Feral Park by Mark Dunn

stench amidst the cacophony and fetor. Yet I noticed and I fired him on the spot.”
    Gemma took a deep breath and continued her report: “And oh, what a harsh exchange of words came then quickly from the tongues of both the Cowpens Acres Drays and the Thistlethorn Drays, each participant coming to the aid of her respective family member! Why did Rose Ellen not have sense enough to aim her gastric missiles away from the instrument? This from my own mother, who seemed almost as deranged over the incident as was my sister. And then Rose Ellen making a response which did not bear upon logic, and May saying something along the lines of ‘sparing the floor, my arse!’ and then John, rising to his sister’s defence and talking of the Cowpens Acres Drays quitting Thistlethorn without another moment’s delay. Oh, how horrible that would have been! I took my turn to try to reason with everyone and to cool every head, and finally, I believe, reason and calm have begun their reign, for the Drays are not gone, as you can see, and Jane-Anne and Ruth are working with every ounce of soap and elbow grease to restore the pianoforte, and to-morrow a man will come to tell us if there has been damage sufficient to compromise the instrument, and we will all hope that his answer is no. It is my profoundest wish that when we three return to the house, peace will have been reinstated, and perhaps we may all have the opportunity of beginning the visit anew.”
    Upon their return, Gemma was indeed rewarded for her optimism by finding some degree of tranquillity returned to the house. Rose Ellen was reconciled to spending the evening within her guest apartment and taking only light nourishment which could be easily kept down, and as for the others, dinner would be taken not in the dining–parlour because it was much too close to the fetid smell of the drawing-room, but instead would be served within the saloon, where the diners gathered to eat upon two card tables, and the informality of this assembly placed most everyone in less agitated spirits and calmed the nerves to an even greater extent. Even Gemma’s sister May found her customary good temperament much revived and further improved by three glasses of wine and the eschewal of all talk of music and pianofortes in particular.
    Anna sat at the card table nearest the full-length casement windows where she watched the sun illuminate in bright pre-twilight radiance the top branches of an arbor of oaks and Spanish chestnuts, the light that would not yet be put to bed dissolving itself into the waters of a small trout stream—the very stream from which had come the first course of the evening. It was a beautiful scene from which she was reluctant to divert her gaze, but it could only be had by avoiding altogether the consideration of John Dray, who could not have been distracted by the scenery since he faced inward to the rest of the cavernous room, and who easily encountered Anna’s countenance simply by looking straight ahead…which he did without much effort. To the left of Anna sat Mrs. Dray, and to Anna’s right was a friend of the Drays of Cowpens Acres—the girl of Mr. Peppercorn’s earlier interest—a youthful governess by the name of Georgiana Younge, who was on brief holiday from the care of three children belonging to a tanner and his wife in the town of Bath near to Cowpens Acres, and who was quite in raptures over the opportunity of removing herself from her demanding charges for a fortnight, even to the point of dismissing the episode of the degraded pianoforte as “not so very horrible in the main, and especially when compared to the sufferings of the world’s population at large, rather insignificant even, and I have seen far, far worse in my days as ministrant to the downtrodden and the badly infirmed in a society of the Methodist New Connexion in London.”
    Across the room at the companion portative table sat Mr. Peppercorn, Gemma Dray, her sister May, and her cousin