We found you dressed as a maid, and so, for now, I shall call you Lady Graves.”

She fell back onto the pillow, stifling a sob of anguish.

source

“Lady Graves,” she said to herself.

“Herr Doktor. Klaus. Sir Klaus, if you will.”

It had all the makings of a terrible dream but whenever she woke, the dream never faded back into the night. It stayed with her, as did the doctor. Rarely did she find him with his back turned to her; he faced her, whatever he was doing. At table he would write or draw in a moleskin book, looking up from his work the moment she stirred. He fed her, watered her, changed her bandages, and spoke to someone in a soft German voice. That someone never replied with anything but a thump, which proved to be a wagging tail hitting the floor.

The man hummed unfamiliar tunes but sometimes she would hear one she could hum along with, or would, but her throat was raw. She drifted in and out of sleep and tried to recall where she’d come from, only to clench her fists in frustration.

Emil made her smile, though, with his tilted head and human expressions.

Days and nights merged without her keeping track of them. She could stand and walk around now and feed herself at the table. “I don’t understand,” she said one afternoon, sniffing the remarkable lavender and chamomile tea he brewed. “I remember names and words, like dog, and Emil. I am a lady, not a serving wench. I remember that I love wine and cheese but hate sauerkraut, and that it would be impertinent to address you as Klaus. My head must be working, however broken it may be. Why am I unable to think of my own name, my home, and how I came to be here?”

Emil, standing with his front paws on the bed, lowered his chin to her lap. She smiled and stroked his good ear.

Stangler tried to look past the bruised, swollen face of the stranger in his favorite chair and into her heart. “The mind is a mystery,” he said. “I have studied with the finest doctors in Europe, and all we seem to know is that there is no such creature as a homunculus inside us.”

“Home-uncu-what?”

“Homunculus, Latin for little man.”

“You are determined to confuse me, Herr Doktor. Tell me about this homunculus.”

“Your head will hurt--or rather, hurt even more-- if you contemplate the idea of the sperm as a tiny, fully formed man, invisible to the eye, planted inside a woman when a baby is conceived, so that every one of us is born with a homunculus residing in the seat of the soul--”

He noted her flinching. “I take it sperm is another word you recognize.”

“And I used to think it unjust that noblemen who become doctors, lawyers, or merchants are banned from high society.”
Stangler felt a sudden warmth, a new connection to this imperious creature the dog had found. “My dear Lady Graves, your sense of that injustice was correct; your former wisdom does my heart good. Now I must remedy your perception of me as crass and outspoken.”

Emil wagged as if in perfect agreement with his master. The lady favored him with a small smile. “How very strange that I should remember holding that opinion, yet I am unable to recall any particulars. You say my speech puts me in England, yet my mind will not go there.”

“You were badly hurt.” Stangler, remembering her cold, battered body in the moonlight, pressed his hand over his heart. He felt the indignity of that shallow grave, the crass disposal of a young lady. “You were also very deliberately hurt. Your head injuries leave no doubt in my mind about that. This was no fall from a carriage, no tumbling into a thicket. Someone tried to kill you. You suffered a great shock, not just a grave physical injury, and your mind, I suspect, is protecting you from a very unpleasant memory.”

She gasped. “Kill me! Who would want me dead?”

“The sooner we find that out the sooner we find out who you are. Or vice versa.”

“I have no enemies! I… I….”

Emil made the leap all the way into her lap, and Stangler allowed the dog’s forwardness only because the lady wrapped her arms around the solicitous furball. Her shoulders shook, and he realized she was sobbing silently, her face hidden in Emil’s wiry coat.

Stangler occupied himself with brewing more tea. What was he to do with an English patient who came with no papers, no luggage, no money, no connections, no place, no name?

He would feed her and bring her tea and do everything in his power to restore her to her former self, whatever and whoever that may be.

---

source

End of Day Two!