The Pale Woman
The day the pale woman entered Thomas Thorne’s bakery, asking for flour and recipes for her kitchen maid who had taken ill, Thomas was not entirely sure what to make of her. She wore a coal grey floor length dress with long sleeves ending in white ruffled silk and red leather gloves, and a wide rimmed hat with a round top. When she removed her hat, revealing her platinum white hair tied in an elegant bun, almost as white as her face. Her red lips stood out in sharp contrast, and her eyes were a rich earthy brown, flecked with gold, like flecks of sunlight on the forest floor.
When he wrote down the recipe of his best loaf of seeded white bread, she wryly observed- “You are a learned man.” with a voice like a ribbon that could cut through steel, maddeningly soft enough to make his head spin and kindle something deep in his chest. He closed the bakery early, offering to carry the bags of ingredients to her carriage, as she was shorter than him by a head, and appeared to be too slight in her form for such an arduous task. She accepted, and later, offered payment. His arms ached, and sweat bound locks of his black-brown hair to his forehead, but he refused, saying that he could afford the loss.
Her soft smile stayed with him long into the night, as he returned to his home. His father and mother greeted him, and told him that little Elliot had been anxiously awaiting his return all afternoon. Only eleven years old, Elliot was his younger brother, and suffered a lingering sickness from the vermin plague that once swept the town a year past. Walking quickly exhausted him, and excitement threatened to consume his lungs with severe coughing fits. Thomas read from his book of King Arthur to him, of Lancelot battling both the enemies of the crown and the desire in his heart for the heart of Queen Guinevere, until Elliot’s head nodded off to sleep.
Thomas mused that he lived a simple, unassuming life in the town of Gledefest, both as a baker and a farmer who helped his family. But the pale woman was right. He was a learned man, gifted with words but alas not as much with numbers. Numbers were the only means of finding a successful career for any man seeking to escape the confines of the small town and the forest that surrounded it. And so Thomas could only stay, and dream, and tend to his little brother, and collect and save what he could from the bakery and from what his family could sell from the farm.
Gledefest was a hamlet sprawled along a gradually sloping hill surrounded by a sprawling village that clung to its centre for life, food and fortune like a leech on a slowly dying fish. It was once the centre of distribution for coal, sandstone and wood, and its resources fed the bellies and coffers of all who partook within its trade and were lucky enough to be local. Eventually, the coal mines dried up, leaving only scraps here and there for nostalgic miners and leaving room for desperate prospectors seeking out jewels within the empty bowels of the forest hills.
Gledefest now hosted small market houses, a playhouse and a small trades centre, near to which Thomas’s bakery was attached. The playhouse was his only favourite place to visit. It was not a place that raised intellects, much less academics, and the Thorne family were forced to settle for a life of farming, living in a small cottage on the outskirts of the town. With the support of the priest, the portly Father James O’Michael, they were able to find their feet.
Thomas was five and ten when the family were forced to uproot from their prestigious life in their home town of Berkredd, several miles east of the forests surrounding Gledefest and near to Elfion’s capital, Thronden. It happened following the collapse of the accounting company his parents had met at and worked for, when its spineless head acquiesced to a settlement from a burgeoning competitor and won an early retirement while his employees crept towards destitution. Then, not long after they moved, little Elliot came along. And since then, tall and lanky Robert Thorne with a gentle smile and Jane Thorne his auburn-haired bubbly wife were all the more grateful for the support of Father O’Michael, and their teenaged son’s help in raising him. That is, when Thomas’s head was not in the clouds or his nose not pressed in an old book.
