Source? Ness brought them from Scotland
Significance? Hector was taking an
interest!
Fate? Hector defenestrated them
Author’s inspiration? It’s the kind
of thing Hector would undoubtedly do. Besides, have you never suffered damage
from a recalcitrant underwire or a nasty bit of frayed elastic?
She laced on her stays, then bundled her sark over her head.
The morning after a girl’s wedding, she might
expect some consideration, but Ness Campbell, newly married to the much older
and extremely pugnacious Hector, didn’t get much. Hector informed her she was
to get dressed and be ready to travel. Ness complied, but she wasn’t without
backbone.
Hector waited, eyes glinting,
as if he enjoyed her embarrassment. Ness lifted her chin, determined to outface
him. If he thought he had married a timorous wife he was wrong. She left the
screen and laced herself into her gown, blushing as she encountered Hector’s
gaze.
The pair travelled on to Hector’s new property, and
when they reached it, Ness was weary, felt grubby and wanted a wash. She found
a clean cold little creek and set to work to make herself more comfortable.
First, she washed her gown…
Next, shaking
with cold and her own audacity, she stripped her sark over her head. She had
not been wearing her stays, for a strip of whalebone had worked loose and made
a painful reddened patch at her waist. Hector had noticed it two days before,
and had seized the stays and flung them out the inn wife’s window, vowing that
when he put his hands on his woman he wanted to feel bonnie flesh, and not
whalebone and flannel. Ness glanced down at her pale body, faintly green in the
forest light. Anyone who saw her now would take her for a kelpie’s bride!
Hector wasn’t pleased to wake up and find his
bride gone, but she hadn’t left him, and at least he got his way with the
stays. Heaven knows what happened to them in the end. Maybe the landlord’s goat
ate them.
Ness and her stays appear in Heather and Heath
ABOUT THE BLOG
Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. You can find you way into her maze of websites and blogs via the portal here.(Sally is me, by the way.)
The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. 2017 is well behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of June 2018 I STILL hadn't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books in the pipeline, and I'm certainly showcasing those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, places, objects and themes. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!
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