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 Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 9:13 pm
It was somewhere around middday on a cool Thursday afternoon when Elliot found himself at work on the anvil. The shop was as hot as it ever was, and he was finding that he had worked up a rather unpleasant sweat. The door was flung open to let the breeze waft in, but it didn't do much good, especially with his close proximity to the flame. He would have quite certainly preferred to be out in the fields, but his work orders had been piling up from his past week of slacking off, and the guilt was at last beginning to catch up with him. They were small--a handful of basic candleholders for a new pub, a stop for the door of the shop a block away, among other odds and ends--but making them all on a time crunch was murder.
He stood, leaning back to crack his back, which was aching from being bent over for such a long period of time, and wiped his brow. Pulling off his thick and heavy protective apron, he took a few steps towards the door in order to cool himself off. The light hurt his eyes as he looked out, since the shop itself was rather badly underlit, but it didn't take him long to adjust. He stared outside, longing to cast off his woes and run straight out of town, but he resisted. His father was just next door negotiating a deal for a large number of horseshoes anyhow--there would be no getting away with a quick run today.
"Bollocks to this," he mumbled, then dried his brow with his cuff and strode begrudgingly back to his work.
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Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2011 9:40 pm
Ariel sighed for the upteenth time, flipping a stray lock of hair off her shoulder back to the rest of her dark tresses that trailed out from under her bonnet. She had long since let her ramrod stiff posture go slack and was now leaning back against the bench with the basket of pastries in her lap, a posture Miss Hendrie, her governess, would never have tolerated. However, Miss Hendrie was otherwise occupied at the moment, and had been for nearly fifteen minutes now, as Ariel could still see through the tailor's window. Miss Hendrie and Bess, the servant who had accompanied them to the market this morning to shop, were busy negotiating with the tailor about some thing or another, some mis-colored lace trim that Bess had accidentally picked up perhaps. Why it had taken so long that Ariel had been able to pick up pastries half a block down and still made it back to the shop she had no clue, but she sure wasn't going to go inside to find out. Sitting outside fighting boredom was infinitely preferable to hearing Miss Hendrie nag on about some trivial bits of trimming.
Another five minutes passed, however, and Ariel started getting restless. The scene in the tailor's window hadn't changed, and showed no signs of changing anytime soon, so she settled the basket on one arm and set off to explore the shops down the block, figuring she'd be back before she was missed. There was the tailor, a small florist, a pawn shop and.... an open door? She paused there, glancing inside but unable to see anything in the dimly lit space, and her curiosity got the better of her. She stopped only long enough to read the sign overhead, 'Pinnock and Son's Smithy,' before stepping over the doorstep with a practiced lift of her skirts and into the shadowy shop. There she paused, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the light, momentarily unable to tell what her surroundings were, or even that there was another person there with her.
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Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2011 4:58 am
"Can I help you?" Elliot said half-heartedly. He hadn't even looked up, but there was a certain sound that came with someone entering such a dark space, and he recognized it quite well by this point in his life. His eyes peeked upwards curiously, and the form before him gave him quite a start. Such a refined lady in this sort of a place? It must have been a joke or a trick of some sort. Any prim and proper woman worth her status would certainly never cross into the unpleasantly heated cavern that was the abode of a blacksmith, oh heavens no. They'd send a servant to do that sort of work, and he had seen it happen more than just a few times in his days.
And yet, there she was. He fumbled over his words as he spoke. "I mean I uh, can I be of assistance, milady?" Elliot did his best to be polite--after all, if a noblewoman was here of all places, there must have been some special circumstance. His father would never, ever let him hear the end of it if he chased out such an important potential customer.
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Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 8:18 pm
A voice asking if he could be of service was her first indication that she was not alone in the dark room. Not that she should have expected any less, since the smithy was bordered by shops on either side so it must have been a shop as well, but the noise startled her slightly. It took her another moment to bring the young man working at his bench into focus, and a moment more to realize his eyes were locked back on her in turn. There was a certain realization in them, the kind she always met when a person realized they were addressing a young aristocrat and not just the common girl which she often passed as. Usually the realization took longer to set in, but today her mother had bedecked her in such a fine dress and bonnet that it was unmistakable what her social rank must have been. His abrupt change in demeanor made her cringe inwardly, as such obvious deference always did. It just seemed so.. so...
'Curtsy to any gentleman you should meet.' Miss Hendrie's ingrained lessons, complete with snappish tone and disapproving scowl, interrupted her thoughts, and she automatically swept up her skirts in a brisk curtsy, not pausing to consider that her governess might not include blacksmiths in her definition of 'gentlemen'.
"I um... your door was open, and, um, well.. I've never seen a Smithy before..." Any pretense of eloquence and elegance must have fallen apart at those slightly mumbled words, and a faint blush, near invisible in the light, lit her cheeks as she realized just how silly her reasoning sounded.
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